“Is this true?” Mr. Christmas said, “May I see it?”
I stood huffing and said, “Are you serious?”
Mr. Christmas grabbed our shoulders, “Have a smooch and let’s go.”
“Now? Tonight?” I said.
“Do you really have this hairboard?” he was like.
And I was like, “Well yeah, I do.”
“Then let me call my driver,” he was like.
Impossible? I tell you, it happened just like that.
We were at my apartment in fewer than ten minutes from when Carol told him about the hairboard. I slid it out while we were still panting from the walk down the hall.
Carol said, “See?” and he told her, “Shh!” which made her choke on her gaping smile and go wait up the stairs in the kitchen, watching from there, wringing a dishrag.
He absorbed a big long look, then started pacing before it, scratching his shave. He stopped to mouth along to some of the notes—Female, 12th and 2nd Ave, April 7th, 1994, 3:19 p.m.—and then zipped his head forward and kept pacing before it. He finally spun around on his toes to say, “You did this. Over the course of eight years?”
I said, “Ach,” and continued stripping shreds of bark off logs by the fireplace. My fingertips were nearly bleeding.
Carol said, “You makin’ a fire?”
I thought fast, “No, just doin’ up some kindler.”
She said, “I never seen you do that.”
I grouched, “It’s cause I had a bunch made already!”
Mr. Christmas looked at the hairboard and went “Uuuuuuh!” like a man dying a death that he doesn’t want to. I stripped the logs even faster, harder, watching him out of the corners of my eyes. It was silent, but for the sound of his shoes crackling on the black floor, but for the sound of me laboring over the wood.
“Why do you have so many tables?” he finally said.
“I was just trying to find the perfect one.”
He nodded and walked penis-first toward me, “Let’s have a seat at one.”
I chose the table with the freshest vase of flowers on it.
Mr. Christmas said, “Why did you do this?”
“Ach,” I waved him off.
“There’s no need to be shy.”
When he said “shy” a piece of his spit landed on my bottom lip. I swiped it off, disgusted with him. I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” I said, “I just did it once, and then after a few times I realized I was a specialist at it, so. I always wanted to be a specialist at something, so that pretty much sold me on it.” I got out a toothpick from my breast pocket and scraped my ear canal. “And plus, you know—watch the collection grow just like hair? Them locks look pretty don’t they? And I don’t even do pretty, but hell.”
“Mr. H.C., I’d like to represent you,” he said.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“I’d like to have you as one of my artists. I’d like to sell your hairboard.”
“Sell my hairboard! What? I’m not an artist.” You know.
He narrowed his eyes at me, then he burst out laughing and they flew apart. “Yes! Yes you are!”
My legs shrunk inside my pants and the hairs on my face stood out like spikes on a blowfish.
That night I lay in bed with Carol and she fiddled with my dead balloon penis and told me everything was going to be the way she’d always wanted. I had said yes to him. He said he would have an opening for the board just like the one for Blaise DonRobison. He said we’d have to prepare statements about why the board was important, and we’d have to find things to say that it’s like or that it’s a “comment on.” He said that someone would buy the board and put it in their home as a piece of art. He said that after it was sold, I could come to him with another piece of art and he would try to sell it too, because it’d be part of my body of work as an artist. He said all that I had to do was admit that I’m an artist because people would be interviewing me and expecting me to care about art and my projects after. And I just sat there like a bird who flew into a window. I was like, “Okay.” And I became an artist. After he left I looked sideways at the table where we’d sat and saw five droplets of spit that had been shot from his mouth during our conversation—sitting there like diamonds.
Two days after Christmas’s visit to see my hairboard, Carol and I were coming home from a walk when the doorman, Doorman Diego, handed me an envelope.
“Zees was lef for you, Mr. H.C.”
It said Mr. H.C. on the front and it was the first time I’d ever received a personal letter in New York.
“What’s this?” I said.
Inside was a plain white card with gold lettering:
Mr. Christmas requests your presence at a cocktail hour
at his home on Tuesday.
Four o’clock, Old Station West, Portsmouth.
