I selected him.
So, was this some appalling repressed fetish? Something, God help me, unleashed after I had a few drinks in me? Had that ubiquitous holiday image somehow woven its way through childhood and into my psycho-sexual development, only to be expressed in early adulthood, under conditions made ideal by the consumption of too much alcohol?
Somehow, that did not seem fixable.
If one was sexually attracted to Santa, one had departed from mainstream reality. This was no different from turning down dates and staying home weekends because you were saving yourself for Cap’n Crunch.
OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD.
I decided to execute a small amount of forensic work on my sexual history. I needed to sit down and analyze The Guy List. This was a list I’d started shortly after moving to Manhattan. On it, I’d scribbled the name or some identifying characteristic of every guy I’d ever had sex with.
I had defined sex as: seeing them naked while they are under the impression there will soon be sex. Because many times, there was no sex. Sometimes, I got grossed out and left. Other times, I was so drunk I got lost in their bathroom. And then sometimes, they broke the spell by speaking and becoming an actual person, which made any kind of intimacy impossible.
I would analyze previous sexual partners and see if I could uncover a possible virus of attraction. Retrace my steps to try and identify any behavioral patterns that could explain how I ended up bedding an old guy with a fat suit.
Neil Bookman
The Unfortunate One
Battery Park City Ick
Saab Man
Jukebox Man
Penthouse Nut with Football
Park Avenue Poor Baby
Hell’s Kitchen Actor
Akita Wednesday
Investment Banker Slime
Auggie’s Pizza Boy
Calvin Klein Model
Stairway Man
Chef of the Village
San Francisco Beard
Chicago Door Unlock
Ad Asshole Dude
Barstool Man Chicago
Head Too Small
Camping Dad
Mr. Boston
Pier Guido
Garage Man
Dr. Little Dick
Teacher Man from Brooklyn
Jay Leno Mouth
Ricky Ricardo
Piano Actor (falsetto laugh)
Something Wrong Down There Guy
Traveling Investment Banker
Egyptian Hunk Doc
Pilot (anatomically incorrect)
Breath Deformity
Porkpie Hat East Village Fuckwad
German Music Teacher Guy
Cocaine Guy from NYU
Looking at the list, I was surprised that a phrase like Breath Deformity could recall the man so vividly.
Breath Deformity was actually a real catch of a guy. He had dark hair and he was ruggedly handsome, some sort of durable Mediterranean stock. He owned an optics company so he was loaded. And his apartment was just amazingly cool—the kind of place you see in a magazine and think, No real person lives there.
But the breath.
It wasn’t like you could ever sit him down and tell him he had a problem and should see a dentist. This kind of breath couldn’t be fixed; it was a birthmark. It was an extra finger. It was simply a part of him. What he needed was somebody who had been in a car accident and suffered the loss of their olfactory bulb.
The Calvin Klein model just fell into my lap; I hadn’t pursued him. For some reason, he’d come after me. It didn’t make sense, a man of such physical beauty actively pursuing an alcoholic with deep-set eyes and rashy skin. I was doubtful that he really was a Calvin Klein model, actually. Until he took me to Times Square and showed me his billboard.
I hadn’t been interested in him, I realized, because he had been so interested in me. It was suspicious.
Ricky Ricardo, I’d liked. He didn’t return my calls. And this had made me insane with frustration because I was convinced I could make him like me.
I realized suddenly, there was a chilling commonality among the men. With the exception of the first, I had been less than sober with all of them.
As I had expected, over the following days I ran into Santa all over town, and each time it made me cringe. The vast quantity of images—photographs, illustrations, molded plastic figures, stuffed and life-size—was literally everywhere. The worst were the ones ringing bells and clutching little red charity pails. The glossy black boots, the geographical location of a street corner, the sweat clinging to the dense eyebrows on Santa’s face, and the wad of one-dollar bills lent these Santas the gritty, available sheen of prostitutes.
