Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  "Hey Mister!" he was speaking from a stupor that bordered on the catatonic, and it was clear that he was talking to me. "I know you. You're that big shot reporter from the city," he slurred at me.

  He plopped down on the stool next to me, almost slid off but corrected himself at the last moment. I lit up a new cigarette and crushed the empty pack of Chesterfield Commanders in my hand.

  "How's about you buy me a drink," he said; it was demand, not a request. I could barely understand him because of his thick accent and his alcohol-induced slur. "If you buy me a drink, I'll give you the story of the century!"

  "Go ahead and set him up," I said to the bartender.

  The old man drank it down as quickly as the bartender had poured it and gasped and choked for a second at the end. He sat still for a second as if lost in thought, and finally he asked me what I'd say if he told me he knew who had killed the three men down at the wharf.

  "I'd buy you a whole bottle," I replied, and I bought it for him right then and there.

  "Well," he said. "the one who did this is everyone's most favorite person in the world," he said.

  "Oh, really?" I said it almost cynically because I had experienced games like this before.

  "It was Kris Kringle," he said. "You know…Santa Claus."

  "You mean a department store Santa Claus, right?" I asked, waiting for him to clarify.

  "Oh, no," he says, "It was the real Santa Claus who did it. He's done this every winter hundreds of years."

  Well, I thought I had heard it all before this crackpot started rattling on, but this one really took the biscuit.

  "You mean to tell me," I began, "that Santa Claus - even though he's a fictitious invention of parents and a figment of kids imaginations - killed those men and he's been doing it for years and years? Next you're gonna tell me that the Easter Bunny is not only real, but he's a homicidal maniac too! Or no! He and The Tooth Fairy are wiseguys in Chicago running rackets for the mob! You know what? If you want to hustle somebody with bullshit, call up one of the gossip rags. They won't believe you either, but they'll print it," I said, pissed off at him for trying to play me like a banjo.

  "Oh, no!" he cried, "No! It's true! It's true! I saw him with my own eyes! He is Strigoi! Strigoi!"

  "Say, what?" I said, not understanding what he was saying.

  "Uh ...., he is vampire! Vampire!"

  His accent made the word sound like vam-peer which must be a European thing, I guess. He was shouting at the top of his lungs now, and rattling on something about garlic, iron spikes and a white horse. I heard a commotion upstairs and then a baby crying.

  Finally, the bartender had had enough of his crazy ass.

  "Okay, you - you get the hell out of here and don't come back. Not tomorrow, not the next night, not ever. You're hollering could wake the dead. Merry fucking Christmas, you jackass!” the bartender screamed at him, leaped over the bar and dragged the old man to the door, threw him out across the sidewalk and into the gutter.

  I could hear the old man still screaming "Strigoi! Strigoi!"

  "Go sleep it off somewhere else, wino," the bartender said as he walked back indoors and sat down on his stool behind the bar..

  "Hey," he said, "Don't pay any attention to that drunk. He tells stories like this all the time and the drink has made him crazy. It's a real shame. Used to be a really nice fella."

  He looked up at the clock, "Well, I hate to do this to you friend, but it's Christmas Eve and if I don't close up and get upstairs, my wife'll give me a divorce for Christmas."

  "No problem," I said nodding. I got up and finished my drink off in one big gulp and set the glass back down and walked to the door and put on my hat and overcoat. "Merry Christmas," I said as I turned back toward him, gave a short wave and went out the door.

  "Yeah, Merry Christmas to ya," he said.

  A light snow was starting to fall outside and in the winter darkness of late night it seemed to glow like the moon, silvery white and luminous.

  It wasn't too cold, but a strong breeze blew over the snow dusted town and chilled you to the bone.

  It was dead quiet. I leaned against a wall under the eaves of a small department store, took out a cigarette and lit it. Across the street was a house that was dark, save the front room which was bathed in a soft light where I watched the occupying family trimming their tree.

  I watched them for a while while they finished hanging the decorations; suddenly light bloomed all over it as the Dad plugged in the Christmas lights.

  A couple of small children ran around the room beside themselves with delight at this simple little pleasure.

  Soon the two children were sent up to bed and the parents sat cuddled in front of the tree, drinking cocoa or egg nog or something else hot and sweet.

  It all seemed rather quaint, even alluring to me. I came to realize that for years I had spent my holidays alone in bars or small dive clubs. Places that definitely lacked class. After-all, they were open on the holidays and that says it all. Maybe it was time to settle down and do The American Dream thing with the wife, three kids, family dog and the little house with a white picket fence around the front yard somewhere in the suburbs.

  The light in the house suddenly blinked out, leaving only the multicolored tree peeking out from behind the edge of the curtains in the darkened window. I walked toward my motel and past a little alley. It was Christmas Eve. I'd missed our office party and was stuck here in this god forsaken little town for who knows how long.

