THE TWELVE FRAYS OF CHRISTMAS

LEE LAWLESS

 

 

“And so now we have the promise of a New York that no longer festoons its capitalist mythologies with promises of social mobility, but rather a place where rich people can sell things to each other, and sometimes to slightly less rich people, without having to worry about too much else at all.”-Brendan O’Connor

 

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” -Oscar Wilde

 

 

New York City—December 13^th

 

The First Day of Christmas.

 

As she leaned forward toward me, I wasn’t sure if Clara smelled overwhelmingly like peppermint because I’d been skulling cocoa spiked with peppermint schnapps all morning, or if it was due to the foot-long peppermint pole she’d just been fellating on the mainstage. It was part of her act —“Mrs. Claws”—a Yuletide dominatrix thing where she stripped off a matronly dress and white wig to reveal a bandolier of candy canes, including the lucky long one that she’d so sweetly swallowed before disgorging it and tossing it to some weirdo in the crowd. She also had a whip made of tinsel, some strategically-placed snowflakes, and a strappy red leather outfit that wouldn’t have kept her warm for two seconds if we were at the actual North Pole.

But we weren’t at the North Pole, we were at the Pussycat Palace strip club, and she wasn’t Mrs. Claus or even Claws and I wasn’t really Santa, although my immaculately-fluffy red suit, droll little mouth, and snow-white beard are paid professionally to make people think otherwise this time of year. Namely, six days a week at Percy’s department store in midtown, the plushest gig in town. I’ve been at it for thirteen years, and I rake in more loot than the real Santa would theoretically give out. I could be going to way better strip joints than the Pussycat Palace, but Clara’s here, and on my watch, I don’t want her dancing for any of these horny little elves.

A few of them were glaring over their expensive Times-Square-priced beers, trying to give me mean looks for hogging her time. Fuck them. This was my lap dance… or three, and none of them had the balls to start something with Santa. Anyway, Clara-Claws was by far the hottest one at the Pussycat Palace, and I was there enough times in my civvies for the elves to know to keep their dirty dollars away from those particular Christmas cookies while King Kringle—or even just regular old Sam - was in the house.

Clara shook her voluptuous South American ass, her G-string’s single jingle-bell ringing merrily up at me as she twerked, and I tipped my Santa hat to the horny elves while flashing my famous dimples (of the poetic “how merry” fame.) The horny elves, mostly finance bros and midtown office drones, scowled. Fuck them, it’s my lunch break. I’m off. Clara was mine, for now. Who cared I was still in uniform, I wasn’t giving them any presents. Maybe I’d throw them the red and green Mardi Gras-style beads Clara-Claws had draped around my neck before the lap dance—the sole element that put me out of standard uniform.

I’ve even got the little round belly. I came by it honestly. I earned it. I sipped my beer.

Peppermint-infused Clara shook her snowflake-tasseled titties at me, making me want to suffocate to death in this greatest avalanche ever. Some of her red body glitter fell into the fur of my suit. Between that and the peppermint scent, I knew she’d be on my mind (and my Santa costume) for the rest of the day.

Fuck. The rest of the day. I had to get back to Percy’s.

“Baby, I gotta roll,” I muttered as the song—Elvis’s version of “Blue Christmas”—came to a close. “Come by later.”

“Possible,” she smiled.

“I know that’s your native word for ‘yes’.”

“Possible.” She kissed me quickly, close-mouthed but deep-lipped enough to make my senses shut off for a second. When I came to, the lingering peppermint flavor hinted that it was time to retry reality. My ridiculous, day-drunk, midtown-mayhem version of it, anyway.

I watched Clara scurry backstage to reset her candy bandolier and “Mrs. Claws” outfit. I wished I could stay and watch her hit the pole again—both the stripper pole and that peppermint pornography.

My beautiful Bolivian bird. My partridge in a bare tree.

I paid my tab and sidled to the door, enjoying the darkened enclave of the room for a few seconds more. The majority of the ambient light was either from the stage strobes reflecting off of Christmas balls dangling haphazardly from the ceiling, or from the strands of multi-colored Christmas lights that purfled it. Both were left up year-round, regardless.

The door to the outside world opened a split second before I intended it to, making me freeze and readjust my eyes to daylight a moment too early. Two gangly frames entered enthusiastically. As my eyes refocused, I saw that it was two sailors, both of whom appeared young enough to still believe in me. Well, the fake me, what I represented. Even I didn’t believe in the real me.

“Hos, hos, hos!” one of them chortled, raising a high-five, appreciating my absurd appearance here.

I smiled a smile that’s a good deal wearier than the one I use professionally. It kills me to see kids like this out on deployments, cruises, whatever, during the holidays. I myself had had a few memorably unpleasant holiday seasons halfway around the world, way back in the day. But even if they weren’t nestled all snug in their beds back at home, with ma in her kerchief and pa in his cap, at least they were here, a mere subway ride from a miracle on 34^th street, instead of some Christ-forsaken jungle or desert or whatever current place where tinsel is an infidel abomination.

I returned the high-five, patted the other sailor on the shoulder, and tried to give my eyes the trademark twinkle as I made my exit.

“Be good, for goodness’ sake.”

 

*

 

Freight entrances make you feel like just another piece of cargo, which was almost certainly the reason why Percy’s made me come into work that way. Even though I was their star this time of year, it was clear that was no reason for me to be thinking I was any more important than the shoes, shirts, handbags, coats, pants, dresses, and accessories that comprised the five floors of their year-round business.

I’d hauled balls across midtown in no time flat—people tend to make room for Santa, and my black “costume” boots were almost the same sort of standard-issue ones I wore back when I was tear-gassing through ‘Nam—and made it up the freight elevator and through the “backstage” of the first floor with a full five minutes to compose myself behind the ornate cardboard gingerbread house that served as backdrop to my throne.

You’re goddamn right I had a throne. Being a sixty-something, authentic-down-to-the-facial-hair Santa Claus buys you some executive privileges.

By design, I hadn’t exposed myself to the floor of the store, but a quick peek through a trapdoor in my flat cardboard-gingerbread mansion showed a line of fidgety children and phone-finagling parents snaking through the store. The crowd was primed for show time. You better watch out.

Stretch, the obvious nickname of the dwarf who played my chief elf, had a small candy-cane clenched between his teeth like a cigarette. He was unloading a bag half the size of his body into a huge bowl held by a swiveling snowman, intended to be carted out for the impending merry mendicants.

“Help me out with this shit, Sam, they made me drag four of these fuckers up here today.”

“What’s the matter, Stretch?” I chuckled as I hoisted the economy-sized bag. “Come on, aren’t these fun-sized? Like you?” I tilted the bag so that a flurry of individually-wrapped candy canes cascaded into Frosty’s bowl.

“Fuck you, and fuck fun-sized,” Stretch wheezed, readjusting a pointy latex ear.

“Fuck fun-sized?! Oh Stretch, what’d I miss?”

Stretch glowered. For a little guy, he sure could project a lot of anger. I sat down on a spare faux-snowbank and looked at him seriously.

“Management was lurking back here earlier, Sam, just before you left. Carnahan said something about there being no ‘festive feeling,’ whatever the hell that means. She was showing around some tub of shit who looked like he’s been rotting in either middle management or McDonald’s for the last forever. Had the Short Eyes, too, I swear he was scoping out the kids. Even creepier than that frosty execu-bitch Carnahan.”

I rolled my eyes at the thought of my malevolent manager Candy Carnahan and her awful offspring Carson, both of them heirs to the Percy’s fortune, but forced by family tradition to work for it. Candy’s personality was the antithesis of her name, and Carson was the kind of guy who ate other employees’ sandwiches in the break room despite (or because of) his family owning the empire. I knew he’d been transferred from the working on official business— something about stalking one of the makeup-counter girls via his access to employee records— but hoped he wasn’t about to be plunked down as some sort of Santa supervisor.

I handled my faux-North Pole empire just fine all by myself. Well, with Stretch as my co-pilot.

I took a final, pepperminty hit of Rumple Minze 100-proof schnapps from my flask, then offered it to Stretch. He took it in both hands and tilted back with half his body.

“I wouldn’t worry. You’re never gonna get fired, Stretchy. Not only can they never find someone to compete with your talent, but it’s always tough getting a replacement on… short notice.”

“Ha, ha,” Stretch muttered, wiping his lips. “You’re gonna get a fun-sized fist in your face if you keep up with that shit.”

“You seriously don’t like that term?” I asked, standing and lightly brushing off the more overt clusters of Clara’s red body glitter from my fur coat.

“Fuck yes,” Stretch said. “And not just because I’m a horizontally-challenged person. ‘Fun-sized’ pisses me off. Don’t tell me what size my fun comes in. And definitely don’t tell me that size is SMALL.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “By the way, if Carnahan comes back, you tell her to sit back and watch as the festive feelings flow over me. She’s delusional if she doesn’t understand the magic.”

Stretch shook his head and crunched off the end of his candy cane. “You’re drunk, dude. And she is DEFINITELY gunning for some kind of change. Watch your jolly old ass, out there.”

I assumed my most robust posture and gave a dry, sub-vocal pantomime of a hearty Santa laugh. Tipping open the small hatchway that led out to the Santa stage, I tousled Stretch’s hair and dropped the red and green strands of Mardi Gras-style stripper beads around his neck.

“Frankly, my dear,” I intoned, “I don’t give a fun-sized fuck.”

 

*

 

Someone once said that if we revealed all of our sins to each other, we’d laugh for the lack of originality. Children’s Christmas wishes tend to move along the same lines. Video games, ponies, mom and dad to get back together, it’s really all the same rehashed themes. I shouldn’t feel bad about not really caring. Like many of life’s greatest relationships, it’s not like there’s anything I can do to change things for these kids or their families, but being there to listen to them makes them happy, and maybe believe wishes coming true are possible. They feel like they got their day in karmic court. There’s your festive-feeling magic right there, at least for the kids. That idea that hope, big hope, HOLIDAY hope, coupled with morally-relative good deeds, can transcend things. Hell, hope of that caliber doesn’t come along every day. That’s why we contrived this whole crazy season for it.

Weirder still, I actually used to believe it worked. I mean, I knew it was fake, but trying invites tremendous capacities for suspending disbelief.

I guess I just wasn’t faking it as well as I thought anymore. I wasn’t suspending any disbelief at all. Carnahan—Candy Carnahan, Executive Manager, stalked up to the stage twenty minutes before close, along with some flabby shape of a thing that appeared to be a melted human man with a cheap suit coagulated onto him. Fucking Carson. Stretch had been right, the landfill did give off a distinctly creepy vibe, and not just because he apparently treated himself like a landfill. Neither the walking trash-stash nor mother Carnahan looked or felt festive, or for that matter, happy. At all, possibly ever.

Disbelief was not being suspended any longer. It was quite clearly on the table, clear as Scrooge’s Christmas goose, but with fewer intimations of a happy ending.

“Mr. MacSorley,” Candy Carnahan clipped, in a tone more severe than her bob-haircut and angular pantsuit, “Please explain to me why you’ve been imbibing spirits before interacting with our guests?”

A sheaf of security-cam photographs clutched in her bony, multiple-Tiffany-ringed hand clearly implicated me. Goddamn. They’d upped their camera game since last season.

