I'm not a Christmas person.
After the age of about twelve I began to notice the various stresses and
anxieties attendant to the approach of the big day, often punctuated by
escalating outbursts and explosions on the part of my father, who had a short
fuse and was quick to boil over in pursuit of the perfect Christmas Morning.
Despite a few scars along the way, though, those mornings did turn out to be
pretty perfect; Dad decorated the tree - it was best to leave that to the
precision of his architect's eye and not get in the way – as well as the rest
of the house with votives and garlands, fir bows and hand-cut snow flakes,
vintage music boxes that played “Fly Me To The Moon” and “La Vie En Rose” in a
sort of endless cacophony, gradually diminishing to a single note. He carefully
arranged the ancient, Italian nativity scene in the bee-hive oven of the big
brick fireplace, placing the creche just so on a bed of straw beneath a flock
of tiny, blue clay angels he'd rigged to fly long ago from a piece of wire
coat-hanger. After decanting our stockings, we would pause for an endless
interval while Dad made sugared grapefruit halves, scrapple, English muffins
and slow-scrambled eggs before heading back in to the living room to open an
embarrassing abundance of presents for which none of us felt particularly
deserving after a week or so of pitched battles and high anxiety. Suzanne and
Zinzi adore Christmas and strive for that perfection while I invariably trip
over my legacy and screw it up, sooner or later, somewhere along the way.
Not that my malaise is all Dad's fault.
Those years in the Eighties jumping slush-puddles at crowded cross-walks and
stuffing myself into packed and reeking subway cars just to wind up in Macy's
Basement, Tower Records or – in complete and abject desperation – Azuma's,
seemed cold, frustrating and thoroughly unsatisfying. Elbowing through the mob
to the display table and pawing over yet another Chemex or pasta machine or
fondue set or quiche pan or coffee grinder, when none of these things was even
remotely good enough for anyone I was shopping for left me, hours later, dark,
brooding and empty-handed with the clock still ticking. The worst gift I ever
gave was a ratchet screw-driver I picked up on Canal Street for my Dad; my only
defense being that ratchet screw-drivers were something of a novelty then and
seemed to me at the time to be more useful than that set of demi-tasse you've
all got hidden away in the cupboard over the microwave.
The best gift I ever gave was
a gift-wrapped bottle of Courvoisier that had been turned down by a waitress
I'd been chasing at Fanelli's. Despondent over her rejection, I determined to
hand it off to the first person I saw after leaving the bar. This turned out to
be a Mr. James Aloysius Finbar McTavish, a tipsy gentleman who lived on a scrap
of packing-crate in the bowels of the Broadway-Lafayette F Train stop. Some
months earlier I had passed McTavish tussling over a bottle of something with
one of his compatriots in the dark and dismal mid-ships of the station. The
other fellow kept bellowing, “ Gimme that bottle, McTavish!” and McTavish
shouted back, “ On the sacred name of me dear departed, James Aloysius Finbar
McTavish will never surrender this bottle to the likes of you....!” Of course, this little bit of urban theater
stuck with me so that, when I came upon McTavish that sad night I was able to
extend the gift-wrapped offering to him with a simple, “Here, McTavish. Merry
Christmas....” and wander away towards
the platform with his astounded retorts echoing in the dark and fetid chamber. “Wait, wait,” he bellowed, “
How'dya know me name, Mister? Who the Hell are you? James Aloysius Finbar
MacTavish thanks you! Me sainted mother thanks you! May the Saints preserve you
and keep you....” He trailed off, drowned out by the arrival of the train.
I'm not much of a New Year's
Eve person, either. My friend John's father, by all accounts a world-class
inebriate, dubbed this “Amateur Night” and recommended drinking at home for the
occasion. Certainly after a few such evenings spent stepping around the puking
Bridge and Tunnel set outside McSorley's or worrying at the giddy girl,
chartreuse tiara askew, being carried off by a few good men, it's best to be
off the streets unless you have a pretty good place to go. My father loved a
party, despite his grouchy demeanor, and would throw a good one. These were
more fun than Christmas and whether they involved Twister and Cold Duck or
transforming the house into some tropical paradise via weeks of papier-mache,
the whole neighborhood would show up for a good time, usually culminating with
Dad at the piano singing holiday favorites accompanied by one of our
pistachio-stuffed Labradors.
The best New Year's Eve party I ever went to
was actually a series of events on the side streets of Soho in 1981. We'd left
our sublet in some Mercer Street basement just to see what was going on and
immediately got swept up in a sort of Conga-line of revelers threading their
way from party to party throughout the neighborhood. No one appeared to have
been invited to any of these loft-parties, we just followed the crowds up one
flight of stairs while those descending called out the addresses of other hot
prospects around the corner or down the street. Groaning boards of ham and
champagne greeted us at every turn and no one turned us away. Celebrities were
everywhere, Mary Boone, Keith Haring, Andre, Bobby De Niro – everyone in Soho
called him Bobby – mixing happily with the common folk as we all tooted on
those ubiquitous, unfurling whistle-things. At one point I found myself in line
on the stairs behind William S. Burroughs, another renowned dipsomaniac, who
smelled like stale piss and was apparently as much of a free-loader that
festive night as we were. Oddly, I would find myself in line behind the stinky
Burroughs on two or three other occasions over the coming years.
As for the whole resolution thing, they've
rarely worked out. I've lost a few pounds now and again, quit smoking for a
minute or two once or twice and, given that I seem to have inherited all my
Dad's uglier qualities with few of his virtues, resolved year after year to be
a better, more tolerant and forgiving husband and father without much success
and a long way to go.
So Happy New Year, dear reader, may you find
and spread tolerance and forgiveness throughout your travels.....
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