6

The Christmases in the Wilderness

So the secret is out: one of my issues at this point in my life is that Christmas is my season for disliking myself.

You could, I suppose, tell an entire life story in Christmases, and for all I know it’s been done a hundred times. The small child’s Christmas, one wonder after another, beginning with the ordinary living room that’s transformed overnight into Aladdin’s cave by a brilliantly gleaming tree; the early adolescent’s Christmas, the magic wearing thin at the elbows, the present you wanted either missing altogether or buried beneath the dreadful store-wrapped rectangles that might as well just blink clothes you won’t like in neon; the late adolescent’s Christmas, a seasonal obligation in a world that has turned rancid in its resolute failure to understand and acknowledge you, when Christmas is just the day when you total in your head how much the presents cost, hear the hollowness of the adults’ laughter, and notice how quickly the eggnog and rum come out.

Then there are the first Christmases on your own, when you’re the founder of the feast and the magic comes back, but different, as you buy something perfect for the boy or girl you love, who will miraculously wake up next to you on Christmas morning and give you the first smile of the holiday, the holy day, the day of your tiny, scraggly, glorious tree with its handmade chain of popcorn, its four strips of tinsel, and the two presents beneath it. Later the two of you can drop by your parents’ places one after the other, comfortable in the gifts you’ve brought, generously tolerant of the ones you’re given, and secure in your knowledge that the spirit in which you now celebrate the holiday—despite its relentless hucksterism and numbing music—is somehow new and original and self-created, and massively preferable to the way your parents celebrate it.

Finally, if you’re truly fortunate, you get the first Christmas again, the infant’s Christmas, but this time the infant is your child and you’re Santa.

When you have a small child, you don’t need to be religious to find the best in Christmas. From the time Rina was born until she was seven, I had the Christmases the carols celebrate. During those years the problem between Kathy and me, which was that she wanted me to be an insurance salesman in her father’s office and I would have preferred to die slowly over a large barbecue, was forgotten at Christmastime because all that mattered was making the season magical for Rina and watching her face as she saw what we’d done. We were—and there’s no reason to avoid the word—merry.

But the problem waited as unaddressed problems do, getting darker, hairier, and more impossible to negotiate, until Rina turned seven and Kathy and I could no longer find anything big enough to sweep the trouble under and began to talk seriously about splitting up. Once the decision was made, we took it in stages to minimize its effect on Rina, with me gone a couple of nights a week, then a week every month, and then poof, after Christmas, gone for good. Didn’t matter how we tried to finesse it; the separation and the subsequent divorce devastated our daughter.

That was the beginning of what I think of as the Christmases in the Wilderness.

About the time Kathy and I began to treat the subject of our split as a genuine possibility, my life took a turn that made the relationship even more fragile and, possibly, endangered my wife and child: my occasional employment as a detective for crooks. It was a risky part-time job, but the extent of the potential risk didn’t come home to me until the murder of Frankie Tongues.

Frankie was a walking short circuit, a guy who had been raised in an especially agitated Pentecostal church where the congregation frequently gave voice to prolonged utterances in no earthly language. This glossolalia, believers say, first occurred fifty days after the crucifixion, when the Disciples (minus Judas, obviously) gathered together and the Holy Spirit burst among them in a most dramatic fashion: And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting . . . and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Frankie Tongues’s congregation not only believed it, but sought ecstasy in reliving it. Loudly and, apparently, often.

This intermittently vivid upbringing left its mark on Frankie, whose nerves were agitated at the most placid of times. In moments of crisis he was likely to erupt into oratory loud enough to set off car alarms, in a language from beyond the solar system. Since Frankie made his living knocking over convenience stores, which has its inevitable tense moments, he left behind a long line of bewildered and terrified store employees and an indelible impression on one and all. One TV newscast had called him “The Jabber-Jabber Bandit,” and when you’re so memorable that the local news gives you a nickname, you’re in trouble.

Herbie Mott had attempted for years to get Frankie into a more placid line of work, one where there weren’t so many people around who could hear, such as grand theft auto, late at night. But Frankie liked to hit convenience stores. Truth be told, he got off on going in broke and coming out a couple of minutes later with a few hundred bucks and a week’s worth of Flaming Hot Cheetos, and he liked getting his toe stuck in that spiritual socket and letting fly in the hair-raising tongue of the angels. But everyone knew that sooner or later, if he didn’t either change his specialty or have his mouth sewed shut, he was going down.