Ask for Charlie Quick.
“Where’s Old Station West, Portsmouth?” I said.
“Well, getcher phonebook out and look!” Carol said, squeezing my arm. “A cocktail hour?” she said, “Exciting!”
An elderly neighbor lady passed us snarling, clutching her pocketbook tight and telling her dog not to sniff us, “Don’t, Kevin!”
Portsmouth was a forty-five–minute train ride out of the city. We swayed past blinding fields of snow, horses steaming under blankets, townfolk waiting like figurines on slippery station platforms. The sun set winter-early and made me a golden Carol. She kept putting her toe triangle up to flute my cobra.
“Stop, or it’s gonna strike, Girly.”
Carol had dyed her blue dress black and had unstitched the lace duster to use as a bow around her head. Her hair was in a shellacked braid and she wore her single white sternum pearl necklace, as she always did. I wore my regular clothes—one of my collared shirts and my jean jacket.
We took a taxi through Portsmouth to Old Station West and were shocked to see that it was an old train station made into a museum. We were like, “Is this right?” We entered and asked the ticket taker for Charlie Quick, and the lady picked up a phone and said stuff quietly. Her chin connected to her neck and made her tongue pop out and her eyes bulge like she was choking on her own face.
She hung up and said, “Okay.”
We stepped into the main area like, “Okay.” It was long and narrow with a high round ceiling. An empty train station. There were glass cases on both sides of the hall with artifacts and papers in them. Laughter echoed eerily—a little girl was skipping circles around her grandpa who was spinning a bookrack and who probably had Werther’s in his pockets. And they were probably all ghosts, along with the lady who died by choking on her own face. There was a staircase that curled a grand wooden banister down into darkness. We heard clicks on the floor and looked and saw a man coming. He reached out to shake my hand when he was still a good fifty feet away, making him look either professional or ridiculous—I wouldn’t know which.
“Mr. H.C.,” he said, “It’s a pleasure. I’m Charlie Quick.” He was a plain blond Englishman in a plain blue suit. “And you must be Carol.”
We clicked down the staircase and the downstairs floor was identical to the upstairs floor but without the round ceiling. We walked a long hall, Charlie Quick’s hands in the pockets of his soft suit pants, Carol’s high heels keeping pace, and The Haircutter trying not to wheeze. We turned right and started another small hall—it had the same glass cases on one side and a picture of a deconstructed black-and-white train on the other, and at the end of this hall was a dead end with some chairs and a couch and a statue of a conductor waving. This end, however, was anything but dead. Charlie Quick glanced back at us once with a smile as we came closer and closer to the couch and chairs. When we reached them, we were not gestured to sit down—rather, Charlie Quick walked behind the couch, stepped over a lamp cord, and stood in the four feet of space behind the couch and the wall, looking down at a miniature wooden door.
“What the?” I said.
Carol threw her arms up delight
ed and said, “I’m just gonna wait and see!”
“It’s a unique home. Mr. Christmas owns this museum.”
We stood in our tall bodies looking down at the little door. It was shaped like a mouse hole, it went up to our thighs, and had an engraving of a Christmas tree on it. Charlie Quick pulled up his pant legs and squatted to turn the little brass knob. It opened out towards us as thick as a vault and an unseen bell jangled roughly.
Inside was a straight, blue velvet tunnel with a pearl of white light at the end. I’m saying there was a royal blue velvet mouse hole tunnel behind that miniature door behind that couch in the basement of that train station museum. And you bet we were told to get down on our hands and knees and crawl into it. But before we did, I thought of my Carol and said, “Now wait a minute here, what’s this all about?” but then from the pearl of white light came a camera flash, “Is that my wolf man?! Welcome to my home, Mr. H.C.!”
I went first and then Carol. Halfway down, she sneezed and Charlie Quick said, “Bless you,” and I realized he could see her butt wrapped tight and wiggling in her dress so I looked back at him with bared teeth, but he was just kneeling at the door with a pleasant expression on, making sure we got through all right. I thought, Okay, relax and just see. Another camera flash—Christmas was taking our picture. “Don’t let him see down your cleavage!” I said to Carol, ticked off. At the end of the tunnel was another door and Christmas was there squatting.