But no matter what kind of Santa I saw, to me he always looked like a leering, glassy-eyed old Frenchman, overheating inside his costume, desperate to rub his dangly bits on any drunk’s lower back.
Then something happened that I didn’t expect. In fact, it never so much as crossed my mind that such a possibility even existed: I saw my Santa again.
I was walking through the West Village to get to the East. As I passed what I had always considered the sleaziest and most depressing bar in Manhattan, there was Santa—sitting in the window at a stool, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
He was wearing his rat-fur-trimmed hat.
If I had ever seen a sadder, more dejected specimen of a human person, I could not remember it. There was no twinkle in his eyes, none of that dignity I’d seen him cling to back at the hotel. That irritating spark of Frenchness was gone from him.
Ruination. That’s what I saw. And it made me sick; it made me ache.
I felt a pull; powerful and impossible to oppose—moon versus sea.
I wanted to comfort him and fix him. I wanted to do something to remove his terrible hollow.
And I didn’t know, maybe this was how he had looked on the night I’d met him. Maybe I’d seen him and felt the same thing I felt now. Maybe this need to repair the broken man was a problem of mine. Maybe it was what therapists called “an issue.”
The truth was, I didn’t care. It didn’t matter.
I was going in there and I was going to sit beside him. And I was going to keep him company.
I would make him laugh.
We would drink Kahlúa.
I would ask him how to say I’m sorry in French.
Later, I would leave and walk home to my apartment.
And he, I assumed, would climb into his sleigh and ride off into the black, black night.
IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.
Why Do You Reward
Me Thus?
FOUR CALLING BIRDS? Three French hens? Two turtle doves? What are turtle doves and why would anybody want one of them, let alone two? And a partridge in a pear tree? Where the fuck was this person shopping?”
Matt said, “You know, Burr, it’s actually inspiring to be around you, you’re so filled with the holiday spirit. Has anybody ever told you that you should be a father? I didn’t think so.”
“I’m just saying. It’s a stupid song. And I can promise you, not one American born after the Dust Bowl has even the slightest idea what it’s about. Yet we all know it. We all sing it. Then we teach it to our brats and they run around singing it all year.
“And what’s the message? Did you ever notice that a lot of the alleged ‘gifts’ happen to be people? Eight maids a-milking, so that’s prepubescent girls forced into labor, probably inserting the underwire in bras. And then nine ladies dancing? That’s the sex trade. I won’t even go into the five golden rings. But somebody’s paying somebody off for something.
“Human trafficking and birds? That’s a good Christmas song? Oh, and swans, which are the drunk, violent ex-boyfriends of the bird world. Because what would any holiday be without a little domestic violence?”
I threw a stick of salami into the hand basket.
Matt said, “You sure you want that? Seems like you’ve already got one of those crammed pretty far up your ass.”
&nb
sp; “I do not have a stick up my ass, you gay sack of cat shit. I just resent the mindlessness of it all. And our obedience. Every year just after Halloween—I mean, they should at least wait for Thanksgiving—we’re supposed to join hands and walk together into the Holiday Spirit. It’s like a fire drill at the office.”
Matt said, “Yeah, of course. It’s exactly like a fire drill. I totally see where you’re going with this.”
“But it’s true. There you are, finally getting some real work done. And all of a sudden, your head is sawed in half by this atrocious blast. You don’t even know what it is; it just stuns you like a brain-wasp. But then you get it and so you figure, Oh, well this doesn’t apply to me. It’s for the other people, on the lower floors.”
Matt kind of smirked, but more in an I-can’t-believe-you’re-allowed-to-live way than anything else.
“But guess what,” I continued. “The fat fuck of a fire warden—who has apparently worked in your office for like forty years even though you’ve never once seen his particular brand of ugly—is right now on your floor barking orders and telling you that, oh yes, this fire drill does motherfucking apply to you. And you will leave the building right this minute, so get up and get moving, buddy.”