Everyone who hadn’t met Frankie at the other end of a gun liked him. He was sweet, generous, and amusing when you could understand what he was saying. He was especially prized in the regular poker games Herbie’s circle of crooks enjoyed because someone who looks down at a good hand and spouts a train of syllables straight out of Little Richard does give you an advantage.

So when someone shot Frankie Tongues while he was sitting in his car, getting himself all wired up to hit yet another 7-Eleven, I was hired to figure out who called up the hit.

And I did, but he turned out to be a guy with enormous specific gravity who owned twenty-six convenience stores and about the same number of betting joints (some of the convenience stores also functioned as betting joints), and when he caught wind of me, he pointed some very nasty people on me, with intent to kill. I had to hire hitters to sit outside Kathy’s house until the threat was past.

So began the phase of my life in which I left my family’s house, put my stuff in a bunch of storage units, and started hopping among the worst dumps in the Valley and in Hollywood, both of which have especially rich veins of dumps. There was, for example, The Elf’s Village, where a truly demented woman who was only four feet tall had created an entire motel on a scale 30 percent smaller than normal, a sort of Motel Three and a Half where customers cracked their heads on the top of the doorway and hung out over both ends of the bed. Or Valentine Shmalentine, the world’s only kosher love motel.

And I stayed away for longer periods of time from the house Kathy and I had bought when we were married. When I visited them I was often an hour late because I was dodging nonexistent tails, and so jumpy I made them turn off the living room lights and spent the evening peering through a crack in the curtains.

Not the best possible environment for Christmas.

This went on for several years, during which, with the grace that it seems to me is unique to women, Rina learned to laugh at all the drama, and Kathy learned to imitate laughing at it. Gradually we found a sort of balance that allowed me to participate, in fits and starts, in my daughter’s life, even befriending her boyfriend, Tyrone, who had just a few moments ago chastised me for my laggardly approach to my daughter’s Christmas and then hung up on me.

Then I bumped into Ronnie Bigelow and fell in love with her, and things changed again. To my great surprise, Ronnie and Kathy had become amicable, if not quite friends, and Rina had made it clear that she approved. We were a cautiously cheerful foursome.

Despite an immediate and frequently gratified physical attraction, Ronnie and I had barely known each other when we had our first Christmas last year. It wasn’t until later that I realized she’d been muted and restrained through the holiday season. I figured it meant she was missing something or someone she hadn’t told me about. Ronnie treated her past as though it were classified information; if we had a major unresolved issue, to use a word that was coming up quite often, it was that I knew nothing at all about her years before I met her. This would be our first real Christmas together.

At a very recent point in our relationship, after Ronnie had saved my skin a couple of times, demonstrating interesting criminal chops as she did it, I invited her to live with me. We took up residence in the apartment I’d never shown to anyone, not even Kathy or Rina, the top secret hideaway where I had long planned to go to ground on the day when absolutely everyone wanted to kill me. I’d taken her into the most secret part of my life and invited her to share it with me, a gesture of trust that was as yet unreciprocated. She hadn’t even told me where she was born. And yes, it disturbed me, but in a way it didn’t matter. I knew she cared about me, and while I might have checked the calendar if she told me it was Friday, emotionally I trusted her entirely.

But.

But there was something about Christmas. Last year, when we were still getting to know each other, I’d written it off. This year it seemed to be serious.

Every time I tried to make plans or asked her what she wanted, she shut down. She defaulted to whatever-you-want mode, refusing to get drawn into conversation. I felt a little like a guy trying to sell a mirror to a vampire; every time I brought it up she changed rooms. Her energy dropped. A light somewhere inside her went out.

I asked what the problem was, and she said, “Nothing. I’m just not much for Christmas.”

I said, “Why not?”

She said, “Oh, you know. Are you hungry?”

I said, “We just ate.”

She looked at me for a slow count of three and said, “Then allow me to rephrase the question. Are you still hungry?”

What it looked like to me was that I should add Christmas to the list of things I wasn’t supposed to ask her about.

So I had yet another issue with Christmas.