Barrel Fever (18 page)

I have to admit that he had a point. But still, I wanted to say that at least I get paid to look stupid, that he gives it away for free. But I can’t say things like that because I’m supposed to be merry.

So instead I said, “Thank you!”

“Thank you!” as if I had misunderstood and thought he had said, “You look terrific.”

“Thank you!”

He was a brawny wise guy wearing a vinyl jacket and carry-ing a bag from Radio Shack. I should have said, real loud, “Sorry man, I don’t date other guys.”

Two New Jersey families came together to see Santa. Two loud, ugly husbands with two wives and four children between them. The children gathered around Santa and had their picture taken. When Santa asked the ten-year-old boy what he wanted for Christmas, his father shouted, “A WOMAN! GET HIM A WOMAN, SANTA!” These men were very loud and irritating, constantly laughing and jostling one another. The two women sat on Santa’s lap and had their pictures taken and each asked Santa for a KitchenAide brand dishwasher and a decent winter coat. Then the husbands sat on Santa’s lap and, when asked what he wanted for Christmas, one of the men yelled, “I WANT A BROAD WITH BIG TITS.” The man’s small-breasted wife crossed her arms over her chest, looked at the floor, and gritted her teeth. The man’s son tried to laugh.

Again this morning I got stuck at the Magic Window, which is re-ally boring. I’m supposed to stand around and say, “Step on the Magic Star and you can see Santa!” I said that for a while and then I started saying, “Step on the Magic Star and you can see Cher!”

And people got excited. So I said, “Step on the Magic Star and you can see Mike Tyson!”

Some people in the other line, the line to sit on Santa’s lap, got excited and cut through the gates so that they could stand on my Magic Star. Then they got angry when they looked through the Magic Window and saw Santa rather than Cher or Mike Tyson. What did they honestly expect? Is Cher so hard up for money that she’d agree to stand behind a two-way mirror at Macy’s?

The angry people must have said something to management because I was taken off the Magic Star and sent to Elf Island, which is really boring as all you do is stand around and act merry. At noon a huge group of retarded people came to visit Santa arid passed me on my little island. These people were profoundly retarded. They were rolling their eyes and wagging their tongues and staggering toward Santa. It was a large group of retarded people and after watching them for a few minutes I could not begin to guess where the retarded people ended and the regular New Yorkers began.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

This evening I was sent to be a Photo Elf, a job I enjoyed the first few times. The camera is hidden in the fireplace and I take the picture by pressing a button at the end of a cord. The pictures arrive by mail weeks later and there is no way an elf can be identified and held accountable but still, you want to make it a good picture.

During our training we were shown photographs that had gone wrong, blurred frenzies of an elf’s waving arm, a picture blocked by a stuffed animal, the yawning Santa. After every photograph an elf must remove the numbered form that appears at the bottom of the picture. A lazy or stupid elf could ruin an entire roll of film, causing eager families to pay for and later receive photographs of complete, beaming strangers.

Taking someone’s picture tells you an awful lot, awful being the operative word. Having the parents in the room tends to make it even worse. It is the SantaLand policy to take a picture of every child, which the parent can either order or refuse. People are allowed to bring their own cameras, video recorders, whatever. It is the multimedia groups that exhaust me. These are parents bent over with equipment, relentless in their quest for documentation.

I see them in the Maze with their video cameras instructing their children to act surprised. “Monica, baby, look at the train set and then look back at me. No, look at me. Now wave. That’s right, wave hard.”

The parents hold up the line and it is a Maze Elf’s job to hurry them along.

“Excuse me, sir, I’m sorry but we’re sort of busy today and I’d appreciate it if you could maybe wrap this up. There are quite a few people behind you.”

The parent then asks you to stand beside the child and wave. I do so. I stand beside a child and wave to the video camera, wondering where I will wind up. I picture myself on the television set in a paneled room in Wapahanset or Easternmost Meadows. I picture the family fighting over command of the remote control, hitting the fast-forward button. The child’s wave becomes a rapid salute. I enter the picture and everyone in the room entertains the same thought: “What’s that asshole doing on our Christmas Memory tape?”

The moment these people are waiting for is the encounter with Santa. As a Photo Elf I watch them enter the room and take control.

