Never Fear (24 page)

I served our nation through several of
its darkest years, and I swear to you I have never seen a look of
such arrogant achievement, even from our most fucked-up foes. I
wasn’t letting this go as easily as Carnahan Jr. had obviously let
his personal standards go. I idly grabbed a fistful of fun-sized
candy canes from Frosty’s bowl, mostly to keep my hand from taking
a swing.

“
Well,” I stated calmly.
“It seems like negotiations are off the table. Like everything else
that’d be on a table around you, you disgusting, slovenly waste of
a biological process. Maybe you should head over to the makeup
counter, and treat it like you would a buffet. Then you’d stand a
chance at being as pretty inside as you are outside.”

Candy, my former boss who now held no
sway over me, and who had brought a Percy’s security guard with her
to protect against that fact, barked a horrified gasp.

Carnahan The Larger chuckled. His
self-pleasure sounded as gross as he looked. “Ignore him, Candy.
He’s an old man whose ideas of respect and appropriate business
don’t conform at all to the modern world, and I feel sorry for
him.”

The security guard, himself no stick
figure, pushed his girth in closer. I shrugged.

“
I feel sorry for
your
skeleton
,” I
said. Dropping the fistful of candy canes to the floor, not waiting
to see which of the lardy party dived after them first, I turned
and walked out the front door - whose politesse in opening, albeit
automatically, was more kindness than I had felt the place had ever
afforded me.

The Second Day of
Christmas.

When I first got to the
city, you couldn’t walk down the block of
42
^nd
street without someone shoving a spoon to your nose to try a
sample, or some streetwalker shoving herself to your eyeballs under
the same premise. Nowadays, it’s all family fun and pedestrian
thruways and costumed characters and conspicuous consumerism and
fieldless bleachers to sit on and gaze out over the
everything-nothingness of it all.

I’d preferred the dirt, for what it
was worth. Too much light all at once makes you blind.

Even the hustle felt fake, as though
everyone here was as much an actor as anyone behind the shining
marquees. Or worse: if not an actor, an ad. Some people were both,
in their designer outfits, costumed for the roles they felt they
deserved in the world but never had to audition for, not anywhere
outside their wallets at least.

Speaking of wallets, I spotted my
buddy Marcos—well, the outfit that I knew contained
Marcos—collecting cash from some tourists who had stopped to take a
selfie with him. Marcos is a Times Square regular who cosplays as a
famous children’s television character whose name rhymes with
Hellno. I always told myself I’d never get roped into the Times
Square character game, but I knew Marcos and others of his ilk made
a damn killing at it. Stuffing tourist bucks into a hidden furry
pocket, he ambled over, his oversized character-head leering eerily
at me.

“
Ey bro,” Marcos threw an
arm around me but spoke low, waving and continuing to keep his
allure to passersby on point. “What up yo? Did you for real get
booted from Percy’s?”

“
That got out
fast.”

“
Streets is buzzin’ bro,
you know that. Mariana heard from Clara mad quick.”

Mariana was Marcos’ girl,
who slung drinks at the bikini bar over on
9
^th
during this time of year. During the summer—the real sweet
months for scratch—she and Clara had been among the famous
Latina
desnudas
of City Hall’s horror, working the pedestrian paths of Times
Square in inexplicable infamy. Of all the afflictions and
restrictions the city contained, the powers-that-be had decided
that the legally topless women who inhabited this Times Square
tourist oasis deserved to be vilified for making money with what
god and/or glorious genetics had given then. In this financially
ripe yet still socially seedy core of the Big Apple, it was
perfectly acceptable to wear a copyrighted costume and swelter to
death in the name of selfie-snaps and scratch, but government
forbid you paint yourself up real pretty and dance skin-clad in the
sunlight with some flyover-state folks whose idea of kicking back
usually didn’t go further than takeout pizza and an PG-13 rated
movie.

Yes, I met and befriended Clara when
she was a topless selfie-slinger in Times Square. Don’t judge. She
eventually parlayed that seasonal gig into her headlining show at
the Pussycat, and goddamnit, I could pull the same sort of
thing…except in reverse weather, and, you know, dressed.

