My Latest: A Christmas Story

 

    T’was the night before Christmas, and the mall was packed. Shoppers incandescent with fury and gall bumped and jostled as shopping season came mercifully to an end.

    No fury or gall for me, though. I was relaxed, carefree, guiltless, because my plan was executing perfectly: ignore my one assigned shopping role until the very last minute, then, with less than two hours to spare, head to the mall just prior to closing and dutifully choose the only gifts my wife, Elizabeth, would entrust in my care, her parents’.

    Gravesend Mall, as it was then, and will forever be, was a battle zone at Christmas, but I had the tactical advantage since I wasn’t operating under the same conditions as most of my hurried and harried fellow shoppers. Inertia is always on the side of the procrastinator. I’d stored up my shopping energy all season and now used it to effortlessly wend my way through banks of barely mobile seniors, gaggles of preening teenagers, and lone lumps of solitary husband out shopping for what, no doubt, they were told to go and buy.

    Gifts for Phil and Benita, who loved alcohol and books, were easy to find. As an accomplished drinker who liked to read, there was no mystery why I got this particular job, since my life skills—those life skills, at least—matched me perfectly with my in-laws’ holiday habits of being drunk and complaining that nobody knew how to write anymore.

    So this year, like every year since they’d unsuccessfully convinced their daughter to drop her college boyfriend for someone with more potential, I was on the hunt for booze for Benita and a book for Phil. All things considered, it was an easy task. Alcohol—“anything mixable and not too sweet”—for Benita, and a book—“something to do with crime, but he’ll be happy with anything as long as it’s American”—for Phil. Like all relations between sons-in-law and the people whose life choices grew into a wife, there was friction, and I wasn’t immune to the covert delights of matching alcohol to book based on the preferred poisons of authors who’d died from drink. Thus, in years when tensions were high, I (we, officially) gifted them gin and F. Scott Fitzgerald, more gin and Raymond Chandler, or vodka and Truman Capote, although that last one nearly gave away my game since everyone knew Phil was uncomfortable about Capote.

    He loved the Oscar Wilde, though, or so he told me over a delicious absinthe.

    Elizabeth disapproved of my petty little holiday pageant, but I believe she secretly enjoyed seeing me so happy at Christmas. It, and the absurd prequel of procrastination, had become holiday tradition. 

    We usually got along at Christmas, though, me and Phil, especially the last few years as the kids got older and more complicated to handle before, during, and after the holidays. In a wink they’d gone from being satisfied with a few popular tie-in toys and trinkets to demanding luxuries that would make a Tsar blush. At those moments when my face gave away my pain, Phil got to announce to me and the rest of the household that he’d been right all along, that the boys would grow into young men and decimate my bank account every Christmas with such predictable habits, habits he had cultivated in his own child. It seemed an endless cycle for that branch of the family, and the boys’ complicity, I suspected, was all designed to destroy any hopes I’d had for retirement—new iPhones, subscriptions to god knows how many video game platforms and streaming channels, enough hoodies to clothe a small country of sporty, college-bound boys. At Thanksgiving that year, Phil had quietly, and a little smugly, loaned me a few dollars to ensure another year of trust between father and sons. I was grateful for his generosity after a hard year financially, and determined that I would put a little bit of thought into his gift that year. 

    So it was that Christmas Eve, that, after chancing on a highly rated half-off Australian pinot noir for Benita, I found myself wedged into the new fiction section at Crabtree’s Books looking for “something to do with crime,” something American, for Phil, a task made somewhat harder since he’d seemingly gone through every one of the faced-out books on display.

    At a loss, I phoned Benita and read out every name on the first few shelves.

    “He's read it… read that one, too… oh, that one’s in the bathroom now… is that a women or a man author?”, and on and on until I’d reached the end of the bestseller list and Benita’s willingness to help me. Not to worry, though. I knew my way around Crabtree’s like a pro and could always reliably choose a good book. Nothing to worry over.   

