Christmas really screwed us over. How it all started was, well, for starters, Mom and Dad never should have been married. They were just kids—and I’m the kind of guy, I prefer using the word “child” when most people use “kid,” but in Mom and Dad’s case, they were just kids. Christmas kept them from growing up.
Every year it was the same. Dad worked two jobs. Mom too selfish and too insane to do much of anything useful for too long. Mom was never happy. She kept thinking, If I just have a baby, then I could be happy. She thought that six times. That’s another story. But Dad working two jobs, slaughtering himself, grinding himself down, day after day—it’s daytime, it’s nighttime, Dad’s at work.
Where’s Dad? He’s at work.
Dad and Mom were 21 and 18, respectively, when they both got to take part in their very own shotgun wedding of their very own making. I am the oldest of my mother’s six attempts at finding happiness. I was conceived out of wedlock one furtive and probably mildly debauched night on a beach in Southern California. I don’t know what beach. Dad was always at work, or I suppose he’d have gotten around to telling me. Mom was too insane and too self-absorbed to pass that along. But it was a beach, I know that much, and it was out of wedlock—whatever that is, anymore—and Dad came from a staunch Baptist father, and Mom came from a drunken, abusive, Irish-Catholic father. Mom wanted to get knocked up to get the hell away from her old man, my Grandpa. Though in typical Mom fashion, she’d insist it was all Dad’s doing. Till her dying day, I’m sure she’ll still be insisting that. Everything she ever did was always, is always, and will always be somebody else’s fault. I guess being raised by a drunken, violent Irish-Catholic will do that to a person. But boy did Dad ever get the crap blamed out of him after that, each and every single day he was ever married to good old Mom. She learned some things from dear old Grandpa. If you’ve ever seen the James Dean movie Rebel without a Cause then you’ve seen my father. He was played by Jim Backus, who played James Dean’s dad, but he was also playing my Dad. I don’t think he knew he was also playing my Dad, but nevertheless he did a damn good job of it, although when Jim Backus finally stood up to his wife at the end of the movie, he broke from his character. He wasn’t playing my Old Man then. Not for that scene. My Old Man never did stand up to his wife. My Old Man never did get to be an Old Man. But that’s another story.
That he lived as long as he did was all because of me, you know. I saved Dad’s life one time. It was when I was conceived. It was that night on the beach in Southern California, when my Mom got knocked up with me. It was 1966. I saved my Dad from Vietnam. He was actually in contact with the local army recruiter, just about all signed up and everything. His family, the Staunch Baptists, thought “it’s the right thing to do for one’s country.” So that’s how stupid they were.
But when drunken Irish Grandpa on Mom’s side caught wind that Dad had knocked up his daughter, the shotguns came out, the “Oh, No You Don’t, You Come Back Here and Marry my Daughter Debate” happened shortly thereafter, and here I was just starting up forming in Mom’s belly. Dad got called away from Vietnam. His tour of duty would now consist of helping my Mom find her happiness, and he earnestly did so at least six times that I am aware of. And so here am I, the oldest of six boys. That’s six times the happiness, mind you. Well, for some people, maybe.
But another way they could fake happiness, Mom and Dad, another way they did it was to save up all that extra money Dad made from working two jobs all year, day in, day out—which was never much because they were always on the brink of bankruptcy—no kidding, brink of bankruptcy, until it finally happened, and then he died—I say, they would scrounge from Dad’s yearly slaving away of himself, and then, wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am style, they would blow it all in one day. Bang. Zoom. Over.
Like two exhausted lovers—if they could ever be conceived of as lovers—Mom and Dad sat exhausted and bleary-eyed, collapsed into the same chairs of weathering upholstery, looking with materialistic pride at the oceans and mountains of toys and games and torn wrappings and bows and ribbons and decorations and chocolate cherries and fruitcake and sweets and hanging ornaments and tinsel and garland and sprinkled glitter and toys and more and more toys and games and toys.
