Can an improved version of a story start like this – with a statement in the form of a question as if it were a clue on the popular gameshow Jeopardy! ?I suppose I’m about to find out, I only know for sure that I didn’t really like the way it came out the first time. I do really love this story though and do sincerely hope that it could someday be adapted into a television special where Morgan Freeman or somebody similar sits in front of a roaring fireplace and reads from a specially manufactured oversized prop book.
As an artist and performer practice, rehearsal and the drafting process have never been particularly important to me. It sort of feels like I am always in the process of creating rough drafts as I play back memories in my mind and experiment with different little literary devices as I convert the raw data to narrative accounts that still only exist in my imagination. I don’t mean that I constantly hear an internal voice narrating my thoughts but I am super interested in what it’s like for people who experience that. I heard somewhere that Robyn does and the voice sounds like early Whoopi Goldberg. For me it’s more like I constantly have to keep my mind busy like a hyperactive toddler that might reach for interpersonal cruelty or suicidal ideation or other things that might be inside a brain but aren’t safe for babies.
I’ve been in the mood to sing for the last couple of weeks so I finally used the pretext of a holiday to record a take singing over Steeleye Span’s version of the Medieval Christmas song Gaudete. As a person who has spent a decent amount of time onstage as a performer I know exactly how it feels to be worth looking at or listening to. In the video I am neither of those things – I just realized that this is sort of a trap and no matter how I phrase it it will still end up sounding like false modesty or a “humble brag”. I wouldn’t actually finish watching the video of me singing myself – it is boring and it sounds bad and I mess up the timing a few times.
In a lot of my bands I ended up as the lead singer because I have lots of energy and a big personality but I still somehow never learned how to sing. This feels like a situation where “practice” might actually become a useful thing that works for me. If I record horrible karaoke videos every single day will I eventually end up making small improvements that lead to less horrible sounding videos? Can rewriting a story that I didn’t like the tone and energy of the first time around make it a more enjoyable thing to read?
I guess we’re going to find out.
I didn’t used to always hate Christmas. As a small child I would bolt awake at dawn and run to the tree in my pajamas with the same giddy excitement that would come to characterize later mornings where I had saved myself a wake up shot of heroin or that my cats seem to muster every time they wake us up to feed them. My parents seemed to pull off miracles: in my personal version of the celebrated pony they somehow materialized a lush terrarium with a pair of tree frogs.
I was raised with a mixture of Christian and Jewish traditions which meant, along with both hanging stockings and lighting menorahs, that lavish gifts were always proffered with a side of hand wringing guilt. While we always had stable housing and enough to eat I became aware from an early age that money was not a thing we had enough of. I’d imagine that the painful realization that Christmas pushes one’s parents to spend more than they can afford is a rite of passage for all but the richest of American children.
I’ve talked to LaPorsha about this and she definitely experienced the same thing when she was about the same age. In her case it was even more extreme – after a few years of living near the top of certain criminal food chains things were not working out as well for her parents and the family had to bounce between temporary living situations in the homes of relatives, residential hotels and vehicles. It wasn’t fun to be expected to display gratitude and excitement toward conspicuous displays of spending in the form of presents when the most important item on her list would not be appearing under any tree: a home.
In a famous article the economist Jared Waldfogel characterized the holiday as a “dead weight loss” because the net money spent on gifts exceeds the actual value they will hold for recipients by billions of dollars. I was troubled by the larger implications of “binge and purge” spending on both the environment and the economy at large. Since the ‘90s the magazine Adbusters has inspired me to celebrate Black Friday as International Buy Nothing Day but I am also acutely aware that the majority of sub cultural boutique and artisanal industries depend on the season for their very survival.
I don’t remember my exact age or the year but I can say with certainty that I began to despise Christmas the moment I set eyes on The Glitterator. While I appreciate the “magic girl” style aesthetics this dedicated crafting toy seemed to perfectly encapsulate all of my misgivings surrounding obligatory and meaningless consumption. Sculpted from easily broken plastic it leaves the shelf a point or so above the twenty dollar mark and requires batteries to approximate the function of a paper bag and shaking.
In the pits of my soul I howled in outrage at the celebration that could impel my younger sister to desire this monstrosity and my father to buy it. I’ve hated the holiday with more or less the same unabated passion ever since.
