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Rosie Schaap’s Great Big Lump of Coal party for her good words @ Good World series was great fun. After the reading, she told Dana, Max, and me a story involving the best and maybe the most inappropriate holiday toast ever. I’m not allowed to post that one.

Instead here’s an Xmas excerpt from Schaap’s forthcoming Drinking with Men. If you like this, listen to the author telling two stories on

A Santa Cruz Christmas, 1989

At sunset most evenings, we went to the state beach, with its natural bridges of enormous eroded rocks, fired up a joint, and watched the winter surfers, the students, the drifters who’d long preceded our own drifting to this place, who must have arrived here much as we did, only years before, with no better plan, traveling the same tine in the same forked road, Santa Cruz or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Humboldt, Santa Cruz or _____, Santa Cruz or_____, Santa Cruz or _____. Santa Cruz instead of anywhere else, especially: instead of wherever they’d come from. Danny and Billy and I lived in the rusty brown Dodge van, parked on Mission Street, in front of the pizzeria where they worked, at least through Christmas, at which point Danny had managed to scrounge together enough money to return home to Jersey for the holidays.

Billy was a Christian, but not a religious one. Still, Christmas was Christmas. And I was one of those half-assed New York Jews who grew up celebrating Easter and Passover — whose family, truth be told, preferred Christmas to Chanukah, because ma really loved chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and overstuffed stockings, and a nice Bûche de Noël and all that, without particularly paying Jesus any mind, though she was firmly of the opinion that he seemed like a totally o.k. guy. So even for me, yes, Christmas was Christmas, and sleeping in a van would not do, nor would eating Domino’s discards.

“We should at least get a room somewhere,” I suggested. Billy quickly agreed, even though we were both close to broke. We checked into the cheapest motel we could find. At a convenience store across the road, for a small fee, we got a loitering grownup to procure a couple six-packs of Anchor Steam for us — the birth of the baby Jesus rated at least a classy regional beer.
 

“Should we get some Jack too?” Billy asked, half-serious. Only a week before, at a motel lounge outside L.A., I’d drunk at least twenty shots of the stuff in one go. I woke up a day later in the van, in Santa Cruz, 350 miles north of where I’d blacked out. Now even the smell of it — sickly-sweet, vanilla and burnt cotton — made me want to retch.

“Nah.” No way.

Billy and I settled into our motel room with our beer and our Cool Ranch Doritos and those cheese-crackers-with-peanut-butter that cost like a dollar for six packets — on account of Billy and me welcoming the occasional junk food splash-out with great enthusiasm, and, above all, on account of Christmas, we could dispense with our usual hippie-health-food-store-totally-organic pieties — and flipped on the TV, each of us claiming our own queen-size bed. Billy and I were friends, but not especially close friends, and, without Danny, we had little to say to each other. We idly watched the local news, then some cartoons, then some videos on MTV. When the clicker landed on the Yule Log, we gave each other a look of faint despair. This was our Christmas, our sad weird Christmas, and a motel room was nearly as shitty a place to be as the van. Doritos and beer were good, sure, but shouldn’t we go out for dinner?

“Shouldn’t we go out for dinner?” I asked. No argument from Billy.

We hit the strip — the pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz — and checked the menus posted outside the restaurants. Every place was way too expensive, or full, or both, or closed. We trudged up Mission Street, past Domino’s. The Saturn Café, known at the time for its activist feminist clientele and vegan-friendly menu, was open. Of course it was open, but it did not do Christmas. No twinkling lights. No tinsel. No Santas or reindeer or candy canes. But there were free tables, and it was better than our stash back at the motel. We ordered salads and lentil soup, and the conversation stayed sparse. I kept my thoughts to myself: I wished I were home, not for good, just at that moment. I missed my family, imperfect as we were. I envied Danny, who at this moment was probably gleefully reneging on his vegetarianism and eating ham or turkey in the company of his relations, young and old, who was probably luxuriating in the flickering light of a Christmas tree, who was in the Northeast, where there was likely snow on the ground and maybe even children sledding, where Christmas was Christmas-y, not like this warm West Coast horseshit. I envied Danny, who was having a real Christmas, so different from Billy’s and mine, surrounded as we were by recalcitrant atheists picking at tempeh and brown rice. What was I doing here? Why had I chosen this? And I imagined that Billy, my reticent, accidental Christmas companion, was thinking much the same.

