Saving Christmas

Saving Christmas There was a panhandler that for years stood at the center of Times Square. One of the forgotten souls, a little off and dressed in rags, he had the air of someone that had found their purpose. Each day deep into the night he chanted his creed to the crowd passing by, ignoring him. “Living is hard,” he cried out. “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. Beauty had begun to seem beyond my reach. 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. It was the first fall of the year. With snow and love the first fall is always the purest. The heart of the city is never ready for the cold. City people bury themselves in apartments, turns the locks and pray 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. That snowy night I started down Third Avenue, alone once more in a storm on the deserted streets. At 2 am it is 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 stood a solitary man. 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. Lost soul, I thought. But as I got closer I could see he the kind of guy that makes his living from unlocked doors. In most cities there is a tribe like this. Street guys, as merciless as coyotes, that live by taking. They move in the shadows and whisper in ears. They prey on the naïve and innocence. They think of themselves as wised up. But the truth can sometimes ruin. The truth can sometimes make a soul cruel. You can’t be wised up without being ruined in some hard to understand way. They all ended up the same, scraping at the sharp 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. “Sweet deal.” I pushed past. I wanted the storm and the solitude and maybe later a few hours of fitful sleep. “Back off. You’re crowding me,” I muttered. “No listen mister…listen…I got something…” He held out the box and in a faint accent, maybe Eastern European, whispered, “Maybe you got a boy. It’s a train… you know… for Christmas.” “Get lost,” I growled. As he stepped closer I raised an open hand, the universal sign to every skel on the planet. ‘Stop…stop now… or it gets deep.’ “C’mon Mister…it’s the goods…” he whispered. I glanced at him. “What do I want with some hot toy from a skeeve like you?” He felt the hard in my eyes and shrugged. “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 hope and love and even faith. They all fall off the back of a truck at some point. “Fifty bucks,” he said. He was ruining the white, this guy. Spilling his gray all around 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 else that would rather walk through a foot of snow than listen to their dreams howl. He was right. I was a lost cause. A hard case. 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, standing in a foot of snow and staring into this street hustler’s face 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. He hollers and pleads, trying desperately to tell me and though I can never quite hear him clearly. I have learned to listen for him. I would free him if I could. He knows more than me. I think he’s trying to save me. The hustler yammered on. “Look…Mishka,” he lowered his voice. “I’m freezing here. How’s 20 by you?” “Back off,” I yelled into the wind. “What do I look like - Santa Claus?” “Ok mister…ok,” he muttered. “Last chance.” He hesitated and the snow, the storm and even the city itself seemed to pause.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 face, already weathered by time and the streets, was turning scarlet from the cold. And I could see a hard penance had begun to force its way into his features. “Five,” I said dangling a bill. 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 fin. “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 his 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 poor ken and no longer of my own choosing. 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 just 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 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 or the bills or the wife. It means I’m tired of the harangue of living and myself. 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. 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 on this side of the river 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 convince 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 wound of wisdom bite 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 and 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 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 again, something I couldn’t quite make out, something about this toy and the Santa story, lined up perfectly in front of me like a pair of boxcars suddenly joined one to the other. ’You can say no at any time.” I told myself. “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 some whisper in the back of you.’ But this felt 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. “I’ll go to the Post Office this afternoon.” Every great city Post Office is like a church. City people speak in hushed tones and stand quietly in line, waiting to confess what they lost. Like 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. 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 stepped in front, looked hard into my eyes like she was trying to see into the heart of me. Then brightening she handed me a business card. I read her name and number. She squeezed my hand and whispered, “Call me.” Puzzled, I looked at it, then her, then continued. As I passed, each girl stepped forward with a practiced smile and a card. Jessica, Margaret, Mary… call me…call me…call me. At 23, like most men, I 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 in the dark for a few hours 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 never got closer than 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 and glanced at me nervously when I reached down and handed it back. She was nervous and embarrassed but tried to steel herself. She unfolded 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 carefully folded it put it in my pocket. And I stepped into the letter room. Some things 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 are maps to finally show us how to straighten all the bent in our dreams. 