Saturday, January 3, 2015

Self On A Shelf




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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