“All right, Ellen, I want you and Marcus to stand in front of Santa and when I say, 'now,' I want you to get onto his lap. Look at me. Look at Daddy until I tell you to look at Santa.”

He will address his wife who is working the still camera and she will crouch low to the ground with her light meter and a Nikon with many attachments. It is heavy and the veins in her arms stand out.

Then there are the multimedia families in groups, who say, “All right, now let’s get a shot of Anthony, Damascus, Theresa, Doug, Amy, Paul, and Vanity — can we squeeze them all together? Santa, how about you let Doug sit on your shoulders, can we do that?”

During these visits the children are rarely allowed to discuss their desires with Santa. They are too busy being art-directed by the parents.

“Vanity and Damascus, look over here, no, look here.”

“Santa, can you put your arm around Amy and shake hands with Paul at the same time?”

“That’s good. That’s nice.”

I have seen parents sit their child upon Santa’s lap and immediately proceed to groom: combing hair, arranging a hemline, straightening a necktie. I saw a parent spray their child’s hair, Santa treated as though he were a false prop made of cement, turning his head and wincing as the hair spray stung his eyes.

Young children, ages two to four, tend to be frightened of Santa. They have no interest in having their pictures taken because they don’t know what a picture is. They’re not vain, they’re babies. They are babies and they act accordingly they cry. A Photo Elf understands that, once a child starts crying, it’s over. They start crying in Santa’s house and they don’t stop until they are at least ten blocks away.

When the child starts crying, Santa will offer comfort for a moment or two before saying, “Maybe we’ll try again next year.”

The parents had planned to send the photos to relatives and place them in scrapbooks. They waited in line for over an hour and are not about to give up so easily. Tonight I saw a woman slap and shake her sobbing daughter, yelling, “Goddamn it, Rachel, get on that man’s lap and smile or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

I often take photographs of crying children. Even more grotesque is taking a picture of a crying child with a false grimace. It’s not a smile so much as the forced shape of a smile. Oddly, it pleases the parents.

“Good girl, Rachel. Now, let’s get the hell out of here. Your mother has a headache that won’t quit until you’re twenty-one.”

At least a third of Santa’s visitors are adults: couples, and a surprising number of men and women alone. Most of the single people don’t want to sit on Santa’s lap; they just stop by to shake his hand and wish him luck. Often the single adults are foreigners who just happened to be shopping at Macy’s and got bullied into the Maze by the Entrance Elf, whose job it is to hustle people in. One moment the foreigner is looking at china, and the next thing he knows he is standing at the Magic Tree, where an elf holding a palm-sized counter is asking how many in his party are here to see Santa.

“How many in your party?”

The foreigner answers, “Yes.”

“How many in your party is not a yes or no question.”

“Yes.”

Then a Santa Elf leads the way to a house where the confused and exhausted visitor addresses a bearded man in a red suit, and says, “Yes, OK. Today I am good.” He shakes Santa’s hand and runs, shaken, for the back door.

This afternoon a man came to visit Santa, a sloppy, good-looking man in his mid-forties. I thought he was another confused European, so I reassured him that many adults come to visit Santa, everyone is welcome. An hour later, I noticed the same man, back again to fellowship with Santa. I asked what he and Santa talk about, and in a cracked and puny voice he answered, “Toys. All the toys.”

I noticed a dent in the left side of his forehead. You could place an acorn in a dent like this. He waited in line and returned to visit a third time. On his final visit he got so excited he peed on Santa’s lap.

So far in SantaLand, I have seen Simone from “General Hospital,” Shawn from “All My Children,” Walter Cronkite, and Phil Collins. Last year one of the elves was suspended after asking Goldie Hawn to autograph her hand. We have been instructed to leave the stars alone.

Walter Cronkite was very tall, and I probably wouldn’t have recognized him unless someone had pointed him out to me. Phil Collins was small and well groomed. He arrived with his daughter and an entourage of three. I don’t care about Phil Collins one way or the other but I saw some people who might and I felt it was my duty to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Look, there’s Phil Collins!”

