Its_Not_Yule_Its_Me_by_Michael_Thomas

Chapter 1: Ben-1

Chapter 1: Ben

December 25, 2007

No Elvis.

I’ve got no problem working Christmas morning at Bean City, but that’s my rule: no Elvis Christmas music. I’ll listen to Mariah Carey or Artie Shaw or Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers all day long, but if Elvis comes mooing over those speakers, I’m going home.

I’ve got no beef with Elvis in general, you understand. I know all the words to “Blue Hawaii,” and if you get enough Fireball in me, I’ll back you up on “Kentucky Rain” at karaoke ‘til you’d think maybe America really does Got Talent. But I spent a summer painting names on ornaments at one of those 365 Days of Christmas! stores in a touristy mountain town. We only had one CD of “Holiday Classics” that played on a constant ten-hours-a-day loop, and I’m not lying to you, “Blue Christmas” was on it twice. By the Fourth of July, I was having nightmares that I’d been buried alive in Elvis’ coffin and he wouldn’t stop singing that song. “Maybe if I sing it louder, someone will come and rescue you,” his ghost proposed on a near-nightly basis. But no one ever did.

So I rescued myself by declaring a unilateral moratorium on that song, and since Jackie, my boss at Bean City, has three little kids who still believe in Santa, she doesn’t care what I refuse to listen to as long as someone who isn’t her can get the joint open by six. My family doesn’t even get home from Midnight Mass until one-thirty in the morning; most years when it’s time for me to go to work at five A.M. we’re still around the dinner table. So for me it’s not a question of getting up early, but rather of staying up until noon, which I wouldn’t be that into if I worked at a dairy farm, but I can get my head around it here, where it’s all the espresso you can drink. Which I’m sure Jackie would be happy to give me as my Christmas present if she knew she was doing it. She’s a sport like that.

I still want to get into teaching when I finish school—at thirty-three, I’m what Metro State calls a “non-traditional” student, but I shall finish—but I gotta say, this coffee-slinging gig’s alright. As long as we show up reasonably on time and don’t cuss anybody out, Jackie kinda lets us do our thing. I can have dreads to my waist, I can be plastered in tats, I can pierce whatever I want and wear a kilt to work, just please wipe out the sink before you go home. Not that I do any of that—I mean, I guess my hair’s kinda long, and I might have one tattoo, never you mind where—but I appreciate the Live Free! atmosphere, and my ink-splattered, dreadlocked co-worker Seth, who wears one every day, definitely has the legs to rock a kilt.

And it doesn’t exactly look like the Hajj around here on Christmas morning. Seeming to believe that the modern coffeehouse economy would crumble without them, one or two small-black-coffee guys still lurk with their laptops; one or two young couples cuddle up on the couch in the corner and let their hot chocolate go cold before they go their separate holiday ways; the occasional frazzled middle-aged mom, halfway to her in-laws’ in Aurora, will leave her minivan running right out front and scurry in for a double shot of Somebody Help Me Before I Strangle One Of These Kids, but these are always to go. No, working Christmas works for me—I’m churched for the year, I’m fed like a tick, I’ve drunk half a bottle of Calvados with my cousins and watched the kids gleefully rip through a houseful of presents. Now all I have to do is earn my little eleven dollars an hour playing souvenir stuffed moose shuffleboard until Seth rolls in at eleven-thirty and tells me to go home, then eat again and sleep ‘til my mom comes and bangs down the door in two days just to make sure I didn’t die. My life is not especially complicated.

Seth was supposed to be here twenty minutes ago, but I’m not fussed about it. I’ll text him if it ticks over an hour—one afternoon he made kind of a big deal out of making sure I had a guy named Lennox’s number. “If you go more than two days without seeing me, call this dude, not the cops, Benny, you gotta promise me.”—but around here, the less you squeal, the less you get squealed on, and we all have our days. Besides, it means another shot of espresso, and the chance to lean against the counter and drool over the dude in the hoodie hunkered down by the door.