We walked quickly back to the motel in the cooling California night, past palm trees and strip malls, past so many parked cars and so few people. I glanced into strangers’ houses, through casement windows framing repeated tableaux of families being families at Christmastime, families drinking Egg Nog and, I figured, listening to Bing Crosby crooning “The Christmas Song” and Ella Fitzgerald elevating “Jingle Bells,” wishing one and all — except for me, except for Billy — a swinging Christmas, as they tallied their holiday hauls. We returned to the motel, to our matching queen size beds, to our already diminished six packs. We drank silently, a few feet apart, isolated by our unhappiness. I do not remember if Billy called home but I know I did not. I had elected this estrangement and would ride it out. We resumed our channel-flipping. Fuck the news and its cheerful reports of Christmas near-miracles and charitable acts. Fuck the Yule Log and all its stupid Yule Logness.

“Hey Billy, pass me another Anchor Steam.”

“You got it.”

And there we were. Two depressed kids far from home, far from parents and brothers and sisters, no cards, no calls, no high school diplomas, no home save a crappy brown van, pounding back bottles of beer, lying on dingy, quilted, motel bedspreads, tired but restless.

Flick. On the next channel: The Sound of Music. Beautiful pixie-haired Julie Andrews, Sister Maria — not yet betrothed to the Captain, not yet a Von Trapp — comforting her little Austrian charges with a litany of her favorite things. Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles! I thought of ma back in New York, and her inexhaustible cheerleading for The Great American Musical, her love of all things Rogers and Hammerstein, all things Lerner and Loewe, all things Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. I thought of Sunday evenings when I was even younger, in my grandfather’s little library, listening to The Original Cast Recording of every cast that had ever originally been recorded. I could see something stirring in Billy, too, something possibly warm and good, though I was sure in his case it had nothing to do with show tunes, and I watched as the fear and fretfulness slowly, slowly, started to wash away from his young, unshaven face. And I noticed, for the first time, really, what a fine face he had: both strong and soft, high cheekbones and Elvis-y lips, pretty blue eyes. Was he thinking of his favorite things? Well, God only knew what those were in Billy’s case — but soon, very soon, damn it if we didn’t feel so bad, if we felt, actually, pretty okay. And damn if by the time “Edelweiss” rolled around, small and white and blooming and growing forever, I wasn’t singing along with the brave, elegant (and, let us be honest, pretty fucking hot) Captain von Trapp while he strummed his guitar. And a feeling of freedom returned, a sense that even if I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was doing was fine, then and there, for all its uncertainty. We both cried, and it was good.

“Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Pass me another beer.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks. Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Merry Christmas, man.”

“Yeah.” He turned his eyes away from the television, looked at me, and nodded. “Merry Christmas.”
 

Recent image of Santa Cruz’s Saturn Café taken from this site.

A few weeks ago, I put out a call for your worst holiday experiences. My friend Brent of Titivil disqualified himself because his entry (below) was longer than I’d specified. He wins anyway. It’s a moving, atmospheric story, and also, he’s the only one who entered.
 

Terrible holiday story? It was Thanksgiving Day two years ago. I was a year and a half into my marriage, and eight or nine of those months my wife had spent an hour and a half away from me, with her mom and her only sibling, a sister. The sister had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, which is a kind of brain cancer you don’t beat. My wife was staying there to take care of the sister in between surgeries. I’d been called down to lend a hand. So the mood was, well you’d think it was grim, and it was, in a way, but there’s a lot more to it when you’re going down that particular tunnel.

We were staying in a Holiday Inn in Towson, Maryland. I’m pretty sure that people live in Towson, but the town seemed to define itself mostly by strip mall/actual mall density — national chains metastasizing everywhere, six-lane non-Interstates, and crowded developments behind every rise. I did find a respectable diner, a fishmonger with good crabcakes and a couple pit beef shacks, but otherwise, life consisted of a generic motel room, with a limp cable package and slow DSL, and the parking lot and the wooded gully next to it, for walking the little dog, a year-old Boston Terrier. The sister was stationed in the rehab wing of a second-tier hospital after what ended up being her last brain surgery. Johns Hopkins rented out space there, but it was no Johns Hopkins. I watched the little dog while everyone else trucked off to the hospital, and I tried to be good company for my wife.
 

