by Ralphie May
With less than two months gone by in what was promising to be a long school year, there was only one person I could turn to if I wanted to solve my problem: the poor-kid lottery, the fat-guy savior himself—Santa Claus.
At school, when we talked about Christmas and our wish lists for Santa, all the other kids in my class wanted the biggest, coolest, newest toys—the ones their parents repeatedly told them they couldn’t afford. I didn’t want any toys. I had plenty of toys. From Santa, I wanted Adidas. No more of this phony-suede, tiny-zippered, no-run-stop-supporting, weak-soled KangaROOS bullshit! It was time for some of that fine German engineering. I wanted a little fahrvergnügen con mis zapatos, if you feel me. I wasn’t trying to be greedy, though. I wasn’t looking for the fat man to bring me a pair of the fancy Rod Laver Adidas or any of the ones the other famous tennis players wore. I just wanted the classic white shell-top Superstars with the three black stripes on the side (the ones Run-D.M.C. would make famous a few years later).
I talked to anyone who would listen about what I wanted for Christmas, but by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, it felt like Santa Claus was the only man left on Team Ralphie. If I was going to get a second new pair of cool shoes this school year, I had to get ahold of him. I had to explain what had happened with the ROOS, I had to describe exactly what I wanted, and I had to make sure he knew I deserved them—that I was on the Nice list.
I started my campaign for the Nice list by doing something that should probably have put me on the Naughty list: I stole forty or fifty stamps from my granny’s desk. I’ve never understood why so many old people carry so much postage around with them, like at any moment a wedding might break out and they’ll need to invite everyone they know immediately, but I’m glad my granny was one of those people because it allowed me to send Santa a letter every other day until the week before Christmas. I sent him letters about how good I’d been. I sent him short notes with pictures of the Adidas I wanted that I’d cut out of the Sunday circular from both local papers (the Democrat and the Gazette). If the sports section had a picture of a famous athlete wearing Adidas, I’d cut that out too and draw a big circle around the shoes with an arrow pointing to them and the words I would like these please scribbled in crayon. Then I’d draw pictures of myself wearing the shoes, so Santa would know for certain how much the Adidas meant to me. I sent so many letters to the North Pole, the post office probably had to charter a special plane just for my shit.
My granny was a whip-smart Southern lady. She knew I’d pinched her stamps and she saw what I was up to on my letter-writing campaign, so she took this opportunity to farm me out to all her old-lady friends to do chores for them: raking leaves, hauling wood, moving boxes and furniture, winterizing porches. I was still only eight years old, but she had me working like a slave. Why she didn’t have these people fucking pay me for doing their chores so I could buy my own shoes, I will never know. At the time, I didn’t mind, and I didn’t ask: I was happy to do everything I could to work my way up to the top of Santa’s Nice list. Indentured servitude was a small price to pay for new kicks.
As Christmas approached, I was both excited and nervous. I knew I’d personally done enough to earn those Adidas, but as a family we’d done fuck-all to make Santa feel welcome on the big day. We didn’t have any decorations or lights up, we didn’t even have our tree, and some of the kids at school said if you didn’t have a tree with decorations, Santa would skip your house because he’d think you were a Jew. I asked my mama about getting a tree, but she deflected and changed the subject whenever I brought it up. Like we could afford a tree. I was also worried because we were going to have Christmas at my granny’s house and I’d put our house as the return address on all my letters. How in the world was Santa going to find me if we weren’t where I’d told him we would be?
