Christmas Surprise

IN 1984 MY WIFE AND I WERE LIVING IN A LARGE ramshackle house on a hill near San Francisco State University. She was working for IBM, managing their TMMS messaging system. I was managing the American Express desk for FCA, Financial Collection Agencies, the largest collection agency in the world at the time. We were heavily involved with the Aleister Crowley circuit, and so we were ingesting copious amounts of drugs (mainly exotic psychedelics and crystal meth) and engaging in all manner of wild sex. We'd been living in San Francisco for a year. My mother lived alone in Camden, NJ. Her father and three brothers had run my deadbeat father off some 25 years earlier. He'd beaten my mother so savagely that he felt compelled to keep the two of us locked in the house for three days in hopes that the neighbors wouldn't notice. The neighbors called my grandfather, and old Bill Morgan loaded up his sons and came over and broke the door down. Her youngest brother, Tom, was gay. My father called him a "faggot" that day, and Tom beat the stuffing out of that evil turd in front of God and everybody.

She stayed in Camden because the divorce arrangement stipulated that if she sold the house, he'd get half the take. That's how crazy with spite she was, and who can blame her? She was crazy in other ways, some of them rather sweet. She was obsessed with Christmas. Every year, by the first week of December, that little row house was festooned with lights and lavishly decorated: snowmen, Santa Clauses of every shape and size, reindeer, gnomes, Christmas stockings everywhere and one ornately decorated tree so grossly out of proportion to the living room that one had to slide around it to get from the dining room to the upstairs bathroom.

Despite our often testy relationship, I managed to get home for Christmas every year except 1976 and 1983. It just broke her heart when I failed to show up, and it made me feel lousy. Christmas didn't mean that much to me. In fact, the whole idea made me uncomfortable, and even when I did manage to get home I preferred to float above it all under the influence of a soothing cocktail of crank, Valium, booze and weed. That combination delivered the perfect "whatever" attitude necessary to gladhand and sparkle my way through the merriment with the requisite 1000-watt smile and relentless good cheer.

This year, I decided to atone for the great disappointment of my absence the previous year. Bonnie had to stay in SF to mind the animals-three cats and a dog-but we found a cheap round-trip ticket for me, in and out of New York. I'd fly in on Christmas Eve, stay overnight with an old friend, catch an Amtrak red-eye down to Philly and grab a cab to my mother's house. We never let on to her that this was the plan.

On Christmas Eve, as I was touching down at JFK, Bonnie called my mother to wish her a merry Christmas, apologizing for the fact that I was too drunk to come to the phone; had, in fact, passed out, and would talk to her in the morning. My mother, her worst expectations confirmed, uttered some forgettable sullen comment and hung up.

As I got out of the cab at 7th St. and Ave. A, a guy got shot in the gut right in the middle of the street, in front of Leshko's. For a fleeting instant I thought about helping the guy out. Reason took hold of me, for once, and realizing that my whole scheme could be undone by hours of hanging around with cops, I headed over to my friend's apartment. There, we guzzled spiked eggnog and celebrated with her mother and husband until the wee hours of Christmas morning.

I slept on the Amtrak to Philly, arriving at 30th Street Station just after dawn. The place was deserted. I got a cab with ease, and settled in for the ride to Camden.

Even on Christmas, covered with snow, winter sun shining in an empty blue sky, Camden is dingy and overflowing with menace. Cruising the trash-strewn streets, gang graffiti covering the walls of once well-kept, modest houses, I was unsurprised by the dearth of decorations. Destruction for its own sake is the hallmark of that town; any decorations placed outside would surely be torn to shreds or burned.

The house on Garden Avenue stood out. The rosebushes on the front lawn were bare, of course, but still intact. My mother now had an anchor fence around the lawn. The front door was gift-wrapped, bright green paper with a big red ribbon and bow running diagonally across it. An illuminated plastic Santa Claus in his sleigh with all his reindeer occupied the flower box beneath the living-room window. Inside, I could see the enormous tree behind the cream-colored faux candlesticks with their orange lights.

I paid the cab, and he took off as I walked through the gate and up to the door. I rang the bell, and the expression on her face when she opened that door is the expression I will remember her with forever.

I would walk through fire to see that face lit with joy like that once more, I really would.