Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (13 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but could you repeat that?”

One doesn’t want to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but this seemed completely wrong to me. For starters, Santa didn’t used to do anything. He’s not retired and, more important, he has nothing to do with Turkey. It’s too dangerous there, and the people wouldn’t appreciate him. When asked how he got from Turkey to the North Pole, Oscar told me with complete conviction that Saint Nicholas currently resides in Spain, which again is simply not true. Though he could probably live wherever he wanted, Santa chose the North Pole specifically because it is harsh and isolated. No one can spy on him, and he doesn’t have to worry about people corning to the door. Anyone can come to the door in Spain, and in that outfit he’d most certainly be recognized. On top of that, aside from a few pleasantries, Santa doesn’t speak Spanish. “Hello. How are you? Can I get you some candy?” Fine. He knows enough to get by, but he’s not fluent and he certainly doesn’t eat tapas.

While our Santa flies in on a sled, the Dutch version arrives by boat and then transfers to a white horse. The event is televised, and great crowds gather at the waterfront to greet him. I’m not sure if there’s a set date, but he generally docks in late November and spends a few weeks hanging out and asking people what they want.

“Is it just him alone?” I asked. “Or does he come with some backup?”

Oscar’s English was close to perfect, but he seemed thrown by a term normally reserved for police reinforcement.

“Helpers,” I said. “Does he have any elves?”

Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I couldn’t help but feel personally insulted when Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque and unrealistic. “Elves,” he said. “They are just so silly.”

The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.” I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always “six to eight,” which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get an accurate head count.

The six to eight black men were characterized as personal slaves until the mid-1950s, when the political climate changed and it was decided that instead of being slaves they were just good friends. I think history has proved that something usually comes between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by cookies and quiet hours beside the fire but by bloodshed and mutual hostility. They have such violence in the Netherlands, but rather than duking it out amongst themselves, Santa and his former slaves decided to take it out on the public. In the early years if a child was naughty, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men would beat him with what Oscar described as “the small branch of a tree.”

“A switch?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. They’d kick him and beat him with a switch. Then if the youngster was really bad, they’d put him in a sack and take him back to Spain.”

“Saint Nicholas would kick you?”

“Well, not anymore,” Oscar said. “Now he just pretends to kick you.”

He considered this to be progressive, but in a way I think it’s almost more perverse than the original punishment. “I’m going to hurt you but not really.” How many times have we fallen for that line? The fake slap invariably makes contact, adding the elements of shock and betrayal to what had previously been plain old-fashioned fear. What kind of a Santa spends his time pretending to kick people before stuffing them into a canvas sack? Then, of course, you’ve got the six to eight former slaves who could potentially go off at any moment. This, I think, is the greatest difference between us and the Dutch. While a certain segment of our population might be perfectly happy with the arrangement, if you told the average white American that six to eight nameless black men would be sneaking into his house in the middle of the night, he would barricade the doors and arm himself with whatever he could get his hands on.

“Six to eight, did you say?”

In the years before central heating, Dutch children would leave their shoes by the fireplace, the promise being that unless they planned to beat you, kick you, or stuff you into a sack, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men would fill your clogs with presents. Aside from the threats of violence and kidnapping, it’s not much different than hanging your stockings from the mantel. Now that so few people actually have a working fireplace, Dutch children are instructed to leave their shoes beside the radiator, furnace, or space heater. Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men arrive on horses, which jump from the yard onto the roof. At this point I guess they either jump back down and use the door or stay put and vaporize through the pipes and electrical cords. Oscar wasn’t too clear about the particulars, but really, who can blame him? We have the same problem with our Santa. He’s supposed to use the chimney, but if you don’t have one, he still manages to get in. It’s best not to think about it too hard.

While eight flying reindeer are a hard pill to swallow, our Christmas story remains relatively dull. Santa lives with his wife in a remote polar village and spends one night a year traveling around the world. If you’re bad, he leaves you coal. If you’re good and live in America, he’ll give you just about anything you want. We tell our children to be good and send them off to bed, where they lie awake, anticipating their great bounty. A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, “Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don’t know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.”