“
If you’re tryin’ to pick
up some Santa fans, you gonna wanna roll someplace else, bro,”
Marcos warned me. “These fuckin’
maricones
over here got all the
game.”

He bucked his hilariously-oversized
costume head toward some twenty-something twats who weren’t
performing yet, but had a crowd circling around them. Four of them
were non-descript chorus-boy types in red pleather pants,
form-fitting lumberjack shirts, and elf caps. They were led by a
shrimpy kid in skintight red jeans, a light-up Santa hat,
noticeably-nice designer boots, an expensive-looking but thin red
velvet jacket with white rabbit-fur liner and ruff, and an ironic
“Santa suit” T-shirt. I gagged a little in the cold air.

They all seemed to be
shills for some off-Broadway thing called
Santastic
! At least, that’s what it
said on the sign above the large pail their waifish commander set
up next to his boom box, which made me wince as he cranked up
cheesy-techno, holiday, background music.

“
THAT’S the competition?”
I asked Marcos. His slow nod but lack of reply made his gigantic
furry head seem strangely somber.

“
Santastic!” swung his
skinny little arms over his head, attempting to induce the audience
to clap to the beat. A smile any decent psychiatrist would define
as “manic” ravaged his features as he twitched to the
music.

“
Hell-lloooo my Broadway
beauties! Who’s feeling pleasin’, this holiday season?”

An unsettlingly bright
cheer arose from the crowd. I shuddered inside both my robustly red
fur jacket and the black trench coat I was wearing to obscure
it.
This guy
was
Times Square’s biggest Santa draw?

“
We are part of the
off-Broadway production of
Santastic!,
a multi-holiday-themed
musical EXTRAVAGANZA, and we are here to spread a little extra
holiday chee-eer!”

The five broke it down boy-band style,
doing a bunch of dance moves that I can’t exactly name. Not
breakdance stuff, just generic Broadway shit. The crowd ate it up.
I’d seen more talent swinging around subway poles.

“
Aaaaand, we are
co-llec-ting a little something extra for the local AIDS
shelterrrs!” He preened.

“
No fuckin’ way that
loot’s goin’ to shelters,” Marcos muttered. “Dude is pulling in
hundreds every day, rollin’ up in them Gucci kicks and rollin’ out
in a livery cab. Bullshit, yo.”

“
Is the real show any
good?”

“
How the fuck should I
know? I get thrown fifty free tickets a week. I got better shit to
see. I only catch shows if it’s like, Henny Ibsen up in there.” His
costume-head’s giant, lifeless black pupils sternly accentuated his
point.

Santastic was playing a child’s toy
xylophone—badly—and humming on a kazoo as the crew did a few more
half-assed dance moves. He threw a few handfuls of snowflake-shaped
glitter in the air for effect as he went. Neither his moves nor
manic music matched the bad background soundtrack. Yet, after two
minutes or hours, or however much longer the endless-seeming
abomination continued, the purses cracked and the tourists
attacked.

I’d seen smaller crowds hounding major
celebrities. Even the pigeons drew closer.

Marcos patted me on the back with one
of his oversized costume paw-mitts. “I gotta get back to work, bro.
Holler at me if you can’t find a new gig quick, I got a spare
Christmas Miss Piggy suit you could rock.”

“
Thanks.”

Marcos stepped off toward a crowd of
kids all wearing the same class chorus T-shirts, brandishing
smartphones and cash money. I shrugged my black leather trench coat
up around my furry suit a bit more, and wandered westward, timed
out of Times Square.

*

I had a wad of singles
that I had intended to dispense into various outfit-strings and
orifices of Clara later that night, but as I wound my way out of
Times Square, down 8
^th
avenue past Port Authority, a few of them made
their way into the jingling cups or outstretched hands of the
grizzled old vets huddled under piles of dirty blankets, or wrapped
in layers of military surplus clothes that were the perfect tragic
dress code for their military-surplus existences. One guy I’d seen
over the last few years, Sergeant Franklin, was already passed out
cold, cradling a paper-bagged 40 like Jesus in the manger. I tucked
a fiver into his camo cargo pocket and kept going.