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, 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. And on December 26 every year, when the last bit of hope had been crushed 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 took their place. A half dozen guys were picking through the piles. I stepped 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 city places to meet a husband. The Santa Letter Room was #1.” He showed me his collection of business cards. He nudged me and whispered, “Ho ho ho.” I felt for the cards in my pocket, then dropped them into a bin. All except the phone bill girls. Then I reached in grabbed a letter 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 into each under those tiny words. What Child is This began to play through the intercom. A postal clerk, dumped another bag of letters into a bin. He 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 now? 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 echo again - “last 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, begging me. 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. That year seemed 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 five were panhandling at the traffic lights off Herald Square - many times swept into anonymous cars, disappearing forever. And along Lexington Avenue in the 20s a new strip of hookers appeared. Working moms. And each day the panhandler stood in Times Square warning that life would become harder. Promising too that it would become beautiful. And that through some mystery the hard of that year was trying to make each of us beautiful. But the city, so full of brilliance, seemed to darken that year. There was only the hard. The hard eyes of strangers, the hard of hearts and the hard of finding your way through. 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. That Christmas Eve I stepped off the subway and stood in front of the aging hotel with a toy under my arm. It was dusk. I stood there, thinking about the blizzard, the hustler, the stolen train, the unread letters stacked and waiting to be burned and the one crumpled prayer in my pocket. Chance Golden. 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. You can say no at any time. Savvy people know how to ignore that voice. They know how to turn down the volume. It gets in the way of success. I was not savvy. I was the fool listening to a Prisoner and praying that the hard could somehow make me beautiful. 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 two dozen 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 an alley and the smoke of a 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. Last chance…chance…chance, the hustler called from blizzard of memory. “Ho ho ho…What’s in the box Santa? That a present for me? I felt my fingers tighten around the letter in my pocket. 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 just a toy. Something broken and scattered about me. Something larger than myself. Something lost. Manhattan is a cathedral. That’s hard to understand, but it’s true in the way some things can only be felt and not known. Something in us all breaks off and away from just living. From the hard of it. From the sharp of it. We become like broken prayers moving by and around each other. Searching for some way to be heard. These broken prayers in us sweep by in cabs, on teeming sidewalks, in well worn channels from apartments to offices and back again. And gather in the avenues and the side streets, in bus stations and late night diners, in after hours bars and the echo of a trains promising the next stop is the one you have been waiting for. Something in us all breaks off. And these pieces of something lonely and something holy chase each other, trying to remember what it is to be whole. But there is some design greater than our own small want. So every once in a great while - one piece will nudge up against another. We become each other’s answer. And doing so, each becomes whole again. Made whole through the brokenness. In the only way we ever could, we become the instruments of each other's redemption, and so then our own. Touched at last by the memory of the thing we were always meant to be. 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. “Merry Christmas,” I whispered then picked up the box and 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.” “Does Chance Golden live here?” I was staring at the floor. “I’m supposed to deliver this package to Chance Golden.” She paused. “What kind of package?” She was 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 tight 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 mister? What are you doing here?” “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 behind the door 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 handing him the train. His mother had him by the shoulder and I glanced into her face as she looked down at her son. 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…not 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 got a lot of nerve, coming here like this! Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are!” “I’m just a messenger,” I whispered. 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 - “last chance…chance…chance.” I saw the newspaper story then saw a sign: Everything gets lost for a time. I saw line of lonely women wanting only love. I saw a cavern of the undelivered and then a golden chance - written in crayon - put into my hand. I saw a chance golden to save Christmas - for a boy and then too for myself. And I heard the Prisoner whisper to me, "They’re the same thing.” All these things, all these broken prayers, began to join like a freight train, one boxcar after another. As they did my 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 you have to decide. The Prisoner whispered to me, “You can say yes at any time.” Back on the street it began to snow. I walked to Times Square and I stopped next to the panhandler. 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 for a moment, then, as I began to walk away I felt for the scrap in my pocket. I 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 and hold it. Then she whispered, “Yes… I remember,” and her voice shook. “I know you don’t know me at all, “ I said. “But tomorrow is Christmas. And I thought… maybe… if you want we could meet for coffee and maybe just 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 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.” And for the first time in a year I slept through the night. 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. WLM