This is the reward for living in the Netherlands. As a child you get to hear this story, and as an adult you get to turn around and repeat it. As an added bonus, the government has thrown in legalized drugs and prostitution — so what’s not to love about being Dutch?

Oscar finished his story just as we arrived at the station. He was an amiable guy — very good company — but when he offered to wait until my train arrived I begged off, claiming I had some calls to make. Sitting alone in the vast, vibrant terminal, surrounded by thousands of polite, seemingly interesting Dutch people, I couldn’t help but feel second-rate. Yes, the Netherlands was a small country, but it had six to eight black men and a really good bedtime story. Being a fairly competitive person, I felt jealous, then bitter. I was edging toward hostile when I remembered the blind hunter tramping off alone into the Michigan forest. He may bag a deer, or he may happily shoot a camper in the stomach. He may find his way back to the car, or he may wander around for a week or two before stumbling through your back door. We don’t know for sure, but in pinning that license to his chest, he inspires the sort of narrative that ultimately makes me proud to be an American.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Rooster at the Hitchin’ Post

T HE NIGHT THE ROOSTER WAS BORN, my father slipped into my bedroom to personally deliver the news. I was eleven years old and barely awake, yet still I recognized this as a supreme masculine moment: the patriarch informing his firstborn son that another player was joining the team. Looking around my room, at the vase of cattails arranged just so beside the potpourri bowl, he should have realized it was not his team I was playing for. Not even a girl would have découpaged her own electrical sockets, but finding it too painful to consider, my father played through, going so far as to offer a plastic-wrapped cigar, the band reading IT’S A BOY. He’d gotten one for each of us. Mine was made of chewing gum, and his was the real thing.

“I hope you’re not going to smoke that in here,” I said. “Normally I wouldn’t mind, but I just Scotchgarded the drapes.”

For the first six months, my brother, Paul, was just a blob, then a doll my sisters and I could diaper and groom as we saw fit. Dress him appropriately and it was easy to forget the tiny penis lying like a canned mushroom between his legs. Given some imagination and a few well-chosen accessories, he was Paulette, the pouty French girl; Paola, the dark-wigged bambina, fresh from her native Tuscany; Pauline, the swinging hippie chick. As a helpless infant, he went along with it, but by the age of eighteen months he’d effectively dispelled the theory that a person can be made gay. Despite our best efforts, the cigar band had been right. Our brother was a boy. He inherited my sports equipment, still in its original wrapping, and took to the streets with actual friends, playing whatever was in season. If he won, great, and if he lost, big deal.

“But aren’t you going to weep?” we’d ask him. “Not even a little?”

We tried explaining the benefits of a nice long cry — the release it offered, the pity it generated — and he laughed in our faces. The rest of us blubbered like leaky showerheads, but for him water production was limited to sweat and urine. His sheets might be wet, but the pillow would remain forever dry.

Regardless of the situation, for Paul it was always all about the joke. A warm embrace, a heartfelt declaration of concern: in moments of weakness we’d fall for these setups, vowing later to never trust him again. The last time I allowed my brother to hug me, I flew from Raleigh to New York oblivious to the sign he’d slapped to the back of my sports coat, a nametag sticker reading, “Hello, I’m Gay.” This following the hilarity of our mother’s funeral.

When my sisters and I eventually left home, it seemed like a natural progression — young adults shifting from one environment to the next. While our departures had been relatively painless, Paul’s was like releasing a domestic animal into the wild. He knew how to plan a meal but displayed a remarkable lack of patience when it came time for the actual cooking. Frozen dinners were often eaten exactly as sold, the Salisbury steak amounting to a stickless meat Popsicle. I phoned one night just as he was leaning a family pack of frozen chicken wings against the back door. He’d forgotten to defrost them and was now attempting to stomp the solid mass into three 6-inch portions, which he’d stack in a pile and force into his toaster oven.

I heard the singular sound of boot against crystallized meat and listened as my brother panted for breath. “Goddam . . . fucking . . . chicken . . . wings.”

I called again the following evening and was told that after all that work, the chicken had been spoiled. It tasted like fish, so he threw it away and called it a night. A few hours later, having decided that spoiled chicken was better than no chicken at all, he got out of bed, stepped outside in his underpants, and proceeded to eat the leftovers directly from the garbage can.

