[Fiction] Silent Night

[Machina]

There's something poetic and sad about spending Christmas Eve in some gin joint. Even the drunks don't want to be there. Hell, most bars close up shop for the days surrounding. Any place where respectable people go to drink know that the kind of clientele they serve aren't going to be hitting the streets to get blasted the night before Christmas morn. They're at home with their mewling little brood shredding open wrapping paper or getting ready to wake up next to their sweethearts dressed in nothing but a big, red bow. So the fact that O'Malley's was open through the hours surrounding Christmas day, keeping the same hours it did the other 364 days of the year, probably tells you something about the kind of drunk the serve, here. These people are career drunks. Diehards. Men and women with faces that never change. They wear the same expression of loss - that haunted look that only watching as your life slides out of view day by day can produce - every goddamn day. I'm one of them. One of O'Malley's.

Christmas day announced itself two hours late in the form of somebody absently checking their watch and announcing "Holy shit! It's past fuckin' two already! A round on the house f'r all my friends!" The john - a sad old husk of a machinist with a few more toes than fingers named Smitty - was a maudlin drunk. Probably bipolar. He was in a manic mode, and nobody was going to refuse free liquor. A few voices grunted their acknowledgement and slugged down their shots after toasting with all the vigor of a motion picture zombie.

O'Malley closed up shop and barked out the weekend warriors at oh-three-hundred sharp, but me an' the regulars, a dozen or so of us, he let stay on while he turned the place down, and our stay of execution lasted me through three more shots of bourbon and about twenty-five minutes. I checked my watch; it wasn't yet oh-three-thirty, and I was not nearly drunk enough.

I figured somewhere on the island there'd be an Indian grocer still open where I could buy a few more bottles of liquid sunshine and a carton of Luckies. Fuckin' bless those heathan bastards, and bless Ganesh, too, they're the only ones that'll stay open on a fuckin' holiday.

The sky outside is dark and foreboding, and it sure as shit looks like we're going to have another white Christmas, with flakes still drifting down and frosting my hair. I struggle under an awning to light a smoke and decide to take a walk, since this is one of the only times of the year that a guy like me can really own the streets. I feel like I got the whole world to myself, like all those lights behind all those drawn curtains are vistigial remnants of a lost empire, power not yet run out from an abandoned plant. Like all the people in all those homes aren't there, and I'm the last man standing. So I cheer up a bit.

Things change up a bit as I get out of my own neighborhood and near the city. I go through three or four more Luckies. Some of the freaks are out now. A crowd of upper-class yahoos getting out of a late show disperse into their piece of shit plastic cars and speed off to their homes away from the filth of the city, leaving me with the winos and the addicts and the hard luck stories and the homeless crazies who've got nowhere to go. My people. I step up to the group of assorted desperates who were mobbing the privelaged class for their pocket change a second ago and produce my wallet, catching their attention with a gruff half-shout as they were set to disperse back to their hovels. I pull a stack of twenties out and disperse four or five of them to everybody around. Even if it's only to buy booze, I figure everyone got a right to a little charity and joy on Christmas. Shit, I'm out to get blasted and I have a home to go back to. What it's like for these poor fuckers I can't even know.

I knock the most of them for a loop. For starters, I don't look like a rich guy. That's pretty fitting, since I never felt like one. Still, as I pull the paper from my pocket, I catch a glimpse of eyes lighting up in a semicircle around me. I try not to look them in the eyes. Not because they're scum or beneath me, 'cause they ain't either, but the truth is, I can't stand to see hope light up in someone's eyes like that. Makes me feel guilty. I give one guy fifty and pat him goodbye. There's a kid who can't be any older than twenty who looks like he saw forty and then came back. I give him a hundred and tell him to find someplace warm. There are a few others. The last one I see is a stick-thin lady with two kids hugging her legs for warmth. Everyone else is gone, so I give her a thou and tell her to hit a rat shack up the streeth that rents rooms for forty a night, and give her the business card of Denise, a gal I know downtown who makes a living matching aparments and jobs to poor folk. Denise is good people. I can hear the broad crying as I stuff my vacant wallet back in my pocket. She tries to thank me, tries to tell me her story, like she has to justify being given the scratch. I shake my head and tell her she don't need to sell me on her hard luck. The money's a gift, I tell her. Make the most of it, and get your kids outta the cold.

I keep walking, damning myself. I'd save them all, if I could.

I hit the liquor store, appropriately named 'Mr. Happy's Liquor', and pay cash for a brown bag with four bottles of whisky, some bourbon, and some gin. Gin makes me a mean drunk, but I'm in a mood to be mean. The bag nearly turns to shit when I get outside and the snow starts to collect, so I end up stuffing the wadded mess under my arm. If I wasn't so strong, I'd drop the fuckers.

By the time I cross O'Malley's, again, I'm the only person left in the world all over. My place is so far from anything that could rightly be called a "home" that by the time I hit my front door, you wouldn't know it was Christmas from nuclear winter. I don't hurry myself getting inside, taking the cargo elevator down to the lab. The bottom falls out of the paper bag as I go to set it on one of the chairs, and the bottles clink to the ground. I strip down to my long johns and turn on the news, but have to stop after a few minutes. It just makes me nauseous. Eventually I find one of those saccharine puppet shows they only show around Christmas and leave it there. I collect two of the whisky bottles and my laptop and crawl up on a threadbare couch I pulled from somebody's driveway last summer. I access my bank accounts and grimace. Too much cash coming in. Too much for me to sleep, anyway. I down a bottle of Jack and piss away some cash on Red Cross, Red Crescent, Habitat for Humanity, shit like that. By the time I've reduced my balance by a couple of zeroes, I'm feeling sauced enough to visit the only web forum I frequent, and my blood is plenty up. Fucking mutants and their fucking charmed lives. Fucking cocksucking assholes. They have so much. They have so goddamn much. I drink more and write something. Nothing gets through those fucking heads. Sometimes I think the only real power any tin god has is to ignore anything that doesn't conern them, including the laws of fucking physics. Self-important sons of bitches.

I chuck an empty bottle into the fireplace and crack open the gin. Nova Blue's got an op pictorial of Slattern I've been meaning to take a crack at. 'Jingle Bells'. I'll let you figure it out.

By oh-nine-hundred, I've passed out. Hopefully I drank enough that I'll be out until O'Malley's is open again.