  A noise in the alley pulled me out of my thoughts and I walked slowly and cautiously through the front of the alley and peered into the darkness. In the darkest corner was a strange mass, moving, shifting.

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out my lighter and lit it. It sent a small yellow glow into the corner.

  And then I saw it.

  It turned around to face me and imagine my horror when I saw Santa Claus standing before me, his beard drenched in fresh blood, streaks of it all over the bright white faux fur that trimmed his pretty red suit.

  With a clawed hand he dropped the old drunk I had dismissed earlier to the ground, his skull making a sickening thud as it hit the road. But it didn't matter – the drunk was dead as Dillinger.

  Splatters of blood glistened on the brick walls, the arterial spurt that had issued from the man's torn open neck had reached quite a ways up the wall.

  I stood there rooted to the spot with fear, unable to move or speak, unable to flee for my life, as Santa Claus gave me a big smile through his blood soaked beard.

  He laughed like a demon as two sharp, long, pointed fangs glistened with blood behind his lips.

  He shook with delight as the old man's blood surged through him, the vibrations making the little jingle bell on his Santa hat tinkle cheerfully.

  And then - you'd never believed what happened next. With a wriggle of his nose, and a wink of his eye he spoke only three words...

  “Write about me,” he said.

  I did.

  They fired me.

  I never worked as a Newspaper Man again.

  Up, up, and away he went. He was gone in a flash, consumed by the darkness and a flurry of snowy air on that Christmas Eve night.

  Get your garlic, get your crucifix and a nice sharp, pointy stick. Bolt the doors and lock the windows, 'cause Christmas is coming.

  He is coming.

  Bloody Old St. Nicholas is on the prowl.

  Coming to a town near you.

  Paul Auster

  AUGGIE WREN’S CHRISTMAS

  I HEARD THIS story from Auggie Wren. Since Auggie doesn't come off too well in it, at least not as well as he'd like to, he's asked me not to use his real name. Other than that, the whole business about the lost wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner is just as he told it to me.

  Auggie and I have known each other for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it's the only store that
carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go in there fairly often. For a long time, I didn't give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was the strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather, the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it.

  But then one day several years ago he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled across a review of one of my books. He knew it was me because a photograph accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us. I was no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person. Most people couldn't care less about books and writers, but it turned out that Auggie considered himself an artist. Now that he had cracked the secret of who I was, he embraced me as an ally, a confidant, a brother-in-arms. To tell the truth, I found it rather embarrassing. Then, almost inevitably, a moment came when he asked if I would be willing to look at his photographs. Given his enthusiasm and goodwill, there didn't seem any way I could turn him down.

  God knows what I was expecting. At the very least, it wasn't what Auggie showed me the next day. In a small, windowless room at the back of the store, he opened a cardboard box and pulled out twelve identical photo albums. This was his life's work, he said, and it didn't take him more than five minutes a day to do it. Every morning for the past twelve years, he had stood on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street at precisely seven o'clock and had taken a single color photograph of precisely the same view. The project now ran to more than four thousand photographs. Each album represented a different year, and all the pictures were laid out in sequence, from January 1 to December 31, with the dates carefully recorded under each one.

  As I flipped through the albums and began to study Auggie's work, I didn't know what to think. My first impression was that it was the oddest, most bewildering thing I had ever seen. All the pictures were the same. The whole project was a numbing onslaught of repetition, the same street and the same buildings over and over again, an unrelenting delirium of redundant images. I couldn't think of anything to say to Auggie, so I continued turning pages, nodding my head in feigned appreciation. Auggie himself seemed unperturbed, watching me with a broad smile on his face, but after he'd seen that I'd been at it for several minutes, he suddenly interrupted and said, "You're going too fast. You'll never get it if you don't slow down."

  He was right, of course. If you don't take the time to look, you'll never manage to see anything. I picked up another album and forced myself to go more deliberately. I paid closer attention to the details, took note of the shifts in weather, watched for the changing angles of light as the seasons advanced. Eventually I was able to detect subtle differences in the traffic flow, to anticipate the rhythm of the different days (the commotion of workday mornings, the relative stillness of weekends, the contrast between Saturdays and Sundays). And then, little by little, I began to recognize the faces of the people in the background, the passers-by on their way to work, the same people in the same spot every morning, living an instant of their lives in the field of Auggie's camera.

  Once I got to know them, I began to study their postures, the way they carried themselves from one morning to the next, trying to discover their moods from these surface indications, as if I could imagine stories for them, as if I could penetrate the invisible dramas locked inside their bodies. I picked up another album. I was no longer bored, no longer puzzled as I had been at first. Auggie was photographing time, I realized, both natural time and human time, and he was doing it by planting himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosen for himself. As he watched me pore over his work, Auggie continued to smile with pleasure. Then, almost as if he'd been reading my thoughts, he began to recite a line from Shakespeare. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," he muttered under his breath, "time creeps on its petty pace." I understood then that he knew exactly what he was doing.

