Saving Christmas
Will Maguire copyright@2018
When I lived in NYC in my early 20s there was a panhandler that stood in Times Square next to the Doomsday Preachers. But he didn’t holler “Jesus is coming, the End is near!”
Instead all day long he would chant the same two lines -
“Living is hard. Living is beautiful - The hard is trying to make you beautiful."
By the time I was 23 I had already lived a good bit of hard into me, the kind that makes you turn over at night because you‘ve become afraid of your dreams. I would try each night to sleep but after a few hours would go out and walk the city streets, just hoping to exhaust myself.
That year, in mid-December, a blizzard blew in - 5 degrees, a foot of snow on the ground. I didn’t care. My dreams were far colder so I bundled up and started down Third Avenue, alone once more in a storm on the deserted streets.
It was the first fall that year. With snow and love the first fall is always the hardest. The heart of the city isn’t ready for the cold, so everyone buries themselves in their apartments, turns the locks and prays for spring. And for a time the ceaselessness of the place grinds to a halt.
First snow is always clean and fresh and cold. And everything grey and cracked and ruined about the city seems like it’s being given one more chance to remember what it really was always meant to be.
It was 2:00 am. Far too late for anyone with sense to be on the streets and too early for the every night drunks to be pushed off their stools and out into the wind.
On St. Marks there was just one other guy on the street. He was unshaven, thin jacket, a box under his arms. He was stamping his feet like he was trying to beat the memory of warmth back into them. Just another lost soul, I thought.
But as I got closer I could see he was a street hustler - the kind of guy that makes his living from unlocked doors.
In New York there is a tribe like this. Street guys, as merciless as coyotes, that live by their wits. Hustlers move in the shadows and whisper in ears. They feed off the naïve and try to erase innocence like it’s a bad habit.
Every one of them that I have ever known thought of himself as wised up. But the truth is each was merely ruined. Maybe that’s the same thing. Wised up and ruined.
They always ended up the same, scraping at the rough edge of wrong, condemned to watching for the unguarded moment and checking car doors.
As I passed he turned, and shivering, started alongside pitching me. “Hey Boss. Look at this.” He held up the box. “Got a sweet deal.”
I wasn’t interested and pushed past. I wanted only the storm and the solitude and maybe later a few hours of fitful sleep.
“You’re crowding me,” I growled.
“No listen Mister…Listen…I got something here…Maybe you got a boy.” He held out the box and in a faint accent, maybe Eastern European, whispered, “It’s a train.”
“Get lost,” I muttered but he stepped closer. So I raised an open hand, the universal sign language to every skel on the planet. “Stop now or pay.”
“C’mon Mister…it’s the goods… you know… for Christmas.” I glanced at him and he felt the hard in my eyes and shrugged. “It fell off the back of a truck."
Everything that’s clipped in Manhattan is taken for a reason. The reason is because it can be. This goes for stolen hope and lost love and even abandoned faith.
They all fall off the back of a truck at some point.
“Fifty bucks,” he said.
He was ruining the white, this guy. He was spilling his gray along beside me and I began to feel the snow spell collapsing beneath it. He paused and glanced up and down the avenue studying the streets looking for some other lost soul - some drunk or graveyard shifter. Someone that would rather walk through a foot of snow than listen to their dreams. I was a lost cause. He could see I knew too much and wanted too little.
But we were alone. The lights on Houston Street blinked green to red and back again - winking at me like they had seen something I couldn’t. And far beneath the cold at the very back of me I began to hear the Prisoner tap.
There has always been some locked up part chained way down deep in the back of myself. The Prisoner. He can hear and see but cannot speak. He is locked up in some dark alley between my heart and my mind. But he understands more than I ever will.
Sometimes I hear him beating on a wall between us, like he has seen something I need to know and is trying desperately to tell me. He hollers and pleads and though I can never quite hear him clearly. I have learned to listen for him.
He knows more than me. I think he’s trying to save me. I would free him if I could.
The hustler yammered on. “Look…Mishka.” He lowered his voice. “I’m freezing here. How’s 20 by you?”
“Back off,” I yelled above the wind. “What do I look like - Santa Claus? What do I want with some hot toy from a skeeve like you?”
He hesitated and the snow, the storm and even the city itself seemed to pause.
“Ok Mister…ok,” he muttered. “Last chance.” The words hung in the air and echoed as they fell - “chance…chance…chance.”
And the Prisoner began beating harder at the back of me like he had heard something inside them.
I looked into the hustler’s face. His forehead and cheeks were turning scarlet to purple from the cold. And I could see a hard penance had begun to force its way into his features, as it always does.
I said, “Five,” and pulled out a fin, dangling it in front of him. And the storm seemed to hold its breath.
He muttered a curse in some language I didn’t recognize, threw the box at me and grabbed the bill. “Wait and see Mister. You’re gonna save …” He began to wheeze, bent in half from a coughing fit. “You’re gonna save …gonna … save…” but the wind took the words. Then he turned down a side street, scurried into the darkness and disappeared from view.
I stood alone in the whiteout darkness of a blizzard, box under my arm then turned back up Third. And just for a moment I had the feeling that I was riding a train, toward some destination well beyond my vision and no longer of my own choosing.
Part 2
The next morning I lifted the neighbor’s Times. He was a broker, a money guy, and like all money guys he never seemed to quite add up.
He was getting in from an office Christmas party just as I was heading out. He had some secretary marching unsteadily on high heels in front of him as we passed on the stairs.