* * *
When Christmas Eve finally came, I had resolved all of my fears about getting skipped by Santa except for one: we still didn’t have a Christmas tree. I was not going to let Santa Claus off the hook because of some weird Jew loophole, so I went out into the woods with my Cub Scout hatchet, cut down a cedar tree, and dragged it back to the house. I was a strong chubby kid, even at eight years old, but ain’t no way a third grader is dragging a tree a half mile back to his house without doing some damage. By the time I got home, one whole side was missing its needles and half its branches. No problem. I used some of that Cub Scout ingenuity and stuffed the AIDS-y looking Charlie Brown side of the tree into the corner against the wall. I maintain to this day that it worked out better with one whole side of the tree gone because it held up against the wall really well. Once I got it in place, I put about forty feet of popcorn garland around it, used the wide-ruled binder paper from my generic Trapper Keeper to make some badass snowflakes, made an angel out of yellow construction paper that I rolled into a cone and drew a face on, then spread out an old strand of white lights that had an ozone smell to them, which, combined with the creosote from the cedar tree, was a house fire waiting to happen. I paid that no mind. This thing only had to hold out about a day and a half before it went up in flames, and the risk was worth the reward. I was not about to lose out on my Adidas because of a code violation.
Christmas Eve night was a cold one in northwest Arkansas. The temperature dropped down into the high teens overnight, and the wind was gusting above thirty miles per hour. That’s a nasty combination when your house is little more than a beat-up shotgun shack with gaps between the clapboards that let heat out and cold in. In the winter we put up plastic sheeting on the walls (like Dexter fixing to kill somebody) and that helped a little, but when it’s eighteen degrees outside and the oven’s not on, there’s no two ways about it—you’re living in an icebox. We were never cold in bed, though, because my mama had us under about thirty pounds of quilts. They were so heavy and exerted so much downward pressure that when they were tucked in, you had to pick your exact comfortable spot before the quilts came down because that’s where you were going to stay the rest of the night. There was no moving once the hatch was closed. I went to sleep earlier than previous Christmas Eve nights because the local six-o’clock news was reporting that they’d just spotted Santa Claus on the radar. I wasn’t about to risk his passing us by after the near miss with the tree. Cookies and milk would be out, and I would be asleep before that could happen.
Early to bed also means early to rise, especially on Christmas morning. I was the first one up at the butt crack of dawn. I pried myself out of our quilt sarcophagus and made a beeline for the living room. The job of the first person up was always to turn on the oven in the kitchen to heat the house, but I ignored that responsibility. I didn’t need a gas oven to warm me through because I was fired up by the Christmas spirit. Two presents with my name on them were under the tree. One looked like some kind of lumpy sweater I’d never wear, but the other was wrapped and shaped like a shoebox. My heart lifted into my cheeks.
You know how every Christmas movie you’ve ever watched has that one scene where the kids wake up early and scout out the presents, waiting for Mom and Dad to get up, but then they can’t wait any longer, so they go bursting into their parents’ room to announce that Santa came, and everyone smiles and hugs like they’re creating memories that will last a lifetime and traditions they will pass down through the generations? Yeah, well, traditions can kiss my ass, I had my own memories to make! I tore off the wrapping, ripped open the box, and nearly had a heart attack. Inside was a pair of white shell-topped sneakers with one, two, three … four black stripes? As quickly as my heart had lifted into my face, it had dropped into my stomach.
Adidas only have three stripes. Not four, three. What in the actual fuck was going on here? I tried to convince myself that maybe these were a new line of Adidas that only Santa had access to, but I knew right well what they were. They were Winners Choice shoes from Walmart. Poor-kids Adidas. If you didn’t grow up broke, you probably have no idea what those are. They are sneakers designed to look exactly li
ke Adidas, except they’re made out of plastic instead of leather. And to make up for the gap in quality, they added an extra stripe. A fourth stripe. A gratuitous, utterly unnecessary stripe.
Three is a perfect number: the rule of three, the holy trinity, three-pointers, triple plays, threesomes. It’s a magical digit.
Four sucks. There are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The worst music ever invented—barbershop quartet—has four members. To the Chinese, four is an unlucky number. And they should know, their children made these shoes. They knew when they were making them: any kid who has to wear these shoes to school is royally fucked. They were right too, because let me tell you something about these plastic pieces of shit called Winners Choice shoes: no winner has ever chosen to buy these things.
Two months of letter writing. Two months of manual labor and being good. That motherfucker owed me. And he’s going to do me like this? With some generic club-store garbage? I went from ecstasy to agony in the time it took to count the stripes on the side of a sneaker.
