Year: 2005

He’d sit up in the darkness staring across the inlet at the lighthouse on its pile of rocks, tossing its feeble light out into the fog rolling in off the lake. It was a ridiculous and hokey metaphor for exactly where he was in his life, but, what the hell, it was oddly comforting.

The Charley Patton, the Robert Johnson, the Skip James records, they sort of cancelled out the lighthouse, but that was the way he lived in the world; that was how he did things and tried to keep the darkness and light of the world in proper proportion.

For at least twenty years, since the first from his ever shrinking circle of friends and acquaintances started dropping dead from cancer, he fretted his way to the butt-end of every cigarette. Something was growing in his lungs; there was some persistent corrosion in his throat, a tightness in his chest. That nonetheless didn’t stop him from working nervously through his pack a day.

There was nothing wrong with his life, really. The things that had happened to him and the things that would happen to his body were things that happened to all sorts of people all the time. Plenty of people had it a whole lot worse, he knew that.

Yet it was an American’s particular prerogative to be miserable when there was really not that much to be miserable about. There was no form of self-pity that could not be romanticized, justified, and otherwise celebrated. That was why he loved the blues; it was so thoroughly American. European music might be tragic, might be romantically tragic, but the blues were full of the vaguest, most saturated sorrow, full of fear and pure, plain, fucked-up self-pity. They made that lighthouse feel like nothing more than the sad, distant metaphor it was, and most nights he could imagine himself crawling through the darkness for days, for months, fumbling his way toward that light, or praying for that light to find him, but somehow never quite managing to get there.

And there was no getting around it: he loved that warm, woozy feeling of drifting in the darkness, just as he loved knowing that the light was out there across the way, vigilant, there not as welcome but warning, a beacon whose job was to push him further out to sea.

Ruckert lived across a pasture from an order of monks who were famous for their gingerbread, their honey, and their singing. They’d supposedly sung at the White House once upon a time, and had made a few records. The had an orchard out behind the monastery, where they kept their bees, and Ruckert often saw the monks over there wandering around in slow motion in their bee outfits.

Summer evenings Ruckert would sit out on his porch drinking beer and watching fireflies drifting around out in his pasture. On many such evenings the monks would throw open their doors and windows and the sound of their singing would travel for great distances in the countryside.

Tormented as he routinely was in those days, the singing of the monks experienced in this manner never failed to give Ruckert a warm burst of uncommon pleasure.

The autumn changing of his storm windows was always a harbinger of Ruckert’s annual onslaught of severe melancholy. He knew that from that day forward, until traditionally the first warm day of spring, he would be locked away from the music of the monks and their languid dance with the bees.

On very rare occasions in the dead of winter, however, Ruckert would hear the faint murmur of the singing monks as he dashed back and forth from his car in the driveway.

In the almost ten years he had lived across the pasture from the monks, Ruckert had never exchanged so much as a word with a single one of them, even as he lived with the constant fear that one of them would someday escape from the monastery and show up at his door seeking asylum.

–Illustration by James Dankert

Here’s a new wrinkle in the gray, clanging days before Christmas: Uncle Jumbo has been playing miserable pet store Santa Claus, wrestling squirming cats and dogs and even the occasional bird or lizard in my lap while a wrinkled and alcoholic little temp-pool elf tries to snap photos for somebody’s sad little Christmas card. Pity the poor bastard who finds himself on one of these people’s mailing lists.

What a way to ruin somebody’s holiday season. Last weekend I spent forty-five minutes trying to balance two very confused greyhounds on my lap. Try it sometime.

It’s all a sad story, but here’s the short version: I got fired from my hotel van gig for general off-season misery and an attitude unbecoming of a shuttle stooge. It’s the third time I’ve been canned from the same job, and they’ll eventually come calling again when they realize once more that this world is not exactly full of people who A) have a valid drivers license, B) a clean driving record, and C) actually want to drive a hotel van. Ninety-nine out of a hundred applicants cannot put an honest check in any of those boxes, and I will eventually get my job back, attitude or no attitude.