We were usually at Johns Hopkins, because the university had a kick-ass neurology department that pretty much adopted the sister and took her care personal. (Actually, I’m unsure of the relationship between the university and the neurology dept. Unlicensed metonymy? Synecdoche? I forget.) When she was treated there, we stayed in Mount Vernon, a museum and coffee shop neighborhood downtown which was good for killing time, and feeding the troups. There was a big park across the street for walking the dog. The location improved everyone’s spirits. But the recovery from surgery was taking a little long, so the sister was transferred up to Good Samaritan, and we moved up to Towson, to be closer. I had been there for the move, and then went back to New York to work for a few days. I returned for the week of Thanksgiving. It was decided that my wife and her family would spend the entire day at the hospital, and not leave for meals. I would stay at the hotel, with the little dog. All day long.

So, Thanksgiving, normally my favorite holiday: alone (with little dog), in a crappy hotel room, in a town I did not want to be in.
 

It did not start as dreary as all that. I had a friend in Baltimore, a bartender type, who was meeting his pals at 7 a.m. to play a boozy game of touch football. I got up early, left the wife and the little dog sleeping, drove down to Fells Point, had a few beers before the parades started and got back with coffee for the sleepers. That was fun, for what it was. My buddy and his pals were tolerant of the only anecdotes I could muster, which were about oncologists and symptoms and such.

I drove the wife out to the hospital by noon – the rest of the family had already driven themselves there. Me and the little dog watched her walk up the sidewalk to the main entrance of Good Samaritan. We weren’t thinking anything dramatic, like you’d like to embellish. It was a routine, and Thanksgiving was just another footnote.
 

On the way back, the little dog and I cruised. We were tasked with providing Thanksgiving Dinner for the troops at the hospital from available open restaurants, and, even though Indian food had been requested, I thought one of the pit-beef shacks might be able to slip me actual turkey. They could, but were not open – we had some later that weekend, and it was nothing to write about – so we went back, to spend the day in the room.

I could’ve watched football games, I suppose, but I didn’t feel like it. I read (my third reread of Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”, my journal shows), dozed lightly. Walked the little dog a couple of times. Around five, I called my family and the friends I traditionally spent Thanksgiving Day with. Oddly, that was the heartbreaker. It was one thing to be living a shadow life, and another to pretend like you’re not to your loved ones. I managed to keep it together until I got off the phone.

Did I mention that the hotel bar was closed? Holiday Inn obviously hates stranded holiday travelers.
 

After dark I started calling around for an Indian restaurant that was open. That was a bit of a fright for a second, as the only one I was finding was way down past the Inner Harbor. Finally I found one in Towson proper, placed the order, leashed the little dog and got going. It was surface streets all the way there. I was the only one on the roads, for miles at a time. The little dog stared out the window at the darkened Starbucks and then the next darkened Starbucks.

I got the food, all two and a half bags of it, birddogged my way to the hospital, dropped it off, kissed my wife and headed back to maybe watch a little football.

Around a quarter of ten I realized that not only had I not eaten any turkey, I had not eaten since a donut from 7-11 at the crack of dawn. And all the food was at the hospital. So, I waited for the gang to come back, and hoped that there would be leftovers, which there were.
 

It does seem like it should be about the worst holiday ever, but… there was a serenity on that day that I miss a little bit. A resignation, and also a digging in of the heels. Sometimes you just do what you’re supposed to, and your only reward may be feeling useful, but that’s not so bad as rewards go.

The sister passed away two months and a week later, at the age of twenty-eight, fighting until she stopped. Me, my wife, and our little dog miss her very much.
 

Image of Towson Town Center Mall taken from avi8torfn’s MD collection at Flickr.

Thanks for the condolences, everyone. Times like these, I like to soothe myself with the mantra of the confirmed pessimist: Things could always be worse.

To that end, I’m rereading As I Lay Dying. My father’s latest intrigue notwithstanding, at least Sister and I don’t have to help him forge a flooded river with our grandfather’s casket.

I don’t expect to have much time before I fly out to Nashville for the service, but if you’d like to recommend any other funeral scenes from literature, send ‘em on (to maud at maudnewton dot com). I’ll add a few here if I have have a free moment.

Otherwise, there’s my mini-interview with Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter) if you missed it, or you can listen to William Faulkner read from As I Lay Dying, his self-proclaimed (and arguably actual) tour-de-force.