    At the back corner of Crabtree’s, in the Mysteries and Thrillers section, it was just me and another man standing so silent and still, it startled me when I rounded the corner.

    “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, smiling weakly.

    He was curiously even more relaxed than myself. Not only did he seem unconcerned about which book to get, he didn’t even seem to be shopping, just standing there poised for conversation by a little table stacked with multiple copies of the same glossy hardback and an oversized promotional poster featuring the book cover and author photo.

    Which, governed by my lifetime of luck, looked just like him.

    Great. The author wishes to sell you his book. My favorite.

    He smiled at me, and I at him, and then I looked down at the table of books, each one destined for the remainder shelves in another month or two. I looked at the table again and saw that an industrious bookseller inclined to dour Victorian tastes had festooned it like a shrine to morose Christmas memories with a sad little candle and a wreath they wouldn’t dare put out near the new fiction at the front of the store.

    I turned my back on the depressing little display and began my hunt. I’d indulged local authors, unknowns, and even a few refugees from the world of literary fame before, but it was just bad timing—and, frankly, bad form—to do this to a customer pecking for gold among the corn on Christmas Eve. Under normal circumstances, I’d have been happy to throw a needy writer some attention this time of year. This is how they got known, after all, handselling being the heart of the business, and all of that. But. Just not today, ok, pal? You’re not why I’m here. I’d like to help you out, really, but not this time.

    I could tell I wasn’t the first person to make their way to Mysteries and Thrillers that day, as he quietly stood there, peripherally idling near G through L. When I edged closer to him, however, I felt his presence ever more forcefully, as if willing me to ask him to please move so I would have to face him once more and he could triumphantly waltz in through that conversational opening and ask if I might be interested in a new kind of crime story, or whatever the marketing line was in those days.

    But I resisted the pull of this pathetic man and carried on with my business.

    As I knelt down and attempted to move by him at shin level, he asked me in a quiet voice, “Have you read my latest?”

    Sometimes, you just have to be nice—Christmas Eve, especially—so I did what I had to do given the situation and jerked myself upright, shrugged in as annoyed a manner as possible without hurting my neck, huffily grabbed off the top of the stack a fresh, crisp copy of something something Die, and said, “No.”

    I hadn’t, although his name, John L. Hampton, rang a bell.  

    “My latest,” he repeated apologetically. I turned the book over and there he was, a smaller version of his pathetically eager face staring back at me. The real thing in front of me was him alright, but maybe a little less lively. The author photo was him on a good day, obviously with some help from professional lighting, the attentions of a part-time publicist, and visions of book advances dancing in his head. The man in front of me was older, sadder, grimmer around the mouth and eyes, which were set in so far I felt like recommending to him the same concealer Elizabeth wore when we had to be social with people our age.

    I glanced at the promo poster and scanned for the few key attractors I employed when shopping for Phil—"award-winning,” a recognizable publisher, not a local author (he hated it when you got him someone local, a sure sign to him that the author was foisted on the general reading public in an act of writing industry charity), and, importantly, an endorsement from Stephen King—and decided maybe this was what I was looking for. I had a passing skill with crime fiction but had never gotten in deeply enough to know some of the also-rans like John L. Hampton.

    “Is it any good?” I asked. I knew it was a terrible, nasty thing to ask as soon as I asked it, but it was nearing 8:00 and I was never all that polite after 7:00 on a good day. “Sorry.”

    John L. Hampton grimaced. “It’s actually quite terrible,” he said, and I laughed at his temerity. “’He obviously wrote this one in memory of the good ones,’ so said one critic, and he wasn’t wrong!”

    We both laughed at that.

    I liked John L. Hampton and turned the book over to see if the cover could provide any argument for not buying his book. Unfortunately, the front cover was as generic as anything I’d seen on the shelves. The critic seemed to be on to something. In bold, slanted capitals, the generic title Last One to Die overlay a sepia, brackish, spooked woods that could be anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. A lump of dead body lay across the bottom edge as a small trickle of crimson oozed its escape to the bottom right corner. I opened the book to the first page, a prologue written in the killer’s voice. How delightfully original, I thought.