Meanwhile, I toil and suffer through the baseball off-season, muttering through every day and nurturing a tator tot addiction that has reached alarming proportions. Or maybe that should be portions. I am putting away a pound of tator tots a day, and last weekend found myself driving to the Rainbow at two in the morning for a new bag. I’m not proud of myself.

The Santa Claus thing is of course a very temporary mistake, but I have very little patience for job hunting, involving as it does initiative and ambition, qualities of which I am in very short supply. Until of course it reaches the point where it involves desperation, something which I can generally muster in spades, and at which point I will very reluctantly agree to wash dishes at Old Country Buffet.

I would love to be a different person, I really would.

God don’t make no junk, my mother likes to say, which is of course nonsense.

Oh well. One of my goals for this off-season was to find a bowling alley I can depend on, which is not as easy as it might seem. I enjoy bowling, but the problem is that I don’t like to have people watching me while I bowl. That, and the fact that I like to have access to a good hamburger while I bowl, has made it difficult to find an alley suitable to my needs. Plenty of the bowling alleys around town serve up a good hamburger, but most of them are crowded with people who are either good bowlers or loud bowlers. I can’t stand either type, and because I pose something of a spectacle when I do bowl and attract gawkers, I am forced to either stay home, or to venture out to one of the mammoth lanes in the middle of the night when the kitchen is closed, and I am unable to get a hamburger. The only thing I ever envied about Elvis Presley was that he had his own bowling alley and a cook at his disposal.

This morning I’ll be going down to Blooming Void to spend Christmas with my mother, staring at her creepy little fake tree bleached blue by the years and strung with patchy tinsel. My brother has a family now, and every year they find something better to do, so it’ll once again just be me sitting there on the couch eating peanut brittle and listening to my mother wheezing through Christmas carols on her Lowry Genie organ. When she goes to bed I’ll sit up half the night watching videos and beach volleyball and horror movies and whatever else the third-rate little cable system they have down there manages to suck out of space.

Down there in Blooming Void they still show David Lee Roth and Billy Idol videos late at night. “David Lee Roth,” I’ll think to myself while nursing an egg nog, “The kind of guy who wears a silk scarf swimming in the ocean, that lucky, shitty bastard.” If tradition holds I’ll fall asleep on the couch and drift into a recurring winter dream: I’m in a large abandoned office building, standing at a urinal in the dark, my forehead resting against the cool tiles on the wall.

Through the giant windows on all sides of me a city stretches away in darkness, punctuated here and there with random displays of blue Christmas lights. Stringers of blue lights dully glowing from the eaves of dark houses and the skeletal trees along the boulevard. Hardly a moon over the world, and not a star in the sky. Nothing moving anywhere. Clouds of gray heat boiling from chimneys and squatting on the neighborhoods.

Then, from somewhere far below me, I hear a large choir singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” the most mournful version I have ever heard, or ever hope to hear. The singers sound like people trapped in the bowels of a sinking ship, holding hands, waiting for the water to find them.

And when I wake up it will be Christmas morning, and the world will have made its first turn out of winter, and my heart will begin its real straining out of the darkness, jogging towards the light, toward Spring Training.

And that, to me, is the real meaning of Christmas.

Those soft, colored lights that make such a comfortable compromise –almost a real peace– with the darkness. The shiny glass bulbs and talismans that have the power to both cradle light and build tiny fires from memories that are almost lost.

The warmth from those fires is powerful out of all proportion: a window, a door, a looking glass through which you can catch glimpses of the child you once were, rising each morning of this season, alive with wonder and anticipation.

The smell of that tree is another gift from and to your memory, one more reminder of how keenly you could once hope (and can still hope) and how much you were once willing (and are still willing) to invest in that hope. A happy smell that’s hard-wired and tangled up in your skull with all the damage and darkness and bands of still startling light.

There’s an empty corner now where that tree should be, yet it stands there glimmering all the same when you turn out the lights, and in the morning you could almost swear you can smell it. After forty-four years your head can still manufacture that smell, can still produce an almost comforting composite of all the predecessors of your invisible tree.