“Holiday spirits, ma’am,” was the only thing I could say. Surely this wasn’t serious. I could tell by Carnahan’s frenzied eyeballs that she was at least a pill or line in for each of the drinks I’d had today. “I apologize, but I don’t believe there’ve been any complaints on my behalf.”

“And we’re going to keep it that way,” her globular acolyte Carson wheezed. He proffered a pudgy hand that squashed like a piece of undercooked cake when I shook it. “I’ll be taking over Holiday Operations for the remainder of the season.”

I looked hard at Carnahan. He’d obviously never worked a serious day in his life. His pink, pudgy cheeks belied a youthfulness that his abject unctuousness was trying to smother inside its rolls upon rolls of careless consumption. He didn’t look like a Santa. He looked like a slouch, at everything, ever.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized again, not meaning it again. “I’ve held this position for over a decade. I’m skilled at my job and I feel this accusation deserves re-evaluation.”

“Maybe you should re-evaluate it from the unemployment office,” Mount Carnahan murmured past his nasty fat lips. “Goodbye, Mr. MacSorley.”

I served our nation through several of its darkest years, and I swear to you I have never seen a look of such arrogant achievement, even from our most fucked-up foes. I wasn’t letting this go as easily as Carnahan Jr. had obviously let his personal standards go. I idly grabbed a fistful of fun-sized candy canes from Frosty’s bowl, mostly to keep my hand from taking a swing.

“Well,” I stated calmly. “It seems like negotiations are off the table. Like everything else that’d be on a table around you, you disgusting, slovenly waste of a biological process. Maybe you should head over to the makeup counter, and treat it like you would a buffet. Then you’d stand a chance at being as pretty inside as you are outside.”

Candy, my former boss who now held no sway over me, and who had brought a Percy’s security guard with her to protect against that fact, barked a horrified gasp.

Carnahan The Larger chuckled. His self-pleasure sounded as gross as he looked. “Ignore him, Candy. He’s an old man whose ideas of respect and appropriate business don’t conform at all to the modern world, and I feel sorry for him.”

The security guard, himself no stick figure, pushed his girth in closer. I shrugged.

“I feel sorry for your skeleton,” I said. Dropping the fistful of candy canes to the floor, not waiting to see which of the lardy party dived after them first, I turned and walked out the front door - whose politesse in opening, albeit automatically, was more kindness than I had felt the place had ever afforded me.

 

 

The Second Day of Christmas.

 

When I first got to the city, you couldn’t walk down the block of 42^nd street without someone shoving a spoon to your nose to try a sample, or some streetwalker shoving herself to your eyeballs under the same premise. Nowadays, it’s all family fun and pedestrian thruways and costumed characters and conspicuous consumerism and fieldless bleachers to sit on and gaze out over the everything-nothingness of it all.

I’d preferred the dirt, for what it was worth. Too much light all at once makes you blind.

Even the hustle felt fake, as though everyone here was as much an actor as anyone behind the shining marquees. Or worse: if not an actor, an ad. Some people were both, in their designer outfits, costumed for the roles they felt they deserved in the world but never had to audition for, not anywhere outside their wallets at least.

Speaking of wallets, I spotted my buddy Marcos—well, the outfit that I knew contained Marcos—collecting cash from some tourists who had stopped to take a selfie with him. Marcos is a Times Square regular who cosplays as a famous children’s television character whose name rhymes with Hellno. I always told myself I’d never get roped into the Times Square character game, but I knew Marcos and others of his ilk made a damn killing at it. Stuffing tourist bucks into a hidden furry pocket, he ambled over, his oversized character-head leering eerily at me.

“Ey bro,” Marcos threw an arm around me but spoke low, waving and continuing to keep his allure to passersby on point. “What up yo? Did you for real get booted from Percy’s?”

“That got out fast.”

“Streets is buzzin’ bro, you know that. Mariana heard from Clara mad quick.”

Mariana was Marcos’ girl, who slung drinks at the bikini bar over on 9^th during this time of year. During the summer—the real sweet months for scratch—she and Clara had been among the famous Latina desnudas of City Hall’s horror, working the pedestrian paths of Times Square in inexplicable infamy. Of all the afflictions and restrictions the city contained, the powers-that-be had decided that the legally topless women who inhabited this Times Square tourist oasis deserved to be vilified for making money with what god and/or glorious genetics had given then. In this financially ripe yet still socially seedy core of the Big Apple, it was perfectly acceptable to wear a copyrighted costume and swelter to death in the name of selfie-snaps and scratch, but government forbid you paint yourself up real pretty and dance skin-clad in the sunlight with some flyover-state folks whose idea of kicking back usually didn’t go further than takeout pizza and an PG-13 rated movie.

Yes, I met and befriended Clara when she was a topless selfie-slinger in Times Square. Don’t judge. She eventually parlayed that seasonal gig into her headlining show at the Pussycat, and goddamnit, I could pull the same sort of thing…except in reverse weather, and, you know, dressed.

“If you’re tryin’ to pick up some Santa fans, you gonna wanna roll someplace else, bro,” Marcos warned me. “These fuckin’ maricones over here got all the game.”

He bucked his hilariously-oversized costume head toward some twenty-something twats who weren’t performing yet, but had a crowd circling around them. Four of them were non-descript chorus-boy types in red pleather pants, form-fitting lumberjack shirts, and elf caps. They were led by a shrimpy kid in skintight red jeans, a light-up Santa hat, noticeably-nice designer boots, an expensive-looking but thin red velvet jacket with white rabbit-fur liner and ruff, and an ironic “Santa suit” T-shirt. I gagged a little in the cold air.

They all seemed to be shills for some off-Broadway thing called Santastic! At least, that’s what it said on the sign above the large pail their waifish commander set up next to his boom box, which made me wince as he cranked up cheesy-techno, holiday, background music.

“THAT’S the competition?” I asked Marcos. His slow nod but lack of reply made his gigantic furry head seem strangely somber.

“Santastic!” swung his skinny little arms over his head, attempting to induce the audience to clap to the beat. A smile any decent psychiatrist would define as “manic” ravaged his features as he twitched to the music.

“Hell-lloooo my Broadway beauties! Who’s feeling pleasin’, this holiday season?”

An unsettlingly bright cheer arose from the crowd. I shuddered inside both my robustly red fur jacket and the black trench coat I was wearing to obscure it. This guy was Times Square’s biggest Santa draw?

“We are part of the off-Broadway production of Santastic!, a multi-holiday-themed musical EXTRAVAGANZA, and we are here to spread a little extra holiday chee-eer!”

The five broke it down boy-band style, doing a bunch of dance moves that I can’t exactly name. Not breakdance stuff, just generic Broadway shit. The crowd ate it up. I’d seen more talent swinging around subway poles.

“Aaaaand, we are co-llec-ting a little something extra for the local AIDS shelterrrs!” He preened.

“No fuckin’ way that loot’s goin’ to shelters,” Marcos muttered. “Dude is pulling in hundreds every day, rollin’ up in them Gucci kicks and rollin’ out in a livery cab. Bullshit, yo.”

“Is the real show any good?”

“How the fuck should I know? I get thrown fifty free tickets a week. I got better shit to see. I only catch shows if it’s like, Henny Ibsen up in there.” His costume-head’s giant, lifeless black pupils sternly accentuated his point.

Santastic was playing a child’s toy xylophone—badly—and humming on a kazoo as the crew did a few more half-assed dance moves. He threw a few handfuls of snowflake-shaped glitter in the air for effect as he went. Neither his moves nor manic music matched the bad background soundtrack. Yet, after two minutes or hours, or however much longer the endless-seeming abomination continued, the purses cracked and the tourists attacked.

I’d seen smaller crowds hounding major celebrities. Even the pigeons drew closer.

Marcos patted me on the back with one of his oversized costume paw-mitts. “I gotta get back to work, bro. Holler at me if you can’t find a new gig quick, I got a spare Christmas Miss Piggy suit you could rock.”

“Thanks.”

Marcos stepped off toward a crowd of kids all wearing the same class chorus T-shirts, brandishing smartphones and cash money. I shrugged my black leather trench coat up around my furry suit a bit more, and wandered westward, timed out of Times Square.

 

*

 

I had a wad of singles that I had intended to dispense into various outfit-strings and orifices of Clara later that night, but as I wound my way out of Times Square, down 8^th avenue past Port Authority, a few of them made their way into the jingling cups or outstretched hands of the grizzled old vets huddled under piles of dirty blankets, or wrapped in layers of military surplus clothes that were the perfect tragic dress code for their military-surplus existences. One guy I’d seen over the last few years, Sergeant Franklin, was already passed out cold, cradling a paper-bagged 40 like Jesus in the manger. I tucked a fiver into his camo cargo pocket and kept going.

Sure, that could have been me, but I’d always kept working. Rallied. Me sitting on the sidewalk doing nothing would be the real day the war was lost. I wasn’t a loser. I was out of a job, out of luck, out of grace, and a little out of my mind, but I was not out of that winning spirit. I wasn’t a believer in much, including in myself, but I wasn’t a loser. Not after making it this far. Surviving. Not even if that survival was for apparently no reason.

Where but for the grace of my lack of God go I.

When I see all the old homeless vets, I can’t ever bring myself to look at them directly in their faces, but I figure it’s all the same, since so much of what we went through always keeps replaying in my mind. The good and the bad, all at once, sometimes changing places, depending on how I recollect it. The real good stuff always sticks, though. Watching the stars through gaps in the jungle canopy after the rain cleared. Handing out candy to kids who’d hound us in small towns. Handing out care packages of medicine or food to families that needed it. Yeah, long before I was this Santa, I was another one. It’s just something that’s in me, I guess. Unfortunately, I also gifted a lot of bullets.

I stopped thinking about it, at least as much as I ever stop thinking about it, and started thinking about what I was going to drink once I got to the bar.

Trooley’s Tourist Tavern was a downtown staple that was perfectly obscured, unless you knew what to look for. The “tourist” part had been a joke since sometime in the ‘20s—it was strictly regulars now. Still, the bar itself was covered in varnished-over maps of old, hinting at adventures far and wide, if you could only manage to get up off the damn barstool. I’d taken my usual spot and usual drink, sipping a French Hens beer and tracing a map of the Venetian canals with my increasingly-blurry eyes.

“You got shat on,” the bartender, Reli, informed me after delivering my drink and hearing my tale of holiday woe.

“As always, I appreciate your candor,” I tilted my glass to her, then to my lips.

“No, I mean literally. There’s pigeon shit on your shoulder.” She wadded up some napkins and dabbed at a spot on my shoulder just beyond my line of eyesight. Reli was a good, observant bartender like that, full of help and facts. “They’re a kind of dove, you know. Rock doves. Cool name. Not that it makes them any better in real life.”

“They were everywhere in midtown today, flocking all around some Santastic! boy-band crap in Times Square. Must have hit me there.”

Reli wrinkled her nose, not at the pigeon shit, but at the mention of Santastic!

“Ugh, I saw those hipster fucks on the morning show the other day when I was closing up,” she growled. “As if Christmas needs to be any cheesier, now we have hipsters hawking it.”