    “Looks interesting,” I lied. It looked and read like every other crime novel published in the last decade. 

    “It isn’t,” he said. “Try one of the older ones. I could still write up to a couple of years ago. I got an Edgar, so they can’t all be bad.” He was right. I turned and scanned the shelves behind me for more of his books and found the first in what looked to be a noirish trilogy featuring a hard-living former alcoholic with a proclivity for making bad sports bets and endless trips into the dark underworld of Miami. Phil liked Miami, so that was hopeful. Plus, they all had the ringing endorsement of Stephen King, a sure thing. I decided John L. Hampton deserved a wider readership, and meant to tell him so, but when I turned around to ask him if he’d mind signing copies of the books, he was gone.

    The thought that his face was familiar continued to nag at me. Maybe I had seen one of his books lying around their living room (or on the back of the toilet), so I called Benita to make sure before getting away from the mall for another year.

    “What’s his name again? John…”

    “John L. Hampton.” I said, looking down at the trilogy in my hand. “Pieces of the Heart? Last One to Die is his newest one,” I said. “Used to be big, apparently.”

    “Oh. John L. Hampton. He died a few weeks back. Good writer.”

    I looked around the bookstore, scanning the faces of shoppers and tired clerks, certain she was mixed up from her after-dinner quart of spirits. “Are you sure? He died?”

    “I’m sure of it,” she said. “We heard he was going to sign books, but then he died. I think he had a heart attack or something. Died right there in the mall.”

    I hung up the phone and looked closely at the signing table. The black wreath. The candles. The silence. I opened the book and turned to the inner sleeve at the back. “John L. Hampton was a master of suspense,” it read.

    “Was?” 

    “I died in October, just in time for them to use it in the adverts. Nice of the staff to keep a little memorial of me to boost sales, don't you think?” He was there again, standing just out of my peripheral vision. I turned to look, this time, really look, and saw the dread in John L. Hampton’s meek little smile. He said, “I see you found the older ones. Good. Those were me at my best.” Ice water ran down my back and froze me where I stood. Then the author dissolved and left me to absorb the unthinkable.

    As I sat in the driver’s seat, rapt by the experience, staring out at the lights ahead, I looked over at the bag of books in the passenger seat, forcing myself to remember every word we’d said so I could tell Elizabeth about it and she could tell me what a liar I was. Getting out of the mall parking lot on Christmas Eve was usually hellish, a necessary side effect of my procrastination, but that year I was aware of nothing else but the fact that I had spent ten minutes in conversation with a ghost. A talented one at that. Phil had better like this gift, I thought.

    “Do you think he’s read my latest?” asked John L. Hampton from the backseat.     

 © Craig Belanger 2020

Get Off Your Ass (with poem)

What: Theatrical program for a limited run of Tongues by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, with insert poem by yours truly.

Cost/Value: $4 to see the show, the cost of a sandwich at Baggins. 

The story, as I recall: Being part of a theater troupe was the closest thing I've ever come to being a pirate: driven far and hard by blackhearted cap'ns, living rough among scurvy crewmates for low wages and long nights, cramped in dank, nasty vessels cast upon maps of imagination, we chased selfish, criminal dreams of easy plenty and starred infamy that, according to legend, lay somewhere beyond the horizon. 

The treasure was all ours, too, if we'd only take the demented risk. 

Not to judge, but if you call yourself a thespian and your experience was nothing like mine, you missed out. Depending on the mood, I suppose other extended metaphors might come to mind as I remember that life--rag-and-bone shops where the used shit of our lives gets sold for pennies, insane asylums run by the inmates, etc. etc., but pirates will do for this one.  

