Never Fear (23 page)

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.”