“I disagree with that term,” I said in between sips. “I met some of the original hipsters around here, back in the day. I drank with Bill Burroughs a few times in the Village. That guy was more hardcore than any of these little twist-moustached twerps. He’d do…”

“…a shot of tequila for every beer you drank?” Reli finished my thought aloud at the same time I said it. She smiled sternly. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned it. But he’s dead, and so’s Kerouac and Cassady and Creeley and Ginsberg and all the rest of the cool kids, and now we’re just left with these hand-me-down-‘hipsters’ who buy things up, fuck things up, and leave it to the rest of us to rinse and repeat.”

“Sounds like I’m not the only one with this particular problem,” I said, opening up the conversation. If anyone might have a good line on how to fix this insane issue, it might be Reli.

“Hell no. You wouldn’t believe what some of these little trust-fund troglodytes are up to. It’s bad enough that five of those snooty Obscene Caffeine coffeehouses have cropped up around here in the last year. Now they’re trying to take over the bars they can’t buy out. You should have seen the hipster herd at Shillelagh last night. They were fucking finger painting. Some thousand-dollar adult-preschool shitshow. Ridiculous.”

“Shillelagh’s way uptown, though. They’re invading the Heights too?”

“It’s a goddamn infestation of imbeciles. Padraig flipped his shit when he saw them pouring their wine into sippy cups and using the rocks glasses to mix their fancy paints. He told them to fuck off and go buy a gallery or a nursery if they wanted to do that shit, that this was a bar. They split without tipping. Fucking worthless weirdos.”

“Surprised they haven’t taken an eye to this fine establishment,” I ventured. A dark look crossed Reli’s otherwise pretty face. She sneered with a raised lip that’d put Elvis to shame.

“Oh, don’t think that little snot from Santastic hasn’t tried to bring that shit-show in here. Hells no. Not a chance I’ll let them get their manicured claws on my family’s bar. I don’t know how they found us, but I made it clear they could go back to their precious coffee shop if they wanted to court cracked-out Christmas fans. That shit they do, it’s supposed to be some schtick for charity cash, and they frigging half-ass it. That Santastic brat is the worst. I guess his dad’s one of the main owners of the Obscene Caffeine chain, as if that makes him important or something just because they were able to tank a bunch of cool old mom ‘n pop bars and put up churches of coffee capitalism.”

“Obscene Caffeine? You mean those snooty places with the $5 cupcakes and the fake-barn wood everything?”

“Yeah. Because only the coolest of people can hang in their hipster hideout, and by ‘coolest’ I mean ‘trendy-spendy.’ God forbid they actually work on art, or improving anything about anything. His whole crew moves like they each drank a pot of meth-laced espresso, and they pull off the theatre thing about as well as middle schoolers putting on a self-made skit about dying chimpanzees. This ‘special snowflake’ shit has got to end, I don’t care how many ‘unique’ bits of crap they buy or wear. Like it makes them automatically interesting, or something. For the one drink they stayed here, ‘Santastic’ tried to get Seany to give him some powdered sugar to lighten up his beard to look more the part. Said he could just mix it with some of his artisanal beard wax. Beard wax, Sam. What the christfuck.”

“That’s not particularly appropriate language for this season,” I mock-chided her.

“Well, it’s particularly appropriate for these losers. I heard that uptown they were acting all impressed that Shillelagh was ‘authentic’ and ‘special’ since they haven’t got any TVs, but then they got mad when Padraig explained they didn’t make mojitos, or frozen drinks, or anything with organic juice or ‘herbal infusions’. He had to warn them twice about not going into the bathroom stall in groups of three in the middle of happy hour, staying in there blowing lines until people were pissing on the wall outside. Finally, he kicked them out after they wouldn’t stop huffing some cotton-candy shit out of vaporizers and begging to hang up their fucking finger-paint art on the walls next to the framed book covers. They didn’t tip him a dime, on a hundred-dollar tab. Trust-fund trash.”

“Well,” I muttered sarcastically, “Let’s have a shot to never worrying about our love of Christmas getting tainted by the likes of them.”

A whiskey bottle materialized in Reli’s hand, and two full tumblers appeared in rapid succession. We raised them and she toasted.

“Fuck this season, and let those special snowflakes wreck someone else’s halls with boughs of folly.”

I clinked glasses with her. “Cheers. I hope they melt.”

We skulled. I paid, then headed out.

As I walked outside, a lone pigeon (rock dove?) pecked at the snow-flecked ground by a corner embankment. Ruffling its grey and white feathers, it regarded me with either disdain or curiosity—it’s hard to tell with pigeons—and made as if to fly in my general direction.

“Don’t even think about it,” I demanded.

It stared at me a second longer, pooped profusely into a snowbank, and then flew away, just another non-contributor who fed off the guts of this great city and then left just as quick, crass, and carelessly.

 

 

The Third Day of Christmas.

 

The reality of my situation hit me squarely in the face when I woke up the next morning still jobless. I remedied this affront with a hearty round of day-drinking. I bought three French Hen 22s and shored up on my couch, waiting for Clara to call and say she was done with work.

I was particularly mad that I’d gotten fired for drinking, and not for being a drunk. I’d put in effort not to be a mess, at least overtly. It’s fine lines like these that keep me from being just another deadbeat in the streets. Being a drunk would keep me from being able to do any job, but drinking was what facilitated my survival of the job I’d had. I’d even bothered to hide the scent, slurping that disgusting over-proof peppermint schnapps. That was how committed I was to appearing normal, while knowing there was no reasonable way I could operate within the bounds of corporate workaday “normalcy.”

Sure, it wasn’t healthy. But at least half of the rest of the gainfully-employed world knows exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe not booze, but we all have our coping mechanisms that may or may not also be doping mechanisms.

I was an old pro at this, from way back. Even most of my time serving in Vietnam had been spent inside a pot cloud. I had basically no regrets—I had been good at what I did, maybe too good. Not that it ended up doing any good, but hey, we can’t have it all.

The worst was thinking about it this season. Although I’d spent two hellish springs, summers, brutal monsoon seasons, and falls stationed there as well, it was the winter—well, Christmas, really—that stuck in my mind like a knife in the back.

The Special Forces teams had been training the Degar, the native mountain people, for months. Indisposed to helping out the Viet Cong, the Degar had quickly entered into an arrangement aiding us, and they’d been astoundingly helpful. Whether it was terrain issues for the best forward mobility, support as fighters, or (best of all) information on enemy movements, we were happy to have the durable, tenacious Degar along with us.

It had been an uneventful Christmas, right up until the trouble started.

The village had been a small one, nestled in the mountains. Barely even noticeable from the air, save for small wisps of smoke from cook fires. Under the jungle canopy in a clearing, there were small hutches made of sticks and fronds, with large rice barrels sitting outside. Typical stuff. One of the Degar soldiers, a kid in his teens, had been living there, and had reported up the chain to the Special Forces that V.C. had been sighted in the area for weeks now, and that they tended to terrorize the villagers for food. The intel hinted that particular division of V.C. were a far-flung faction and, as such, eradicating them would compromise a considerable tenet of their aggression in that area.

We’d made it to the village after an all-day trek, during which we’d sang Christmas carols, substituting bawdy or silly lyrics to amuse ourselves and staunch the nagging, nigh-fictional visions of silver bells and decked halls back home. Here the only chestnuts getting roasted were when we were nape’ing some V.C. balls.

We were halfway through a new parody I was pretty proud of—I fancied myself a musician back then, at least maybe for when I got home—and we’d been belting it through the chest-high grass that led to the village.

 

Rudolph the Red Spy reindeer

Had a very shiny nose

And ranted Commie prop-a-gan-da

That all the other deer opposed

All of the other reindeer

Were in favor of dem-o-cra-cy

They never let poor Rudolph

Crush oppressive bourgeoisie…

 

Charlie’s artillery fire provided the bridge. Immediately we were taking cover in the grass, running for the tree line hither and yon, completely confused.

The V.C. hadn’t just been dropping by there for food. They knew the place inside and out. We were at a complete tactical disadvantage, totally FUBAR.

I just don’t remember how it happened. Maybe I do, or did, but I just… well, the details are hazy to the immediate recollection. Except one.

I’d managed to get completely lost in the tall grass when I’d ducked, covered, and ran, and ended up flanking the village. In the commotion, I’d snuck up behind a hutch and watched as four black-clad V.C. railed at the few villagers around a central fire.

A kid in a Degar uniform was being held by the hair. He seemed strangely calm, as though he’d already accepted his fate, but on closer inspection I could see he was dazed, probably from the massive, bloody wound on the back of his head. The V.C. jackass holding him was brandishing a hunting knife and screaming. It didn’t take much to deduce that they had figured the kid for a snitch.

Without any delay, the V.C. bastard spiked one of the kid’s eyeballs onto his knife. The villagers gasped in horror. The sound of bullets cascaded closer. The soldier raised the knife again—for what intent, I’ll never know—and that was it.

I swung out from behind the hutch and shot the knife-wielding soldier plus the three V.C. flanking him, all in what seemed like one burst. I paused and picked off another two at the village’s perimeter, allowing a few of my fellow soldiers to dash in and secure more of the area.

The kid who’d been knifed stood and staggered, admirably attempting hand-to-hand combat with a remaining V.C. thug who was armed with a machete. Unarmed but still quick on his feet, the kid took surprisingly accurate swings at the soldier in close quarters, stunting the other soldier’s ability to swing the huge blade. It wasn’t nearly a fair fight, though, as evidenced by the large swath of the now-monocular kid’s arm the soldier managed to carve open in passing, taking off two fingers, shortly before I shot him down as well. The kid, still standing, was bundled off by the villagers, maybe to safety, but who knew. The term was relative, over there.

I had really thought I was being helpful. Useful. But who knows.

More V.C. were pouring into the village. Explosions, gunfire, and smoke became my world.

The rest is just a smattering of sensory input. There was more fighting. More screaming, more noise, more bullets. Orders to retreat, that an airstrike had been called in. No sight of the helpful Degar kid or any of his comrades, no warnings for the villagers.

I remember being back in the tall grass again, hundreds of yards out now, watching the fireball of foliage and former foes as the attack helicopters rained hell onto where the village had been. My mind, shocked and tired and at odds with everything I’d previously known as reality, defaulted to the seasonal soundtrack. I started humming to myself, from cracked lips that had somehow become bloody.

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.

And have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.

 

*

 

The uptown A train clattered to a stop at its terminus below 207^th street. Once above ground, I hardened all of my senses amidst the ubiquitous, slush-slinging snow.

Clara buzzed me up and greeted me at her apartment door, instantly making me forget the tundra-wide trek I’d endured to get here. Her skin was a perpetual color of caramel that insinuated she had a private stash of sunshine somewhere within, some radiance that was tanning her from the inside out, whatever the season, a tantalizing to-go tropicality that made her stunning in the warm months and scorchingly irresistible in this blasted winter.

She was hot in every way possible.

The coke was definitely a problem, though.

As I self-medicated with booze, Clara was fond of the blow. I didn’t hold it against her; she’d been using before she even came to the states. And, compared to the pitfalls I’m sure her ecdysiast Pussycat colleagues dealt with, she seemed to have it in control. But as we drank the French Hen 22s and snuggled on her collapsing couch in that tiny, turn-of-last-century apartment, I hated thinking about how much better she could be doing, and I had to turn my head every time she’d unsexily huff up a pile of snow that could have put the sidewalk outside to shame.