Despite what you might imagine, culture wasn't exactly rare and running scared in Tucson in the 1990s. My first month in town, I learned the map of Tucson easily by plotting out islands of cultural solace: The Loft Cinema, on 5th Street before it moved to Speedway, Zia Records, which I'd later manage in Phoenix, and the various used and new bookstores where I mainlined transgressive entertainments on student's wages. The local theatre scene, fed generously by the University of Arizona's fine drama program, was a distant country cousin of what I imagined "the life" in New York City to be like, a sort of I-met-Woody-Allen-at-the-bistro-and-he-loves-my-writing fantasia that I chased for several years before retiring for a life of medical benefits and upwardly mobile recompense for an education and reasonable aspirations. 

AKA Theatre and other black box theaters dotted the local map, run as described above, no more or less rare, I suppose, from the denizens of other similar theatres around the world where this perennially dying art form still thrives in respective economies of class and local concern for the arts. 

To put this production of Tongues in that context, you'd also have to imagine that other recent productions would have included works by Bertolt Brecht, María Irene Fornés, 

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Caryl Churchill alongside lesser-known contemporaries and local writers. Sometime after one of those headliners, then, our little troupe would have been a late-night attraction.

While AKA hosted Tongues, this was actually a production of GOYA, a loosely considered collective, less a formal movement than the intention of one, the result of collective creative will energized by ideas and youthful desire to shine. GOYA stood for Get Off Your Ass, a "forum for artists interested in multi-media collaboration," which meant "go see a play and we'll give you a free poem," pretty much. But we tried.

Well, they did. I'm among a very fortunate few who, through the vagaries of geography and timing, studied theater arts under Marie Kerwin, who ran the Moon Valley High School program, not as an after-school nursery for misfits and imaginative children, but as a serious, semi-professional dramatic arts academy. As a public school educator, she had no business doing that, but thank god she did. It was magical, the closest thing to Hogwarts I've ever experienced. But even then, I was always a loiterer in the wings, drawn to the indiscreet backstage treats far more than the dogged discipline of being a talent on stage or off. When GOYA launched, nothing had changed: I wrote a few things and dreamed, but my partners--the actors, the production consultant--were far more serious about getting on that boat and sailing for the high seas, which they did. They were the real theatrical artists, powerhouses of energy and creativity who settled on Tongues, a two-man piece for voice and percussion, as the perfect showpiece for their livid energies. It was their ship, and I was happy to be a castaway.   

The poem included is bad beat poetry with socialist overtones, a humanist peaen to depravity, my melieu in those days, although I still like the refrain of "My mouth is no comedian"--it has a dumb fatalism that even a salty old pirate could appreciate.
  
Why did I keep it? It's an obvious keepsake. Although not my inaugural publication--we'll look at that one some other time--I'm proud to have been bonus content for a good night at the theater. 

Item 3: A collection of concert tickets from the 1980s/1990s.

I Smoked for Michael Dukakis

What: An empty pack of Campaign 88 Dukakis for President King Size Filters. 

Cost/Value: $2.15 retail, roughly twice what a pack of Camels cost. One eBay lot of Dukakis and Bush packs sold for $22.99 a few years ago.

The story, as I recall: I smoked every last one of them. 

In 1988, I was wayward in every sense of the term. No permanent address or fixed direction in life, my friends and girlfriends itinerant and unreliable, I was absent from both college and career and ready to join the circus or go be a poet somewhere that would have me.

My only reliable assets were delusions of beatnik grandeur and an uncritical curiosity that should have killed me before my 20th birthday. My role models were Lou Reed and Hunter S. Thompson, both of whom I revered as self-exiled, fellow abominations of middle class America. I, too, felt sick and dirty, more dead than alive, and yearned to escape my bourgeois heritage then grow up to taunt it for making me. Or something.

I wanted to know everything, but was confused how one did that, know everything. Like all my heroes, I devoured books and lyrics and poems and art and films out of psychic self defense. Every new name was a feast for the imagination--Celine, Dos Passos, O'Keeffe, Ginsberg, Godard, Artaud, Coltrane, Van, Patti. There was so much to ingest, yet I was paradoxically terrified of starving. 

