–Illustration by James Dankert
Here’s a new wrinkle in the gray, clanging days before Christmas: Uncle Jumbo has been playing miserable pet store Santa Claus, wrestling squirming cats and dogs and even the occasional bird or lizard in my lap while a wrinkled and alcoholic little temp-pool elf tries to snap photos for somebody’s sad little Christmas card. Pity the poor bastard who finds himself on one of these people’s mailing lists.
What a way to ruin somebody’s holiday season. Last weekend I spent forty-five minutes trying to balance two very confused greyhounds on my lap. Try it sometime.
It’s all a sad story, but here’s the short version: I got fired from my hotel van gig for general off-season misery and an attitude unbecoming of a shuttle stooge. It’s the third time I’ve been canned from the same job, and they’ll eventually come calling again when they realize once more that this world is not exactly full of people who A) have a valid drivers license, B) a clean driving record, and C) actually want to drive a hotel van. Ninety-nine out of a hundred applicants cannot put an honest check in any of those boxes, and I will eventually get my job back, attitude or no attitude.
Meanwhile, I toil and suffer through the baseball off-season, muttering through every day and nurturing a tator tot addiction that has reached alarming proportions. Or maybe that should be portions. I am putting away a pound of tator tots a day, and last weekend found myself driving to the Rainbow at two in the morning for a new bag. I’m not proud of myself.
The Santa Claus thing is of course a very temporary mistake, but I have very little patience for job hunting, involving as it does initiative and ambition, qualities of which I am in very short supply. Until of course it reaches the point where it involves desperation, something which I can generally muster in spades, and at which point I will very reluctantly agree to wash dishes at Old Country Buffet.
I would love to be a different person, I really would.
God don’t make no junk, my mother likes to say, which is of course nonsense.
Oh well. One of my goals for this off-season was to find a bowling alley I can depend on, which is not as easy as it might seem. I enjoy bowling, but the problem is that I don’t like to have people watching me while I bowl. That, and the fact that I like to have access to a good hamburger while I bowl, has made it difficult to find an alley suitable to my needs. Plenty of the bowling alleys around town serve up a good hamburger, but most of them are crowded with people who are either good bowlers or loud bowlers. I can’t stand either type, and because I pose something of a spectacle when I do bowl and attract gawkers, I am forced to either stay home, or to venture out to one of the mammoth lanes in the middle of the night when the kitchen is closed, and I am unable to get a hamburger. The only thing I ever envied about Elvis Presley was that he had his own bowling alley and a cook at his disposal.
This morning I’ll be going down to Blooming Void to spend Christmas with my mother, staring at her creepy little fake tree bleached blue by the years and strung with patchy tinsel. My brother has a family now, and every year they find something better to do, so it’ll once again just be me sitting there on the couch eating peanut brittle and listening to my mother wheezing through Christmas carols on her Lowry Genie organ. When she goes to bed I’ll sit up half the night watching videos and beach volleyball and horror movies and whatever else the third-rate little cable system they have down there manages to suck out of space.
Down there in Blooming Void they still show David Lee Roth and Billy Idol videos late at night. “David Lee Roth,” I’ll think to myself while nursing an egg nog, “The kind of guy who wears a silk scarf swimming in the ocean, that lucky, shitty bastard.” If tradition holds I’ll fall asleep on the couch and drift into a recurring winter dream: I’m in a large abandoned office building, standing at a urinal in the dark, my forehead resting against the cool tiles on the wall.
Through the giant windows on all sides of me a city stretches away in darkness, punctuated here and there with random displays of blue Christmas lights. Stringers of blue lights dully glowing from the eaves of dark houses and the skeletal trees along the boulevard. Hardly a moon over the world, and not a star in the sky. Nothing moving anywhere. Clouds of gray heat boiling from chimneys and squatting on the neighborhoods.
Then, from somewhere far below me, I hear a large choir singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” the most mournful version I have ever heard, or ever hope to hear. The singers sound like people trapped in the bowels of a sinking ship, holding hands, waiting for the water to find them.
And when I wake up it will be Christmas morning, and the world will have made its first turn out of winter, and my heart will begin its real straining out of the darkness, jogging towards the light, toward Spring Training.
And that, to me, is the real meaning of Christmas.
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