To even things out, she lit a joint wrapped in a red-and-white-striped candy cane paper as she listened to me bitch about Santastic and his scene.

“You hate him because he maricon?” She did a limp-wristed sashay that any twink would have given his flat abs to pull off as adorably.

“I don’t give a fuck who he fucks, that doesn’t factor into any of why he’s a terrible human being.”

“But is porsoot of happiness, bebe, no?” She handed me the candy-cane joint. I took a cloyingly heady drag. The paper made my lips taste of peppermint.

“Well, the rest of us would be a damn sight more inclined to pursue our happiness if assholes like him didn’t pursue theirs by fleecing us at every goddamn turn. And needlessly, no less. He’s got plenty of money, but for some reason that makes him immune to the idea of ever actually perfecting a skill. That’s not just lazy, that’s actively being useless.” I coughed and handed her back the candy-striped peppermint joint. “I don’t know how you can stand all this peppermint crap.”

“You no’ like it?” Reclining, she sipped on the joint and slowly French-inhaled the smoke. I’d paint her like that, if I could paint.

“No, I can’t just not like it. It makes me think of you.”

She smiled mischievously. “Do a little bump with me.”

What the hell, it was a snow day. I sprinkled a snowflake’s worth of blow onto the crest of her breast and (laying a finger aside of his nose) rode it into my face like a champion skier slamming into the first powder run of the day. My heart got tight in my chest. I groaned as I pulled back.

“No good, bebe?”

“Good. All good,” I wheezed. “You just make my heart stop, beautiful.” I forced a smile that the blow held firmly in place.

She sucked on the peppermint joint and handed it to me. The minty coolness met the weed’s burning flavor and the chemical drip of the coke, blending into one heady sensation that made me fall backward and sink into the couch as if it were a warm snowbank. Clara climbed onto my lap.

“And what do you want for Christmas, little girl?”

“A key,” she said immediately. “De perrico.”

I hoped she couldn’t feel my heart plummet from her perch. “Perrico”—Spanish for “parakeet”—was local slang for coke.

“That’s too much parakeet for a pretty little bird like you,” I replied.

“No for me, bebe. I cut and sell. Then we have fuuun.” She pouted in a way that made me wish I could buy her all of Colombia.

“I dunno, babe.”

“For school money. For better job,” she attempted.

“Why don’t I just give you money for that, then?”

“No. I make it. And more.”

I hated how right she was. Flipping a kilo of coke at her club, or between her and Mariana working at the bikini bar… they’d clean up. Even more if they cooked it to crack. Then repeat customers, bigger buys, bigger scores… probably not going to be used as school money at that point, though.

Unless I made sure she stayed on the straight and narrow. Relatively speaking, I mean.

“I’ll think about it. You’d have to be a really, really nice girl.”

She coyly narrowed her eyes. “I’m a nice girl.” My heart rose again. She tugged at the elastic of my boxers. “You wanna go down my chimney, bebe?”

I extinguished the peppermint joint and grabbed her pillowy ass in both hands.

“Did you leave me some cookies?”

 

*

 

The next morning, we bundled up and I hailed a cab to take us back downtown. I wasn’t up for another arduous train-trek, and anyway I always liked seeing Clara safely to the door of the Pussycat. As we pulled away, I pondered giving the driver the address of my apartment or Trooley’s.

I went with the former, just so I could pregame. With Clara now ensconced in her exotic realm for the day, I started noticing my other surroundings again. It started with a “Support The Troops” sticker on the taxi console. Then by default, my eyes did recon on the driver.

I instantly began questioning if I had any reason to be hallucinating.

The back of the driver’s head was a crisscross of scars where hair had staunchly refused to grow in. A strap that appeared to lead to an eye-patch ran across the back of his head.

Two fingers were missing from his right hand.

Almost subconsciously, I uttered one of the few Vietnamese phrases I’d ever learned, asking if he was a Degar soldier.

He responded in elegant, perfectly-enunciated English, in a resonant baritone voice.

“Why yes, I am a veteran of Degar descent. How did you know?”

“I thought I killed you on Christmas. 1972.”

“Excuse me?” He turned and looked me full in the face. It wasn’t an instant realization, but it was a singular one.

“Jiminy Christmas,” he breathed. I suppressed a weird laugh.

The light turned green. He didn’t notice.

“Change of plans,” I stated. “We’re going to Trooley’s Tourist Tavern, right now. You and me.” I couldn’t contain my shock, but added in a stunned monotone, “’Tis the season to be jolly.”

Several cars behind us honked. The cabbie immediately cut left and continued, now toward the bar.

A few moments of introspective silence passed. Fat snowflakes whirled outside like puzzle pieces fitting perfectly into their picturesque snowbanks.

The driver broke the silence in a surprisingly worried tone. “Please don’t make an attempt to kill me. I’m armed and would unfortunately have to reciprocate.”

“What?”

The driver spoke evenly, but anxiously. “I didn’t give the enemy any intel on you guys. I wasn’t a double agent. They were just… there. I had no way of contacting…”

“Stop,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Jesus. We were the ones who called in a fucking airstrike. I thought I burned you alive.”

“I trained and worked with the Americans long enough, I figured an airstrike would follow,” the cabbie noted, his one good eye probing my face via the rearview. “I ran out of there like hell was on my heels. I was worried YOU guys were done for.”

“Came close. Not as close as it did you, though. Jesus, you were just a kid. You didn’t deserve to lose an eye and half a hand just because we were too ass-backwards to spot an ambush. And on fucking Christmas. Jesus.”

Another stop light. He turned, his one eye doubling-down on a meaningful stare. “Forget the eye, forget the hand. You gave me the greatest Christmas present I could have possibly desired: plausible hope, and the realistic expectation of escape from an impossible, terrifying and violent end. Do you know how rare that is?”

“I’m glad things worked out for the best,” was all my stunned mind could murmur.

The driver persisted, forceful but friendly. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not sure I could even know how to offer that level of ruthlessly effective gratitude to anyone else. You’re not exactly going to get picked off by V.C. coming out of the subway tunnels or fall in a pungi pit going down Broadway. There’s no way I can ever repay you!

“Sir, you killed seven men to save me, and you didn’t even know my name.”

The whirling snow outside seemed to give a low, ghostly whistle of appreciation in the wind. I glanced at the faded photograph on the license stuck behind the bulletproof glass of the driver’s partition, and sort of hated that despite the gravity of the situation, I still couldn’t stifle a snicker.

“Phuc? Your name is Phuc Tat?”

Phuc rolled his one good eye hard enough to serve extra for the missing one.

“Yes, you base-humored beast. In my language, it means ‘blessings and luck.’ Don’t hate—appreciate.”

 

 

The Fourth Day of Christmas.

 

The next several hours were spent in the kind of clarity-cultivating haze that only a dark bar and a long-lost person of importance can induce.

First, Phuc demanded to learn everything about me. I swooped through what must have seemed like a bland personal history in comparison… I’d served the rest of my war tour mostly uneventfully, had left Vietnam in 1973 and had never been back. I’d gone home to NYC, did the standard wife/job/apartment thing, put it on autopilot for the next thirty years. Initially thought I could have been a jazz or rock drummer at one of the clubs downtown, settled for pounding garbage cans into trucks for a very decent city wage. Still, that wasn’t enough to keep an upwardly-mobile New York Wife happy, and an appropriate-feeling divorce followed. I’d retired a few years ago and got by on a fair union pension and the seasonal Santa thing. Phuc got a chuckle out of that.

“And how does it feel to be a person of part-time magical character?” he asked.

I laughed some of my French Hens beer foam into my beard. “One of the Batman villains said that there’s no true despair without hope. That’s basically true for everyone in real-life Gotham. Maybe the rest of America too, maybe the whole world. I wouldn’t know anymore. Magic’s the same deal. There’s nothing that makes reality hurt as bad as being offered the glimmer of magic.”

“I don’t know about that,” Phuc mused. “What you did for me was damned close to magic. Perhaps myopic magic, but magic nonetheless.”

I didn’t like talking about this sort of shit now that it was no longer my professional obligation, either as a soldier or as Santa. I switched the subject, genuinely interested in my new friend Phuc. “How’s your English so good?”

“My parents were Degar, but we were all influenced by the French missionaries that came to our region when I was young. I grew up with Christmas and all the trimmings, including Petit Papa Noel— that’s you, Mr. Claus. When the war ended, I took what little cash I had and made my way to France… I might have behaved a little inappropriately, but it paid the bills, and it was Paris… I put myself through hell, but I also put myself through the Sorbonne.”

“So why are you driving a taxicab?”

Phuc shrugged. “American Dream, right? ‘On The Road’? It just works for me. I’m my own boss, I’m not stuck in an office or a foxhole, and it makes me feel useful. Particularly with my side-gig. And that’s where yoooooou…”—he tipped his martini glass at me, then inhaled half of it without missing a conversational beat—“are in for a Christmas miracle.”

“I’m done with the holiday cheer,” I said, skulling more of my beer. “I’ll try my luck again on St. Patrick’s Day.”

Phuc chuckled. “Oh, I think you’re in luck. You see, I too do a bit of superheroic sanitation, as it were.”

“How do you mean?”

“I get a lot of interesting clients in my cab. Some of them admire my mobility, my resourcefulness. Some inquire as to my former life, as you did, and are interested to learn that I was an American-trained soldier who’d seen so much battle. Sam, you know the question that follows, what people ask when they learn things like that.”

I did. It was a terrible question, one that nobody in their right mind should ever ask a man who’s seen the horrors of war.

“I never talk about my kill count,” I said sternly. “To anyone.”

“I understand that, Sam. And I do indeed understand why. However, the difference between us is, that discussion is one I entertain. And one that I have, let’s say, extrapolated.”

I wasn’t sure if the beer was hitting me harder than usual, or the weird events of the last few days were wearing on me harder than I thought. Subtlety was not going to tiptoe through this discussion any further. “Phuc, are you telling me you’re a contract killer?”

Phuc’s one eye went wide in mock-horror. “Heavens no! Nothing that assiduous. However… I may have, once or twice, used my well-honed skills and spacious car trunk to aid in the… removal of certain societal blights.”

“Certain blights that were in human form, I take it?”

“A wife-beating Triad underling and an unscrupulous pedophilic pimp, specifically. I assure you, they are not missed. Doesn’t sound like your unsavory Santa successor would be, either.”

I probably should have been shocked, but I just muttered, “Amen to that.”

We sat in somber but understanding silence for a minute.

“It’s all relative,” Phuc mused. “That Christmas we underwent that little rumble in the jungle? The Americans were dropping legendary bombs on Hanoi. You and I had it easy, comparatively.”

“Operation Linebacker II,” I remembered. “Largest heavy bomber strike since the end of World War II. The Prime Minister of Sweden compared it to the Holocaust, we strafed Hanoi so hard.”

“And yet we called it a ‘success.’”

“A success no one talks about.”