It should have been clear to me that I swung hard left politically, what with all the liberals and punks and counterculture heroes in my music collection. (I mean, come on! I owned three Billy Bragg albums and a Phil Ochs tape!) But at 19, I was unstaked, so my politics were elusive at best, enigmatic at worst. That year alone saw me renounce my membership in the Republican Party, a youthful indiscretion attributable to an adjacent membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints (some other time, dear, curious reader), in favor of a flirtation with the Socialist Party by way of Fred Hampton, the murdered Black Panther, and John Reed, the harassed chronicler of Red October. 

The renunciation occurred inside a North Phoenix DMV teeming with rednecks at a time when gun racks were as common a sight as, well, rednecks in North Phoenix. The clerk who took my voter registration card did so reluctantly after discovering I had written "Communist" in the box for party affiliation, whereupon she announced that SHE was never going to sign it officially, whereupon her supervisor told her she had to because I was free to be a Communist, whereupon several people standing around the counter looked at me and began asking if I'd rather go live in Russia, whereupon I made a commie-shaped hole in the door and escaped before I could find out what it's like to get my ass kicked in a parking lot of a government building. Needless to say I was not then nor was I ever an actual Communist, but I was listening to a lot of punk (by way of the Velvets and Talking Heads and Television) and felt inspired to do something wicked and monstrous to... the US government, I suppose, for being all governmenty and wrong. 

The hard shift into liberal politics began with Hunter S. Thompson. Being politically dyslexic, I didn't realize Thompson was Libertarian. His writings were attractive to me initially because of his quasi-association with beatniks, which I gleaned from reading Hell's Angels and, in much more detail, The Great Shark Hunt, the latter on permanent check-out renewal to me from the Phoenix College Library. By the time I finished it, I was certain I was a Democrat because I hated Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, detested the police state that America was becoming, favored free living and doing what I wanted over not favoring those things, and had a general sense that the free-loving hippies, though full of shit generally, were more correct in world-view than the flat-topped Conservative gargoyles lurking in the frames of Ralph Steadman's monstrous illustrations. Truth be told, I found preppy girls slightly cuter than the tangled, bedangled hippie girls I'd come across, but that's another thing altogether. This is about smokes.

The smokes, then.

Late Summer, Arizona State University campus, meeting a friend who had gone through the rigamarole of actually applying and getting financing for a state university and then actually attending. By then, the Democrats had selected Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis as their candidate to run against Vice President George Bush. They were both dweeby but I hadn't lived long enough yet to see politicians as anything but that, so I had no sense that voters occasionally get a candidate they are passionate about, a Kennedy, say, or a Clinton. 

On the table for the Democrats, alongside xeroxed policy documents and charity paperbacks for sale, were several packs of Dukakis for President cigarettes. They were ridiculous, tasted and smelled like shit, although nothing like the Dukakis campaign itself, but he was my candidate, so I bought a pack and smoked his cigarettes, not Bush's cigarettes, and wallowed in a cloud of hope for few more months until my first Election Day came around that November. Of course, my guy lost that year and faded into the type of anonymity failed candidates can only dream about these days, and I carried the dread of all Democrats with me as we swirled inexorably towards the Gulf War, which I protested the next year as a newly attitudinal, firmly leftist, campus "radical" at the University of Arizona. By the time Bill Clinton came along, campaign cigarettes were passe and so was George Bush, and I'd discovered that a political conscience was only as good as the country that didn't kill you over it.  

Why did I keep it? God knows, other than my love of the absurd. It's a piece of history now.

Item 2: A theatrical program. in which artistes start a theatre troupe!

Memories Can't Wait

God knows why, but I'm opening the boxes at last. So much kept inside. 