There is an army of girls that come from Brooklyn and Bayonne to the city for their first real jobs. They become executive assistants which means they answer phones, smile hard till their jaws hurt and tell people how long they’re going to have to wait to see whoever.
Inevitably they become entranced by some unhappily married guy. The “she doesn’t understand me” guys that fill every office in every high rise on the island. These girls believe a man’s lingering presence means I need you or only you can save me.
It doesn’t of course. It means I’m tired of the boss and the bills and the wife. Or I’m tired of the harangue of living and myself. Or it means I’m tired of the way the future gets smaller and quieter and a little more lost in the subway tunnels each day.
The girls are always young and pretty and hopelessly naïve, so they start to see these guys as the missing variable in the unbalanced equation of their own unhappiness. They tell themselves what they feel is true and probably love. And then they begin to dream of a life with the guys that linger near their desks, a kind of life where loneliness isn’t waiting on the train home every night.
So they smile harder and jade their dreams and let their hearts beat away the worry and the doubt… and wait for a chance.
In December in Manhattan that chance always shows up at a Christmas party. It always appears between the One Too Manys. The One Too Many vodka tonics, the One Too Many whispered phrases, the One Too Many wedding ring hands brushing against the small of their backs.
So these girls finally step into the breach of their bosses’ arms in an empty office or a stairwell and tell themselves it’s just dancing.
And, of course, the wives suddenly appear. They peer at the embarrassed girls and watch their husbands shrug. Then the sweet naïve versions of loneliness grab their coats, run for the door in tears, out alone again into the cold.
In December in Manhattan they line the avenues crying and hailing cabs and feeling that first small bite of wisdom creep into themselves through the hurt of it all.
The broker was divorced and I knew he had his hands full with the secretary so I clipped his paper. Back then newspapers were still printed with ink. This was long before the world took its search for news and happiness to Google. Turns out, though, even the speed of light isn’t fast enough to catch some things.
I turned to the Metro section. “City Kids Write Santa.” Two columns about the letters every poor kid sends to the North Pole and how they end up at the Post Office on Eighth Ave. There is a room there open to the public, if anyone wanted to see them, or if they had a toy they couldn’t use. Fat chance.
I felt my eyes drawn again to the train set - dry now - and glistening in its cellophane wrapper. I folded the paper, dropped it in the trash and stepped to the window.
Outside, the broker’s secretary was stepping out and down the stairs trying not to slip, her heels too high for the ice. She looked a little forlorn, the way a woman always does the morning after when she feels the first edge of how ridiculous a heart can be.
I turned back to the train. It sat motionless. Out of service. And I heard the Prisoner begin to tap. It sounded like “The Little Drummer Boy.” Parump a pum pum Parump a pum pum.
He started hollering something I couldn’t quite make out, something about how this toy and the Santa story lined up perfectly in front of me, like a pair of boxcars suddenly joined one to the other.
But you can say no at any time. You can turn your back. You can ignore the Prisoner.
You can’t hear him anyway. Not really. And he will stop eventually. It’s just a whisper in the back of you. But this was different. His beating lost itself in the cadence of my pulse until they seemed the same.
I took the paper from the garbage.
I would go to the Post Office that afternoon.
Part 3
Every great city Post Office is like a church. Everyone speaks in hushed tones and stands quietly in line, waiting to confess what they lost.
But every dream has only half a zip code and every heart is stamped return to sender. We become undeliverable.
A clerk had posted a sign near his window. Everything gets lost…but it all turns up…in time.
“O Come All Ye Faithful” began to play through the intercom. It was scratched and skipped the way records sometimes did then. And someone had handwritten a sign near the stairwell with an arrow pointing north: “Santa Letter Room 3rd floor.”
The stairway turned onto a long hall with a doorway at the end that opened into a warehouse. The hall was filled with two dozen women, each dressed meticulously. Makeup, high heels, painted nails...the whole nine yards.
“Lost.” I thought. But as I passed the first girl she stepped in front, looked hard into my eyes, then brightening, handed me a business card. It had her name and number and on the back handwritten: “Call me.” Puzzled, I looked at it, then her, then continued. As I passed, each girl stepped forward with a hard-practiced smile and a card. Jessica, Margaret, Mary… call me…call me…call me.
At 23, like most men, I had stumbled arm in arm with my share of strangers. I had tried, like most, to pour a women’s embrace into that first space between hope and lonely.
We all do it. We do it over and over, trying to fool our hearts for a few hours. But that’s all make believe. It is the common lie we tell ourselves when the nights are too dark or the quiet too thick. We tell it again and again to make living bearable. And we try to convince ourselves its human pantomime is the genuine article.
So we go through the motions and we repeat the words like an incantation that might someday conjure up the real thing.
But it’s all like the gold watches they sell in Times Square. They only run for a few hours, in the dark before they stop forever.
So I whispered my lonely truths into women’s ears for a few years. And I tried to hold them near. But they only got as close as Cleveland.
As I passed, the last girl fumbled with her purse and dropped it. She was dressed modestly, no makeup, stammered. She kept her eyes down like the lonely will and glanced at me nervously when I reached down and handed it back. Then she pulled out an old phone bill, tore off a corner with her name and number and scribbled underneath: “I'll understand if you never call.”
I took it, looked for a moment into her eyes, nodded, then put it gently in my pocket.
And I stepped into the letter room.
Part 4
Some things in this life can never be delivered. Good news at 2 am, happily ever after, and letters to Santa all qualify.