“So a push, then, as the blackjack players say. It’s all relative. We tried to fight evil, yet our enemies were nothing compared to the horrors that those above us wrought in the name of supposed good. I tried to be useful my whole life, but it just ended me up as another damaged face, haunted every day about how I could have done better. But all that, that was just history. History may be written by the winners, but the future is written by the legends. And you, Mr. Claus, are something straight out of legend.” Phuc nodded a bit sassily at me. “I thought I couldn’t pay you back, but I can. Let me be of use to you. You saved me, let me save you back. It’s the gift of a lifetime.”

Giving a life… or taking it? I thought. I pictured Carson Carnahan sitting in my Santa throne. Gross. But…

“I just… I know that meeting you has been a great stroke of luck, but I just can’t see this ending well,” I admitted. “No matter how useful it’d be, for both of us.”

“It’s the greatest of luck, and the greatest of Christmas presents. Feeling useful.”

“It’s not useful, Phuc, it’s troublesome as hell. It’s murder.”

Phuc shook his head more hyperbolically than necessary. “You need a mission. I need penance. The world needs less evil. How is that not useful? To EVERYONE?”

I sipped my French Hen.

“You’re not wrong.”

“Just say it, you know I’m right. People are ill at ease with the idea that there can be such overt predators—like Carnahan, or anyone else coasting on capitalist spoils - in the world. Because it’s definitely not just an idea, it’s a reality - but it’s a reality that one never, ever wants to experience. And ideally, shouldn’t experience. So, it takes predatory measures of a different sort to combat them. Relatively speaking, this isn’t even near the worst of what you or I have done in life. But it might be among some of the best, if it works right…”

“Right and wrong are relative, you just said that.”

“They are. But heroic is another level. The glory is yours. I’m just the middleman evening out the push.”

“I don’t know about this. I’m no superhero. I’m just an average guy now.”

Phuc smirked at me. “Really? Sam, look in the mirror. You might look like shit, but dammit, honey, you’re Santa Claus. And it’s time you started cracking down on the naughty list.”

“Oh Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah! Do it as a birthday present to him, if you have to.”

“No, no. What you said… cracking down on the naughty list. Jesus, Phuc, I’ve got it.”

Phuc gave a demure grin and cocked a dramatic, impeccably-groomed eyebrow. “Santa Claus is goin’ to town!”

 

*

 

Three phone calls secured my idea. One to Clara, one to Marcos’s bikini-bartender girlfriend Mariana, and one to the lovely lady-voiced robot that electronically helmed The Secret Service, the best drug-delivery operation in town. Fortunately, thanks to my own habits and the frequency of those of my friends, I was in very good standing with The Secret Service “agents.” I have no idea who “them” is—the voice on the other end of the phone is the perpetually-pleasant lady-robot, the transactions are done exclusively via a secure online account, and the deliveries of any weight are dead-drops in an impartial secure location. But if it was good enough shit for Clara and her scores of stripper friends, it was good enough for my plans.

I called requesting thirty six ounces of cocaine—two point two pounds, one full kilogram brick—or, as they are popularly known on the streets, a “bird.” Though the volume was a bit ridiculous even by The Secret Service’s standards, I was told my called-in bird would be ready tomorrow. Half of the money was taken in deposit from an account I kept exclusively to satisfy Clara. The rest would be provided at the pickup.

And just like that, I was dreaming of a White Christmas.

 

 

The Fifth Day of Christmas.

 

Everyone knows that a drug deal isn’t really a drug deal if you pay in funds appropriated from elsewhere. It doesn’t count. It’s like how you’re never an addict if you only smoke someone else’s cigarettes or snort their coke.

I wasn’t about to spend a whole bunch of my actual cash on the sizeable coke score, but getting rid of some excess crap lying around never hurt. The thing is, sometimes people hold onto bad memories just because they’re valuable. Not valuable in a learning way, valuable in a greedy way. I had a few I could easily hock to help set things right. Anyway, maybe it’d make some poor slob’s Christmas, scoring some bling on the relative cheap.

The Sanitation Department provided me with a healthy pension. My apartment had been rent-controlled for decades now. On paper, I wasn’t doing too badly. And I was somehow adept at spreading seasonal joy in ways few others can. This time, I was just going to do it a little differently.

I dug the rings out of the old Macanudo cigar box that I kept a few important documents and things in. I had six rings that I took to the pawn shop. The guy behind the bulletproof-glass didn’t even bother scrutinizing the stones with his loupe, at first. He just scratched the rings across a sandpapery pad in front of him, testing quality.

Only one came up fake. My ex had given it to me. No wonder that evil bitch hadn’t tried to claw it off of me in the divorce. The rest were not only real, but infused with decent diamonds that I had been assured the quality of, long ago in a war-torn nation where barter could win violent favors and nightly poker games were easy to rack up high pots, when your day-to-day existence was always a gamble.

The total haul got me over half the cash I needed for the bird.

The rest I wrote off from my savings account as my Christmas present to the city of New York, and to all of effort-promoting, forward-thinking, non-hip humanity in general.

Meanwhile, Phuc had been working on some stocking stuffers.

That had been his cheesy code-phrase to me for his work stalking Santastic. “Stalking” stuffers. As dumb as the code was, the results were impeccable. I got a text reading “Got the BEST stocking stuffers, will be great to hang over the fire!” I left immediately to meet Phuc at the bar for more details.

I stopped by the bank and deposited the five rings’ worth of money. Then I went straight to Trooley’s to drink off my doubts.

 

 

The Sixth Day of Christmas.

 

Trooley’s was swinging that night, as the house band was sinking their teeth into a set, and their livers into the usual copious whiskey. Tonight they were blasting out perverse versions of holiday classics, which of course felt like serendipitous sound-tracking.

Onstage, beneath the taxidermied moose-head covered in long-liberated bras, the rocking quartet known as U™ wailed out a different version of their favorite things…

 

Bongrips and booty and big drug collections

Bright flaming cocktails and armed insurrection

Whiskey so strong that your throat fucking stings

These are a few of my favorite things…

 

Phuc was sitting in one of the booths near the black-lit pool tables. His wide, blue-white smile shone out like the Cheshire Cat as I approached. Sinking into the leather banquette and plunking my pint of French Hens down on the tabletop (this one bearing a collection of ski mountain trail maps that had been immortalized under half an inch of bar-top epoxy sometime in the 1960s), I simply smiled back, effectively tipping over the veritable Christmas stocking of informational goodies.

“Santastic is even more of a fraud than you think,” Phuc gushed. “It’s ridiculous. I followed him to some shitty hipster bars after their final ‘show’ in Times Square yesterday, and I made sure I was the one who he hailed when he left. God-damn, Sam.”

I hadn’t yet known him for more than forty-eight hours, but I could tell Phuc was being more effusive than usual. He was obviously very proud of his intelligence gathering score.

“Alright?”

“I totally had him figured for one of my team, but he gets on the phone, and his whole damn demeanor changes. Seriously, like taking off a coat that doesn’t fit. He starts talking in this deeper voice”—Phac did the impression of it—“and I could tell it was way more natural. But what killed me is what he was talking about.”

Sam, none of that money is going to AIDS charities. He’s taking all of it. The production of Santastic is barely more than some singing and dancing once a week in the Obscene Caffeine coffeehouse down in St. Mark’s. It’s not just off-Broadway, it’s off-off-off Broadway. And it is definitely off the books.”

“Awful Broadway,” I smirked, sipping my beer.

“So then, he tells me to stop, and this girl gets in the car. Some horrible hipster chick. They start making out, totally grossly, he’s got one hand inside her ironic ugly Christmas sweater, but she pulls away and asks if he’s holding. He pulls out a folded fifty and half a cocktail straw, and they start hooting it up right there in my backseat. I dropped them off at Obscene Caffeine—he barely tipped, of course—and there was a whole posse of other losers there. Sam, our work is cut out for us.”

“Us?” I asked. “I’m just putting up the capital.”

“Well,” Phuc said. “Your investment is going to pay off bigtime. This kid is a scumbag. You pick your enemies well!”

“I’ve had enough enemies for this life, Phuc. I shouldn’t even care enough to hate him.” The moment I openly elucidated this thought, I began feeling curiously bad.

“Well, you care enough to make this city better for the people who can’t do it by themselves. And not by some crappy show-and-dance cash-grab or CHEATING CHARITIES. You’re having an actual initiative get undertaken. It’s inspiring.”

“I’m glad. Because you’re the one who’s got to be inspired here.”

The band, behind us, continued fervently.

 

Anarchy, nihilists, coups in each nation

Watching the world burn to man’s decimation

Demons descending from bomber-planes’ wings

These are a few of my favorite things…

 

Phuc took a hearty slug of his martini. “There’s more,” he enthused. “This should buck you up. Santastic might not be batting for my team, but you’ll never guess who is.”

“I don’t give a fuck about…”

“Carson Carnahan,” Phuc cut me off. I struggled not to spit out my beer.

“Carnahan? Isn’t he… I mean… don’t you guys pride yourselves on being… you know, super-handsome and muscular and all that?”

“Indeed we do, Sam, indeed we do. And he’s holding us all back. And the bears of power are NOT happy about it.”

“‘Bearers.’ The word is ‘bearers’ of power, not ‘bears’,” I noted.

Phuc raised the eyebrow over his eye-patch. “Honey, you tell me which of the two of us took college-level English classes. I know the word is ‘bearers.’ The BEARS of power hate Carnahan. For several good reasons.”

I gave an open-handed shrug. “Enter through the Hate Entrance.”

Phuc’s eye and teeth gleamed in the blacklight. “Okay. So, there’s this club in Chelsea… SUPER exclusive, completely amazing. It’s for larger, more hirsute gentlemen with a proclivity for leather, and the means to enjoy only the finest of things. It’s called RareBear. Only the most distinguished of Daddies hang out there.”

“Okay?”

“Anyway… Carnahan, with his legacy of loot from Percy’s, thirsts for the attention of these guys. Like, Sahara-desert thirsts. It’s hard to watch.”

“I take it you’ve seen this firsthand?”

Phuc straightened his posture mock-haughtily. “It should go without saying that my exotic appeal and exceptional bearing are more than welcome there. There’s lot of Asian twinks in the world, but considerably fewer Panda Bears. Anyway. These guys, they’re big, but it’s muscle-big. Or maybe just too-many-fine-steaks-and-whiskies big. Not slovenly, hate-weight big, like Carnaham.”

“So they hate him for being fat?” I said. “Who cares? I hate me for being fat. Carnahan fucking sucks, but at least he’s sucking in Santa servitude. He’s not on the level of real rich guys.”

“Exactly.” Phuc shook his head, nonplussed. “His outward appearance is just a hint of the mindset that goes along with being an indentured servant of the Percy’s empire, working as a damn Santa to look good for mommy because he can’t cut it behind the scenes in the business, but still needs to show up at the store to score any of the family loot-cake. He’s the living embodiment of entitled sloth, and now he’s trying to act like he’s important because he has a super-special job.”

“I’m not catching your point here.”

“Carnahan thinks his little benevolent spin as Santa makes him even MORE entitled to attention, affection, whatever, that he’s already not getting from these guys. He’s just a whiny little weasel who sits at the bar in RareBear and sulks when all the hot leather daddies go off to smoke cigars in the library without him, or to chain someone else up for a flogging on their St. Andrew’s cross. He’s not important, interesting, anything. Just a waste of space.”