“Yeah, and this ties into Christmas how, exactly?”
“Because,” I said, annoyed, “it’s forced on you. It’s mandatory participation even if you have better things to do. Higher-floor things.”
“Oh,” he said, making a face like I’d just puked on his Gucci loafers. “Somebody seriously needs to take you out behind the barn and shoot you between the ears. Higher-floor things. God help us all if you ever get elected to power.”
“Well you can be sure I’d stop forcing the poor Jews to tart up their humble little temple dedication anniversary into some corn-fed whore of a holiday to compete with our super-slut, three-titted Christmas.”
“Now I don’t even know what language you’re speaking, let alone what you’re yammering on about.”
“Hanukkah,” I said, annoyed that he was so slow, mentally. Probably due to his odious career in managed care. “Hanukkah is only supposed to be a minor holiday for the Jews. It marks the date that one of their temples was dedicated. Or rebuilt. Or rededicated. Or taken back from Palestinian Pizza Palace and turned back into a Jewish temple. Whatever. But it’s real estate based. Not father-of-all-mankind based, as corrupted by the Coca-Cola icon in the red fat suit. But we make them make a huge deal out of it because guess what? That’s what drug addicts do. Nobody likes to shoot up alone. The more the merrier.”
“Okay,” he said. “I think maybe you need some alone time. Why don’t we get back in touch after the holidays? Like a year after.” And before I could helpfully inform him that the average survival time with stage 4 melanoma in the lung was just a few months, he was gone.
I set my hand basket down next to the peanut butter and left the store. I hated shopping and only did it when I was with other people because it made me seem more normal. “Come with me to the store?” sounded way less freakish than “Come sit with me in the dark while I drink alone?”
But I didn’t even know why I bothered. I was horrible at this friends thing. I said all the wrong things except when I was busy saying all the mean ones. And in the end, I hated everybody and everything.
Outside on Seventh Avenue, the sun irritated my eyes. The winter light in New York seemed somehow sharper than the summer light. It was bluer, more finely honed.
God, I thought, I hate the sun.
I knew what I had become. I wasn’t trying to kid myself or anything. I was that old man on the cartoons I used to watch as a kid. What was his name? With the big nose and the ghosts? And there was a little gimp kid that trailed him around? Scrooge, that was it.
And didn’t he talk to himself, too?
Actually, there was a clinical term for what I had become: miserable fuck.
If you have to be single and you have to be bitter and you also have to be without family for the holidays, Manhattan is the only place to be. And praise Jesus for the Jews, the Chinese, and the alcoholics. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to have sex, eat, or forget all the people I’d had sex with.
As I turned onto Twelfth Street I thought, But that’s what’s so great about New York. All these people exist here and they don’t give a shit about Christmas, either.
Let the Upper East Side bitches drag their oily hedgehog hedge fund husbands from party to party. I will get drunk and have sex with the Jews. I will order General Tso’s chicken.
While I sip my Rolling Rock, all the little sheep-shoppers will race from one store to another and pass out five dollar bills to the bums. Which really should be against the law, like feeding the pigeons.
It was as if an infection, an actual virus, swept the nation once a year.
Fortunately, my brittle exterior provided immunity. And as I reached my apartment building I thought, Why? Why go upstairs when I could get a head start on Christmas and reverse my awful current state of sobriety. It was, after all, less than forty-eight hours away. That’s only a couple of bars in alcoholic time. Which was like dog years, except without the fleas.
I had a mice-in-the-oven kind of life. I might as well turn on the gas.
Even at the filthiest hole-in-the-wall bar down by the West Side Highway they were playing “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Here Comes Santa Claus” and my own favorite, “The Chipmunk Song,” which made you glad arsenic was invented. And all of this joyous noise was playing on an endless loop. Satan himself was the Christmas DJ.
Truly, this was music with no prefrontal cortex.
