The Memoirist’s Christmas

By Ben Leib

Sitting alone at a deserted café, I’d convinced myself that I love Christmas. It’s a Jewish reprieve, became my mantra. Not being a family holiday for me, I was almost forced to take the day off. While friends were off opening gifts, eating smoked ham, doing Christmasy activities, I had no choice but sit alone with my laptop, drinking my coffee. It was refreshing, I reassured myself, to have no obligations.

The truth was Christmas played out much the same as every other day in the year. There’d been a time, it seemed, when I was so busy, so burdened with friendship that I barely had a waking hour to myself. That was no longer the case. I no longer had good friends, only acquaintances.

That being the case, I was thrilled to see a message appear on the screen from an old friend. Shirley Ann – now there was a lovely, lovely woman who I’d never expected to hear from again. Having last seen her maybe seven years prior, I supposed she’d fallen into that nebulous place where fallow relationships are lost, never to revive.

Through those intervening years I had looked up Shirley’s homepage from time to time in moments of longing, begrudging my own failures and envious of her successes (and hers was not the only homepage that I turned to during these fits of self-pity). Accepting that pictures do not lie, she was as beautiful as the day I met her: that thick mass of tangled black hair cascading to her shoulders, her flawlessly complexioned amber skin, the thick lips, the slightly too large front teeth.

I remembered her throaty voice as if we’d spoken in the past seven years, remembered her slight lisp, and as I read her message I could almost hear her beside me dictating. I could almost imagine an actual, real-life conversation.

Happy holidays, she wrote. How are you?

Shirley Ann! I replied.

We chatted in brief, fragmented sentences about books.

I told her I liked crime fiction.

We recommended good reads.

So she’s back in Santa Cruz for Christmas?

She was in town, she revealed.

I’m sitting at a café doing some writing, come and meet me, I suggested.

Busy with family, next time.

What you up to tonight?

Leaving town for a snow trip. Tahoe, baby!

We exchanged phone numbers, promised to dial those numbers in the near distant future, and then came that solemn exile back to my physical world of aloneness: Shirley Ann is offline.

—

When Shirley called that evening I answered the phone with an enthusiasm that bespoke desperation.

“Hey,” she said, “soooo, my snowboarding trip got cancelled.”

“Bummer.”

I was sitting at my desk, chain smoking Lucky Strikes in my boxer shorts and a ripped undershirt, reading Frederick Exley and bemoaning a lack of life experience.

“I know, total bummer, right?” she said. “But at least this means I’ll get to hang out in town for a couple more days. I could totally use the rest too. I figured that maybe we could hang out tonight, catch up, maybe grab a drink or two.”

An actual, breathing, living human woman invited me out.

I showered.

—

We met downstairs at the Red Room. Downstairs was a dive. It was my kind of place – hipsters took up too much room, smoking, drinking cheap well drinks. The light was soft and the ambience subdued. Aggressions were checked in preference of a nonchalant and tacit suggestion of superiority. Instead of being in the way, I didn’t exist, which I preferred.

I strode into the bar at nine fifty, nodded to a few folks, and said hello to Gabrielle, one of the bar tenders who remembered me from years back. It surprised me, the number of people spending the PM hours of Christmas drinking in this public space, away from their families.

Shirley sauntered in ten minutes later.

“Hey darlin’,” I yelled over the ambient noise. We hugged. I held her at arm’s length, looking her up and down. “You’re looking good girl.” No woman can resist compliments to her physical appearance, right?

“You want to grab a booth,” she asked.

We found a place and I asked Shirley if I could get her a drink.

“Vodka soda, lemon wedge,” she told me.

“Any specific vodka?”

“Just not well, you know what’s good.”

When I got to the bar, Gabrielle smiled and walked over. “What can I get for you, Hon?”

“A coke for me, vodka soda for my friend,” I told her. “Use some top shelf vodka. What do you have?”

“I’ll make something good for you,” Gabrielle said.

I had my wallet out when she set the drinks on the bar in front of me. “I got you tonight,” she said, waving a hand at my money. I suppose it was a special occasion after all, seeing as I hadn’t stepped foot in there in what must have been two years.

