You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (11 page)

I set my hand basket down next to the peanut butter and left the store. I hated shopping and only did it when I was with other people because it made me seem more normal. “Come with me to the store?” sounded way less freakish than “Come sit with me in the dark while I drink alone?”

But I didn’t even know why I bothered. I was horrible at this
friends
thing. I said all the wrong things except when I was busy saying all the mean ones. And in the end, I hated everybody and everything.

Outside on Seventh Avenue, the sun irritated my eyes. The winter light in New York seemed somehow sharper than the summer light. It was bluer, more finely honed.

God,
I thought,
I hate the sun
.

I knew what I had become. I wasn’t trying to kid myself or anything. I was that old man on the cartoons I used to watch as a kid. What was his name? With the big nose and the ghosts? And there was a little gimp kid that trailed him around? Scrooge, that was it.

And didn’t he talk to himself, too?

Actually, there was a clinical term for what I had become:
miserable fuck.

If you have to be single and you have to be bitter and you also have to be without family for the holidays, Manhattan is the only place to be. And praise Jesus for the Jews, the Chinese, and the alcoholics. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to have sex, eat, or forget all the people I’d had sex with.

As I turned onto Twelfth Street I thought,
But that’s what’s so great about New York. All these people exist here and they don’t give a shit about Christmas, either.

Let the Upper East Side bitches drag their oily hedgehog hedge fund husbands from party to party. I will get drunk and have sex with the Jews. I will order General Tso’s chicken.

While I sip my Rolling Rock, all the little sheep-shoppers will race from one store to another and pass out five dollar bills to the bums. Which really should be against the law, like feeding the pigeons.

It was as if an infection, an actual virus, swept the nation once a year.

Fortunately, my brittle exterior provided immunity. And as I reached my apartment building I thought,
Why?
Why go upstairs when I could get a head start on Christmas and reverse my awful current state of sobriety. It was, after all, less than forty-eight hours away. That’s only a couple of bars in alcoholic time. Which was like dog years, except without the fleas.

I had a mice-in-the-oven kind of life. I might as well turn on the gas.

Even at the filthiest hole-in-the-wall bar down by the West Side Highway they were playing “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Here Comes Santa Claus” and my own favorite, “The Chipmunk Song,” which made you glad arsenic was invented. And all of this joyous noise was playing on an endless loop. Satan himself was the Christmas DJ.

Truly, this was music with no prefrontal cortex.

So if you sat and drank enough Rolling Rocks, the same songs repeated over and over. And if you rolled your eyes and muttered, “Jesus fucking Christ,” within hearing range of the bartender, he might walk right up to you and say, “What’s the matter, fella, didn’t get to sit on Santa’s lap today at Macy’s?”

The fact is, if you don’t “get into the holiday spirit” people will not only be angry with you, they will think something is wrong with you and they will decide you are a bad person. A spoil sport. “He’s a Grinch.”

They will feel a visceral mistrust, a hatred, even.

They will reject you.

And you will find yourself on the outside of the snow globe.

I paid up and walked out.

What seemed like a couple of hours later, I suddenly sort of
woke up
I guess and found myself sitting on the filthy red carpeting outside the entrance to the Art Greenwich Twin at the top of my street. My back was pressed against the glass door to the lobby. And when I glanced down, I saw that my clothes—khakis, white T-shirt, blue button-down shirt, Timberland boots—everything I had on was inexplicably dirty. Almost as if I had been wearing the exact same outfit for days and done nothing but slime around on the streets. And I was smoking a cigarette.

But none of that truly alarmed me. The jolt of terror arrived because there were two reeking, shockingly filthy wretches huddled up next to me, one on either side. Call them whatever you wish—
the homeless, bums, vagrants, winos, bag men, beggars, hobos, tramps
—but when your nose was literally inches away from their hair? The only name that fit was
disgusting.

I walked past this theater every evening, usually looking in the opposite direction because after the last show let out, these very bums arrived. They came with their cardboard boxes and stolen shopping carts piled high with debris and filth. And right there where I was now sitting—on the pitiful threadbare red carpeting in front of the doors to the movie theater—they set up a little camp.

It absolutely
stunned
me the city didn’t come along with fire hoses and just wash them out of here. They were like Norway rats, just an ugly part of the city that had to be endured if you wanted the good parts. But just because you had to step on a few rats on the way to work every day didn’t mean you had to bend over and hand them some Roquefort. So I never paid any attention to the creatures.

Yet. There I was. Right in the heart of their clan. And here’s the really weird thing: according to my watch, it was 3:00
A.M
. On Christmas morning. Which kind of begged the question,
Where did I put those forty hours I was carrying around with me?