The stockings that are not hung from the mantle are still hanging from the mantle. The dog that is not curled up near the bottom of the tree is still paddling in his sleep near the bottom of the tree, under which there are still presents waiting to be opened. There is still a carton of eggnog in the empty refrigerator. There are Christmas cards in the mailbox that has received no Christmas cards.

All those church bells that no longer exist and no longer ring, tonight you will hear them ringing in the darkness, ringing out all over town. In your dreams, at least, the animals will still kneel, will still speak. A promise will be made and a gift acknowledged. In the darkness outside of town, along gravel roads beside snow-covered fields, you will still see stars tumbling down the sky.

And if there is no cake at midnight, so be it. You will still have your frosting, and still recognize it with gratitude.

You will eat your frosting out of a can, with a plastic spoon if need be, or with your fingers, and through some miracle that is as much a miracle as any other your heart will still feel full to the point of bursting.

—Irwin Norling

My grandfather played Santa Claus for more than twenty years, purely, I liked to believe, out of the goodness of his heart. His annual ritual was completely a volunteer effort and a solo undertaking.

This was in a small town in the Midwest, and every November my grandfather would build a tiny candy-striped cottage in his front yard. In the evenings in December he’d sit out there after dinner waiting for the neighborhood children to stop by.

My grandmother played a plump and largely unenthusiastic elf for the first several years of her husband’s long run as Santa Claus, but she eventually expressed the opinion that the experience was depressing and ruined a perfectly good holiday. My grandfather soldiered gamely on without her. He was a rail-thin Kentucky native with a pronounced twang and eccentric habits (including a crackpot streak that compelled him to write regular, not entirely coherent letters to the local paper) that had long made him an arms-length stranger to most of the people in town.

He was working from a pretty serious handicap, then, right from the beginning, but in the early years of this annual undertaking neighborhood families seemed to get a kick out of the whole thing. There wasn’t another Santa in town in those days, so my grandfather actually managed to become something of a holiday tradition for a number of years.

Then the neighborhood got older, and those kids who might have had fond memories of the Santa on Sixth Street grew up and moved away, and my grandfather found himself being increasingly rejected by subsequent generations. Every year there were still a few visitors, but it became more discouraging each December, and for years local teenagers had been spreading the rumor that my grandfather was a pervert.

In reaction to this increasing indifference, every year my grandfather built larger and more elaborate Christmas displays in his front yard, hoping to capture the attention of the town’s dwindling number of youngsters. He’d actually work the entire summer building a hill right in the middle of the yard. He trucked in tons of dirt and terraced the thing carefully to avoid erosion, and the hill was eventually so large that it literally obscured much of the house behind it.

My grandfather had a fierce and constantly evolving vision of his Santa Shack (he called it the "Castle"; it was always "Santa’s Castle" to him) that was perched atop this hill. He also imagined scores of local children, walking hand-in-hand with their parents and winding their way up the long path –"Candy Cane Lane"– to visit Santa Claus.

Loudspeakers mounted on the roof of the shack blasted Christmas carols out over the neighborhood.

It was this hill (and this music) that eventually turned much of the neighborhood against my grandfather, and one year the city council actually deliberated shutting him down. A young and smirking local newspaper reporter took my grandfather’s side –"Santa Claus vs. Joyless City Council"– and the story was picked up by news services and television stations all over the state.

The town was inundated with mail, virtually all of it supporting the beleaguered local Santa Claus, and my grandfather was eventually allowed to carry on his increasingly escalating holiday spectacle. All this new attention ultimately succeeded in making the Christmas Village on Sixth Street a destination for road-tripping young ironists from all over the area.

These teenagers –many of them clearly stoned– would drive in from towns all around, and were alleged to leave beer cans in the street and urinate in yards up and down the block. My grandfather was so caught up in this new and unexpected wave of attention that he was apparently oblivious to the streak of ridicule that was predominant in these young visitors.

The last year I went home for Christmas I was appalled by the marked decline in my grandfather’s original, pure vision. The place looked almost perverse, part third-rate theme park, part used car lot spectacle. The actual house was now completely hidden behind the huge hill and the outrageously festooned shack that sat upon it.

