A Christmas Carol

They say Christmas is this magical, jovial time of the year where apparently

everyone forgets that they have a mutual hate for each other, let each other

be merry little shits and let the town glow hues of reds, greens, whites.

People often break out the Christmas carols, and the Irving Berlin songs that

have been known to invade radio waves and the Christmas lights that stay

on peoples’ houses until at least President’s Day, unless you’re Jewish. When

you’re young, this day is the greatest day of your young life because you

believe an obese, white-haired man with iridescent reindeer defies any and

all aspects of physics to give you a Barbie, or Pokémon or whatever your tiny

little heart desires. [Once you’re older, however, you realize that Santa Claus

is really a credit card.] It also had something to do with the word “family”.

Christmas is to a lot of people, a big day to be with family, and often, they

open presents together or watch Christmas movies or go to their church for

the little baby Jesus Christ and embrace the fact that everyone’s happy and

healthy, leaving all their troubles for the post-Christmas hangovers or

department store refund lines.

But not in my life.

Twelve years ago, when I was five, on Christmas Eve 1990, my father died.

He got into an argument with my mother, drank half his life away, and

crashed his car into a van full of Russian orphans on the way to buy presents

for me, his “favorite son”. They all died on impact.

We spent Christmas Day at the morgue identifying the mass of dead bodies,

and as soon as we got back into the car, she spent the ride home yelling at

me. At that exact moment, the massive shit that you could call my

“childhood” dive-bombed head-first into the fan. My mother was depressed,

taking her anger out on me, spewing venom at everything functioning and

turning each Christmas into “The Musings of an Inebriated Widow”, with her

as the lead role. This was my Nativity story for the next 4 years of my

pathetic childhood, until on December 23rd, 1994, I heard her open up the

presents my dad’s family got for me – a DVD of Home Alone and a video

game. She looked at them, screamed at how much of a spoiled dipshit I

apparently seem to be, swigged her vodka and went upstairs, never to be

seen again.

She died of a brain aneurysm in her sleep overnight.

It’s not every day that the joy of Christmas is ruined for the rest of your

young life, but when you live a childhood like mine, your formerly-young-at-

heart-but-slowly-turned-decrepit-geezer self seeps an aura of hatred out of

everything that lives and breathes on this green earth, leaving those who’re

around you no choice but to convert you to this happy-go-lucky ideology of

happiness where everything will be alright and pristine because someone is

always there for you. Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. No one will always be there

for you. No one was there for me in high school, or college, or law school,

where 3 years and enough money to restart a third-world economy was

invested into me being known as the guy who could end up advocating for

the next Osama, or a crazy woman who sues a fast food place over the

sudden lack of her sandwich. But when I graduated, I had to exude this

negative energy in some directions other than up, so I joined the one law

firm that was openly hiring at the point – Gordon Associates, LLC.

The law firm was in a shady corner building in the part of town that no one

wanted to live in, a survivor among the financial cancer the boulevard looked

like. Boarded-up old, brown brick shops juxtaposed the road where you could

hear a pin drop, or hearts pump. It was that quiet and at the same time, full

of a distant but eerily comforting silence – like the departed who shopped

here decades ago.

I was in my bone-chillingly cold apartment with Lisa, my old friend from

college that I moved in with - the landlord had turned off the heat - and

getting ready for the obligatory law firm Christmas/Holiday party that all the

lawyers in the seemingly cramped state of Maryland were obliged to go to at

the antique sepia mass of pre-Civil War bricks that was Jacob Marley’s

mansion, still paid for by his widow, Annelise. Since his passing, it’s become

somewhat of a cirrhosis contagion full of liquor that reeks of clinical

depression and alcoholism.

“Going to that lawyer party again?” Lisa asked.

“If by ‘lawyer party’, you mean ‘douche lawyer fest,’ then yes. It IS a ‘lawyer

party’, I said.

“Have fun.”

“I will try to, Lisa Marie. Make sure to keep warm.”

I dressed in my semi-formal black shirt and jacket with the red skinny tie and

went on my way.

I was walking on my way to the Marley residence, just a couple of blocks

away past some rowhouses, a convenience store and a rundown pharmacy,

all laden with Christmas decorations – Santa Claus, a wreath, a Nativity

scene, hell, even the cacophonous sounds of celebrity holiday albums and

Irving Berlin and mid-1990s Macaulay Culkin screaming or warding off

thieves through mafia movies and all of that ear-gratingly, blinding

“Christmas spirit”! Bah humbug!