He’s been here forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. Alone, without a laptop, which doesn’t really fit the holiday customer profile, but then again he’s not exactly radiating festive. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of reasons people don’t celebrate Christmas, and this guy looks like he’s stocked up on quite a few.

Maybe that’s what I notice. More than someone who doesn’t celebrate, he’s slouched into his seat like someone who wishes he was celebrating. Which is certainly none of my business.

So I plop my little butt into the chair across from him. He removes an impressive cascade of blond-ish bangs from in front of his face, the better to ascertain who goes there, and I smile. Whereupon his elfin face crumples and he dissolves in tears.

“Oh my gosh. Are you okay?”

He keens dramatically when I ask this, and I flinch. Stupid question, got it.

“I mean, what’s wrong? Do you want to talk about it?”

He looks at me—well, you know, towards me—as the tears just gush from his eyes. He snuffles up a tremendous glob of snot, chokes on it a little, wails out a “No,” then proceeds to tell me the whole sordid story.

Probably. What I mostly hear is Waah and Ooooh and Meh meh meh as he blubbers out about thirty seconds of gibberish before he throws his head back and just howls “Whyyyy?!”

I am at a loss.

His open weeping does not abate. He looks at me again. His face is the color of a traumatized tomato and he’s just soaked in tears, the poor guy. I half-stand and half-drag my chair around the small table until I am close enough to offer him a hug and he flings himself into my arms, clawing at comfort. He cries for a spell yet, then gathers up a handful of my T-shirt from the hem—yup, that’s my hairy belly; it’s usually flat, dude, I swear—and trumpets into it like a cartoon elephant. We’re talking five pounds of snot, pretty much right into my lap, right as Seth walks in the door.

The crying dude is mortified. He gapes up at me in horror, still clutching a handful of my shirt. Did I just do that? I laugh. He bolts to the bathroom, knocking over his chair and leaving me to extract myself from within his makeshift handkerchief as a bemused Seth looks on.

“What’s goin’ on here?”

“I don’t know,” I admit, balling my shirt into a trash can. It was a company shirt; I think I’ll go ahead and let replacing it be Jackie’s problem. “But I might go wash my…well, you know…” I was gonna say hands, but suddenly fear there might be a little more to it than that. I move my hands gingerly through the air to indicate, “My everything.”

“You go do that,” Seth says, very assiduously not laughing at me.

I am not surprised to find the bathroom door locked. I am not surprised to pull on the handle and generate a sniffled “Go away” from inside. I am a little bit surprised to hear the lock un-click after I tell him, “See, what just happened is, a handsome stranger just blew his nose pretty much all over me, and I’d kind of like to wash my hands. And maybe my hair.” But I seize the moment and slip in.

He’s working on pulling himself together. His face is still pink, but the panicky purple has faded; his face is still wet, but from splashing it in the sink. He spares me a small smile. “I’m really sorry.”

“Please don’t worry about it,” I say. “Are you okay?”

“I can’t believe I did that. In case breaking down in a coffee house isn’t embarrassing enough…”

“Don’t be embarrassed.”

He laughs. “Oh, I’m embarrassed.”

“It was just an old work shirt,” I insist. I step up to the sink, jarred for a second to see myself shirtless at work of all places. I run the sink and wash my hands. I splash my face, then wipe the water away from my eyes and scrutinize my hair. I pulled the shirt off from the back, obviously, but my hair’s really curly, and it’s longer than it probably needs to be, and, well, I figure you can’t be too careful when it comes to some random dude’s snot in your hair. Okay, so when I get home, I’ll shower, then eat again and go to bed. I put a hand on my belly to make sure there’s gonna be room for more of that duck, then shrug; I’ll get it in there.

“You have another shirt or something you can put on?” he asks. “‘cause if you need to borrow one…”

“It’s fine,” I assure him. “I’m about to go home, I’ll just throw on my coat.”