I stared at the shoes for what felt like forever. I counted and re-counted the number of stripes to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. I looked at them cross-eyed to make two of the stripes merge and hoped that if I held my gaze long enough the stripes would literally morph into one right in front of my eyes. I picked at one of the stripes with my chewed fingernails. Maybe it would come clean off and I’d have passable Adidas on my hands. None of it worked. My young mind could draw only one conclusion from all this: Santa had fucked me. I had been doughnut-holed by Saint Nick. I was furious. The anger that swept over me engulfed the entire house. I picked up the shoes and threw them at the tree, which slowly fell over on its AIDS-y side. I started hollering at the top of my lungs, cussing a blue streak: “Fuck you, Santa, you fat fucking asshole piece-of-shit cocksucker motherfucker! You sure ate the cookies I put out for you, didn’t you, you sonuvabitch!” I didn’t care who heard me. Santa, the neighbors, God—they could all eat shit as far as I was concerned.
That’s when I looked up to find my mom at the top of the stairs crying.
“Ralphie, what are you doing?”
“These shoes suck, Mama!”
“Your dad hasn’t sent any money since August, honey. And since I stopped working at Junior Food Mart after Thanksgiving, things have been really tight—”
“What the hell does Dad have to do with anything?! I’m talking about Santa. He’s the one that fucked me, Mama! He fucked me!” It was like she wasn’t even listening to what I was trying to say.
“—and after paying bills and putting gas in the car so we can go see Granny later, all I had left was thirty-four dollars. These were all we could afford.” She was choking back tears.
If life were like a movie and if I had the ability to empathize with other people yet, that was the moment when I would have stopped and thought about my actions, then got up and hugged my mama and maybe gone outside and given the shoes to some homeless kid sleeping in the gutter. But life isn’t a movie. Life’s a bitch. So instead I said, “Yeah, well, Mama, these shoes still fucking suck. They suck a big dick. Fuck these shitty shoes.”
I was so absorbed in my anger and disappointment that it didn’t dawn on me for at least a minute and a half what she’d really said. When it finally clicked, I turned back and looked her square in the eyes.
“Mama, what do you mean this was all we could afford?”
“Santa didn’t bring you those shoes, Ralphie. I did.”
“Why? Why didn’t Santa bring me the shoes I asked for? What the fuck happened to Santa, Mom? Is he dead? Where is Santa?!”
That’s when she said it. Possibly the worst four words one could think to say to an innocent child that one is trying to console: “Santa Claus isn’t real, sweetie.”
In one moment, my mother had ground my childhood into oblivion and fractured my worldview with a hammer wrapped in a velvet Santa suit. I wanted a new pair of shoes. What I got instead was some triflin’ plastic nonsense and my innocence stolen from me.
Most kids would then have started to cry and sob uncontrollably, but with all the stuff I’d already been through by eight years old, I was past that kindergarten shit. I was self-sufficient enough as an independent thinker to put two and two together and realize the broader implications of what my mama had just said. My young, inquisitive brain started firing. I was like Neo as the red pill moved through his body and the revelations came faster and faster until he reached the singularity. Dots began connecting in my head, questions began rolling off my tongue at a lightning pace—the answers coming to me even before my mother could respond.
“So what you’re telling me is that everyone is a liar? You’re a liar? Granny is a liar? Teachers are liars? Everybody is a liar?”
How could so many people be complicit in a massive lie to America’s children?
Who was that old guy whose lap I sat on at the mall up in Fort Smith? Who the fuck was that piece of shit?! We went to Long John Silver’s afterward and Mama got me extra crispies like I was big-time. Cold comfort. Were the crispies how she covered up her shame for perpetrating a heinous lie on her baby boy? I was livid. Eight years old and I was flipping out like a meth’d-up long-haul trucker.