  That was more than two thousand pictures ago. Since that day, Auggie and I have discussed his work many times, but it was only last week that I learned how he acquired his camera and started taking pictures in the first place. That was the subject of the story he told me, and I'm still struggling to make sense of it.

  Earlier that same week, a man from the New York Times called me and asked if I would be willing to write a short story that would appear in the paper on Christmas morning. My first impulse was to say no, but the man was very charming and persistent, and by the end of the conversation I told him I would give it a try. The moment I hung up the phone, however, I fell into a deep panic. What did I know about Christmas? I asked myself. What did I know about writing short stories on commission?

  I spent the next several days in despair, warring with the ghosts of Dickens, O.Henry and other masters of the Yuletide spirit. The very phrase "Christmas story" had unpleasant associations for me, evoking dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle. Even at their best, Christmas stories were no more than wish-fulfillment dreams, fairy tales for adults, and I'd be damned if I'd ever allowed myself to write something like that. And yet, how could anyone propose to write an unsentimental Christmas story? It was a contradiction in terms, an impossibility, an out-and-out conundrum. One might just as well imagine a racehorse without legs, or a sparrow without wings.

  I got nowhere. On Thursday I went out for a long walk, hoping the air would clear my head. Just past noon, I stopped in at the cigar store to replenish my supply, and there was Auggie, standing behind the counter as always. He asked me how I was. Without really meaning to, I found myself unburdening my troubles to him. "A Christmas story?" he said after I had finished. "Is that all? If you buy me lunch, my friend, I'll tell you the best Christmas story you ever heard. And I guarantee that every word of it is true.”

  We walked down the block to Jack's, a cramped and boisterous delicatessen with good pastrami sandwiches and photographs of old Dodgers teams hanging on the walls. We found a table in the back, ordered our food, and then Auggie launched into his story.

  "It was the summer of seventy-two," he said. "A kid came in one morning and started stealing things from the store. He must have been about nineteen or twenty, and I don't think I've ever seen a more pathetic shoplifter in my life. He's standing by the rack of paperbacks along the far wall and stuffing books into the pockets of his raincoat. It was crowded around the counter just then, so I didn't see him at first. But once I noticed what he was up to, I started to shout. He took off like a jackrabbit, and by the time I managed to get out from behind the counter, he was already tearing down Atlantic Avenue. I chased after him for about half a block, and then I gave up. He'd dropped something along the way, and since I didn't feel like running any more, I bent down to see what it was.

  "It turned out to be his wallet. There wasn't any money inside, but his driver's license was there along with three or four snapshots. I suppose I could have called the cops and had him arrested. I had his name and address from the license, but I felt kind of sorry for him. He was just a measly little punk, and once I looked at those pictures in his wallet, I couldn't bring myself to feel very angry at him. Robert Goodwin. That was his name. In one of the pictures, I remember, he was standing with his arm around his mother or grandmother. In another one he was sitting there at age nine or ten dressed in a baseball uniform with a big smile on his face. I just didn't have the heart. He was probably on dope now, I figured. A poor kid from Brooklyn without much going for him, and who cared about a couple of trashy paperbacks anyway?

  "So I held on to the wallet. Every once in a while I'd get a little urge to send it back to him, but I kept delaying and never did anything about it. Then Christmas rolls around and I'm stuck with nothing to do. The boss usually invites me over to his house to spend the day, but that year he and his family were down in Florida visiting relatives. So I'm sitting in my apartment that morning feeling a little sorry
for myself, and then I see Robert Goodwin's wallet lying on a shelf in the kitchen. I figure what the hell, why not do something nice for once, and I put on my coat and go out to return the wallet in person.

  "The address was over in Boerum Hill, somewhere in the projects. It was freezing out that day, and I remember getting lost a few times trying to find the right building. Everything looks the same in that place, and you keep going over the same ground thinking you're somewhere else. Anyway, I finally get to the apartment I'm looking for and ring the bell. Nothing happens. I assume no one's there, but I try again just to make sure. I wait a little longer, and just when I'm about to give up, I hear someone shuffling to the door. An old woman's voice asks who's there, and I say I'm looking for Robert Goodwin. 'Is that you, Robert?' the old woman says, and then she undoes about fifteen locks and opens the door.

  "She has to be at least eighty, maybe ninety years old, and the first thing I notice about her is that she's blind. 'I knew you'd come, Robert,' she says. 'I knew you wouldn't forget your Granny Ethel on Christmas.' And then she opens her arms as if she's about to hug me.

  "I didn't have much time to think, you understand. I had to say something real fast, and before I knew what was happening, I could hear the words coming out of my mouth. 'That's right, Granny Ethel,' I said. 'I came back to see you on Christmas.' Don't ask me why I did it. I don't have any idea. Maybe I didn't want to disappoint her or something, I don't know. It just came out that way, and then this old woman was suddenly hugging me there in front of the door, and I was hugging her back.