That's Entertainment!

Christmas eve I drank 3$ pints of Keiths in a small bar called Coco Rico. I was the palest one in the room, the only one speaking english, and the only one sitting alone. At least until Allyn arrived and took a seat at the bar two hours after I made several desperate calls for her to join me, and not until I had been sitting there for two hours staring at my folded arms, methodically drinking. Finally she arrived, and with the glow of a projection style big screen tv casting a hockey game onto our faces, I put a small shiny gift into her reluctant hand, and by the end of the night she was in my bed.

Christmas day, I woke up alone, got stoned, and sat in the sill of my open window while I stared at the vacant offices across the alley. I played my guitar and watched the rain fall for an hour or so, ate a quiche tart, and went back to bed. I slept most of the day away, woke up, had a shower, put on a tie, and grabbed the #4 into the West. After riding the crest of a near empty eight lane bridge, I was deposited into the end of town with the beaches that stare into the twinkling lights of the city on the north shore. A city slowly crawling its way up an entire mountain range using capitalism and its spoils as fuel. Usually I hated walking in that place, but it was Christmas, and I couldn't help getting caught up in the beauty and the warmth of the evening. I was on my way to dinner at Frannie's, my hard heeled shoes clicking on the aging concrete with a little authority, a few presents in hand, my pants crisp and pressed, a 40$ bottle of tawny in my knapsack, and a nervous pitt in my stomach something awful.

I hardly spoke to Frannie anymore, not since she started seeing some architect with a nice car and a cabin in the woods which would impress any woman that is impressed by such things, and really, who wouldn't be. All my friends thought Frannie was crazy about me, and maybe she was, but I had nothing to offer her. I drank too much, didn't think about the future, and was too hung up on the past. I was good at getting crazy and running into the ocean full tilt with no clothes on at 2am, but that wasn't much for fodder the other times I didn't even have bus fare to get to her place to showcase my wild abandon. So it was inevitable that she would eventually meet someone that paid attention to these things, even if it was a tad dull. Thankfully though, Frannie's new boyfriend was unable to get out of Christmas dinner with his parents and the co-parent of his 2 year old daughter. So I set my mind at ease with the the assumption that things would be the way they normally were, and that we could just relax and act the way we normally did. How foolish of me to think so.

I couldn't help but think in the back of my mind that perhaps I was being offered up as a little bit of controversy and jealousy for an absent boyfriend to mull over as he had dinner with his ex, and his parents. I quickly found out though that this was not the case when Frannie asked me to move over and give her a little more room on the couch while we were sipping wine and watching a movie with her two other dinner guests that lived down the hall. I wasn't sitting that close, and was horribly embarrassed at this obvious declaration to the others in the room that I was evidently having trouble with Frannie's lack of availability. I buried my thoughts into the movie we were watching, the massive cheese plate, and the varietals of wine covering the table in front of me. The film was called Love Actually, a Christmas movie about relationships. People were falling in love all over the place in this movie, and I was draining glass after glass of whatever happened to be near the tapenade. Needless to say, by the time I sat at the head of the dinner table, I felt like a lecherous social reject. I was drunk and remember little. Except for a delight in the fact that I was eating an official turkey dinner for the first time in three years, mixed with the foggy details of an audible mental debate with little interest in any one else's opinion, over my confusion as to which Globe and Mail writer I lusted after more, Leah McLaren, or Lynn Crosbie. Without doubt my drunken banter was boring and indulgent, but it did produce one of the most insane pictures of myself ever taken. It looked like I was spinning like the slobbering Tasmanian Devil from the Warner cartoons, except for the fact that I was frozen in what looked like a moment of profound thought. After dinner we were on the Tawny when Frannie's boyfriend arrived. I was outnumbered and officially designated the fifth wheel, which was my cue to leave.

I arrived home shortly after midnight, Christmas was over, and I tried to remember every December 25 that I had been alive for. I began to have trouble remembering anything before 2003, when I spent the early beginnings of December 25th staring at the back of my soundly sleeping wife, crying over the realization that this would be our last Christmas together. Then my mind was on chapter skip, jumping all the way back to childhood memories of sleeping in the back of my parents car on our way home from Christmas dinner, and the sound snow makes when it's -40 and so crisp that you can hear someone approaching your front door from within the house. There was no chronology, no rational order to the memories that were presenting themselves. From stocked fridges full of pop and deli trays, to blasts of cold air around shaking hands in the shag carpeted foyer of my parents house, to my mom directing me not to pour grandma too much scotch, to introducing my first girlfriend to the family, to the smell of yorkshire pudding, and the dull sound of a console tv. It was a dizzying montage that ended with the realization that no one from my family had called me all day, the most current of December 25's.

I stripped down to my white briefs and black socks and hung my clothes neatly in the closest where they surely would be needed again without any time to wash them. I sat in the kitchen smoking, with my ass on the sink and my feet on the cement counter in front of me. As I went through the call display, listening to messages that were recorded earlier in the week, I had an overwhelming urge to gently allow myself to fall forward so that my face would smash into the concrete slab in front of me, but I was distracted by the thought of Allyn telling me at the bar the night before that she would feel a sense of release when her mother would beat her when she was a kid, and how she would often beg me to hit her harder and harder when we would be having sex. It all made sense as I sat there fantasizing about damaging the most visible part of my body. My mind turned to fucking Allyn in the shower on Christmas Eve, and the way her ankles looked, wrapped in my white shower curtain as I furiously pounded against her body with the sound of the water falling to the bottom of the tub in unison with our frantic movements. I jumped off the counter, picked up a black stool that was sitting on the floor in front of my computer and threw it across the room. Then I came back at the flimsy little thing again in a pathetic attempt at assertiveness over something inanimate and meaningless. This time I threw the stool clean out the large open window, into the empty alley below, and I had to stop myself short of destroying the whole place. Instead, I crashed into bed, in a final display of defeat, my mind slowly processing the events of the day into history for later consumption,

December 25th, 2006, I woke up alone, got stoned, and sat in the sill of my open window while I stared at the vacant offices across the alley.