Unlike the rest of you, I’m not agonizing over a Halloween costume. I know what I’ll be. I know who I am: Grapes.
I’ve been Grapes every year since 2009 — nearly two decades. I don’t expect that I will stop, either. It’s a lifelong commitment to the bit. Grapes gives the feeling of Cronenbergian body horror: a freakish solid with near-liquid bounce.
The first time I dressed as a bunch of grapes, I was 21 and new to New York. I didn’t know what I was looking for, only that it had to be quick and easy, a bit of a gag, and within my Balthazar-server budget. I wanted armor — friendly up close, spooky at a distance; perceived but not seen. I was a weird queer brown kid navigating a new social world. I wanted attention, but not follow-up questions. I didn’t yet believe I had anything to say. I needed a costume that read as defiant, not sexily gay — a category I felt excluded from.
So, post-breakfast shift, I went to the Balloon Saloon in TriBeCa (an upscale emporium for, you guessed it, balloons). Out I came with the bags of sinewy latex that would become my exoskeleton.
A quick tutorial: Grapes as a costume is just green felt and 15 purple balloons safety-pinned to a long-sleeve shirt in an inverted pyramid. It is decidedly D.I.Y., impressionistic, hard to bungle. That first year, I wore an all-purple American Apparel outfit, but I learned it hardly mattered — your body underneath the balloons becomes invisible. I roll a sheet of felt into a cone and pin it to a hat; another rings my neck. The big to-do is blowing up the balloons, which was infinitely easier when I had five roommates, though I eventually got it down to 10 minutes solo. Each balloon gets a pin through the lip. (Keep your back and bum balloon-free so sitting is possible.) Start at the top and work your way down the front: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. By the second row, the operation becomes untenable: you’ll start pricking yourself and popping precious inventory. But by the third row, the magic sets in. The scaffold turns into structure, and the ghost enters the machine. Grapes is in the room with us now.
The first few years, Grapes was pure joy. Everyone was happy to see me. Children bopped me, dogs booped me. Straight men leaned out of cars to say, “YO, GRAPES!” — a welcome catcall rather than a menacing taunt. With the same costume every year, I could sit out the annual rat race to yassify a new profession (sexy data center worker?) or embody the most niche queer reference (Elizabeth Holmes, or the “dancing bird automaton”?). I refused to make it new.
Some years I told people I was Bacchus, or Sour Grapes, or the Grapes of Wrath. But I never stuck with the conceits. The worst part of any costume is having to explain it. Even at 21, I was tired of explaining myself — my race, my sexuality — of making myself neat in someone else’s mind. I wanted to overflow matter-of-factly. With Grapes, I could. I was Grapes, plain Grapes.
Grapes is great at parties. The first balloon crosses the threshold and suddenly everyone has a role to play. Fellow guests must see that this new being can get a drink, make way for its many bathroom breaks. All Grapes can do is smile and shrug and hope to be taken care of. People pause conversations; crowds part. I wave to the world from inside my balloon bumper car, buffered against social anxiety.
Grapes makes the awkwardness literal and unavoidable, and somehow lets me be more myself. I can take a night off from self-protective extroversion — from meeting everyone more than halfway. Now they have to come to me. Surviving the night as Grapes is a testament to the miracle of human cooperation, like crowd surfing or voting.
Here’s a thing I learned: Grapes is a divining rod for sadists. I’m not talking about the innocent boppers or mischievous jostlers — I honor both. I’m talking about poppers. Poppers are otherwise normal people who are overcome with the urge to maim Grapes. They are sleeper cells activated by the sight of sweet, bulbous me. They cannot be avoided, and rarely can they be reasoned with. Most are strangers. Some are not.
Poppers can be anywhere, and they might look like normal people — they shop at the Park Slope Food Co-op; they live on my block; I still run into them at Christmastime and at Shabbat. But Grapes remembers who popped them. There are things Grapes cannot unsee.
There were years when Grapes began to feel like an albatross around my neck — or 15, pinned to my body. Eating was impossible; going to the bathroom was risky. I had to ride contorted in the back seat of cabs, and forget about a seatbelt. Wind could ruin me. Sometimes the store ran out of purple balloons and I had to go as jet-black caviar (2018), or I had nowhere to go but a Zoom chat (2021), or I had somewhere to go but it was more of a grown-ups-drinking-wine vibe (2024). Some years I just was not in the mood, but I pressed onward (2016, 2023, 2025). There was no opting out.
To don the same costume every year is to defy the relentless passing of time, and to see how I’ve changed in turn. In early photos of Grapes, I can see how much I needed the armor. In later ones: I have more confidence and calm, more wrinkles. I forgive poppers now. I carry extra balloons. Today, under all that purple, I want to be seen, not just perceived. I have plenty to say, and I can take all the questions. I wonder how I’ll ripen and sour in the next 20 years of Grapes.
Like any piece of endurance art, Grapes took on different valences over time. It was funny, then less funny, then mundane, then ironic, then post-ironically sincere, then, God willing, funny again. I could tell what kind of year it was by people’s eyes. As I tumbled out of cars or jiggled upstairs, I might catch the wide-eyed excitement of a party host or the slow blink of an exasperated friend. Recently, I told my partner I’d be his plus-one to a fancy (plainclothes) soiree falling on Halloween — as Grapes. He looked at me witheringly. I am now uninvited.
The trail from “YO, GRAPES!” to “Oh, Grapes” is shorter than you’d think. Luckily, it is a loop.
Michael Linares writes about culture and technology and is the vice president of product for NYT Cooking.
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