I was mortified. “In your underpants?”

“Damned straight,” he said. “I ain’t getting dressed up to eat no fish-assed-tasting chicken.”

I worried about my brother standing in his briefs and eating spoiled poultry by moonlight. I worried when told he’d passed out in a parking lot and awoken to find a stranger’s initials written in lipstick on his ass, but I never worried he’d be able to make a living. He’s been working for himself since high school and at the age of twenty-six had founded a very successful floor-sanding company. The physical work is demanding, but more tiring still are the nitpicky touch-ups, the billing and hiring, and endless discussions with indecisive clients. When asked how he manages to keep all those people happy, Paul credits the importance of compromise, explaining, “Sometimes you got to put that dick in your mouth and roll it around a little. Ain’t no need to swallow nothing, you just got to play on it for a while. You know what I’m saying?”

“Well . . . yeah.”

At an age when the rest of us were barely managing to pay our own rent, he had bought a house. At thirty-two he sold it and traded up, moving into an established neighborhood inside the Raleigh beltline. Four bedrooms and the place was his, as were the trucks and sport-utility vehicles that spilled from the driveway and onto the lawn he paid to have mowed. All this from a business philosophy based on the art of a blowjob.

Paul referred to his house as “the home of a confused clown,” but to the naked eye, the clown seemed absolutely sure of himself. There was the farting mound of battery-operated feces positioned on the mantel, the namesake rooster inlaid into the living-room floor, the bright-green walls, and musical butcher knives. “No confusion here,” you’d say, tripping over a concrete alligator. It was an awfully big place for just one clown, so I was relieved when told that a girlfriend had moved in, accompanied by an elderly pug named Venus.

My brother was overjoyed. “You want to talk at her? Hold on while I put her on the phone.”

I prepared myself for the voice of a North Carolina girlfriend, something like Paul’s but lower, and heard instead what sounded like a handsaw methodically working its way through a tree trunk. It was Venus. Months later he put me on the phone with their new dog, a six-week-old Great Dane named Diesel. I spoke to the outdoor cats, the indoor cats, and the adopted piglet that seemed like a good idea until it began to digest solid food. They’d been living together for more than a year when I finally met the girlfriend, a licensed hairdresser named Kathy. Erase the tattoos and the nicotine patch and she resembled one of those tranquil Flemish Madonnas, the ubiquitous Christ child replaced by a hacking pug. Her grace, her humor, her fur-matted sweaters — we loved her immediately. Best of all, she was from the North, meaning that should she and Paul ever conceive a child, it stood a fifty-fifty chance of speaking understandable English.

They announced their engagement and designed a late-May wedding tailor-made to disappoint the Greeks. It would not take place at the Holy Trinity Church but at a hotel on the coast of North Carolina. The service would be performed by a psychic they’d found in the phone book, and the music provided by a DJ named J.D. who worked weekdays at the local state penitentiary.

“Oh, well,” his godmother sighed. “I guess that’s how the young people like to do it these days.”

I flew in from Paris two days before the wedding and was sitting in my father’s kitchen when Paul came to the door dressed in a suit and tie. A former high school classmate had committed suicide, and he’d dropped by the house on his way home from the funeral. Since I’d last seen him, my once slim brother had gained a good sixty pounds. Everything seemed proportionately larger, but the bulk seemed to have settled about his face and torso, leaving him with what he referred to as Dick Do disease. “My stomach sticks out further than my dick do.”

The added weight had softened certain features and swallowed others altogether. His neck, for instance. Obscured now by a second chin, his head appeared to balance directly upon his shoulders, and he walked delicately, as if to keep it from rolling off. I told myself that if I looked at my brother differently, it was because of the suit, not the weight. He was a grown man now. He was going to get married, and therefore, he was a changed person.

He took a sip of my father’s weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. “This shit’s like making love in a canoe.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s fucking near water.”

Then again, I thought, maybe it is just the weight.