But we all keep trying. So we whisper small prayers when the phone rings late at night and we watch old movies like they might finally show us how to straighten all the bent in ourselves into happy endings. And we tell small children that Santa reads every word and will somehow find his way through the cold this year.
We believe that you give what you have and get what you need - and in the end those two, like halves of some broken prayer, will become the same. And we do all these things in the hope that we ourselves, like a lost letter, might someday be delivered.
But the letters in this room were not merely lost. They were abandoned. Pile after pile waiting impossibly for deliverance. And on December 26 every year, when the last bit of hope had been squeezed down by the calendar, they were bundled together and swept out toward a furnace and burned. And every year a new avalanche of crayoned hopes, rolling carts full of cards, tables stacked with envelops, letters scattered like misspelt prayers would take their place.
A half dozen guys were picking through the piles. I stepped up next to one of them and asked, “What’s that all about in the hallway?”
“Oh, the girls?” he said. "New York magazine ran a special issue this week on the NYC Man Shortage. The cover story was the 10 best places to meet a husband. The Santa Letter room was #1.”
So I dropped the business cards into a bin with all the other hopes and started to read.
“Dear Santa,
Mama says Daddy run out on us. I know he left because I done something bad. I’ll be a good boy. I’ll be good. I promise Santa. Please.”
“Dear Santa,
Can you bring a lock for my door? The men my Mama brings home always hit me when I cry.”
“Dear Santa,
Mama doesn’t come home at night anymore. Can you make her safe? That’s all I want for Christmas.”
I held each page perfectly still in my hand but it felt like a large lead weight had crept in under those tiny words. “What Child is This” began to play through the intercom. And a clerk walking past looked into my face and whispered, “They’re all like that.”
The Prisoner was quiet. And looking at the cavern of letters all around me I whispered to him, “What do you want me to do? I’m just one man.” I waited and listened but he didn’t answer. So I reached into the bottom of a bin and gripped a letter.
“Dear Santa,
Please bring any toy… maybe one nobody else wants.”
I glanced at the address. It was a welfare hotel notorious for prostitution and the drug trade. At the very bottom, scrawled in crayon was a name. “Please. Chance Golden.”
I put the letter down like it held some kind of invisible fire and I was suddenly made of straw. And I began to back away.
You can say no at any time.
But I heard the hustler’s whisper again - “chance…chance …chance.” And the Prisoner suddenly began to beat at the back of me. He was screaming something I couldn’t make out. Something about a last chance, something about saving someone. It almost sounded like he was saying they’re the same thing.
So I stuffed the letter into my pocket and felt a far corner of my straw heart begin to burn.
And I left, wandering into the streets of Manhattan, wondering if the Prisoner, locked away in the blizzard of me, was warming himself near it.
Part 5
That year was like every other. The people of Manhattan continued to work and live, to make their mistakes and cheer their successes, to find their way to love, then lose it, then claw back some small shadow of it - just as they had always done.
Hacks were still robbed, the Hasidim were still jumped on 47th St. and late night drunks still had 38 specials held to their temples by shaky hands.
But unlike other years, Manhattan was suddenly awash with the dispossessed, each dragging their memories in grocery carts down the avenues.
And each night small children as young as 5 were panhandling at the traffic lights off Herald Square - many times swept into anonymous cars, disappearing forever. Along Lexington Avenue in the 20s a new strip of hookers appeared. Working moms.
The city, so full of brilliance, seemed to darken that year. Kindness seemed suddenly overwhelmed by cruelty.
This was Manhattan that Christmas - full of promise and broken promise - full of prayer and broken prayer - full of things lost and abandoned, like letters, trying once again to be delivered.
Part 6
That Christmas Eve I stepped off the subway and stood in front of the aging hotel. It was dusk. I remember standing there, thinking about the blizzard, the hustler, the stolen train, the unread letters waiting to be burned and the one crumpled prayer in my pocket.
I thought about my sleepless self, afraid of my own dreams. And I thought about every bit of faith that had fallen off the back of a truck in me.
But you can say no at any time.
Instead I took a deep breath and pushed through the smudged glass doors.
The lobby was darker than the street and the Prisoner immediately began to howl. There were 30 guys leaning against the lobby walls. And as I glanced from face to face I recognized that same hungry pitiless gaze.
Addiction is a form of slavery. And I could see the master in their blood was forcing each through the same silent calculation, sizing me up and staring at the package under my arm.
To the left was a dilapidated elevator. To the right a staircase. I knew if I stepped into the elevator I would be jumped and this small corner of Christmas would disappear into the smoke of some crack pipe. So I turned toward the staircase and started up. I was on the first-floor landing when three of the lobby boys started up after me.
I knew what was coming. There would be a knife or a gun. I would fight, but the box would be torn open. And Christmas would be passed hand over hand back out onto the street and sold like ransom for a twenty-minute high.
“Ho ho ho…What’s in the box Santa? That present for me?”
I felt my fingers tighten around the letter in my pocket. And it felt like Christmas was about to slip through my hands.
But I suddenly felt too as though I was trying to save something larger than a mere toy. Something broken and scattered about me. Something larger than myself. Something lost.
Part 7
Manhattan is a cathedral. And like all cathedrals it is full of broken prayers.
In this cathedral city the broken prayers move by and around each other each searching for some way to be heard. They sweep by in cabs, on teeming sidewalks, in well worn channels from apartments to offices and back again. And all around in the avenues and the side streets, in the bus stations and the late night diners, in the after hours bars and the echo of a train circling again and again, the pieces of something lonely and something holy chase each other, trying to become whole.
Something in us all breaks off and away from just living.
But sometimes - every once in a great while - one piece will nudge up against another. The plea of a broken prayer somehow becomes its own answer.
In that instant, it humbly understands that it is a part of some design greater than its own want. And doing so it becomes whole again. Made whole through the brokenness.
And so each becomes the instrument of its own redemption. It is touched - forever - by the memory of the thing it was always meant to be.
Part 8
I was on the 5th floor landing when I set the package down. The lobby boys were jogging up after me now. “Ho Ho Ho Mister…We got a present for you.”
I kicked the first one up in the chest and he tumbled back toward the others carrying them all down to the landing. I was hollering, raving really. And suddenly afraid, they turned. “You crazy man! You crazy!” and retreated.
I whispered, “Merry Christmas,” picked up the box, made my way to the 7th floor, found the apartment and rang the bell.
Chance’s mother’s expression was set, the way concrete sets. I had seen that same cement in my own eyes. I knew how hard it was. She had that same rebar of broken hope running through her. She held the door tight so I stepped back.
Looking down and away I realized that she was standing there in a tee shirt - and nothing else. She sensed my unease, then opened the door wider showing herself to me. “It’s 100 up front.”
I was staring at the floor. “Does Chance Golden live here? I’m supposed to deliver this package to Chance Golden.”
She paused. “What kind of package?” Searching my face now, the unease back on her side of the door.
“I don’t know lady,” I said. “I’m just a delivery guy.” She held the door tightly and behind her I could hear a child calling.
“Who are you?” she said again. “You’re no delivery man.”
“Is this the right place?” I asked. “Is Chance Golden here?”
She stared hard at me. “What do you want? What are you doing here Mister?”
“Look lady,” I answered. “I’m just a messenger.” My fist tightened on the letter. It felt suddenly cold. So I shrugged. “He wrote a letter.”
The voice began to plead over and over. “I did Mama…I did ...I did write a letter.” She pushed him back and leveled her gaze again at me again. “Who are you?”
So I lied once more. “I’m just a messenger.” And as I did a small boy pushed past his mother’s legs and stood in front of me jumping up and down. His face was full of the kind of joy that adults can only remember.
“Are you Chance Golden?” I asked and handed him the train. His mother had him by the shoulder and I glanced into her face as she looked down at her son there. For just a moment some forgotten feeling seemed to stir. Her expression, cemented in heartache, seemed to weaken.
Chance, train in arms, pushed back past her into the apartment and as he did we stood alone.
Her eyes were clear and for the briefest instant I saw a shadow of gratitude. Not for me, but for some prayer that was broken and abandoned long ago. Then the concrete reset in her eyes and she lowered her voice.
"Who do you think you are - coming here like this on Christmas Eve?”
“Lady,” I said, “You got this all wrong. I’m just a delivery guy.”
Her voice shook with anger. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, coming here like this! Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are!”
I whispered, “I’m just a messenger.” And as I did the door slammed shut and I heard the locks turn.
It was Christmas Eve. I was alone on the 7th floor of a welfare hotel in Manhattan when I first heard a voice as though from very far away.
It was clear and low, humble and full of a kind of mercy. And for the very first time the Prisoner spoke to me.
"Who do you think you are?” he whispered. “Who do you think you are?”
Will Maguire copyright@2018
When I lived in NYC in my early 20s there was a panhandler that stood in Times Square next to the Doomsday Preachers. But he didn’t holler “Jesus is coming, the End is near!”
Instead all day long he would chant the same two lines -
“Living is hard. Living is beautiful - The hard is trying to make you beautiful."
By the time I was 23 I had already lived a good bit of hard into me, the kind that makes you turn over at night because you‘ve become afraid of your dreams. I would try each night to sleep but after a few hours would go out and walk the city streets, just hoping to exhaust myself.
That year, in mid-December, a blizzard blew in - 5 degrees, a foot of snow on the ground. I didn’t care. My dreams were far colder so I bundled up and started down Third Avenue, alone once more in a storm on the deserted streets.
It was the first fall that year. With snow and love the first fall is always the hardest. The heart of the city isn’t ready for the cold, so everyone buries themselves in their apartments, turns the locks and prays for spring. And for a time the ceaselessness of the place grinds to a halt.
First snow is always clean and fresh and cold. And everything grey and cracked and ruined about the city seems like it’s being given one more chance to remember what it really was always meant to be.
It was 2:00 am. Far too late for anyone with sense to be on the streets and too early for the every night drunks to be pushed off their stools and out into the wind.
On St. Marks there was just one other guy on the street. He was unshaven, thin jacket, a box under his arms. He was stamping his feet like he was trying to beat the memory of warmth back into them. Just another lost soul, I thought.
But as I got closer I could see he was a street hustler - the kind of guy that makes his living from unlocked doors.
In New York there is a tribe like this. Street guys, as merciless as coyotes, that live by their wits. Hustlers move in the shadows and whisper in ears. They feed off the naïve and try to erase innocence like it’s a bad habit.
Every one of them that I have ever known thought of himself as wised up. But the truth is each was merely ruined. Maybe that’s the same thing. Wised up and ruined.
They always ended up the same, scraping at the rough edge of wrong, condemned to watching for the unguarded moment and checking car doors.
As I passed he turned, and shivering, started alongside pitching me. “Hey Boss. Look at this.” He held up the box. “Got a sweet deal.”
I wasn’t interested and pushed past. I wanted only the storm and the solitude and maybe later a few hours of fitful sleep.
“You’re crowding me,” I growled.
“No listen Mister…Listen…I got something here…Maybe you got a boy.” He held out the box and in a faint accent, maybe Eastern European, whispered, “It’s a train.”
“Get lost,” I muttered but he stepped closer. So I raised an open hand, the universal sign language to every skel on the planet. “Stop now or pay.”
“C’mon Mister…it’s the goods… you know… for Christmas.” I glanced at him and he felt the hard in my eyes and shrugged. “It fell off the back of a truck."
Everything that’s clipped in Manhattan is taken for a reason. The reason is because it can be. This goes for stolen hope and lost love and even abandoned faith.
They all fall off the back of a truck at some point.
“Fifty bucks,” he said.
He was ruining the white, this guy. He was spilling his gray along beside me and I began to feel the snow spell collapsing beneath it. He paused and glanced up and down the avenue studying the streets looking for some other lost soul - some drunk or graveyard shifter. Someone that would rather walk through a foot of snow than listen to their dreams. I was a lost cause. He could see I knew too much and wanted too little.
But we were alone. The lights on Houston Street blinked green to red and back again - winking at me like they had seen something I couldn’t. And far beneath the cold at the very back of me I began to hear the Prisoner tap.
There has always been some locked up part chained way down deep in the back of myself. The Prisoner. He can hear and see but cannot speak. He is locked up in some dark alley between my heart and my mind. But he understands more than I ever will.
Sometimes I hear him beating on a wall between us, like he has seen something I need to know and is trying desperately to tell me. He hollers and pleads and though I can never quite hear him clearly. I have learned to listen for him.
He knows more than me. I think he’s trying to save me. I would free him if I could.
The hustler yammered on. “Look…Mishka.” He lowered his voice. “I’m freezing here. How’s 20 by you?”
“Back off,” I yelled above the wind. “What do I look like - Santa Claus? What do I want with some hot toy from a skeeve like you?”
He hesitated and the snow, the storm and even the city itself seemed to pause.
“Ok Mister…ok,” he muttered. “Last chance.” The words hung in the air and echoed as they fell - “chance…chance…chance.”
And the Prisoner began beating harder at the back of me like he had heard something inside them.
I looked into the hustler’s face. His forehead and cheeks were turning scarlet to purple from the cold. And I could see a hard penance had begun to force its way into his features, as it always does.
I said, “Five,” and pulled out a fin, dangling it in front of him. And the storm seemed to hold its breath.
He muttered a curse in some language I didn’t recognize, threw the box at me and grabbed the bill. “Wait and see Mister. You’re gonna save …” He began to wheeze, bent in half from a coughing fit. “You’re gonna save …gonna … save…” but the wind took the words. Then he turned down a side street, scurried into the darkness and disappeared from view.
I stood alone in the whiteout darkness of a blizzard, box under my arm then turned back up Third. And just for a moment I had the feeling that I was riding a train, toward some destination well beyond my vision and no longer of my own choosing.
Part 2
The next morning I lifted the neighbor’s Times. He was a broker, a money guy, and like all money guys he never seemed to quite add up.
He was getting in from an office Christmas party just as I was heading out. He had some secretary marching unsteadily on high heels in front of him as we passed on the stairs.
There is an army of girls that come from Brooklyn and Bayonne to the city for their first real jobs. They become executive assistants which means they answer phones, smile hard till their jaws hurt and tell people how long they’re going to have to wait to see whoever.
Inevitably they become entranced by some unhappily married guy. The “she doesn’t understand me” guys that fill every office in every high rise on the island. These girls believe a man’s lingering presence means I need you or only you can save me.
It doesn’t of course. It means I’m tired of the boss and the bills and the wife. Or I’m tired of the harangue of living and myself. Or it means I’m tired of the way the future gets smaller and quieter and a little more lost in the subway tunnels each day.
The girls are always young and pretty and hopelessly naïve, so they start to see these guys as the missing variable in the unbalanced equation of their own unhappiness. They tell themselves what they feel is true and probably love. And then they begin to dream of a life with the guys that linger near their desks, a kind of life where loneliness isn’t waiting on the train home every night.
So they smile harder and jade their dreams and let their hearts beat away the worry and the doubt… and wait for a chance.
In December in Manhattan that chance always shows up at a Christmas party. It always appears between the One Too Manys. The One Too Many vodka tonics, the One Too Many whispered phrases, the One Too Many wedding ring hands brushing against the small of their backs.
So these girls finally step into the breach of their bosses’ arms in an empty office or a stairwell and tell themselves it’s just dancing.
And, of course, the wives suddenly appear. They peer at the embarrassed girls and watch their husbands shrug. Then the sweet naïve versions of loneliness grab their coats, run for the door in tears, out alone again into the cold.
In December in Manhattan they line the avenues crying and hailing cabs and feeling that first small bite of wisdom creep into themselves through the hurt of it all.
The broker was divorced and I knew he had his hands full with the secretary so I clipped his paper. Back then newspapers were still printed with ink. This was long before the world took its search for news and happiness to Google. Turns out, though, even the speed of light isn’t fast enough to catch some things.
I turned to the Metro section. “City Kids Write Santa.” Two columns about the letters every poor kid sends to the North Pole and how they end up at the Post Office on Eighth Ave. There is a room there open to the public, if anyone wanted to see them, or if they had a toy they couldn’t use. Fat chance.
I felt my eyes drawn again to the train set - dry now - and glistening in its cellophane wrapper. I folded the paper, dropped it in the trash and stepped to the window.
Outside, the broker’s secretary was stepping out and down the stairs trying not to slip, her heels too high for the ice. She looked a little forlorn, the way a woman always does the morning after when she feels the first edge of how ridiculous a heart can be.
I turned back to the train. It sat motionless. Out of service. And I heard the Prisoner begin to tap. It sounded like “The Little Drummer Boy.” Parump a pum pum Parump a pum pum.
He started hollering something I couldn’t quite make out, something about how this toy and the Santa story lined up perfectly in front of me, like a pair of boxcars suddenly joined one to the other.
But you can say no at any time. You can turn your back. You can ignore the Prisoner.
You can’t hear him anyway. Not really. And he will stop eventually. It’s just a whisper in the back of you. But this was different. His beating lost itself in the cadence of my pulse until they seemed the same.
I took the paper from the garbage.
“Ok. OK. I get it,” I muttered to him.
I would go to the Post Office that afternoon.
Part 3
Every great city Post Office is like a church. Everyone speaks in hushed tones and stands quietly in line, waiting to confess what they lost.
But every dream has only half a zip code and every heart is stamped return to sender. We become undeliverable.
A clerk had posted a sign near his window. Everything gets lost…but it all turns up…in time.
“O Come All Ye Faithful” began to play through the intercom. It was scratched and skipped the way records sometimes did then. And someone had handwritten a sign near the stairwell with an arrow pointing north: “Santa Letter Room 3rd floor.”
The stairway turned onto a long hall with a doorway at the end that opened into a warehouse. The hall was filled with two dozen women, each dressed meticulously. Makeup, high heels, painted nails...the whole nine yards.
“Lost.” I thought. But as I passed the first girl she stepped in front, looked hard into my eyes, then brightening, handed me a business card. It had her name and number and on the back handwritten: “Call me.” Puzzled, I looked at it, then her, then continued. As I passed, each girl stepped forward with a hard-practiced smile and a card. Jessica, Margaret, Mary… call me…call me…call me.
At 23, like most men, I had stumbled arm in arm with my share of strangers. I had tried, like most, to pour a women’s embrace into that first space between hope and lonely.
We all do it. We do it over and over, trying to fool our hearts for a few hours. But that’s all make believe. It is the common lie we tell ourselves when the nights are too dark or the quiet too thick. We tell it again and again to make living bearable. And we try to convince ourselves its human pantomime is the genuine article.
So we go through the motions and we repeat the words like an incantation that might someday conjure up the real thing.
But it’s all like the gold watches they sell in Times Square. They only run for a few hours, in the dark before they stop forever.
So I whispered my lonely truths into women’s ears for a few years. And I tried to hold them near. But they only got as close as Cleveland.
As I passed, the last girl fumbled with her purse and dropped it. She was dressed modestly, no makeup, stammered. She kept her eyes down like the lonely will and glanced at me nervously when I reached down and handed it back. Then she pulled out an old phone bill, tore off a corner with her name and number and scribbled underneath: “I'll understand if you never call.”
I took it, looked for a moment into her eyes, nodded, then put it gently in my pocket.
And I stepped into the letter room.
Part 4
Some things in this life can never be delivered. Good news at 2 am, happily ever after, and letters to Santa all qualify.
But we all keep trying. So we whisper small prayers when the phone rings late at night and we watch old movies like they might finally show us how to straighten all the bent in ourselves into happy endings. And we tell small children that Santa reads every word and will somehow find his way through the cold this year.
We believe that you give what you have and get what you need - and in the end those two, like halves of some broken prayer, will become the same. And we do all these things in the hope that we ourselves, like a lost letter, might someday be delivered.
But the letters in this room were not merely lost. They were abandoned. Pile after pile waiting impossibly for deliverance. And on December 26 every year, when the last bit of hope had been squeezed down by the calendar, they were bundled together and swept out toward a furnace and burned. And every year a new avalanche of crayoned hopes, rolling carts full of cards, tables stacked with envelops, letters scattered like misspelt prayers would take their place.
A half dozen guys were picking through the piles. I stepped up next to one of them and asked, “What’s that all about in the hallway?”
“Oh, the girls?” he said. "New York magazine ran a special issue this week on the NYC Man Shortage. The cover story was the 10 best places to meet a husband. The Santa Letter room was #1.”
So I dropped the business cards into a bin with all the other hopes and started to read.
“Dear Santa,
Mama says Daddy run out on us. I know he left because I done something bad. I’ll be a good boy. I’ll be good. I promise Santa. Please.”
“Dear Santa,
Can you bring a lock for my door? The men my Mama brings home always hit me when I cry.”
“Dear Santa,
Mama doesn’t come home at night anymore. Can you make her safe? That’s all I want for Christmas.”
I held each page perfectly still in my hand but it felt like a large lead weight had crept in under those tiny words. “What Child is This” began to play through the intercom. And a clerk walking past looked into my face and whispered, “They’re all like that.”
The Prisoner was quiet. And looking at the cavern of letters all around me I whispered to him, “What do you want me to do? I’m just one man.” I waited and listened but he didn’t answer. So I reached into the bottom of a bin and gripped a letter.
“Dear Santa,
Please bring any toy… maybe one nobody else wants.”
I glanced at the address. It was a welfare hotel notorious for prostitution and the drug trade. At the very bottom, scrawled in crayon was a name. “Please. Chance Golden.”
I put the letter down like it held some kind of invisible fire and I was suddenly made of straw. And I began to back away.
You can say no at any time.
But I heard the hustler’s whisper again - “chance…chance …chance.” And the Prisoner suddenly began to beat at the back of me. He was screaming something I couldn’t make out. Something about a last chance, something about saving someone. It almost sounded like he was saying they’re the same thing.
So I stuffed the letter into my pocket and felt a far corner of my straw heart begin to burn.
And I left, wandering into the streets of Manhattan, wondering if the Prisoner, locked away in the blizzard of me, was warming himself near it.
Part 5
That year was like every other. The people of Manhattan continued to work and live, to make their mistakes and cheer their successes, to find their way to love, then lose it, then claw back some small shadow of it - just as they had always done.
Hacks were still robbed, the Hasidim were still jumped on 47th St. and late night drunks still had 38 specials held to their temples by shaky hands.
But unlike other years, Manhattan was suddenly awash with the dispossessed, each dragging their memories in grocery carts down the avenues.
And each night small children as young as 5 were panhandling at the traffic lights off Herald Square - many times swept into anonymous cars, disappearing forever. Along Lexington Avenue in the 20s a new strip of hookers appeared. Working moms.
The city, so full of brilliance, seemed to darken that year. Kindness seemed suddenly overwhelmed by cruelty.
This was Manhattan that Christmas - full of promise and broken promise - full of prayer and broken prayer - full of things lost and abandoned, like letters, trying once again to be delivered.
Part 6
That Christmas Eve I stepped off the subway and stood in front of the aging hotel. It was dusk. I remember standing there, thinking about the blizzard, the hustler, the stolen train, the unread letters waiting to be burned and the one crumpled prayer in my pocket.
I thought about my sleepless self, afraid of my own dreams. And I thought about every bit of faith that had fallen off the back of a truck in me.
But you can say no at any time.
Instead I took a deep breath and pushed through the smudged glass doors.
The lobby was darker than the street and the Prisoner immediately began to howl. There were 30 guys leaning against the lobby walls. And as I glanced from face to face I recognized that same hungry pitiless gaze.
Addiction is a form of slavery. And I could see the master in their blood was forcing each through the same silent calculation, sizing me up and staring at the package under my arm.
To the left was a dilapidated elevator. To the right a staircase. I knew if I stepped into the elevator I would be jumped and this small corner of Christmas would disappear into the smoke of some crack pipe. So I turned toward the staircase and started up. I was on the first-floor landing when three of the lobby boys started up after me.
I knew what was coming. There would be a knife or a gun. I would fight, but the box would be torn open. And Christmas would be passed hand over hand back out onto the street and sold like ransom for a twenty-minute high.
“Ho ho ho…What’s in the box Santa? That present for me?”
I felt my fingers tighten around the letter in my pocket. And it felt like Christmas was about to slip through my hands.
But I suddenly felt too as though I was trying to save something larger than a mere toy. Something broken and scattered about me. Something larger than myself. Something lost.
Part 7
Manhattan is a cathedral. And like all cathedrals it is full of broken prayers.
In this cathedral city the broken prayers move by and around each other each searching for some way to be heard. They sweep by in cabs, on teeming sidewalks, in well worn channels from apartments to offices and back again. And all around in the avenues and the side streets, in the bus stations and the late night diners, in the after hours bars and the echo of a train circling again and again, the pieces of something lonely and something holy chase each other, trying to become whole.
Something in us all breaks off and away from just living.
But sometimes - every once in a great while - one piece will nudge up against another. The plea of a broken prayer somehow becomes its own answer.
In that instant, it humbly understands that it is a part of some design greater than its own want. And doing so it becomes whole again. Made whole through the brokenness.
And so each becomes the instrument of its own redemption. It is touched - forever - by the memory of the thing it was always meant to be.
Part 8
I was on the 5th floor landing when I set the package down. The lobby boys were jogging up after me now. “Ho Ho Ho Mister…We got a present for you.”
I kicked the first one up in the chest and he tumbled back toward the others carrying them all down to the landing. I was hollering, raving really. And suddenly afraid, they turned. “You crazy man! You crazy!” and retreated.
I whispered, “Merry Christmas,” picked up the box, made my way to the 7th floor, found the apartment and rang the bell.
Chance’s mother’s expression was set, the way concrete sets. I had seen that same cement in my own eyes. I knew how hard it was. She had that same rebar of broken hope running through her. She held the door tight so I stepped back.
Looking down and away I realized that she was standing there in a tee shirt - and nothing else. She sensed my unease, then opened the door wider showing herself to me. “It’s 100 up front.”
I was staring at the floor. “Does Chance Golden live here? I’m supposed to deliver this package to Chance Golden.”
She paused. “What kind of package?” Searching my face now, the unease back on her side of the door.
“I don’t know lady,” I said. “I’m just a delivery guy.” She held the door tightly and behind her I could hear a child calling.
“Who are you?” she said again. “You’re no delivery man.”
“Is this the right place?” I asked. “Is Chance Golden here?”
She stared hard at me. “What do you want? What are you doing here Mister?”
“Look lady,” I answered. “I’m just a messenger.” My fist tightened on the letter. It felt suddenly cold. So I shrugged. “He wrote a letter.”
The voice began to plead over and over. “I did Mama…I did ...I did write a letter.” She pushed him back and leveled her gaze again at me again. “Who are you?”
So I lied once more. “I’m just a messenger.” And as I did a small boy pushed past his mother’s legs and stood in front of me jumping up and down. His face was full of the kind of joy that adults can only remember.
“Are you Chance Golden?” I asked and handed him the train. His mother had him by the shoulder and I glanced into her face as she looked down at her son there. For just a moment some forgotten feeling seemed to stir. Her expression, cemented in heartache, seemed to weaken.
Chance, train in arms, pushed back past her into the apartment and as he did we stood alone.
Her eyes were clear and for the briefest instant I saw a shadow of gratitude. Not for me, but for some prayer that was broken and abandoned long ago. Then the concrete reset in her eyes and she lowered her voice.
"Who do you think you are - coming here like this on Christmas Eve?”
“Lady,” I said, “You got this all wrong. I’m just a delivery guy.”
Her voice shook with anger. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, coming here like this! Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are!”
I whispered, “I’m just a messenger.” And as I did the door slammed shut and I heard the locks turn.
It was Christmas Eve. I was alone on the 7th floor of a welfare hotel in Manhattan when I first heard a voice as though from very far away.
It was clear and low, humble and full of a kind of mercy. And for the very first time the Prisoner spoke to me.
"Who do you think you are?” he whispered. “Who do you think you are?”
I answered, “I’m just a messenger.”
And as I did I saw myself stumbling in a blizzard. I saw a stolen toy and I heard the hustler calling out again and again - “chance…chance… last chance.”
I saw the sign: Everything gets lost for a time.
I saw the newspaper story and a line of lonely women wanting only a child to love. I saw a golden chance - written in crayon - put into my hand. I saw a chance golden to save Christmas - for a boy and for myself.
And I heard the Prisoner whisper to me, "They’re the same thing.”
All these things, these broken prayers, began to join like a freight train, one boxcar after another. As they did my convenient lie begin to crumble and fall away. And beneath it, in its place, stood something undeniable.
Something true.
I was only a messenger. That was all I had ever been. That is all any of us are.
I saw the sign: Everything gets lost for a time.
I saw the newspaper story and a line of lonely women wanting only a child to love. I saw a golden chance - written in crayon - put into my hand. I saw a chance golden to save Christmas - for a boy and for myself.
And I heard the Prisoner whisper to me, "They’re the same thing.”
All these things, these broken prayers, began to join like a freight train, one boxcar after another. As they did my convenient lie begin to crumble and fall away. And beneath it, in its place, stood something undeniable.
Something true.
I was only a messenger. That was all I had ever been. That is all any of us are.
The city is full of prisoners.
But it's up to you to decide.
The Prisoner whispered to me, “You can say yes at any time.”
I left and walked to Times Square and I stopped next to the panhandler. It had started to snow and the End is Near Preachers had all gone home.
We stood alone for a long moment. Then he turned and looked at me and whispered,
“The hard is trying to make you beautiful.”
I stared at him, then felt for the scrap in my pocket. I walked away, found a pay phone and dialed. The girl with a stammer answered.
“You probably don’t remember me” I said. “I’m the guy at the post office you gave your number to.”
I heard her breathe in hard like a wish and hold it. Then she whispered, “Yes I remember,” and her voice shook.
“I know you don’t know me at all. But tomorrow is Christmas. And I thought, maybe, if you want we could meet for coffee and talk a while.”
I could hear her bite her lip and it sounded like she wanted to cry. But finally she said, “Yes - yes. I’d like that very very much.”
I went home that night and laid down in the dark. Outside the snow, fresh and clean, was falling fast trying once more to cover the grey and the ruined and make Manhattan remember what it was always meant to be.
I closed my eyes and said out loud, “Living is hard.”
I heard the Prisoner answer, “Living is beautiful.” For the first time in a year I slept through the night.
And all night long, in the deserted avenues and side streets of my dreams I heard the panhandler calling out his message to the cathedral city full of prisoners and broken prayers.
"The hard is trying to make you beautiful.
The hard is trying to make you beautiful.”
Let It.
May all of you save Christmas this year for someone else and for yourself.
They’re the same thing.
But it's up to you to decide.
The Prisoner whispered to me, “You can say yes at any time.”
I left and walked to Times Square and I stopped next to the panhandler. It had started to snow and the End is Near Preachers had all gone home.
We stood alone for a long moment. Then he turned and looked at me and whispered,
“The hard is trying to make you beautiful.”
I stared at him, then felt for the scrap in my pocket. I walked away, found a pay phone and dialed. The girl with a stammer answered.
“You probably don’t remember me” I said. “I’m the guy at the post office you gave your number to.”
I heard her breathe in hard like a wish and hold it. Then she whispered, “Yes I remember,” and her voice shook.
“I know you don’t know me at all. But tomorrow is Christmas. And I thought, maybe, if you want we could meet for coffee and talk a while.”
I could hear her bite her lip and it sounded like she wanted to cry. But finally she said, “Yes - yes. I’d like that very very much.”
I went home that night and laid down in the dark. Outside the snow, fresh and clean, was falling fast trying once more to cover the grey and the ruined and make Manhattan remember what it was always meant to be.
I closed my eyes and said out loud, “Living is hard.”
I heard the Prisoner answer, “Living is beautiful.” For the first time in a year I slept through the night.
And all night long, in the deserted avenues and side streets of my dreams I heard the panhandler calling out his message to the cathedral city full of prisoners and broken prayers.
"The hard is trying to make you beautiful.
The hard is trying to make you beautiful.”
Let It.
May all of you save Christmas this year for someone else and for yourself.
They’re the same thing.
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