Things. They are varied: letters from people I barely remember and some I can't forget, scribbled reminders to do something or go somewhere, notes of love and termination, dispatches from the culture wars, even a set of Jesus pencil toppers, one for each of my mortal sins, all kept in decorative Lebkuchen chests that may as well be buried alongside me in the end since they're unlikely to survive on their own. 

The rules of keepage are simple: everything kept was important in the moment, and in that moment it was kept. My m.o. is to remember why. 

Item 1: An empty pack of smokes from 1988. Stay tuned.

A Westown Christmas

On Christmas eve, me and Estrada and Como’s sister and Sackville were hiding in the alley behind the school because the kids from across Thunderbird Road wanted to kill us. Como had the flu, but we liked his sister, so she got to hang out with us. She asked what we were all getting for Christmas.

I said I was getting some Star Wars toys and probably a book about baseball. She said they were getting the Guns of Navarone Giant Playset but it had to be for her and Como, since it cost a lot, but if they didn’t get that her mom would probably get her more Holly Hobby stuff, which she hated more than boys did. She got mad at everything her mom did. “Mom says I’m not supposed to like war toys. She better not get me anything stupid.”

Estrada said he didn’t know if he was getting anything else because it depended on how much money his mom had. He was almost twelve but flunked 5th grade so he was in my class now. His mom was a waitress at Westown Tavern at night and then in the mornings she worked at Thrifty Drugs. She only came home for sleep and to drink coffee and tell him what to do. She wasn’t mean but she didn’t smile much, either. She was in between.

“Last year, she got us a color tv,” he said.

I’d never heard of a kid getting a tv before. “For just you?” I asked.

“For everybody. But we don’t get to watch it if Paul is home.” Paul, his mom’s boyfriend. We came over after school one time and Paul was asleep on the couch in his underwear. He was supposed to work, but didn't. Paul looked too young to be a mom’s boyfriend, but he was.

“I don’t know. I asked for a Blondie poster, though. She’s such a fox,” he said, and we all agreed she was. I’d been thinking about Blondie. A lot. Last year Estrada got a Benji poster and some books about dogs. He traded me the books for one of my dad’s wrenches and we turned the Benji poster into a torch and used it to burn weeds at the park.  

Sackville had been listening quietly, digging dirt worms out of the tracks of his shoes. They were Payless, same as the rest of us, but not even the kind of Payless with the fake Adidas stripes. His didn’t look like any other shoes at all. They were just brown. They were so old there were holes where his big toe almost stuck out, but if you pointed it out he got quiet and his face turned red and he’d go somewhere to sit down by himself. Not really face red, but more like if you stained straw with red koolaid. It was more like a pattern than a color.

He cleared his throat. “I’m getting a new skateboard and some records and probably a rifle and a new seat for my Huffy.” We all looked at him. He was proud of his Christmas, and so were we. “Plus a trip to Disneyland and twenty-five dollars,” he added.

Estrada gave Sackville a push on his shoulder, then clopped him on the side of the head, but he smiled as he did it, which meant he wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. “Must be nice to be Sackville,” said Estrada. He stood up and scouted the alley. “We can go.”

At the corner, we stood around for a few minutes watching some older kids trying to tune up an old yellow Camaro. The radio was on and they shouted orders at each other over Molly Hatchet. One of them told us to take a picture, it lasts longer. Estrada yelled out, “The only thing that works in that piece of shit is your mom,” so we had to book it.

Even though the kids from across Thunderbird were gone, we still had to look out in case we ran into any other enemies, especially anybody who got out of juvie for the holidays. One time I was walking home and this girl who got out of girl juvie and her friends waved me into her driveway and she kissed me on the neck and rubbed my stomach and called me pretty and then her friends laughed and they tried to pants me.

Christmas vacation was hard because we weren’t allowed inside. We couldn’t go play at Como’s because Como’s mom said his sister had to stay outside all day, plus she didn’t want a bunch of kids anyway. Paul was sleeping, and we didn’t get to go to Thrifty when Estrada’s mom was working because of stealing, and my dad said Estrada wasn’t welcome to come over ever again after he caught him peeing on the side of the house. I told my dad it was an emergency but my dad said you still had to come inside and use the bathroom like a civilized person, even in emergencies.