—

With drinks in hand, Shirley and I sat side by side chatting. She told me about leaving town, training under a world renowned chef, and making the decision to start a catering company. By the time we met, her catering services had become not only successful, but in demand. As she described her life to me I imagined a whirlwind, a Tasmanian devil-like flurry, whisking through existence with an inexhaustible surplus of energy, every waking hour constituting an opportunity, a moment of productivity.

—

“I loved hanging out with you boys back in the day,” Shirley said. At that time, all of my friends lived together in a second story apartment, located above a local café. Shirley spent a lot of time with us in that dirty flat. “Do you keep in touch with any of those boys?” she asked.

“I see Sayre from time to time and keep in touch with Steve a bit, but, other than that, not so much these days.”

“It sounds like I see them more than you do.” That was true. They all lived in San Francisco. Shirley ran into those guys at bars, at parties. “How did we ever start hanging out anyways?” Shirley pondered, “I feel like it was you who introduced me to everybody, but I don’t remember where we met.”

“We met when I was working at the Metro Mart. You were always in there with your friends, buying candy and soda and stuff. We started talking when I’d serve you, and, you know, we kind of just became friends by nature of seeing each other around a lot.”

“Oh yeah, I remember now.” Shirley said this with a coy grin. “I remember how I was: see a cute boy working at the market. I’m sure I couldn’t wait to become friends with you.” Contact was being made. Shirley had begun touching my arm, resting an occasional hand on my knee, pushing my shoulder when I made her laugh.

“Well, you weren’t too shabby yourself. I’m sure the boys were blown away the first time I brought you over to the apartment.” I told her. “You’re still looking good.” I threw it in for good measure.

“For a bunch of womanizers, you guys sure were gentlemen. I can’t believe that you didn’t try anything with me.”

“Steve and Sayre are really the ladies’ men. I always had the hots for you, but you were with that dude you went to high school with. I can’t remember his name…”

“Caleb.” I remembered her awkwardly teenage boyfriend upset that he’d been dragged over to the house to hang out with a bunch of older, worldlier men – at least as we saw ourselves. He moped around a lot and wasn’t wrong to feel discomforted – we didn’t want him around.

“That’s right. You had a boyfriend that whole time. Besides that, I think everyone felt they had to proceed carefully, you know, you were still pretty young. That said, I’m sure there were a couple of times that someone or another gave it a go. I seem to remember a drunk Jeremy making the move on you one night.”

“Oh, I remember that.”

Then it was my turn to talk: “What have I been up to? Well, it’s been a crazy handful of years.”

“I know. I want to hear what’s been going on. When I looked at your homepage, I half expected to find out you’d gotten married. And you moved out of Santa Cruz for a while. What the hell happened?” Shirley asked.

“Actually,” I revealed, “it was really my fault that the relationship ended.” I said this by way of confession. I leaned close as if my secret might be overheard in that too-noisy bar. “I don’t know if you realized it when we were friends, back in the day, but I always had a bit of a drinking problem.”

“I knew you liked to drink, but I always just thought you were kind of edgy, just doing the same thing as a lot of dudes your age.”

“It was a problem back then and it got worse over the years. When I first got together with Mirabelle, I was in love. I really hoped that was enough to force me to hold it together. And it was enough for a long time. I settled down. I started to be more responsible. But it only lasted so long. When we were living in San Jose, I was working with a bunch of alcoholic, gambling old men. They just fed me booze at the restaurant. So that’s when things started to get worse. Then, when we moved back to Santa Cruz we weren’t really getting along anymore, things really went downhill. I was indulging more and more. Almost without realizing that it had happened, I found that I’d started using needles. I was out of control – teaching my classes on the nod. I’d get the shakes in lecture. Three years ago, we broke up. Mirabelle moved out.”

“How long have you been sober?” Shirley had scooted closer to me as I told the story. Our thighs were touching.

“A year and a half now.” I had revealed myself to Shirley in hopes that it might bestow on me an edginess that she’d find irresistible. But a love affair with addictive substances is bound to result in degradation that is less than dignified, that’s certainly not attractive. I never told Shirley about the time that I shot up my grandfather’s liquid morphine, as he lay on his deathbed, moments away from lapsing back into the eternal. I chose not to mention how often I injected my sick cat’s medication; how Kit-Kit would get her dose and then I’d take one for myself.