“So why do they even let him in?”

“To mess with him. Sometimes… on slooowww nights… they let him play as a submissive, literally just by throwing a ball-gag in his fat mouth and locking him in a cage while they talk real business and get down to real… manly things. Problem is, he’s now getting a rep for approaching certain well-to-do Wall Streeters at business environments in real life, and, well, let’s just say he’s not much for conversation or usefulness in the real world, even when untied and ungagged.”

“So he’s trying to claw his way up in the world, and he’s going to fail. Good. I’m happy he’s going to know how that feels. Let him dig his own double-wide grave.”

Phuc’s monocular gaze roamed my face. “Sam… are you okay?”

“It’s just… it’s fucking silly. This is all just silly. I shouldn’t care about any of this.”

“Are you having reservations about… my usefulness?” Phuc wondered.

“I mean… you just… I know you want to do this to repay me, but it’s not like it’s a matter of life and death anymore. I’ll survive, regardless of what happens to Santastic, or Carnahan.”

“Ha!” Phak laughed. “Simply surviving is different from achievement. You of all people should know that.”

“But what are we achieving?”

Phuc, glowing purple in the blacklight, took on an ethereal sort of presence.

“We’re achieving what we’ve been fighting for all along. What America wanted to bomb my country for, what they indentured us both as soldiers for, what we came to New York and struggled for, and what these little hipster fucks and one-percent heirs want to gobble up and take as their own, but don’t realize that buying or cajoling it or taking it from others doesn’t give them more of it. Freedom. The ability to make things better for people who can’t do it on their own is liberation—to them, from their oppressors, to us, from the guilt of having to be at either end of this sick societal spectrum. We are killing these entitled bastards’ golden goose and eating it for Christmas dinner. For everyone who’s not naturally crazy-greedy, we’re after the pursuit of happiness that only happens when it’s still possible to have a fair shot. We’re taking that shot, Sam, before it’s too late.”

My silence served as obvious acceptance. Down the bar, near the entrance, I saw Clara, Marcos, and Mariana walk in. I waved them over.

We began to lay down our plans. Six schemes a’laying.

Onstage, the band crescendo’d to a glorious finale.

 

When the gods fight

When your pee stings

When you’re going maaad

I simply remember my favorite things

Before the whole worrrld goooes baaad…

 

As we were heading out, I spotted my old Sanitation Department pal Lenny Lampson sitting at the bar. He was still in uniform and caked with snow. He didn’t look like a jolly or happy soul.

“Nice Frosty the Snowman outfit, Lenny.”

“Hah. Hey, Sam. Careful out there tonight, it’s brutal. Visibility’s nil. I nearly buried some hipster twat with my snow plow over in Hell’s Kitchen. Who the fuck tries to mush a dog sled using an inner tube and six Pomeranians?”

“It’s not your fault, Lenny,” I reassured him. “The Idiot Iditarod deserves the danger.”

“Hey, you still playin’ drums?” Lenny asked, perking up. “Richie’s got the flu and the band has a gig at the Christmas parade. We could really use ya.”

The band Lenny referred to was the Department of Sanitation’s Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Corps. I’d played bass drum for them for years when I was working. I missed it. It’s hard to find pure opportunities to work hard and create something really good with like-minded people like that.

“Sure, Lenny. Gimme a call tomorrow.”

“You got it Sam. Good seein’ you.”

Reli ambled over to say goodbye. “Out so soon?”

“Busy week coming up,” I said.

She smiled enthusiastically. “You got a new job?!”

“Not exactly,” I smiled. I didn’t want to say too much, but I couldn’t resist a question of my favorite, eternally-amenable bartender. “Reli, if I needed to get a whole bunch of strippers coked to the gills to set them loose on Santastic’s shit-show and possibly start trouble, would you let us pre-game here?”

Reli smiled.

“Absolutely christfucking not. My first-person chemical warfare tactics here”—she raised a whiskey tumbler out of thin air—“aren’t meant for mass murder.”

She slammed the shot, spun a martini shaker in one hand, and placed both delicately on the bar rail.

“But I’ll totally host the after-party.”

 

 

The Seventh Day of Christmas.

 

As ugly ducklings turn into swans, ugly thoughts can turn into beautiful achievements.

You don’t have to like it. You don’t even have to understand it. Maybe it’s better that way.

But like any incomprehensible, good piece of magic, it still works.

Once your mind goes to these kinds of extremes, there’s no recalibrating. It’s like escalating a Christmas-lights war with your neighbors… once you have full-sized sleighs on the roof, you’re never just going back to simple candles in the windows. And neither are they.

However, to properly process the full extent of the duckling-to-swan growth, I had to see for my own eyes what we were up against. Of course, that didn’t mean I wanted to internalize every last detail of things. I went into battle-recon mode and kept sharp for only what I needed to process. The rest just hurt too badly.

Phuc and I went to the franchise of fuckery that was the Obscene Caffeine coffeehouse on St. Marks, clearly the epicenter of the Santastic operation. Until a few years ago, the spot had been the famous Wursthaus punk rock club, until coffee apparently became more lucrative than chaos.

Opening the door felt like breaching the entrance of a particularly snug spacecraft. The inhabitants would have been just as happy to have seen us float right back outside into the aether and not inhale their rarified air.

That wasn’t happening.

We each ordered a small black coffee, of which there were an unnecessary number of names, modifications, and varietals, and Phuc chatted up the apathetic barista who was wearing both a scarf and cap, despite the abundant warmth indoors.

“So, miss, I understand that this is where the show Santastic is being staged?”

The barista girl looked up from her smartphone, a look of insufferable dullness radiating out from behind her yellow thick-rimmed glasses. “Uh, I think that was last week.”

I gazed around the bland, fake-barn-wood-paneled walls of Obscene Caffeine. Beneath the glow of ubiquitous Edison lightbulbs, calculatedly scrappy-looking young people tapped screens and devices. No one spoke to each other. A dull drone of what I eventually realized was ambient synth music slouched from hidden speakers.

Phuc became incrementally more cheerful as the conversation went south, his tone a stark contrast to the cultivated boredom that seemed to permeate the room. “Surely not! We donated some money to your dance corps in Times Square just the other day, and their ads said the show would be appearing at this address!”

“I dunno,” the barista half-shrugged. “I think it’s over.”

Phuc took a different tack. “Miss, I’m here from the press, and I was hoping to review the show. Surely there must be some final performance to occur?”

This perked the barista up enough to hold Phuc’s gaze for more than five seconds. “Who do you blog for? The Skinflint? Mawkish? RoboHobo? I’m totally in a band. I can answer questions about that.”

Phuc glowered. “No, miss. I’m from the paper, not a blog. I just wanted to learn more about Santastic, or perhaps your organization’s charity work.”

Her gaze sank to the life-raft of her smartphone. “Oh. Yeah, I dunno.”

“Could I possibly speak to the young man who is in charge of these things?”

“Braendeyn won’t be back until tomorrow. He has cat yoga class tonight.”

“I see,” Phuc pressed on. “And what of the other young men in his cadre? Are they available?”

“Those guys don’t, like, work here.”

“Does anybody?” I interjected. A few wayward eyeballs flitted angrily up at me, noticed me noticing their clickbait-filled screens, and retreated.

“If they’re not in Times Square, you can see if the Santa squad is out in the park,” she said. “Union Square or Washington Square, probably. Wherever the tourists are, ha.”

I gave Phuc a look that clearly indicated I was done with this. He gave a small nod.

“Thank you for your time, miss,” Phuc told the barista. We turned to leave.

“If… Braendeyn… comes back,” I said over my shoulder, loud enough for the sullenly, smugly silent room to hear, “Tell him I’m a gallery owner doing a winter retrospective on up-and-coming finger-paint artists. The adult preschool aesthetic is so necessary, right now. You know, rethinking all those boring old conventions about the value of effort and risk and all that. I hope he and I can connect.”

With that, Phuc and I left.

Not halfway to the corner, a scruffy-bearded kid in ratty, skintight black jeans, half-unlaced boots, plaid earmuffs over a man-bun, and a very high-end shearling coat ran up from behind us and tapped Phuc on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” he said, already out of breath. “Did you say you were from the press and looking for Braendeyn?”

Phuc gazed at him impassively. “If that’s who’s running the Santastic show, then yes, I am.”

The hipster kid pulled off his earmuffs and shook both of our hands. “I can tell you all about it. I’m one of the dancers. There’s more to the show than you know.”

“Oh really?” Phuc said dubiously. “Not just generic gentricidal bullshit?”

“Really,” the kid said. “Someone needs to call him out. He’s stealing money from charity, he’s not paying the dance crew, he’s on drugs all the time, and for real, this sleazy Santa thing is just so uncool. He should be impaled on the North Pole, not representing it. Let me help. I’m Hrothgar.”

“How do we know you’re being straight with us… Hrothgar?” I asked.

The kid giggled and pulled a fake beard from his coat pocket, donning it over his neck-length real one. A thin but effective Santa hat followed.

“So?” Phuc said.

“So?” the kid admonished. “Sweetie, I’m the understudy.”

 

 

The Eighth Day of Christmas.

 

“It's better to destroy than create what's unnecessary.”

—8 ½

 

Trooley’s decades-deep blend of crazy and cool had always made it my favorite hangout headquarters, but after the bout of blandness that had been the Obscene Caffeine coffeehouse, I appreciated its frenetic, funky fervor even more that afternoon.

Reli was stringing up Christmas lights over the back-bar, weaving them around the collection of odd perpetual-motion machines that twisted and turned and spun above the booze bottles.

“You know that there’s different versions of The Twelve Days of Christmas song?” she said. “In one, the eighth day is ‘hounds a-running.’ Another’s ‘boy’s a-singing.’ Dunno if that’s better than ‘ladies dancing’, but I like how there’s options.”

“We’re going for all of the above today,” I said, sipping my beer. Phuc nipped at his martini. We had twenty minutes to kill before the plan went into effect.

The hipster kid, Hrothgar, had settled into a few craft beers before telling us his story and telling us just to call him “Roth.” He had confirmed everything Phuc had told me about Santastic—real name, Braendeyn—stealing the take, plus more dirt about him leading on the “dancers” by promising them part-time jobs at the coffeehouse and not coming through with that (which, Roth was quick to note, was the reason he’d decided to go turncoat on the Santastic scene.) Braendeyn being a literal crackhead with no knowledge of business practice didn’t help either, and Roth—who seemed to have a good brain under that goofy man-bun haircut—was tired of filling in for him when he failed as Santa or as Obscene Caffeine’s management.

Well, that covered “boys a-singing.” Our snitch had sung like a choir of angels.

Lenny and some of the Sanitation guys had been sitting down the bar, and as was custom in Trooley’s, jumped in on the conversation they could contribute to.

“Obscene Caffeine can bite it. Those guys suck. They throw out trash bags full of those goddamn five-dollar cupcakes every night, and the rats go nuts eatin’ em all up. Gross, chuckin’ a garbage bag fulla rats into the truck.”