“That’s the difference between us and them,” he explained, pointing at Estrada through the window.  He didn’t like Estrada’s type. Estrada said he had too much style for my dad anyway.

We decided to go over to the canal behind the school and throw rocks at birds. A kid drowned there in the summer because he wanted to catch a floating bag of tin cans and fell in. He was in Como’s sister’s class and his name was Richard. She and Sackville built Richard a memorial out of rocks and sticks and coke cans and then drew a pentagram and wrote “RUSH RULES” underneath. She made a swastika and then crossed it out by stomping on it because you weren’t allowed to do swastikas. Sackville didn’t know Richard, but he always liked doing things with Como’s sister, probably because he used to have a sister but she had to go live with their grandmother. I saw them together at the park once before she moved away, and it made Sackville look older because of the way he held her hand and helped her ride a bike. He didn’t seem like a kid who had a sister anymore.

Estrada hit two pigeons. I almost pegged one, but my rock skimmed right over its head and plinked a coke can in the weeds instead. “Bonus,” I shouted. You got bonuses when something weird happened.

“There’s no bonuses,” said Estrada. He was mad because none of the pigeons he hit got knocked out. They just dipped their heads and flew away to the roofs beyond. The rule was you couldn’t throw rocks at pigeons when they landed on someone’s roof. That was universal. I told him pigeons were doves.

Como’s sister ran over to us. “You guys, you guys,” she squealed, pointing at Sackville. “You guys!”

“I didn’t say that!” yelled Sackville. He stuck his hands in his pockets and started walking away from us backwards. “That’s not what I sai-ai-aid!” He was crying.

She pointed at him. “He thinks there’s a Santa Claus,” she announced. We all laughed at him for thinking it. “He says he never knows what he’s getting for Christmas because it’s up to Santa Claus, and that Santa might bring more than I expect. He said that!”

“No way,” I said, looking at Estrada. “Just no way.” Nobody believes in Santa when they’re ten. That’s universal, too.  

Sackville stomped away from us fast, his hands jammed deep in his pockets. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t say it,” he pleaded. Como’s sister made baby noises at him. 

I yelled at Sackville’s back, “I’m going home because I’m crying!”, then I hung my head and walked in a circle and acted like Sackville. I tried to get Estrada to look at me but he just stared at him. Usually he would tackle a kid when he got weak, but Estrada didn’t do that or even call him a dumbfuck. He let Sackville walk away for a little while before pointing at him with his chin and squinting as Sackville disappeared into the alley.

We followed Sackville all the way back to the park. He knew we were behind him but stayed a few houses ahead of us. Somewhere along the way, he stopped crying and Como’s sister stopped laughing. We met him at the little kid monkey bars.   

                “I know about Santa Claus,” he confessed. He tore at the fabric of his shoe with his thumb, making the holes gape like he didn’t care anymore. I’d known Sackville for about a year but until now I never thought about how he never smiled or laughed except when he scored a basket, and then he just grunted and opened his eyes wide and and bit his lower lip like he was embarrassed to score. He had a mom but it wasn’t the mom he lived with. Kids like Sackville probably only got happy at Christmas if they believed in Santa Claus.  

“I might get some new shoes from my grandmother,” he said.

Estrada sat down next to him. “That sucks,” he said. “Shoes are sucky presents.”

“They’re worse than Benji posters,” said Como’s sister. Everybody knew that.

Sackville looked at me and asked, “How do you know if you’re poor?”

I shrugged. Poor people lived in shacks and sat on their porch holding babies.  “Maybe you get a letter from the government.”

“Paul always says we’re broke ass poor,” said Estrada. “So that probably counts, when you just know it.”