So if you sat and drank enough Rolling Rocks, the same songs repeated over and over. And if you rolled your eyes and muttered, “Jesus fucking Christ,” within hearing range of the bartender, he might walk right up to you and say, “What’s the matter, fella, didn’t get to sit on Santa’s lap today at Macy’s?”
The fact is, if you don’t “get into the holiday spirit” people will not only be angry with you, they will think something is wrong with you and they will decide you are a bad person. A spoil sport. “He’s a Grinch.”
They will feel a visceral mistrust, a hatred, even.
They will reject you.
And you will find yourself on the outside of the snow globe.
I paid up and walked out.
What seemed like a couple of hours later, I suddenly sort of woke up I guess and found myself sitting on the filthy red carpeting outside the entrance to the Art Greenwich Twin at the top of my street. My back was pressed against the glass door to the lobby. And when I glanced down, I saw that my clothes—khakis, white T-shirt, blue button-down shirt, Timberland boots—everything I had on was inexplicably dirty. Almost as if I had been wearing the exact same outfit for days and done nothing but slime around on the streets. And I was smoking a cigarette.
But none of that truly alarmed me. The jolt of terror arrived because there were two reeking, shockingly filthy wretches huddled up next to me, one on either side. Call them whatever you wish—the homeless, bums, vagrants, winos, bag men, beggars, hobos, tramps—but when your nose was literally inches away from their hair? The only name that fit was disgusting.
I walked past this theater every evening, usually looking in the opposite direction because after the last show let out, these very bums arrived. They came with their cardboard boxes and stolen shopping carts piled high with debris and filth. And right there where I was now sitting—on the pitiful threadbare red carpeting in front of the doors to the movie theater—they set up a little camp.
It absolutely stunned me the city didn’t come along with fire hoses and just wash them out of here. They were like Norway rats, just an ugly part of the city that had to be endured if you wanted the good parts. But just because you had to step on a few rats on the way to work every day didn’t mean you had to bend over and hand them some Roquefort. So I never paid any attention to the creatures.
I remembered the bar. I remembered “The Chipmunk Song.” I remembered “The Chipmunk Song,” again. I even remembered it a third time.
But after that, it was all a little fuzzy. My memories were not quite as sharp. Blurry, was maybe the word. Blurry or completely missing. That was it, right there.
At least they hadn’t ripped my coat off me, I thought. Not that it did much good. It must have been twenty degrees. These bums were nuts to be camping outside in this weather.
God, what was I doing thinking about the weather? I had to get up, pry myself out from between those horrible creatures. And as I moved about two inches forward, it was instantly apparent that it was not my coat which was keeping me warm: it was the bums.
A more sickening feeling I cannot imagine. But the stinking heat radiating from those two life-forms was the only thing keeping me alive. Of course, now that I thought about it, I could actually cross the street and go home. I didn’t have to stay here one more minute.
I began to stand up.
Just flexing the muscles in my arms to push myself up was enough; the movement caused both of the bums to spring fully awake and launch to their feet. They were standing above me in less time than it had taken for me to even get my ass off the ground.
Seeing me, their faces instantly relaxed into easy, friendly smiles. Relief, even. “Oh, hey, man. You scared the shit out of me. I felt that movement down by my feet and I thought somebody was trying to take my shoes,” the bum said, then he laughed. He was a white bum, only around thirty. So that was pretty scary, the guy was just five years older than me.
The other guy was a black bum and he wasn’t all that old, either, now that I got a good look at him. He might even have been the younger of the bums. “Are you okay?” he suddenly asked me. “To be honest, some of us have been a little worried about you. I was keeping an eye on you myself—Shirley asked me to, but I would have anyway.” He smiled. “Wanted to make sure you didn’t choke to death or swallow your cigarette.” Then he said, “Oh, and ah, thanks again for the sandwiches. I’m not sure it registered the first time I told you,” and he chuckled and reached forward, slapping me on the shoulder.
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Page 7