Many of Santa’s visitors are from out of town and welcome the opportunity to view a celebrity, as it rounds out their New York experience. I’d point out Phil Collins and people would literally squeal with delight. Seeing as it is my job to make people happy, I didn’t have any problem with it. Phil Collins wandered through the Maze, videotaping everything with his camcorder and enjoying himself. Once he entered the Magic Tree, he was no longer visible to the Maze audience, so I began telling people that if they left immediately and took a right at the end of the hall, they could probably catch up with Phil Collins after his visit with Santa. So they did. People left. When Phil Collins walked out of SantaLand, there was a crowd of twenty people waiting for autographs. When the managers came looking for the big mouth, I said, “Phil Collins, who’s he?”

I spent a few hours in the Maze with Puff, a young elf from Brooklyn. We were standing near the Lollipop Forest when we realized that Santa is an anagram of Satan. Father Christmas or the Devil — so close but yet so far. We imagined a SatanLand where visitors would wade through steaming pools of human blood and feces before arriving at the Gates of Hell, where a hideous imp in a singed velvet costume would take them by the hand and lead them toward Satan. Once we thought of it we couldn’t get it out of our minds. Overhearing the customers we would substitute the word Satan for the word Santa.

“What do you think, Michael? Do you think Macy’s has the real Satan?”

“Don’t forget to thank Satan for the Baby Alive he gave you last year.”

“I love Satan.”

“Who doesn’t? Everyone loves Satan.”

I would rather drive upholstery tacks into my gums than work as the Usher Elf. The Usher stands outside Santa’s exit door and fills out the photo forms. While I enjoy trying to guess where people are from, I hate listening to couples bicker over how many copies they want.

It was interesting the first time I did it, but not anymore. While the parents make up their minds, the Usher has to prevent the excited children from entering Santa’s back door to call out the names of three or four toys they had neglected to request earlier.

When things are slow, an Usher pokes in his head and watches Santa with his visitors. This afternoon we were slow and I watched a forty-year-old woman and her ancient mother step in to converse with Santa. The daughter wore a short pink dress, decorated with lace the type of dress that a child might wear. Her hair was trained into pigtails and she wore ruffled socks and patent leather shoes. This forty-year-old girl ran to Santa and embraced him, driving rouge into his beard. She spoke in a baby voice and then lowered it to a whisper. When they left I asked if they wanted to purchase the photo and the biggest little girl in the world whispered something in her mother’s ear and then she skipped away. She skipped. I watched her try and commune with the youngsters standing around the register until her mother pulled her away.

This morning I spent some time at the Magic Window with Sleighbell, an entertainer who is in the process of making a music video with her all-girl singing group. We talked about one thing and another, and she told me that she has appeared on a few television shows, mainly soap operas. I asked if she has ever done “One Life to Live,” and she said, yes, she had a bit part as a flamenco dancer a few years ago when Cord and Tina remarried and traveled to Madrid for their honeymoon.

Suddenly I remembered Sleighbell perfectly. On that episode she wore a red lace dress and stomped upon a shiny nightclub floor until Spain’s greatest bullfighter entered, challenging Cord to a duel. Sleighbell intervened. She stopped dancing and said to Cord, “Don’t do it, Se. Yoot be a fool to fight weeth Spain’s greatest boolfighter!”

Sleighbell told me that the honeymoon was filmed here in the New York studio. That surprised me as I really thought it was shot in Spain. She told me that the dancing scene was shot in the late morning and afterwards there was a break for lunch. She took her lunch in the studio cafeteria and was holding her tray, when Tina waved her over to her table. Sleighbell had lunch with Tina! She said that Tina was very sweet and talked about her love for Smokey Robinson. I had read that Tina had driven a wedge between Smokey and his wife, but it was thrilling to hear it from someone who had the facts.

Later in the day I was put on the cash register where Andrea, one of the managers, told me that her friend Caroline was the person responsible for casting on “One Life to Live.” It was Caroline who replaced the old Tina with the new Tina. I loved the old Tina and will accept no substitutes, but I told Andrea that I liked the new Tina a lot, and she said, “I’ll pass that along to Caroline. She’ll be happy to hear it!” We were talking when Mitchell, another manager, got involved and said that he’d been on “One Life to Live” seven times. He played Clint’s lawyer five years ago when the entire Buchannon family was on trial for the murder of Mitch Laurence. Mitchell knows Victoria Buchannon personally and said that she’s just as sweet and caring in real life as she is on the show.