“Next time you show up there,” I instructed Roth, “take any of the food they’re going to throw away and save it. We’ll give it to the homeless over by Port Authority.”

“Cool,” said Roth. It sounded genuine.

I felt bad I had to send him out on point as our double-agent in Santastic’s operation, but it was what today’s plan required.

By the time Phuc and I had gotten to Times Square, a streamlined version of the initiative that we had discussed the other night was underway. We sat on the bleachers that looked out into the sea of bright ads and watched as the Santastic ship hopefully sank.

It was Clara and Mariana on the ground, easily the most attractive women in Times Square despite being bundled under their winter coats. Their beauty made it no problem for them to sidle up next to Santastic for a picture. With Roth conveniently using his body to obscure the sleight of hand, Mariana neatly reverse-pickpocketed a sizeable stash of coke, around a quarter of a kilo, individually wrapped into eightballs for maximum appearance of intent to sell, directly into Santastic’s xylophone gig-bag. As they giggled and gushed and pretended to fawn over Santastic, the package was perfectly placed.

The original plan had been so good on paper when we were drunk, but the streamlining would save us all a lot of trouble, I figured. I realized after Reli shot down my idea of facilitating a giant coke-fueled stripper onslaught that we didn’t need all the bells and whistles. Just the blow. Two minutes after it was planted, the anonymous tip I’d called in to the police paid off: a pair of officers and a shiny black K-9 murder-dog cruised past Santastic.

They were mid-“dance” number when the dog went ballistic and surged on his leash toward the pretentious but pitiable performers.

The dog caught one of the backup boys straight in the ass.

In the commotion that followed, I stood up on the bleachers, trying not to look too obvious. The dog had the kid on the ground and had a lock on not his ass, but one of those fanny-pack pouches that most of us knew had gone out of style in the ‘80s.

The backup Santa-hipster had been rocking one. Clara later told me it had been full of some really killer-smelling weed.

The dog was now salivating over its contents as tourists and the Santastic crew screamed.

The blow in Santastic’s bag went untouched.

On the pavement, Clara and Mariana clambered for a better look. Opposite them, the cheerfully-costumed Marcos observed. Looking up in my direction, even from across half of Times Square I could clearly see him shake his giant furry character head as a “no.”

Screams regarding “police brutality” and an “innocent victim” suddenly made a swath of cell phones appear. The last thing I needed was to be a part of Santastic’s big crime scene. Phuc and I muttered our goodbyes as we strode off in different directions.

I went to the Pussycat. So did Clara. She had work to do, and now I did too. I had to try harder next time. And I was already out almost a quarter a key of blow—a cut quarter key, but a ridiculous expense nonetheless.

I assuaged my woes at the Pussycat with the classical definition of the day—nine ladies dancing. They were more than happy to show appreciation for the rest of key that, via Clara, they had been buying pieces of at reasonable rates. I tried to watch her do her Mrs. Claws thing, but her mind was obviously elsewhere, and so was mine. I watched as she gave emphatic but not empathetic lap dances to other guys, and I finally left after a quick cheek-kiss goodbye. I was pissed, and she was sad at seeing me pissed, and there’s no amount of merry and bright that can come from even the whitest Christmas there. I think she knew—now that she had basically as much of the blow as she wanted—that it was no way to really be happy, either making easy money off of it or even when abusing the stuff. It just abused you worse for offering that goddamn glimpse of magic and then receding to reality. I left to accentuate that fact. This day had been a major low point just all around.

Then when Phuc texted and I deduced what he was up to, I figured I’d be feeling even worse.

 

 

The Ninth Day of Christmas.

 

I thought I’d hate myself when I heard what happened with Carnahan.

Honestly, I just hated how anticlimactic it was.

From what Phuc told me, a lavish orgy had been taking place at a hotel frequented by the members of RareBear. No expense had been spared—fine liquors, exotic drugs, well-tailored leathers and silks and sex toys of all ilk made their appearances.

Carson stuck out like bullshit in a China shop.

The RareBear crowd weren’t holding back this time. Carson had begged to be allowed to wear a leather hood and get tied to the bed, but they didn’t want his gross sweaty flab all over the Egyptian silk sheets. Carson had proceeded to walk around the party on all fours with a riding crop in his teeth, begging to be beaten. A few bears took him up on it, though with each swat of the crop they told him he’d been an asshole for trying to weasel up next to them at business meetings and nice cafes in real life.

Carson finally had enough of the abuse he’d brought on himself, and got grabby on some particularly handsome studs locked in a threesome. These things were deeply frowned on, and Phuc, ever helpful, was commissioned with removing him from the party.

As going the extra mile was what these types of power brokers were all about, Phuc took it upon himself to make sure Carson’s pity-party had ended permanently.

Phuc had only to suggest that they sneak off for a smoke on a private penthouse balcony, one which several of the RareBears had made sure he had exclusive access to. The maid who was the only outsider on the floor was using a breast pump in a closet, trying to make ends meet for her and her child like so many other brutally-bereft strivers on this compassion-deserted island. Carson and Phuc had been on the private balcony for all of two minutes before their smoke session ended in a messy make-out attempt.

Phuc had slapped Carson across the face, which he said made a sound like dropping a pound of loose deli meat on the floor.

Carson Carnahan, heir to the Percy’s Department Store fortune, current head of Holiday Operations, and utterly useless paragon of the pathetic, started to cry.

“NOBODY LIKES ME!”

“And that’s nobody’s responsibility but yours,” Phuc said calmly.

“YOU’RE BEING A BULLY!”

“I’m only repeating a truth you yourself just confirmed. Nobody likes you.”

“WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN?”

“The truth can be mean. It can also be nice. But seeing as how you’ve never made an effort to be nice, the truth will reflect that as such.”

“I HATE MYSELF.”

“So change. No one else is going to do it for you.”

“IT’S TOO HARD.”

“Life’s hard. And you’ve already got a leg up with your family money. It’s not going to get any easier until you start personally doing better.”

“I DON’T KNOW HOW!”

“Have some self-awareness. Work harder on maintaining yourself. Learn from those around you instead of abusing your power to give orders. Understand where your emotions come from. Regulate your physical self. All of your handicaps are self-imposed, and all of them can be fixed. But only by yourself.”

“I’LL SHOW THEM!”

And thus, at the place where temper tantrum met tough love, Carson Carnahan had made the choice to side with perpetual pity.

Phuc said that it took a full five minutes for Carson to maneuver his body over the railing.

Around three minutes in, he’d wanted to help, but thought better of it.

The impact of Carson’s body weight hitting the sidewalk from fifty-one stories up wasn’t pleasant. The blood spatter covered various snowbanks across both sides of the entire block.

It wasn’t until some of the street’s snow was plowed the next morning that they found one detached, bloated foot, still sporting a men’s winter boot from the Percy’s collection, piled up in the curb-snow around the corner. The coroner said Carnahan’s blood was so distinctly fucked he’d have been in a wheelchair from diabetes within the next year, anyway.

So, as the blackjack dealers say, it was a push.

I’d been at the bar going over drum scores with Lenny. As Carson was hitting the pavement, I was thinking about hitting the bass drum. That chance at musical magnificence felt better than any beat down, literal or metaphorical.

But I’m not gonna lie, I was at Percy’s the next afternoon, Santa suit in hand, ready to capture Carnahan’s spot as lively and quick as the job description stated.

 

 

The Tenth Day of Christmas.

 

The paper’s headline didn’t include any “lords a-leaping” puns, which was kind of them.

Stretch was happy to see me. He suspected nothing.

Candy was, of course, not present. I was rehired on the spot by the sympathetic management team who knew how good I was.

I didn’t have a drink all shift.

My joy at being reinstated in my job—even under these sort of circumstances—baffled me. I was smiling at least as brightly as any kid who hopped onto my lap and started extolling their wish list. Maybe it was because I knew how good at it I was. Maybe it’s because I know how brutally rare actual second chances are. There’s no replacing one good thing, even if there’s millions of similar ones available. It’s a mentality we’ve lost in our overkill consumer culture. But even if I was a cog in that capitalist machine, I was a happy one there. Helping.

I realized that I didn’t even have a wishlist of my own. I had everything I wanted.

Of course, that didn’t mean a few Christmas surprises weren’t in store.

“What’s the alternate lyrics for today, Reli?” I asked, later at the bar.

She flipped open an old songbook, one of many in the random bookshelves scattered around Trooley’s Tourist Tavern, and scanned a page.

“Hmm… yesterday’s was ‘Bears A-Beating’… wonder what was going on the day they composed that! Let’s see… today is… ha ha. ‘Ten asses racing.’ Any idea who that’d fit?”

My phone buzzed. It was Phuc. He’d sent a picture of a mangled bike that was so screwed up, it looked like an avant-garde metal sculpture. I looked up at Reli.

“Set up another round and you’ll find out.”

Phuc arrived several minutes later. Hrothgar the Hipster—human name, Roth—was in tow.

“I swear I had no idea the street would be that icy,” he said, sitting and tucking into an Eight Maids A-Milk Stout. “I mean, I knew the entire route of the Obscene Caffeine Xmas Alleycat bike race, and I knew that most of those fuckers at Obscene Caffeine don’t keep their brakes in good repair, and that they’ve been doing a lot of hard drugs during the day, maybe smoking some freebase now because the coke is getting too pricey or they’re trying to stretch some lucky stash they found but… well, there was just no way to know for sure what those crazy kids would get up to.” Roth shrugged and sipped.

“They could have been a lot more cautious about proper use of one-way streets, and not running red lights,” Phuc added. “I know the nature of Alleycat racing is intentionally daring and risky, but my goodness. They should have at least worn helmets and not Santa hats.”

“Oh boy,” I said. “You know I hate asking this, but…”

“Ten casualties. Five with broken bones, three with broken bikes, two with broken skulls.”

“Damn,” I muttered.

“There was just no way I could have known their exact route and made sure it was extra icy with a few gallons of water beforehand,” Phuc continued, giving Roth a wink and me a knowing nudge. “It was incomprehensible that I could have stopped, after I’d been waiting appropriately, just beyond the streetlight. No way I knew they’d run the red and be at my mercy. Just terrible.

“At least that’s what I told the police.”

Phuc shrugged and delicately sipped his martini, tilting up the space where his pinky finger would have been. Roth smiled a genuine smile of achievement, not the smug know-it-all hipster smirk that I knew had graced the faces of the other denizens of Obscene Caffeine.

“And you probably get to fill in a bunch of shifts there now, huh?” I asked Roth.

“Well it’s not like I want to fill in as Santastic”, he replied. “Anyway, I don’t mind slinging java. I can read scripts for real auditions all day, and the full-time wage’ll be good Christmas present money,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was gonna make my rent this month. I’m no Trustafarian. My parents gave me this jacket for Christmas last year to keep warm, and this year now I can do something nice for them.”

“That’s nice, son,” I said, still pretty sure I was feeling genuinely happy about the day’s events. But when Roth went outside to smoke, I turned to Phuc and spoke seriously.

“Look, I know we trained you from a young age to kill, and I know I let you repay a blood debt to me that was really important for both of us, and this bike race accident, well, honestly that just needed to happen. But promise me you won’t make a habit of vigilante justice.”