I remembered the bar. I remembered “The Chipmunk Song.” I remembered “The Chipmunk Song,”
again
. I even remembered it a third time.

But after that, it was all a little fuzzy. My memories were not quite as sharp.
Blurry,
was maybe the word. Blurry or completely missing.
That
was it, right there.

At least they hadn’t ripped my coat off me, I thought. Not that it did much good. It must have been twenty degrees. These bums were nuts to be camping outside in this weather.

God, what was I doing thinking about the weather? I had to get up, pry myself out from between those horrible creatures. And as I moved about two inches forward, it was instantly apparent that it was not my coat which was keeping me warm: it was the bums.

A more sickening feeling I cannot imagine. But the stinking heat radiating from those two life-forms was the only thing keeping me alive. Of course, now that I thought about it, I could actually cross the street and go home. I didn’t have to stay here one more minute.

I began to stand up.

Just flexing the muscles in my arms to push myself up was enough; the movement caused both of the bums to spring fully awake and launch to their feet. They were standing above me in less time than it had taken for me to even get my ass off the ground.

Seeing me, their faces instantly relaxed into easy, friendly smiles. Relief, even. “Oh, hey, man. You scared the shit out of me. I felt that movement down by my feet and I thought somebody was trying to take my shoes,” the bum said, then he laughed. He was a white bum, only around thirty. So that was pretty scary, the guy was just five years older than me.

The other guy was a black bum and he wasn’t all that old, either, now that I got a good look at him. He might even have been the younger of the bums. “Are you okay?” he suddenly asked me. “To be honest, some of us have been a little worried about you. I was keeping an eye on you myself—Shirley asked me to, but I would have anyway.” He smiled. “Wanted to make sure you didn’t choke to death or swallow your cigarette.” Then he said, “Oh, and ah, thanks again for the sandwiches. I’m not sure it registered the first time I told you,” and he chuckled and reached forward, slapping me on the shoulder.

Was I among bums or frat boys? And who the fuck was Shirley?

A third bum meandered over. This one was a little more fucked up. I mean, they were all fucked up. But the first two, there was something a little clean about them on the inside. They almost seemed like regular people. Or like they had been regular people not too long ago. But this new third one, his eyes were holes; he looked nasty and hollow inside.

He handed me a beer. “ ’Ere ya go,” he said.

But I liked the guy.

Sometimes, that rough-around-the-edges look in a person’s eyes was really just good manners combined with an uncomfortable mattress.

“Man, oh man,” he said, “you are one crazy mother-fucker.” He started to laugh and looked at the other two bums to join in. They kind of smiled but didn’t really laugh. And then the crazy, beer-giving bum asked, “So man, what’s up with you? Like, all of a sudden you swoop down on us like you’re Batman or something and you dump all these sandwiches and beer and cash from the ATM machine on us. Fucking nuts!”

I thought,
I’ll say it’s nuts.
Jesus. I did that? How
much
beer?

He laughed some more and it was that laugh where the tongue is kind of fat and forward in the mouth and there’s a dopey smile. And it all just lets you know that this is not a really smart person. So proceed with caution.

“Dude, do you even remember anything? Like, do you remember talking to Boner? That was fucking hysterical—hiss-ter-i-cal! What was that shit you was talking about, Boner? Semi-exotics or something?”

The black guy said, “Semiotics, ChapStick. We were discussing my former life as a semiotics major at Brown.” He glanced at me. “Do you recall any of our conversations?”

I caught the plural. “Um, actually? I really kind of don’t remember a whole lot. Jesus, it’s freezing out here. How can you guys—” And I stopped myself.

The first bum, though, he answered the part of the question I left off. “It just happens. You don’t decide one day:
I think I’ll go out and become homeless.
It’s a whole set of circumstances that align in just the right way.”

And the Chapstick guy said, “Yeah, and smack.”

“Yeah, that didn’t help.”

I was thinking,
What the hell are semiotics?
Is that something I should know about?

Two more came over, girl bums. And all the guys started acting like guys, teasing and fiddling with the girls. And they were all girly, laughing and slapping shoulders and saying, “Screw you,” but playfully.

I was trying to think of a way to thank them, then back away and walk across the street to my apartment. But at the same time, there was something so oddly compelling about it all. Like with the girls. The way they both had relatively clean nails and hair. The rest of them, forget it. But these little details—hair and nails. It was like this was their last link to civilization and they weren’t going to give it up.

It frightened me in a way I didn’t understand.

And they were both
very
drunk.

I wondered if I had appeared as drunk to these bums as those girl bums appeared to me now? Or had I been even drunker?

And was I with them for the whole two days?

One of the drunk bum girls looked at me and said, “Sam-which man? Can you spot me another ten?
Please?
”