Merry Christmas by Patrick Sean Lee (black authors fiction txt) 📖

December 24, 1958

     Late in the afternoon Margaret McGuire came knocking on our door. It was Christmas Eve, and Mom had invited her to have dinner (and drinks) with us, and then visit for a while until the start of Midnight Mass at the witching hour. Precisely.

     I’m Skip…Morley, that is…and this is what happened that night.

     Jimmy McGuire, my best friend who lives next door, had spent the day with me, which in itself isn’t all that unusual. We’ve spent most of our free time together since his mom bought the little brick home next to ours five years ago. That was right after she divorced George. He’d abandoned her and Jimmy; run off with some floozy to South America to check out rubber trees for Henry Ford, Mom once told me. I don’t know if that’s true. Henry Ford died a long time ago I think. But whatever happened, wherever he went, Margaret hit the sauce pretty heavy after he flew the coop. I don’t quite get it. I mean, if he took off with some other woman—well, I don’t understand all that love stuff.

     Margaret worked at Crowley Rubber Company—which is where she met George. I don’t know what he did there, but whatever it was, I think it was with a lot of the ladies who worked there.

     Anyway, we were bored stiff by five-thirty that afternoon, and I could see Jimmy’s brainwaves beginning to spike. In the morning we’d incinerated the last battalion of my little plastic soldiers down in the basement, which pissed Pop off because of the really foul smell that drifted up through the ceiling joists and floor. When we heard the old doorbell clank and clunk, Jimmy hopped to his feet as though he owned the place, as though he’d been rescued by some kindly saint, and he ran to answer it. I was right behind him, a guest in my own house. There stood his mother, swaying pretty bad, grinning. Even from where I stood, I could see that her eyes were only half-opened. Already she’d gotten a good start on the night’s festivities.

     “‘Who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons!’” he said to her, stopping her at the threshold with a hand on her shoulder and the scrutinizing glare of a barroom bouncer. “What’s your business here, woman?”

       I couldn’t help but laugh, watching the look of Huh? rising on Mrs. McGuire’s face. She had her bottle in one hand, and a breadbox-sized present wrapped far more neatly, it looked to me, than she was capable of doing it, tucked under the other arm. She was ready to do some serious celebrating—if Jimmy would just clear out of her way. Her hair was pretty much all fixed up—pretty much, that is, in the style of ten or fifteen years ago, and she wore a not-too-carefully applied glop of lipstick, which brilliance would make even a fire engine blush with envy. It made her lips look puckered, kinda’ like Betty Boop’s.

       “Oh, get out of the way, silly,” she laughed, trying to casually tap him on the shoulder with the bottle clenched in her hand. Her eyelids drooped a little, I think the signal from her brain floating on its sea of rolling alcohol waves that it wanted to just shut down for a while, but she went on. “And don’ be talking in nasty riddles tonight. You watch your tongue; it’s the Lord’s birthday.”

     “‘Who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight’…sure, Mother! I thought it might be you under all that paint, but I wasn’t sure ‘til I saw them sparklin’ eyes. God, ya’ look beauteous. Ya’ did a good job with the rouge, too. Get on in here, Verne and Rosie and another bottle or two are waitin’ for ya’ out in the kitchen…God weren’t born, though, for a couple more hours,” he whispered. He stepped aside and gave her a peck on the cheek as she giggled her way past him.

     “Well, that’s better,” she mumbled. Who cared what night the Lord was born, anyway, I’ll bet she was thinking? As long as there was Mr. Jim Beam hanging around.

     Not far behind her, right on schedule from some distant planet, another voice began to grow. It was that of cousin Sylvie. She and Aunt Corey made their way up the front walk, and soon enough they too were assaulted by Jimmy and one of his raspy lines from Howl, that bizarre poem by this guy named Allen Ginsberg. Unlike his mom, though, who was used to the meaninglessness of the verses, and most times drunk enough not to pay much attention to them, neither of my relatives had the slightest idea of what he was saying. They looked at one another and then at him as if he’d gone nuts, or gotten into a bottle of bourbon. Jimmy had taken to wearing a black beret when he discovered Howl a month or so ago, and that made them hesitate and stare. They stepped back and really concentrated on it. Being old maids—secluded, in love with things like collectable salt and pepper shakers, rose gardens, fishing—dumb to the real happenings of the world, neither of them had a clue that the hat was only part of the larger costume of his new life. Jimmy had become a Beatnik. But, commandos wore berets fifteen years ago. Smartly dressed gentlemen killers of Fascists. Brave men who loved the free world and Misters Churchill and Roosevelt. Jimmy must be entering into a new and laudably patriotic, warlike phase, they had to have been thinking. Ready, these days, now, to go after Communists hiding under every rock in the country. God bless his young soul.

       But what were they to make of the gibberish?

