Off
The Charts in Tears
Timber
Masterson
I emerge from headquarters and innocently go out
looking to inhale some fresh air, but am forced to ingest the
ever popular Santa Claus Parade. I’m agitated, quickly
exhausted, forced to view the urgency of suburbanites hustling
and bustling, chomping at the bit to purchase presents that’ll
only be returned by spoiled offspring days later for cash to
feed that pot and porno mag addiction. Yes, I’m far from
in the mood for such ridiculous prancing. Also darkening my
day - the story already having leaked of Comet and Blitzen,
selling their meaty, raw, tiny charges into slavery - their
rotten and embarrassing behavior, now dubbed ‘Reindeer-syndrome’
by some Eastern Syndicate - the latest en vogue disease to get
all flustered about. A good twenty feet above the heads of bewildered
holiday zombies, a sign that I could have sworn said COME ALL
YE HATEFUL billowed in the breeze, but I could have read it
wrong. All this, amongst earsplitting Charlie Brown Christmas
music, performed by an astonishingly talent-free and all-too-tinny
out-of-step and visibly nervous - and perspiring - grade nine
all-brass band.
The amount of papier-mâché involved in this weirdo
frightful event is amazing and I’m feeling too much like
Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, pacing amongst the crowd, looking
for an opening, too easily lost in film noir reverie...in pursuit
of a victim, one that warrants it. There is a SWAT team for
crowd control and yes, there is tension. Gargantuan wavering
snowmen with blistering swollen heads - perfect bludgeoning
targets, easily pummelable, zooming in on carrot noses; baffling
tall gents in sweaty-antlered-outfits that only bring harm to
children’s defenceless minds. All now smashes to the ground,
all left deranged, damaged and tainted. Everybody’s brains
and bodies seem barricaded, bewildered Christmas wanderers deserving
of what’s coming to them (at least that’s what would
happen in the movies), this from my bruised and purpled perspective.
A little girl dressed all in rhinestones and
sparkly pink Yuletide gear, perched on a demented float, rides
by at the jet speed of a beached sea turtle dragging a bloodied
javelin.
She’s energetic, inexorably excited, her
smile gigantic and beaming. Later I figure out it had been painted
on by a sluggish past-her-prime make-up artist, disturbingly
nick-named ‘Turtle.’ She minces about, feverishly
waving wands and batons (the child, not ‘Turtle’)
at the crowd, then suddenly our eyes meet. This minute hellion
tries to extract a big old “It’s a Wonderful Life”
holiday smile and grander wave from me, but I’m having
none of her rehearsed delight. My response is a tilted head
- perplexed and inquisitive - plus a knowing squint and my arms
folded uncompassionately. Let’s have some fun. I toss
her a red and white candy-cane-flavored Frisbee, sharpened.
I’m pretty sure she, and security, thought I was trying
to pick her off.
She becomes self-conscience and shaky as my charming
presence speaks to her:
“Just what are you doing, you homunculun oddity? What
parental orb arranged for you to take part in this mockery of
Old Saint Nick? Why the predictable pink and fake gems? What
of your sparkly facade? Are you not chilly, inside and out?
Can’t you catch a damn Frisbee?”
All this spoken with a skeptical glance, not
trying to be overtly harsh, really just wanting to cross the
damn road. She starts to bawl, as loud as a child wearing pink,
sparkles and a painted-on-smile bursting from too much cotton
candy, rehearsal jitters and role in this carnival-crap scam-a-rama,
can bawl. I had set little Hecubus’ heart aflame and was
called a - Mirthless - Puddinghead - Scroogester by onlookers.
A balding, Hudson’s Bay coated gentleman, clutching festively
bright packages billowing with brilliantly-colored ornaments
(probably her father, or a Hudson’s Bay Christmas tree
salesman) runs to her rescue. He holds her close and comforts.
The little girl spins her head around devilishly to cast the
Damian-Omen-like finger in my direction, sealing my fate, casting
me out. (What of The Fates riding atop seals - or inside wooden
horsies? Well, there’d be wet sheets, “Many wet
sheets to wash,” I hear Mom saying.) Fuck. This isn’t
going well, this ‘crossing of the street’ idea is
now a complicated cavalcade.