It was very much in this spirit that I was swallowing Somas and scheming with my friend Badger on the Christmas Eve in question. We hatched a plan to walk to the closest Supermarket and steal a bottle of liquor to potentiate the prescription drugs. This would have been the now discontinued version of Captain Morgan Private Stock where the bottles were decorated with the red and white cords that we all wore around our wrists earning us the nickname “pirate punks”.
When we arrived the store was closed but the brisk walk had metabolized the narcotics to the point that we could not hope to repeat it. Badger looked for a pay phone to call his girlfriend Martina to retrieve us. I noticed a Black homeless man sitting against a brick wall in the shadows. His face was hidden beneath a voluminous hood, his legs were crossed and he had unzipped his fly to remove his testicles and was cradling them in the palm of his right hand, presumably for warmth.
I assume that his penis was still inside his pants but I suppose its possible that for some reason he didn’t have one. Like Schroedinger’s Cock it never left his pants at any point in the ensuing encounter to cement its existence in reality.
What I did notice was a curved metal flask in his left hand of the type that usually contains alcohol. I asked him for a drink and upon taking it was consumed with a sudden need to urinate. Due to my height and relatively weak bladder I had gotten into the habit of pissing directly into covered stone trash cans as a means of concealing this forbidden act from the eyes of potential law enforcement. My nameless new friend was suddenly at my elbow and had taken an active interest:
“You ain’t circumcised?”
As is so often my custom I overshared:
“No, but I am Jewish but I was also born on a commune instead of in a hospital and…”
Unphased, He steered the conversation back toward business:
“Can I suck it?”
I was determined to allay my rage against Christmas by turning up and if this was what up was then the knob would not languish untwisted.
Besides, the clock had inched past midnight and all of us were pumpkins.
Ultimately, it was a sacred holiday centered on rebirth and the act of giving.
In terms of the physical intimacy and potential for infection that characterize each role in the pantheon of customary sex acts allowing him to put his mouth around my penis did not come off as a very big ask. I hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of smoking crack on the street with strangers which would result in the same proposal being repeated a countless number of times. I suppose that somewhere in my drug addled mind I had concluded that if this act would be sufficient to provide him with any pleasure or comfort whatsoever it would simply not be Christian to deny it to him:
“Dude, it’s Christmas! Who am I to tell you no?”
He drew my flaccid penis into his mouth and attempted what, in total absence of arousal and under the sedating effects of a heavy dose of carisoprodol, was impossible. Badger had returned from the pay phone and despite his generally unflappable demeanor, visibly jumped at the bizarre tableaux before him. My new companion paused:
“Your partner can see us!”
My answer was instantaneous:
“Do I look like I care?”
At that point our chariot had arrived. I withdrew my penis and climbed into the back of Martina’s truck, leaving my no doubt unsatisfied sexual contact cupping his scrotum in bewilderment. As we left the shopping center parking lot Martina posed the question that has so often been repeated:
“Was that homeless guy just sucking your dick?”
When I spent a little over a year as a crypto-Catholic I came to really enjoy the experience of a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. A huge crowd of the faithful building up their excitement for the revelation of a plastic baby. A hope, a spark of divinity in a dark and frightening world that had lacked such a thing only moments before. Now that I am writing this I realize that this feeling was exactly what was missing from the Gaudete performance I uploaded earlier today.
I was so preoccupied with the recording process, my voice and the challenging Latin lyrics that I had completely neglected the emotions that had been spurring me to sing it in the first place. There was a remarkable absence of joy in the thing that I had committed to digital storage and shared with the world. Is that something that I can actually fix with practice? While I am by no means confident that this would actually be possible an old, familiar phrase is suddenly asserting itself in my mind:
It certainly couldn’t hurt.
I have nothing against anyone who chooses to celebrate the holiday by giving and exchanging gifts but for me and LaPorsha that practice simply triggers too many negative emotions to actually be practical. I do think that the holiday itself, and the many different observations from around the world that center on this shift in the turn of seasons, is absolutely a thing of beauty. For all of its potential to shock, titillate and offend I do think that this story also has some inner sensitivity and beauty beneath it’s ironically smirking facade.
I present it now to any readers who may have found themselves in a time and place where they are reading these very words. Let’s not call it a gift, that word feels tainted to me like all of the different fairytales where somebody accepts an offer they are incapable of understanding the true price of. Let’s go with something ambiguous. Something like “something to be shared”.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 