“As I live and breathe,” Phuc gasped. “The Grinch’s heart has grown three sizes today!”

“Shut up and drink your martini. There’s sober children in Asia.”

“Indeed there are, Sam, indeed there are. Just one more bit of business first though…if I’m supposed to cut out the killing, and our plan is already in motion, what the hell do you suppose is going to happen tomorrow?”

I just grinned. “Our finest gifts we bring, par-rum-pa-pum-pum.”

“Oh boy,” said Phuc. “Well, we already cut down this giant trouble-tree and hauled it home, we might as well light it up.”

 

 

The Eleventh Day of Christmas.

 

THE NEW YORK POST—12.24.15—MERRY XXXMAS!

 

Forget Rockefeller Center, today all the coolest Christmas celebrants were enjoying “the most wonderful time of the year”—in Times Square!

In a show of holiday cheer that brought New Yorkers and visitors from all walks of life together, today a dazzling holiday spectacle took over Times Square in a modern miracle on 42^nd street.

In a surprise that warmed hearts while doubtlessly chilling a few bared bodies, twenty-four lovely ladies (some of whom are known better in the summertime as the body-painted, bare-breasted beauties, Las Desnudas) paraded their pasties in the pedestrian promenade. The women, who appeared in high spirits and completely immune to the cold despite being clad in little more than sparkly garland and twinkling smiles, danced more rowdily than the Rockettes while a crowd of fans of all ages cheered along.

Their soundtrack was provided in a surprise appearance from New York’s Strongest: the Department of Sanitation’s Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Corps. Who knew that they had managed to work a funky bagpipe version of Blue Christmas into their repertoire?

The oft-maligned costumed characters of Times Square got into the action as well, and some even got to act out their alter-egos when trouble was afoot. After an attempted attack on the desnuda darlings by a gang of scraggly Santas that have reportedly been terrorizing the town, reports indicate that a bootleg Batman, an imitation Iron Man, and a faux Elmo teamed up to physically subdue the carousing Clauses. The Santa scuffle, however, took a backseat to the dance party that followed as the delightful desnudas encouraged the crowd to dance the day away with them, along to the swinging strains of the Pipe and Drum Corps’ version of Jingle Bell Rock…

The pipes and drums buzzed and thumped joyously outside the tiny construction port-a-potty I was wedged into. Shaking in front of me, an inch away from being skewered on one of my broken drumsticks, Braendeyn the Santastic quivered and quaked.

In the midst of the fight, where he and ten of his cracked-out cronies had tried in vain to battle the costumed Phuc, Roth, Marcos, and scads of homeless vets who we’d bribed to show up via yesterday’s trash bags full of formerly—five-dollar Obscene Caffeine cupcakes, I’d quietly stepped away from the band and forced Santastic in here.

The crowd had been more than focused on the handsome, kilt-uniformed Emerald Society Pipe And Drum Corps who’d arrived at my request, plus the twenty-four half-naked strippers and bikini girls whose imperviousness to the actual snow had been facilitated by Clara and Mariana’s dissemination of the nasal-variety snow.

They hadn’t seen us leave at all. And now I could cross one final name off this year’s naughty list.

“You stole peoples’ trust,” I lambasted Santastic. “You stole from charities. And you stole earnings from people who are out here EVERY DAY, eking out a living by giving at least half a damn about this scene. How fucking dare you?” I brandished the drumstick as Santastic—I refused to call him “Braendeyn”—cowered, crouched over the toilet seat.

“I had to! The Obscene Caffeine money is all my dad’s! I can’t make enough money working there to sustain myself!”

“So it’s fine to underpay everyone else there, but you deserve special treatment?”

“I need it! I’m a geeeeenius!” he wailed. “I was supporting the scene by bringing people there with my art! My dad would have to respect it then, if I brought in more customers!”

“But you didn’t bring in customers. You just took the money, and squandered it trying to look cool. All while showing a distinct”—I jabbed him with the broken drumstick—“LACK of genius.”

“You just don’t understand my brilliance. You’ve probably never even heard of me. I am an IMPORTANT, RESPECTED…”

“Stuff it. Your friends like you for your drugs. Your hangout isn’t even cool. The majority of the people you know don’t have the intellect or attention span to cultivate anything worth a good goddamn, and are going to get bored of everything here, including you, and leave. The rest won’t be able to afford anything here on the money they make with their negligible skill-sets, and you leading them on with a few hours at your shitty, overpriced coffee shop just keeps them stunted as humans and gentricidal to the people who actually worked to do something good for their community. Yeah, how hip is that? The people that you kicked out for all your precious coffee shops, they made a community here before it was cool. THEY did. Not you. Your so-called community has already abandoned you. I’d say they were being intelligent in that choice, but they’re probably just being as unobservant and easily distracted as always.”

I jabbed the stick into his skinny belly. He shrieked. It was pathetic.

I hadn’t been this pathetic in a fight when I was his age.

Of course, now, look at where that mentality had gotten me.

“THIS ISN’T FAIR!” he wailed.

“Life’s not fair,” I said. “The closest thing that we get to it is the chance to make our own fairness.” I withdrew the sharp stick a fraction of an inch. “Open the lid.”

“What?!”

“Open the lid.”

“Oh gawwwwwd,” he moaned.

“He can’t hear you. He’s listening to the bagpipes for his kid’s birthday right now.”

“I don’t wanna die heeeeeeere,” Santastic sobbed. “Pleeeeaaaase. I’ll work harder. I’ll contribute more to the community. I’ll be a better artist. I’ll put in effort. Please don’t kill me.”

“You’re going to get very into the community,” I said. “From the bottom up.”

And with that, I hoisted his skinny hipster ass into the air, dropped him into the port-a-potty, and slammed the lid down over his head. He was dazed but still breathing as I discreetly strode back outside and tied the door shut with a length of festive red packing twine from Percy’s.

Re-shouldering my bass drum and hitting it harder than my heartbeat, I rejoined the party.

 

 

The Twelfth Day of Christmas. Christmas Eve.

 

Reli held up her end of the bargain. She always threw a hell of an Orphan Christmas party, but this was one that the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future would all envy. The bar was jammed with everyone from the now-famous Times Squaredance, all still shining from the day’s spectacle. Best of all, not a hipster in sight. They must have been too cool for our communal Christmas.

At the end of the bar, I held court with Roth and Phuc as endless rounds appeared before us. “You know, people hate on hipsters when they try to pass off their pretentious half-ass bullshit as art,” I told Roth, “But YOU must have some serious acting chops to have been able to straight-faced tell Santastic and his crew it was a good idea to get all yacked up and come fight us, gang-turf style. You might actually have what it takes to be a real actor, if you cut off that man-bun.”

“Thanks,” Roth smiled and raised his arm (still clad in the rented Ironman costume) and clinked his Eight Maids A-Milk Stout pint to mine. “Maybe someday I’ll be able to act as happy as you do when you see all those Christmas kids.”

“That’s not acting, son,” I said. “Not anymore. I’ve achieved an actual ability to share joy. Well, sharing joy and noble fisticuffs. But mostly joy.” Phuc, Roth and I clinked glasses all together, then drank deeply.

“You were an excellent double agent,” Phuc, still dressed as Batman, congratulated Roth. He eyeballed me and spoke distinctly. “Not that I’d know.”

Sergeant Franklin sidled over, freshly shaven and wearing an ancient but clean Army cold-weather jacket. Some of the other homeless vets, similarly sharp from having been taken in by a shelter for the evening, were shooting pool with the still-kilted Sanitation guys and enjoying a few of the many pitchers that we’d bought with the “Times Squaredance" proceeds from the delighted crowd.

“Just wanted to say thanks from me and the boys for giving us all those baked goodies. It tastes like organic drywall, but it beats having to go hungry. I can’t believe those coffeehouse creeps charge five dollars for that stuff! But hey, we’ll raid their trash bags every day if it means consistently copious chow since no one’s buying. Maybe even weird out some yuppies in the process and take the property values back down. Well done, sir.” He saluted me. I returned it.

Marcos, still in his furry red character suit but without the head, strolled over with the still-shirtless Mariana on one oversized arm. Mariana was wrapped in tinsel like a tree, with ornaments hanging from her earlobes and pasties, and a light-up star on her headband.

“Awesome party, bro!” Marcos said. “Yo, some cat hit me up about the video of me and your boys throwin’ down on the Santas… we viral stars now, dawg! I might get a streaming video deal!”

“That’s great, man. Maybe now you’ll get a promotion, you know, to acting someplace INDOORS on Broadway!”

Marcos laughed. Mariana gave me a hug. “And the desnudas have got a bigger following than ever now,” she added. “Next summer, there’ll be no stopping us! Tetas para todos!” The crowd of strippers and bikini-bartendresses that had served as the dance squad cheered voluminously.

Marcos and Mariana tango’d over to the dance floor, ebullient. I took a long sip of my beer to cool my burning brain as the completely captivating Clara strode toward me.

She was wearing the same furry snow boots as she had that morning during the dance party/fight in Times Square, and probably the same red booty shorts. I couldn’t tell, as she was wearing my furry Santa jacket as apparently her only other garment. It fell to the tops of her taut thighs and fluffed open at the top to expose her exceptional entourage. A single jingle bell hung deeply down from her neck.

She kissed me so hard I tasted peppermint even over the powerful flavors of the evening’s constant beer. I looked into her beautiful brown eyes, which were sharply in focus. She stuffed a wad of something into the sporran I wore over my Emerald Society kilt. Not wanting to take my gaze from her, even for a second, I just kept staring at her, reveling in the moment.

“I sold it, bebe. All of it. Is the cash for you?”

“What about school? That money’s yours.”

“I make more. That…” She grabbed my sporran, and left her hand lingering near my crotch. “… is what you spent, porsooing happiness for me. With me. Thank you for believing in what I got.”

“I believe in much more than that,” I said. “I believe in what we’ll get next too. But no more perrico, okay? Too loco!”

“Possible,” she smiled. She kissed me again.

“Hey! Santa Claus!” Onstage, U™ was getting ready to fire up another set. The singer, a rocker girl dressed in all black but wrapped head-to-toe in multicolored Christmas lights, had beckoned me.

“Yeah?”

“I already know I’m getting coal this year, so let’s fire it up! Come up here and rock with us!”

Climbing onstage, I donned my bass drum rig and Santa hat. “More carols?” I asked.

“Hell no!” the bassist, wearing a Santa-skull T-shirt that said “NUCLEAR MISSLETOE”, declared.

“Know any Zeppelin?” asked the lead guitarist, who was rocking a black leather Santa hat with black fur. “How about something off Presence, Santa?” The band laughed.

I nodded at him, then the drummer, who had Sharpie’d a Santa hat on his biceps Misfits skull tattoo. Perched on his head was a pair of reindeer antlers, entangled with a wayward stripper bra.

“You guys kick it off. I’ll jump in. Chimney style.” I pounded my bass drum and smiled. The crowd cheered wildly.

I felt myself smiling hard. Real hard, like… well, yeah, fuck you… like a kid on Christmas. I grabbed the mic and hollered at the crowd as the band sprang to life. Around the room, the other drummers saddled on their instruments as well.

To the top of the roof, to the top of the wall

Now bash away, bash away, bash away all!