“We aren’t poor. My dad just doesn’t want to move,” said Como’s sister. Como’s family had two cars, but everything in their house was dusty and one time I saw their mom put water in a half-empty koolaid pitcher to fill it back up. My mom did that, too. Plus they had too many kids to be rich.

“I think we are,” said Sackville. There was something else he was thinking but he didn’t say it. He blinked and cleared his throat. We sat in silence for a little while and watched the older kids push their yellow Camaro down the street. It didn’t have doors anymore and the radio was off.

Sackville looked at Como’s sister. “I just thought maybe you still believed in Santa Claus because you’re eight. So I said that in case you did.” It was the kind of lie you get to tell if it makes things better between friends, but it could have been true.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s ok. I didn’t mean to make fun of you.”

“I’m probably just getting shoes,” he said.

“Well that’s good because you need them,” she said.

When I got home later, my family put together a puzzle of an Irish castle in the snow and then we ate popcorn and watched Charlie Brown and had to say some Christmas prayers that were basically what Linus was talking about. I got yelled at because I took the Jesus baby out of the manger scene and put a German sniper in his place. My dad thought it was funny but my mom gave me to the count of five to put Jesus back.

I asked my dad if we were poor, but he said it was a stupid question and told me to pick up the dog crap in the backyard. All of it. On Christmas eve.

On Christmas, I got some Star Wars toys and a book about baseball plus the Great Brain series and a model of the Boeing B-29 Giant Superfortress and a shirt that said Shazbot and a Dodgers batting helmet. I gave my parents a hug and thanked them because it was more than I asked for and then we ate pancakes and bacon and real hashbrowns and something called stones from England and my dad took a nap and my brothers got into a fight because they were stupid fat idiots and my mom got ready for church. Estrada’s mom had to work for somebody else so she called my mom and he got to go with us. He had to wear one of my shirts because my mom said his mom said his good shirt got lost, and everybody knows you can’t go to church in a dirty tee shirt. He even tried to look respectable by combing his hair and tucking the shirt into his shorts.

Church reception wasn’t bad when they had donuts and the old people weren't smoking like chimneys. The best part was when we sang carols and Estrada kept singing “O homo night” until my dad noticed and made us shut up by thumping us both on the back. My dad told Father McMurray sorry for his son’s guest’s outbursts but Father McMurray said he didn’t even notice but maybe it was something to consider for confession.

“I’ll consider your mama,” Estrada whispered, and we laughed and laughed and laughed until home.

After supper, we decided to give Sackville some presents so we wrapped up some of my Iron Man comics and this giant gold pencil I got in California which I said could be from Estrada. Como’s sister came with us. She got him three cookies in a tin box. The streetlights were just glowing on as we rode up to his house, and in the carport we saw by his side a little girl, and the little girl was playing with a baby doll, and when we rode up Sackville was smiling and making baby noises.

He saw us and came running. “My sister is here. They didn’t tell me about it. My sister gets to live here now! She’s seven,” he told us, and we were so happy, we all hugged him, even Como’s sister, and we said hello to her and we gave him most of the presents, but Estrada kept the big pencil in case we got attacked by the kids from across Thunderbird.

"You got new shoes!" said Como's sister.

“Uh huh, I did," said Sackville. He pulled up his pantleg to show us, and Como's sister said they were the good ones. They had the fake Adidas stripes. "And a skateboard."

“You got a skateboard?” asked Estrada, even though that’s what Sackville just said.   

Before bed, my dad took a razorblade and cut the parts out for my model kit, and when he finished he told me in a serious voice that if your parents are sad at Christmas, then you’re probably poor, but if they are happy at Christmas, then you aren’t.

“I hope that answers that. Do we look happy or sad to you?” he asked.

They were kind of both, I thought. It changed every day. But I told him I thought we were happy.

“We are,” he assured me. “Even when we don’t know it. Merry Christmas,” he said, and he turned off the light and left me there to think.

I thought about Blondie.

Linking the Old to the New

Link to ruminations on travel writing