Matthew Licht

Fuck Christmas

Since it was Christmas Day Mom wanted to get drunk. This sounded like a good idea but it’s illegal to sell alcohol in Massachusetts on holidays. She would not be discouraged.

“We’ll drive up to New Hampshire. There’s liquor stores just across the State line.”

That sounded depressing. A storm had covered the Northeastern Corridor with several feet of snow that’d mostly turned black and crusty.  But anything was better than being at home, except maybe the Bay State Prison where I’d spent the last few Xmases. 

“And then we can drive a bit further north and visit your father.”

She put icing on the suicidal cake. My old man’s buried just outside the Navy Stockade at Portsmouth. He struck an officer while intoxicated. They could’ve strung him up, but he took care of that detail himself. 

Black ice blotted out the long stretch of industrial blight. Mom’s naturally chatty. I turned on the radio to drown her out. She doesn’t appreciate Satanic metal, and switched to a station heavy on the Xmas carols. She sang along tunelessly and it was better than her usual nonsense about happier times.

She’d dressed as though we were headed to Miami instead of closer to the North Pole. The car’s heater was broken. She mewled about eggnog, Yule logs and chestnuts burning on an open fire.

The New Hampshire liquor stores were all open. Even so, there were long lines. Xmas is hard to face sober. Mom waited till we were back in the car to open the first bottle. 

“Did you see how all those men were staring at me.”

The attention made her merry. The sky got lower and lower, grayer and grayer. Jesus Christ is born, hallelujah. A storm warning interrupted the carols and prayers. It was strongly recommended that citizens remain in their homes and avoid the highways. 

The prison loomed deathly pale against black clouds headed in from over the Atlantic. There were no other cars in the visitors parking lot. 

The inmates’ graveyard is just outside the chain-link perimeter. The names on the tiny headstones face in towards what amounted to home and family for those dead men.

Mom got weepy, even though her first ex-husband had spent all her money, knocked her up and then left her for some other alcoholic floozy. I never even met the guy, but he’d passed on the prison gene. 

The ice storm hit while we were on the bridge that leads onto I-95. The old car had bald tires and we skidded like a rattlesnake in a jar of vaseline. Police cars had staked out all the exits and the cops were waving people off the road. I prayed they wouldn’t make me pull over because I wasn’t too sober at that point and wasn’t supposed to go out of State. 

Mom saw the pink neon motel sign. “Oh look I stayed there with your father once. At least I think it was him.”

Seemed like a miracle when the old guy at the reception desk took a check for the room. He must’ve been new in the motel business, or maybe he was drunk too. 

“Oh look honey a double bed. We can snuggle up and watch TV like when you were a baby.”

A bottle hit the floor and I awoke to what looked like a snowdrift dancing up and down on my lap. The TV glowed an electric snowstorm and roared static. Mom looked up. 

“Oh I thought it’d be OK as long as you’re asleep.”

Actually it felt pretty good, and it wasn’t as though I had any other hot dates lined up. So it was time to follow through, head in where I came out of, turn life into a round-trip. The place where everything started was nice and cozy and Mom was singing jingle bells but then a thought crossed her mind and she stopped. 

“Ooh baby weren’t you awful lonely in prison?”

“They never stuck me in the hole.”

She moaned. “Oh that’s not what I mean, honey. Didn’t you have a nice cellmate to hug you and keep you warm on Christmas Eve?”

Those are the memories you forget as soon as they let you out. “I’d rather not talk about it, Ma.”

“You don’t have to talk about it, baby. Just let me feel it.” She assumed the position.

TV glare showed a wreath of dead flowers that pulsated with the cathode vibrations. The thing went in slow.

“Ooh now I remember why I fell in love with your papa.”

Guess I’d learned a thing or two at the Bay State Correctional Facility, the only place I was ever popular. 

Outside the motel the snow fell and fell. Mom sounded so happy. She sang about her dreams of a white Xmas. 

The white stuff came out, eventually. And I remembered through an alcoholic haze that there was something else I’d picked up in prison that maybe I should’ve told her about.