I straddled along the barren streets of town as some people from the

Salvation Army approached me with a red donation bucket and rung their

bell as someone went up to me with a Bible. I kept walking along the barren

path of the city, avoiding them as their footsteps got closer.

“Sir!”

“Sir! Today is the birth of Christ our Lord! The Book of Isaiah, chapter nine,

verse six tells of the prophecy of the birth of a savior! Could he be yours on

this frigid winter’s night? Jesus is the way, the truth and the…”

I kept walking as his words turned into a hush from behind my back and

arrived at the steps of the Marley residence, the next two hours of my life

about to become a living hell. I knock the door.

His widow, Annelise, who looked, if anything like a million failures, greeted us

at the grandeur doors of the house, wearing some tattered red dress.

“Hey! Happy holidays,” she said lightly.

What the inner Scrooge inside wants me to say: Fuck off.

What I end up actually saying: “Thanks,” in a careless, dull, bored expression

but in a way that shows you have this margin of respect on the outside.

The legal team was your average and simultaneously horrible group of

American lawyers that handled every side of the legal spectrum, from rapes

to convenience store robberies to divorces to hit-and-runs. Anything aside

from genocide, we’ve probably had to handle. The team often changed

because people relocated or quit or were even fired from what they did.

[Note: Sleeping with your client in order to assuage the massive fees that are

incurred with the American legal system is a very, very, very bad idea and

trying to hide it will not only get you fired, but it may dissolve your marriage]

You had Morton Horowitz: almost shatteringly twiggy and amazingly

pretentious – the man probably thinks to himself that he’s the next William

Rehnquist or something - and claims to know his stuff about the wonderful

world of law when he doesn’t. He only talks about three things aside from

law almost all the damn time: his wife and his one kid that really wants to be

like him and a lawyer just because they, in the eyes of his 16-year-old naïve

little teenage mind, “make a shit-ton of cash,” and I’ve had to tell him

numerous times that we really don’t, unless you go to work at a big one in

the middle of Manhattan. I’ve also had to tell him numerous times that law

school is hard and the perfect place to kick-start a binge-drinking habit.

You had Cesar Carillo – dark-skinned, Latino and the epitome of quiet and

reserved. The only person in the whole world who would ever talk about

Carillo’s family was Carillo himself – and that was only once. Ever. Known

the man since the early days of law school and he was always insightful on

life, one of the few people here who I somewhat respect for actually being

reserved, knowledgeable and a humble man to the law firm and his family,

again, from what he tells us. Unfortunately, he isn’t going to suffer at this

confounded hellhole with me – he’s one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses that

don’t do holidays or birthdays or other peoples’ celebrations.

Last, but not least, you had Marion Flores, the only woman of the group and

unfortunately, the brunt of every joke because of apparently how she got

transferred here from the immigration department in Tucson. She was like

Horowitz but unlike Carillo in that she was only a slight twat, but enough of a

twat that I resent being around her sometimes because of her daily-albeit-

slowly-infuriating-me stories about how her parents escaped the Castro

regime in Cuba with nothing or how in Cuba, they had some sort of incredible

deal for them, but then royally fucked up in some sort of unknown fashion

and were threatened with execution, or how she spent five hours on her day

off trying to find the perfect dress for her niece’s First Communion or some

other story meant to filibuster the collective suck that is all of you.

Here it’s only been 25 minutes, but she’s already exemplified the old Latin

saying – veni, vidi, vici – I came, I saw, I conquered, only in the case of

Marion Flores, it’s “I came, and I got drunk as the very face of original sin…

and now I’m crazy.”

Every lawyer in suburban Annapolis happened to be there, chatting or

reminiscing about their cases that they can finally talk about. There’s

Ebenezer Betancourt, that disbarred lawyer who had sex with all his clients

to assuage legal fees and even Lorraine Tyler, the most hated woman in the

state of Maryland for acquitting the governor on those sexual harassment

charges.

I pour myself some dark red punch into a Dixie cup, keep my mouth shut

and look towards the ironic vastness of the ceiling in hopes that I avoid all

major tenets of social interaction