Shirley was starry eyed by the intimacy of my words. In a spirit of mutual disclosure, she began to tell me of her own misadventures, her own battles. She had skeletons about which she expressed remorse and a bit of shame, guarded secrets that defined her as somebody more complex than a simple success story. She was also someone who’d been impelled to overcome. And she revealed to me just a few of these secrets, that we might share in the guarding of each other’s struggles, that I might not feel too vulnerable in the professed weakness of my own revelations. “Because you’ve shared something so intimate with me,” she began, “I want to tell you about my own story…”

—

After hearing my story, Shirley stopped drinking in front of me. I interpreted her abstention as self-conscious and overly-concerned appeasement, as if she might be tempting or offending me by imbibing in my presence. Furthermore, such accommodations painted me as weak in ways that I refused to admit. I could see that I had become a bourdon, a vestigial appendage, tolerated because of a preexisting attachment, preventing anyone in the room from feeling comfortable because there, in plain view, was that appendage, looking unnatural as bystanders attempted to avert their eyes, stumbled over their words in the effort, and ultimately were unable to look away, for the visage of human freakishness engenders an intrigue too powerful to tame.

Then Shirley’s friends started rolling into the bar, and, when they arrived, I, being without a single friend, at least without any in attendance, found myself at an irredeemable disadvantage. It began with a suave looking, pompadoured young man, who, to my utter relief, was accompanied by his girlfriend. Because he and Shirley had grown up together, they were drawn into the encrypted discourse reserved for old friends who seem to have developed a language all their own, leaving the girlfriend and me to entertain each other.

The woman was beautiful. She was the spitting image of a young Jacqueline Bouvier. But she wasn’t a conversationalist. She held her martini too delicately, spilling half of it on me through a series of constant and barely perceptible jerks of the arm. She spoke softly, awaited conversation to arise, and failed to laugh each time I took a stab at humor. I, for my part, talked. I paused only long enough to give her a chance to laugh or to respond, and then, seeing that she had no intention of doing so, I would lapse once again into soliloquy. I tried to get her involved. I asked her questions: Where was she from? What brought her to California? What kind of music was she interested in? To which she’d reply in monosyllabic fragments of sentences, smile, and wait for me to continue. I couldn’t tell whether she was missing a chromosome, or if I was the simpleton whom she humored while awaiting her boyfriend’s return.

She touched my arm regularly, a gesture which I was ambivalent about. Of course, I loved being touched by beautiful women, but at the same time it felt one of those expressions of affection reserved solely for small children, demented old men, and cute dogs.

“You’re very sweet,” she informed me. Although she attempted to drain the words of condescension, it was then I realized, beyond a doubt, that I was the tragic figure, not at all humorous or interesting.

—

“Some of my friends are upstairs,” Shirley told me, “I’m gonna go up and check it out. What do you feel like doing? I could come back down here in a bit? You could come up?”

It was at this moment in the evening that the implications of social cues eluded me. “I’ll go with you,” I said, “I don’t mind hanging out a bit.”

The upstairs portion of the Red Room was more a lounge, less a pub. Men strutted with a self-conscious bravado, nearly as happy to physically resolve a drunken dispute as they would be to pick up one of the girls that they came to impress. Men outnumbered women upstairs. They spoke loudly, firmly declaring their personhood.

I didn’t like the upstairs Red Room, less that night than ever before. My pugilistic days were over, I having long since realized a dearth of both skill and heart in the face of physical confrontation. My drinking days were over, gone as well, leaving me uncomfortable and intimidated amidst that alcoholic excess. I was less a man than ever before.

For Shirley, upstairs was a high school reunion. Upon entering, like some sanctified starlet, she was surrounded by a group of boys who wanted nothing to do with me. In surrounding Shirley, this half dozen men effectively cut me out of all conversation. They were, every one of them, taller, more physically fit, younger, more interesting than I could ever hope to be.

Time passed. I stood off to the side, silent but holding out hope that Shirley would choose me at night’s end, never quite realizing that I had become a liability and not quite understanding the first thing about women – not understanding that Shirley had been more of a friend to me that night – sitting with me while her friends awaited and listening to the uncomfortably personal details of my life – than anybody had been in quite some time.

—

As last call was impending, one of Shirley’s high school friends made a suggestion: “Let’s go to my place. We can play beer pong and take bong loads.”