“Can I at least buy you a coffee or something? I’m really embarrassed, and you’re being really sweet.”

I shrug. “Hey, it needed out, you let it out. It’s good for ya; healthy. Can’t keep that s**t bottled up inside.”

“I could have asked for a napkin.”

“Next time you’ll know.”

He tries to grin, but bless his little fat-lipped mouth, he can’t. “It’s just…”

I reach for the refill roll of paper towels under the sink.

“What kind of person dumps you on Christmas?!”

I hand it to him.

“Only the worst kind,” I assure him. “A heartless monster. An evil queen. Maybe a serial killer…?”

“He waited until I gave him his present.”

“He did not.”

“He did.”

Must not have been a very good one, I am careful not to say. But he sees it on my face.

“It was a scarf. A really nice one. Long and soft, his favorite colors. I made it for him.”

“And do you know how to make scarves…?” I ask.

He laughs in spite of himself. “It was gorgeous, thank you for asking. Gorgeous enough—he took it with him.”

“And what did he get you?”

“I don’t know. He took that with him, too. He said seeing as how we were through, there was no reason Bed Bath, and Beyond shouldn’t give him a refund.”

“You’re kidding, of course.”

He sniffles, shaking his head. “He even took the sweet potatoes I made. We were gonna go to his mom’s house? That’s the reason he came over, was to get me to go over there? I gave him the scarf, he put it on, said ‘There’s someone else,’ then took the sweet potatoes. ‘I mean, you did make them for her, right?’”

“‘There’s someone else?’” I mimic.

“He wants to be exclusive, right, this other guy? ‘Otherwise, you know, we could totally stay together.’ I’m like, wait, we haven’t been exclusive? He goes, ‘I don’t know about you, but I sure haven’t.’ He actually laughed, then he said ‘Thanks for the scarf’ and he walked out.”

“With the sweet potatoes?”

“With the sweet potatoes.”

“And this was when?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe two hours ago.”

“Well, I’d say you’re holding up remarkably well,” I commend him. “I feel like sacrificing a shirt is the least I can do for a guy when he’s that down on his luck.”

“Yeah, well, thanks. Just another Christmas. I fuckin’ hate this holiday.”

I gasp, only partly in fun. “You hate Christmas? Who hates Christmas?” He looks at me like Am I gonna need to tell that story again?, and I hasten to commiserate. “Okay, yeah, I get that today might not be Santa’s best work.”

“It’s always something.”

“Come on.”

“Just the last three years, okay? Let’s see…Last year my boyfriend got arrested going through airport security. We were going to Mexico, you know, spend Christmas sipping margaritas by the pool? He dumped me when I wouldn’t tell the TSA all the heroin in his bag was prescribed by my doctor for my ‘brain pain.’ Fine. Year before that, my boyfriend takes me home to Philadelphia to meet his family. His parents come to the airport to pick us up, his mom gets one look at me and asks me, ‘Are you trying to make a fool of me? Shannon is a woman’s name.’ Then she says to him, ‘You’re not bringing any s****l deviant into my house.’ He tells her, ‘Mom, I’m gay,’ and she says ‘Not if you want the trip to Europe we got you for Christmas you’re not.’ Thirty-one years old, he goes, ‘I’ll send you a postcard’ and leaves me standing in the Philadelphia airport.”

He’s kind of crying, but he’s kind of laughing, too. Probably because I’m cracking up. I can’t stop saying, “No, he didn’t.”

“Year before that? Straight up and died on me, December 20th.”

“What?!” I swear I try to stop laughing.

“Okay, we might not have been technically boyfriends,” he allows. “But we were friends—well, our sisters were friends—and I wanted to be boyfriends.”

“That is quite a track record.”

“Don’t get me started.”

“This is just a preview of your beef with Christmas?”

“It’s like I said, I hate this holiday.”