The indistinguishable fatherly salesman type
guy comes over and punches me in the nose. I slip and fall backwards,
crushing a couple of seniors not paying proper attention. I
admit I may have been half-deserving of a knock, though not
fully deserving of the promotional funeral-flyer he flicked
atop my disheveled frame, the one that boasted of reductions
on caskets. Now the day is really getting going. Par for this
course? Uncertain, as the pro shop is shut down for the season.
No one to monitor this mapless story of menschless, messed-up
munchkin mayhem. Jesus.
This Dickensian death camp will soon be over,
I reassure myself, but I am still on the battlefield, (minefield?)
left to my own unpoetic devices: dodging floats; freak show
countesses; easily swayed crowds; surreal scenarios; children
with sickening festive agendas and their puppet idolatries -
with me off the charts in tears, as I miss everyone this time
of year.
I come across another fumbly father-child equation
(so many of them) having a snowball fight in their front yard…or
they’re trespassing. If I could muster up the energy,
I’d flag down a cop and report the man for child abuse.
I decide to let the whole thing slide, for fear that I, in turn,
would somehow get nailed for ‘Snowball Possession’,
a crime that carries the heavy sentence of being forced to watch
ghostly videos of past Christmas parades on extra slow-mo-speed.
It’s time to turn to more important and
relevant matters, like how I’ll look in my hand-sewn Luge
outfit for the 2005 Special Olympics. Must get that going. Where
to practice? Oh, and material...must acquire material. Hey,
the kids’ll eventually have to abandon those catastrophically-useless
costumes from the parade - no, that would be sacrilicious...how
many sins would that cover? I hunt down a Black Market sinister
mushroom-man with fake blotter-acid who fesses up and divulges
the secret location where this whole travesty ends. I hike across
town and wait for parade participants back at the starting point:
an icy auditorium, scalding hot chocolate, weary parents discussing
when they think their crazy children will be arriving back on
their shoddy floats, and me lurking in back rooms conversing
with profoundly marshmallow-laden costume ladies with too many
stories:
“It was New York, the year 1958, a much
younger, trimmer Ed Asner was lookin’ for a dresser, so
I told my parents to go to hell and that I’m cutting this
dyke-school-scene to break into showbiz, so then...” I
endure Grizelda’s bizarre nostalgia in order to procure
colourful fabrics, cloths, textiles needed for my uniform in
an upcoming sporty project (not to mention some pretty darn
funny comedic material.) fabric (fabricated)
I end up being held without bail for trying to
lure youngsters away from their costumes with alfalfa salt licks,
carrot noses and a half-eaten box of After Eights.
“It’s not the kids, I only want their
costumes! I’m not some pervert, I just need the material;
they don’t need it anymore. Unhand me!”
“Tell it down at the station, gramps.”
The arresting officers said I was nothing more
than a sour, judgmental presence, but for the life of me I couldn’t
see it. Nor did I see how such behavior could be considered
criminal. I told them calmly that this day somehow reminded
me of finely chizzled crystal coffins whizzing down an Arctic
icy race course. Sour, maybe. Judgmental, never.
They transported me to a cold, damp igloo of
a hollow-minded police station; the snowballs not confiscated
in the arrest are melting down my trousers. I try to make a
game out of it, but it’s all turned awfully unfunny; thoroughly-iced-genetalia
going numb with the rest of me, hungry corrupt constables staring
at me, eager to cross examine, to extract ‘the truth’
from my mind’s eye. I’m melting and starving, just
having missed the once-a-day snack allowance. Pockets deep with
regret, like snowmen who’ve gotten off at the wrong stop
and forgotten their extremely odd-shaped-underwear not prepped
properly for the all too humid and airy aroma of an early thaw.
Where DO crafty snowmen go in Springtime? Oh,
they have places, you just have to look.
All this I had scribbled down on a notepad, scrunched
somewhere in my back pants pocket, now lost or stolen. I bet
it was one of those Goddamn cherubic-float-riding kiddies just
back from eating entire cotton-candy-floats, who gobbled up
my Life Notes, testing to see what’s edible and what isn’t
at their after-party: appetites insatiable, unquentionable thirsts.
Never satisfied.
Okay, maybe I have done that. But I’m not like them. I’m
not like anyone.
....
Timber