I drove to the coast early the next morning with Lisa and her husband, Bob. Being the oldest and the only one married, she’d bumped herself up a notch, assuming the dual roles of experienced older sister and designated mother of the groom. To mention Paul, Kathy, or even Atlantic Beach was to inspire an upwelling of tears, followed by a choked “I just never thought I would see this day.” From Morehead City on, she pretty much cried nonstop, provoked by the landmarks of our youth. “Oh, the bridge! The pier! The midget golf course!”

Paul was to be married in what used to be the John Yancy but was currently called the Royal Pavilion. The remodeling had been extensive, and what had once been a modest ocean-front hotel now boasted reception rooms and a wedding gazebo. Waitresses wore bow ties and pushed the scampi, explaining that it was Italian. Had you spent the 1980s in a coma, you might have been impressed with the fake columns and pastel color schemes, but as it was, there was something sad and mallish about it.

While the ceremony would take place at the Royal Pavilion, guests would be staying next door at the Atlantis, a three-story motel essentially unchanged since the early space age. It’s where we’d spent weekends as young adults, when trips to the beach became trips at the beach. Mushrooms, cocaine, acid, peyote: I’d never checked in without being, at the very least, profoundly stoned, and on arrival I was surprised to find the furniture actually standing still.

My brother had chosen the Atlantis not for its sentimental value but because it allowed the various family dogs. Paul’s friends, a group the rest of us referred to as simply “the Dudes,” had also brought their pets, which howled and whined and clawed at the sliding glass doors. This was what happened to people who didn’t have children, who didn’t even know people who had children. The flower girl was in heat. The rehearsal dinner included both canned and dry food, and when my brother proposed a toast to his “beautiful bitch,” everyone assumed he was talking about the pug.

An hour before the wedding, the men in my family were scheduled to meet in Paul’s room, no women or Dudes allowed. I went expecting a once-in-a-lifetime masculine moment, and looking back, that’s probably what I got. While my room was immaculate, Paul’s was dark and littered with bones, like the cave of an animal. He’d only arrived the previous afternoon, but already it looked as though he’d been living there for years, surviving on beer and the bodies of missing beachcombers. I spread out a newspaper and sat on the bed as my father, the best man, attached my brother’s cummerbund. It was five o’clock on one of the most important days of their lives and both of them were watching TV It was a cable news channel, a special report concerning a flood in one of those faraway towns senselessly built on the banks of an untrustworthy river. Citizens stacked sandbags on a retaining wall. A wheelbarrow floated down the suburban street. “And still,” the announcer said, “still the rain continues to fall.”

I’d heard once, maybe falsely, that when filming the movie Gandhi, the director had hired extras to play the roles of sandbags, that it had actually been cheaper than finding the real thing. It seemed like a worthy conversational icebreaker, but before I could finish the first sentence, my father told me to put a lid on it.

“We’re trying to watch some TV here,” he said. “Jesus, do you mind?” Over in the bridal suite, they were applying makeup and systematically crying it back off. Noteworthy things were being said, and I couldn’t help but feel I was in the wrong room. My father turned my brother to face him and, with one eye on the television, began knotting his bow tie.

“Water like that will fuck the shit out of some hardwood floors,” Paul said. “Those sons of bitches are looking at total replacements, I’ll tell you what.”

“Well, you’re right about that.” My father helped the groom into his jacket and turned to give the flood victims one last look. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get married.”

It was a busy day at the Royal Pavilion. The five o’clock wedding had gotten off to a late start, and we watched from the sidelines as a Marine Corps chaplain finished marrying an attractive young couple in their early twenties. Lisa and Amy gave the relationship three years at the most. Gretchen and I put it closer to eighteen months, and Tiffany suggested that if we wanted the real answer, we should ask the psychic, who stood beside a scrub pine entertaining Paul’s godmother. She was a tall, conservatively dressed woman with flesh-colored hair and matching fingernails. Sunglasses hung from a chain around her neck, and she wiped their lenses while reciting her credentials. It seemed that aside from her regular Friday-night tarot-card readings, she also cured cancer, diabetes, and heart disease by touching the sufferers in secret, hard-to-reach places. “I’ve had the gift since I was seven,” she said. “And believe me, I am very good at what I do.”