Sure, that could have been me, but I’d
always kept working. Rallied. Me sitting on the sidewalk doing
nothing would be the real day the war was lost. I wasn’t a loser. I
was out of a job, out of luck, out of grace, and a little out of my
mind, but I was not out of that winning spirit. I wasn’t a believer
in much, including in myself, but I wasn’t a loser. Not after
making it this far. Surviving. Not even if that survival was for
apparently no reason.

Where but for the grace of my lack of
God go I.

When I see all the old homeless vets,
I can’t ever bring myself to look at them directly in their faces,
but I figure it’s all the same, since so much of what we went
through always keeps replaying in my mind. The good and the bad,
all at once, sometimes changing places, depending on how I
recollect it. The real good stuff always sticks, though. Watching
the stars through gaps in the jungle canopy after the rain cleared.
Handing out candy to kids who’d hound us in small towns. Handing
out care packages of medicine or food to families that needed it.
Yeah, long before I was this Santa, I was another one. It’s just
something that’s in me, I guess. Unfortunately, I also gifted a lot
of bullets.

I stopped thinking about it, at least
as much as I ever stop thinking about it, and started thinking
about what I was going to drink once I got to the bar.

Trooley’s Tourist Tavern was a
downtown staple that was perfectly obscured, unless you knew what
to look for. The “tourist” part had been a joke since sometime in
the ‘20s—it was strictly regulars now. Still, the bar itself was
covered in varnished-over maps of old, hinting at adventures far
and wide, if you could only manage to get up off the damn barstool.
I’d taken my usual spot and usual drink, sipping a French Hens beer
and tracing a map of the Venetian canals with my
increasingly-blurry eyes.

“
You got shat on,” the
bartender, Reli, informed me after delivering my drink and hearing
my tale of holiday woe.

“
As always, I appreciate
your candor,” I tilted my glass to her, then to my lips.

“
No, I mean literally.
There’s pigeon shit on your shoulder.” She wadded up some napkins
and dabbed at a spot on my shoulder just beyond my line of
eyesight. Reli was a good, observant bartender like that, full of
help and facts. “They’re a kind of dove, you know. Rock doves. Cool
name. Not that it makes them any better in real life.”

“
They were everywhere in
midtown today, flocking all around some
Santastic!
boy-band crap in Times
Square. Must have hit me there.”

Reli wrinkled her nose,
not at the pigeon shit, but at the mention of
Santastic!

“
Ugh, I saw those hipster
fucks on the morning show the other day when I was closing up,” she
growled. “As if Christmas needs to be any cheesier, now we have
hipsters hawking it.”

“
I disagree with that
term,” I said in between sips. “I met some of the original hipsters
around here, back in the day. I drank with Bill Burroughs a few
times in the Village. That guy was more hardcore than any of these
little twist-moustached twerps. He’d do…”

“…
a shot of tequila for
every beer you drank?” Reli finished my thought aloud at the same
time I said it. She smiled sternly. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned it. But
he’s dead, and so’s Kerouac and Cassady and Creeley and Ginsberg
and all the rest of the cool kids, and now we’re just left with
these hand-me-down-‘hipsters’ who buy things up, fuck things up,
and leave it to the rest of us to rinse and repeat.”

“
Sounds like I’m not the
only one with this particular problem,” I said, opening up the
conversation. If anyone might have a good line on how to fix this
insane issue, it might be Reli.

“
Hell no. You wouldn’t
believe what some of these little trust-fund troglodytes are up to.
It’s bad enough that five of those snooty Obscene Caffeine
coffeehouses have cropped up around here in the last year. Now
they’re trying to take over the bars they can’t buy out. You should
have seen the hipster herd at Shillelagh last night. They were
fucking
finger painting
. Some thousand-dollar adult-preschool shitshow.
Ridiculous.”