The whole goddamn reason I went to bed at 6:45 that night was because the Channel 7 news had Santa on their radar! The fucking news was in on this too? Was Doppler radar even real? It’s the news! If you can’t trust the news, if the newspeople are a bunch of asshole fabricators, who can you trust? You all have been feeding me horseshit and telling me it was spaghetti, but I know horseshit when I taste it and this is some grade-A horseshit, Mama! Good goddamn, Lord Jesus!
I stopped and went quiet. The calm and complete stillness of a life-changing epiphany had just overwhelmed me. This was my Neo-in-the-empty-white-room moment. I had arrived at the question:
“Wait, Mama … is Jesus real?”
“Yes, Ralphie, of course Jesus is real.”
“Really, Mama, really?”
“Yes, honey, Jesus is real. He sits at the hand of God.”
“So you’re saying there’s a magical bearded fella who knows everything about us, whether we’ve been good or bad, he keeps score, and if we’re good enough, he comes and gives us stuff—that guy is not real. But there’s this other bearded fella who is also magical and knows everything about us, whether we’ve been good or bad, keeps score, and if we’re good enough, he comes and provides for us—that guy is real?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if I fucking believe you, Mama. I think you’re full of shit. I’m calling bullshit, Mama. You just told me you’re a liar two seconds ago, how can I trust you?”
My mom was an emotional person and this really got the tears flowing. “I’m sorry, honey, maybe you should ask the preacher at church. He can tell you.”
I thought about it for a second. “You mean that fucking liar who told me he hopes Santa brings me everything I asked for? That sonuvabitch?! Mama, how can I trust anything an adult tells me ever again?”
* * *
When school came back in session after winter break, the first thing we did in class was to share what we got for Christmas. The kids who had money got the toys their parents insisted they couldn’t afford. The poor kids with no dads got empty promises, and the poor kids who had dads got homemade stuff that could probably kill them. I’m pretty sure all the poor kids in America who maimed, cut, or burned themselves when I was growing up did so with a dangerous implement their fathers made for them in the garage in lieu of getting them a bike or an Atari VCS. I didn’t want to tell my classmates the truth about my Christmas presents, but I had to wear the evidence to school every day, so there was no hiding it. My feet were a walking crime scene.
I tried my best to make the Winners Choice shoes look cool. I hit the extra stripe with a layer of Wite-Out. I tried taking a seam ripper to it. Nothing could help those plastic pieces of shit, and since elementary-school kids are monstrous little pricks by nature
, they spent the rest of the school year making fun of me. In the span of two months I went from being the coolest kid in third grade to being a leper.
Those were my real Christmas presents: a crappy sweater and a crisis of faith.
It took me years to get some of my faith back. I’ve got a little now. It’s important, I think. Without faith in something you’re just a pessimist, and no one likes to hang out with a cynic for long. Funnily enough, it was The Matrix that helped reel me back toward a more normal version of myself. I recognized my Winners Choice shoes and Santa’s empty red suit in the red pill that Morpheus gave to Neo. I hadn’t actually been stripped of faith: I’d been given the power to investigate questions whose answers I had only taken on faith up to then. I learned how to ask my own questions and come up with my own answers.
It’s that combination—your own questions and your own answers—that sits at the foundation of good comedy. The combination is difficult to generate if you have not had your red-pill moment. The people who have, who can do it best, are usually the best comics. They are true skeptics, riding the red-pill wave until it crashes into a half-empty room of foreign tourists who don’t get their jokes. At which point they want more than anything else to believe in Santa or Jesus again because one of them might actually be able to deliver a decent audience to their gigs one day.
2.
RUSTY WAS RETARDED GOOD
One of my first friends was a boy named Rusty Dugan, who lived down the road. We met one day when a group of kids from the neighborhood were playing in the street and Rusty came out to join us. He was wearing shorts and shoes and a T-shirt like everyone else, but he also wore a hard white plastic helmet that, today, I recognize as a mountain climber’s helmet. He was the only kid with one of those. We all had parents who made us do and wear ridiculous shit, so nobody flinched when Rusty came up to introduce himself. Maybe the helmet was just his parents’ unique way of humiliating him in front of his friends. Still, we had to ask: