You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (10 page)

Obviously I needed to do my best to forget what Santa and I had shared.

And to hope he died soon.

The problem was, my grandfather’s best buddy was more famous than Coca-Cola. And he was eternal.

This was really bothering me: I picked up that sad crusty thing in a bar. He didn’t fall from a sleigh in the sky. I wasn’t bound and gagged and brought to him, a gun at my temple.

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
.

F
OUR 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.”

“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.