“You came! You actually came!” he said.
The ceiling touched my hair. Mr. Christmas had to walk with his head bent in his own home. Home? It was a small room lit by a Christmas tree and a murky aquarium that hummed like a background tenor for a Christmas song. There were white cats everywhere—walking around or sleeping on the furniture. There was a low blue velvet couch, there was a low glass table that you could see the black carpet through. Across from the couch there was a kitchen that made you let out a sigh of relief because it looked like a regular apartment kitchen from New York City—a strip of stove, fridge, and sink with the normal light that a kitchen has, though it was sickly dim.
Mr. Christmas opened the door to his bedroom for a second, saying, “The bedroom,” and we saw a black room with a black bed with white cats walking over it. Sleeping on it. And when Carol later used the bathroom, accessed by the bedroom, she said there were two cats shitting in the litter box at the same time, growling at her while she peed. The place was a real dump, a real eccentric’s lair—even had a computer on the floor with graphs on the screen. I sneezed and heard it slap the glass table. Carol said, “Lookit!—the aquatic fish match the ornaments on the tree!” and when Christmas and I looked, she wiped my snot up off the table and petted it onto a cat’s back.
We were given goblets of wine. We were told to sit on the couch, which was so sunken in our knees went up to our chins. Mr. Christmas sat in a puffy TV chair and screamed, “WATCH!”—we jolted and wine splashed out of our goblets. He demonstrated how his chair electronically reclined. A buzz harmonized with the fish tank as he reclined all the way straight, holding his goblet aloft, then slowly came back up to sit. And of course as soon as he was upright he burst out laughing.
Christmas will burst out laughing at something or other in his head and he’ll howl and grip whatever’s handy. He bursted out laughing and slouched down in his chair laughing so hard he had to chew the armrest. (Once, months later during one of his laughs in a steak restaurant, he picked up a knife and stabbed it into the wallpaper and it stayed there bobbing, then fell and knocked over his glass of wine which Charlie Quick sucked up off the edge of the table so it wouldn’t get on Christmas’s suit.)
“Wait—you live here?” I said.
“I live in many places,” he said.
I was like, “Okay.”
A cat jumped up on my lap and meowed, wondering, “Can I be petted?” I saw my snot on its back—what a coincidence that it was the same cat. I stood up to make it drop off and it clung for a sec looking up at me; then it dropped off and I sat back down, grunting louder than I would’ve liked, but that couch was low. I looked at Christmas and he was blowing on a cat that was perched next to his chair on a side table. His top lip flipped up ridiculously as he blew on the squinting cat so hard its fur parted down to the skin. He turned to look at us and seemed slightly drunk from the exertion.
He said, “Oh, you have to see my scales if you come here, that’s the rule. I do these voice lessons.” He did a lung-clearing cough and swallowed the produce. “Scales in G-alternate-minor,” he announced and a passing cat meowed like, “Oh, goody, I love this song!” Christmas clashed with his fish tank doing singing scales like a nervous person telling a stranger about their morning poop because the stranger is an artist and the person can’t even so much as sing. I was sitting there like, “Huh?” Carol clapped dramatically when he was done.
“You should perform out!” she said.
He buzzed his chair back to recline, sipping his wine from there as a game to see if it wouldn’t spill on his face.
“Are you married? Cause I bet girls go crazy for that!” Carol said.
“I’m not married. Having one body is burden enough,” he said.
I said, “Huh?”
“I detest having a body,” he said. “Isn’t it a pest? I have to distract myself from it.”
“What do you got all these cats for then if you don’t like pests? I don’t care for animals, but I like meat,” Carol said. “Get in my stomach,” she said to a passing cat.
Christmas asked about my hairboard.
“Are you ready to sell that door?”
I had thought about it. I’d thought: if I sell that board, you can’t argue it’d be a manly move. Especially since I like the board so much. It’d be a sacrifice for my girl. I’d have this great girl, I’d have money, and I’d have a “job.” It made sense.