Shirley smiled and I knew that I had lost.

We all – me, Shirley, the half dozen studs – left the bar together.

“You coming with us, bro?” One of the studs grabbed onto my shoulders and gave me a manly shake.

“Not my thing,” I said, rolling my eyeballs around their sockets blindly, eyelids closed.

Standing outside together in a small group, they were making their plans and I was awaiting a good moment to announce my departure, when a tall drunk man was thrown from the barroom door. He was a gangly man, inebriated to the point of undeserved confidence.

“Fuck you.” he said, turning back towards the exit that he’d just been ejected from. “Why the fuck do you have to treat me this way? I was going to leave. I was fucking leaving.”

Three bouncers appeared as the drunk man backed down the curb. I could relate to this luckless drunk. He wasn’t fighting back. He wasn’t threatening anybody. He was simply demanding to be treated with the respect that a man deserves.

“Why does it take three of you to throw me out of the bar?”

I don’t know what kind of scene he’d been making inside, but physically the drunk man appeared harmless. He wasn’t a man who spoke with his fists.

“You’re fucking pussies, all of you.” he yelled.

“What the fuck did you call me?” a doorman asked.

The three bouncers fanned out so that they flanked him while he backed away.

“I was fucking leaving,” the drunkard said. “You’re pussies for treating me like that when I didn’t do shit to you.”

“Hear that? He called you a pussy dude.”

One of the bouncers, tall, clearly skilled as a boxer, took three long strides in and punched the drunk twice in the face. The drunk fell into the gutter and began seizing immediately.

—

One of his friends ran to him and took a position over the motionless body, holding his hands out lest another bouncer might get some more ideas about what a deserving punishment might be. A second friend knelt at the drunkard’s side, patting his face and trying to lift him by lifeless arms.

“Why’d you need to do that?” asked the man knealing there. “He was leaving.”

The guys surrounding Shirley had their own running commentary.

“Dude had it coming.”

“Calling the bouncer a pussy, that’s a no-no.”

“He’s too drunk for his own good.”

“Yeah, maybe he’ll learn his lesson tonight though.”

I was disgusted. More so that there had been a time not so long before that I might have gloried in a public display of violence, although I preferred to believe that such senselessness would always have repulsed me. More profoundly though, I recognized that I had been in the drunk man’s shoes oftener than I’d cared to reflect on. I’d been there and I knew – It’s a long fall into that gutter.

I approached him lying there on the asphalt. I looked from him to the bouncers, who strutted, chins thrust forward, daring anybody to question their right to violent acts. I stared at them like a gaze might be a knife, that I might draw blood and rectify violence with a violence of my own.

—

One of Shirley’s high school classmates ran over to the unconscious man. He helped the guy’s friends to scoop him off of the ground, and together the three of them helped the drunk start walking down the street.

I returned to Shirley and her group of suitors, and asked, “Does he know that kid?”

“No,” one of the studs answered. “He’s friends with the bouncer, the guy who knocked the kid out. He wants to get that drunk dude out of here before the cops show up.”

I looked at Shirley. “That guy didn’t deserve that,” I told her.

But I once again failed to follow my heart. Fear kept me from it.

“It was great seeing you,” she said.

I knew that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep that night. From my bedroom, I would hear the drunken revelers hollering as they made their way home from the bars. Life had once again proven to me its fundamental and unalterable truths: disappointment and cruelty. Had I spent uncountable years plying my share of nature’s own capital? I certainly had spent years, a good part of a lifetime, trying to numb myself to these truths.

And other people seemed to get by. Others seemed to find some sort of contentment, a blissful serenity amidst the unfairness. I would make a vow that night, a promise that I had made to myself so often over the years, that I’d recently found myself repeating over and over as if an incantatory spell wherein was hidden the secrets of an unknown salvation. Leave it all behind, I told myself. You don’t need anybody. Your own world will be enough. And with my vows renewed I would sit alone in cafés, avoiding eye contact, banging keys, circumscribing a life already lived and thereby recreating the space in which I might perpetually dwell.

“You too,” I said. “I’m glad we got a chance to catch up. I’m really happy for you. I always knew you’d come out on top. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.” Pithy wisdom from a man unqualified to make such summations. “Shirley, darlin’, I gotta run.”