   Aunt Corey salvaged the moment. “Merry Christmas, Jimmy. Now, take off your hat and move out of the way. We’re adults, dear. You must always remember that.” As always, her voice was low and musical, emitting an air, not of adult arrogance, but rather a soothing directness that suggested his life could actually become more meaningful if he obeyed.

     And so he did. Got out of the way, at least. He jumped aside, removing his beret, and he bowed gallantly. This seemed only to intensify the uneasiness of Sylvie, who stood behind her mother, always capable of being rattled even in the presence of a cooing baby. The poor woman’s head bobbed and jerked as though someone had hooked her up to our electrical arc super zapper, and she gritted her teeth. I thought she looked exactly like she needed a good stiff drink to calm her down. Lord knows, every summer she and Pop drank enough beer up at our cabin in the mountains, and she always seemed so at ease then…Oh, wait…no she didn’t. Alcohol just made her jitters worse now that I thought about it. If Coors made her stumble a little up there in the high country, Jim Beam was destined to bring her crashing to her knees five thousand feet lower, down here in the city. She eased past Jimmy, and he tried to plant a kiss on her cheek.

     They threw their coats onto the backs of the chairs in the dining room, and went out into the kitchen to join my folks and Mrs. McGuire who were hard at the business of setting up the evening for a first class Christmas donnybrook. I could hear the clink of glasses being joined in salutes, laughter, and here and there an, “Oh, bullshit, LaVerne!”

     After the adults had kissed and punched one another for a little while, I bent down and picked up the present I’d bought for Jimmy from its spot under the tree, and said to him, “Here you go. Open it.”  

     He looked at me with surprise, not expecting to have received a gift, I guess, and especially one that visibly moved him with its festive black wrapping.   “What’s this?”

     “It’s for you. I got it downtown this week. I hope you like it.”

     “But…I didn’t get you a thing. I…”

     “That’s okay. I wasn’t expecting anything. Really. I just thought…well, since we’re both alive and well and…oh, gosh… just Merry Christmas. Open the darned thing up.”

     I grabbed his arm and pulled it away from his side, placing the small package into his outstretched palm. He dropped his gaze, not to the gift lying in his hand, but past it to the fraying carpet. For a moment he just held it in his hand, not moving.

     “Open it! I want you to see what I got you. Go ahead.”

       He looked up and threw that crooked little smile at me, then ripped the black bow and black paper off and read the title aloud.

     “A Coney Island of the Mind. Lawrence Ferlin…Fer-lin-ged-i. Ferlinghetti? Crap, never heard of him.” Jimmy opened the cover, flipped into the body of the small text a few pages, and then silently read some of what was written. He turned another page. I saw his eyes scan down it, and then he turned another, and then another. Finally he went back to the page he’d started at and studied it for a minute.

     “This is good stuff. Whoa! Really good. Yeah, this cat knows…where’d you pick up on this guy?” he asked looking up at me. “You don’t read poetry. Gosh, thanks! Ferlinghetti. Yeah, I like ‘im. Bet he knows Ginsberg.” He closed the cover and read the title again, then turned the book over in his hands, savoring the feel of it. He lifted it to his face and sniffed it.

     “There’s a special smell that a book has…you ever notice that?”

     “Ah…no. Not really. Well, yeah, I guess maybe so.”

     “Yeah. Like its very own perfume or somethin’. Unique. This one smells a lot like Howl, but different, somehow. Mustier.”

     I watched him run his nose up and down it, his eyes opening and closing.

     “I think it’s good that you have a friend for Howl. I have no idea what a Coney Island of the Mind might be, but it sounds a lot like a place where the wolf in the Ginsberg poem could sit on the boardwalk there, maybe go on one of the rides. Maybe that’s where the wolf really lives,” I said.

     Jimmy closed his eyes, and I saw his lips moving, reciting certain lines. And then he smiled and opened them to me. “Yeah. Could be right.” His eyes drifted shut once again, “ ‘…who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey’…Coney Island’s in New Jersey, I think. Pretty sure. Yeah, that might just be where the wolf lives,” he said.

     “No, no. It’s in a place called Brooklyn, or by it. I looked it up. They have lots of rides and stuff there, like at Elitch’s. A beach, too. Maybe you and Sara can go there someday. Maybe me and Carol can go with you! We’d have a blast, don’t you think?”

     “Well, first thing ya’ gotta’ do,” he said with a laugh, “is get her to talk to ya’ again. Then we’ll all take off to see Sara and this Coney Island joint.”

     As Jimmy and I dreamed dreams of disappearing into Beat-land and amazing romantic adventures in dark haunted houses in amusement parks, the adults waltzed back into the living room carrying their drinks and scads of good cheer. I could see Mrs. McGuire hanging on cousin Sylvie’s shoulder with one arm as they walked through the dining room, blabbing and waving the drink in her other, like she was lecturing her. Sylvie nodded her head often, though I wasn’t sure if she was actually agreeing with Mrs. McGuire, or