“I’m ready when you are.”
“Good!” he said.
And it was hot in the lair, and I don’t like wine, so I said, “How long is this cocktail hour?”
Christmas laughed like a female seal barking in the background of Carol saying, “Jonathan Reilly Junior that is the rudest thing I ever heard you say! I’m sorry, Mr. Christmas, or Leslie? What should we call you, X-mas?” And he just laughed at her, not deigning to answer a question that his Charlie Quick should’ve taken care of.
He did a speech about my hairboard then. His purpled lips sampled the words soundlessly before he spoke them. He sat up straight: “If someone feels compelled to create something, then the something created is art. Because, where did that compulsion come from? The only explanation is that it came from art itself. Art is everywhere. Babies are art, or at least the ones that weren’t accidents. Your hair thing, yes. People want to look at it! Because they’re compelled to! Compulsion is born of art, as art is born of compulsion. My apartment here is a work of art; I felt compelled to create it.” A cat jumped up on his lap and he swatted it off, disgusted. “Synonyms for compulsion: Obligation. Urge. Obsession. Need.” When he said “need” he pointed at me.
“See now that’s interesting,” Carol said. “You’re opening me and John’s eyes up. He told you we’re from Wyoming? See, cause most stuff just takes longer to get over there.”
Christmas was fingering his goblet rim, smiling at me.
“Oh, tell me,” he said, “what does Mr. H.C. stand for?”
“It’s not Mr. H.C., it’s just plain H.C. Actually, I’m The Haircutter, but most people ask me what that means, so I go by H.C.”
“THE HAIRCUTTER?!” he screamed, his cats hissing and running to hide.
He got down and chewed the carpet.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DICK OF FATE
We left Christmas’s museum with bellies gurgling the dregs of mostly peed-out wine. We ate Tic Tacs and yawned all the way home. Even Carol was tired of it.
The next day I was knotting my tie when Carol said from the bed, “What are you doing? You found a
job! You’re an artist, remember?” She undressed me piece by piece like a little ceremony and we smoothed our goose bumps by getting back under the covers and rubbing up against each other. “I love your chest hair!” she screamed.
In order for Christmas to sell my hairboard I had to dust it off. I made a fire and Carol made a Jell-O mold. I blew on the board a few times, then Carol walked the length of it with her hands behind her back like Christmas. She popped her legs backwards for balance before she straightened a lock—her floor-length dress looked weird in the back accordingly.
“Aren’t you sad to see this thing go?” she said.
“I don’t really do sad.”
I guess if I had my way I’d keep my hairboard where it was and I’d go on Monday to get my old job back. I liked the peace I had in Wyoming when I just did my carwash job and went to see my crush and no one bothered me. A “leave me alone” kind of thing. I wanted what I’ve always wanted: nothing. And Carol. I wanted Carol and nothing else. But it was a Christmas who stole the Grinch situation.
Christmas sent Charlie Quick and some “art handlers” to get my hairboard. They put plastic over it and unscrewed it from its track. Charlie Quick lifted his sunglasses up to show how elitist his eyes were when he said, “Mr. Christmas would like you to come to the gallery now to sign papers.” Carol waved goodbye to me and the hairboard with a silk hanky.
The Thank You Gallery looked completely different in the light of day. Only “the kissers” were still there. Their lips were through their holes, their whack-job minds and bodies were on the other side of the walls waiting. Charlie Quick motioned for one of the handler men to kiss a set, and I watched the man slowly understand what it meant and by the time I left, he was down to an undertank and had a radio out and an arm up on the wall, and the back of his head squirmed and I heard sucking at musical pauses.
Mr. Christmas was on the phone, but he motioned for me to come into his little office.
I stuffed my fatass into an artsy chair and watched him cover his phone in spit. Everything he said sounded like an airplane door ripping off at forty thousand feet. The words seemed like they’d stick to a fridge. He spoke from a glitch in time and space. When the person on the other line had a turn, Christmas lightly whistled with his brows in tide with what he heard.
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