My grandfather had by this time spent several years working –or eating– toward what he considered the proper level of obesity for his annual turn at Santa Claus. There was, however, nothing proper at all about his arrived-upon corpulence. He became monstrous; his naturally thin frame was obviously ill equipped to carry so much excess weight, and he now walked with a pronounced, staggering limp and sweated profusely. I was horrified to see my grandfather in such a clear and dangerous state of mania. He must have weighed in excess of three hundred pounds, and eventually had to be assisted on his painfully labored trek up the path to "Santa’s Castle."

That year, I noticed, two, and even three, drunken teenagers would pile onto his lap while he gasped out his congested ho-ho-hos.

Eventually, of course, even the young ironists abandoned the old Santa Claus, and my grandfather was left with his unreliable memories and lingering fantasies.

My grandmother had inherited a considerable sum of money some years earlier, and she reluctantly –ever more reluctantly as the years went by– allowed her husband to appropriate increasingly unconscionable sums of this money to subsidize his annual Christmas displays. The utility bills were almost too much to be believed, and as my grandfather’s morbid obesity and mounting health problems no longer allowed him to contribute anything in the way of actual physical labor to the elaborate and protracted set-up procedures, all the work had to be contracted out to local laborers.

The city had also become increasingly tough in enforcing any and all pertinent codes, and there were constant battles with the inspectors and neighbors.

The visitors to my grandfather’s Christmas Castle finally trickled to a very few annual regulars, mostly the confused or frightened children of the occasional local who still retained some fond memories of their own childhood visits to the eccentric small-town Santa.

Most evenings in December my grandfather would sit alone in his shabby Santa suit in his little shack on the hill, listening to Andy Williams or Robert Goulet or the New Christy Minstrels drifting out over the neighborhood from the speakers on the roof. He would read tabloid newspapers and drink straight from two-liter bottles of RC Cola.

That last year I visited I could see that a sad ending was taking shape for my grandfather, a sad ending for the whole family, really. He had worn us all out, and what had started as a sort-of cheesy, harmless, and charming holiday tradition had spiraled out of control. The rest of us weren’t really properly equipped to understand the fierceness of my grandfather’s vision, or his motives.

Perhaps I alone actually made some attempt to figure out what drove my grandfather to such extremes of fantasy. My grandfather had always been an oddball and interloper, and had long had a reputation in the family as something of shiftless character. He’d had a checkered job history and was a pack rat. It seemed clear enough that my grandfather wanted desperately to fit in, to have his neighbors like him and accept his children. He had grown up poor, and I suppose there was something generous and magical in the image of Santa Claus that appealed to his lingering sense of insecurity. He had been in the military for a number of years before he married my grandmother and settled in the small town in Illinois, and this long part of his life had always been a mystery to everyone in the family. It was something he resolutely refused to discuss.

At any rate, the Santa Claus suit, I had come to believe, was a disguise for a man who desperately wanted to be disguised. What more puzzling outsider was there than Santa, the exotic yet entirely benevolent other, eccentric but completely non-threatening? I think my grandfather hoped he could get to the parents –win their approval– through their children. And the whole thing worked –sort of– for years, but eventually, when it morphed into a full-blown and ultimately destructive obsession it negated all the good will and largely turned the town, and even his family, against him.

The year after I made my last visit my grandfather’s health declined. He was in and out of the hospital, and was eventually moved into an assisted living facility. My uncles finally got around to bulldozing the hill and restoring my grandmother’s front yard to a proper lawn.

If you visit that town now and can manage to locate the local historical society (which is located in a Quonset hut at the county fairgrounds) you can see my grandfather’s fully recreated Christmas Castle hidden away in a back room. They also, I am told, have a number of vintage photographs from the archives of the town’s newspaper.

Though I’ve been back there several times in the intervening years, I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to pay a visit. I’m not quite ready –I fear it would break my heart– but I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to it, by which time I’m hoping it will flood me with appropriately happy memories.