Mom and Dad, you blew it all in one big wad. No foreplay, no after play, just watching us play. You sat, exhausted, like two post-orgasm lovers on Xmas morn, watching us tear open our presents you got for us and here you blamed it all on this Santa guy. Six boys in attack mode, high on hyperactive materialism and sweets and sleep deprivation. You sat like two lovers and watched us, though you never really loved one another. You were stuck together, you two were, and you were young and you never grew out of it, and so you tried to make the best of it, and Xmas, the ritual of Xmas told you this was how you make the most of marriage, the most of love, the most of family. The way you show your kids—I say “kids” again—the way you do it is, you buy them lots of toys and games and torn wrappings and bows and ribbons and decorations and chocolate cherries and fruitcake and sweets and hanging ornaments and tinsel and garland and sprinkled glitter and toys and more and more toys and games and toys.
And to think, now that I know what I know, the whole time the satraps and administrators and governors and counselors and treasurers and judges and magistrates, and all the officials of all the provinces were screwing you over just for thinking that, and then for doing that, for falling into this whole asinine rat race thing called Xmas.
Keep Christ in Christmas, Mom might say, when she wasn’t too self-absorbed to say something else. Woman, Jesus might say, What have I to do with you?
You never told us about college, Mom and Dad, you never taught us how to succeed in life—you chopped us down on that score, in fact. (But that’s that other story again.) By god, though—by the god of Xmas past!—you sure bought us a lot of presents. Presents made of plastic that broke that very day, or never worked at all, or else they took the wrong kind of batteries and we didn’t have any more of those. Got to wait till the stores open. But sometimes they worked for a whole year, those gadgets did, sometimes even till the next empty orgasm of the next December 25, the next fusillade of trinkets and baubles and wrappings strewn all over the living room floor, ejaculated there, with Nat King Cole serenading voluptuously away in the background. But then, we wouldn’t be interested in those toys by then. Those were “old toys.”
We have nothing of it left now, none of those plastic doo-dads. It’s all gone.
But my—oh, my!—the effort my poor Dad put into buying all that stuff. The slavish, dog-weary exertion he put into that yearly colossal living-room, pine-needled enterprise—because he loved us. Indeed, he did love us. But my, that Monopoly money, and that striving, and all of that life force lost to attrition in the chasing after the wind of all those plastic goodies and all those electronic gizmos could have been better spent on a gajillion other things I can think of just off the top of my head right now, this instant, without even pondering over it. No pondering needed.
Dad, Xmas screwed you over. (Mom, what can I say?—you screwed yourself over. You’re that other story again.) Myself, my brothers, all five of you, all six of us, Xmas screwed us all over. In fact, it screwed you, my brothers, over so badly you don’t even know it. You’re still doing it, the hamster-wheel chase, year in, year out, got to buy those presents for your own little ones now, got to play the unprofitable game, pass it long, generation to generation, this pagan accursed thing they dressed up in tinsel and Jesus Christ’s robes, and this year it’ll leave you just as empty after the presents are unwrapped, after it renders you that very morning in the same post-orgasmic state, bleary-eyed—not really satisfied though, because, when you get them, even when you give them, they’re just toys, just lights—what do you do with them now? Now that you have them—now what? Where’s the fulfillment? Well, maybe next year. Got to save up for next year. Make sure you have batteries, that thing won’t go without the right batteries. The stores are all closed on Xmas, you know.
Jeremiah warned you. He warned us. Jeremiah was a prophet of Jesus. Jeremiah said, Don’t do this.
Yet, you’re doing it.
Oh, my brothers, wake up, come out of her. Don’t do this to your children, not while they are still children. Keep them as children, don’t make kids out of them.
Mom and Dad said this was about Jesus. But they were just kids. They didn’t know anything. They were young. They were too young. They just wanted to screw.
And so they got screwed. Every December 25, Rockefeller let them have it. The banks let them have it. Arthur F. Burns and Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan let them have it. They all took turns.
And Dad, you sat there, exhausted, watching us open our presents, used up, drained out in the same chair from another year’s servitude. You thought yourself satisfied, when all you were was screwed.
