Oh, Just F*ck F*ckin' Christmas

I think I was five or six when the magic of Christmas began to be destroyed for me. Before that, it was all sitting on Santa's lap, parades, Christmas village at the mall. Small, penny candy canes were for the asking and there was always a tree. Never the greatest tree but we generally didn't have a Charlie Brown tree either, so yeah, it was a Merry Christmas at the Thompson house. Ah, sorry ... apartment.

We lived in an ancient apartment building in midtown.

To a kid growing up it was a wonderful place, full of hidden, dusty, unused places to find and hide in. Old dumbwaiter shafts, coal shoots, and boiler rooms were of course off limits, but hey I was a kid. I was supposed to misbehave. Right?

Anyway, what really took the blinders off of me about Christmas, and childhood, in general, was when I came home from kindergarten and saw we had a huge number of presents under the tree! When I had left that morning, there had been five little gifts--with suspiciously familiar bows glued on top--sitting under a slightly bare tree. Now, there were dozens! And most were beautifully wrapped too. I ran to the tree and wanted to open one, Christmas being three days away or not.

I was spanked by my father and sent to my room the moment I touched one!

Having not even gotten it fully picked up when he saw me, yelled at me, popped my butt and then hauled me to my room by my shirt and told me not to come out till dinner, I thought that rather unfair. So I protested by crying. That was kind of my only Kung Fu at that time, and it was not strong. But hey, I was a kid. What did I know?

Dinner time came and went, but I was not called to the table by my mother. Finally when she came to my room she looked scared, which of course scared me. But she told me not to cry, and then she told that Santa had called and was very mad that I had tried to open a present early. He was also mad because I had tried to open a present that wasn't for me. So, I must not touch the presents again, or he would come take them all back and I would get anything but a bunch of switches.

Or maybe just underwear.

So, to avoid that horror of horrors for any child, I avoided our Christmas tree like it had cooties. I walked hugging the far wall whenever I came into the room. Hell, I made it a point to not even look at it too closely all the way to Christmas Eve.

But I was glowing inside. Christmas morning could not get there quickly enough as far as I was concerned. I was going to be like the richest kid, on the whole, block, with all those new toys to play with. Every kid in the apartment building was going to envy me. I was counting the last days in hours, then in minutes.

When I went to bed Christmas Eve I was sure I would never get to sleep. I was so wound up I was all but levitating above the bed. Ready at a moment's notice to jump out of the bed, I did not want to be in, rush to the living room and shred all that wrapping paper.

But sleep took me into dark and somewhat unpleasant dreams.

That I didn't wake till late morning was odd--looking back on it now, no it wasn't-- but once I was awake I came out that bed like I had been catapulted. I raced down the hall, tore into the living room ...

... To find five small, lonely looking poorly wrapped presents under that half-bald tree.

"Santa said you had been too bad, so he took them all back." That was my father's response to the look on my horror-stricken face.

You know, even for a scumbag motherfucker who would hide two dozen kilos of cocaine in his house, for a mafia connection of his, by disguising them as normal Christmas presents ... that was some sick fuckin' twisted shit to tell a five-year-old child.

To say I cried is, of course, a given. I was told to stop crying, which, of course, worked about as well as telling a woman to calm down. Then I was told if I didn't stop crying I wouldn't even get the presents that were left. Ever seen a five-year-old try to stone his father to death with unwanted Christmas presents? Sigh. Yeah.

Anyway, that was the beginning of my dislike of Christmas, but it was by no means the last time my life became shit on that putrid holiday.

Take my tenth year for example.

That was the wonderful year when the fact that my father was an asshole, on levels that none of us really knew of, began to come to light. It was Christmas afternoon. A cold fog, which was determined not to ever go away, had been hanging around the base of the apartment building. That fog hid the police cars when they pulled up. All ... fourteen of them.

Answer me this, how does a guy working as a number cruncher for a savings and loan suddenly has a hidden bank account with a million dollars in it? A million dollars that cannot be traced from any other account, it just suddenly appeared in this account. A Christmas present no doubt, right?

Yeah ... no.

Dad was laundering money through the savings and loan. Apparently again from that same, unnamed, mafia connection. But they could not find a source, no matter how hard first the police and then the FBI tried, and Dad wouldn't name his buddy who had given him the money to move.

So dad went to jail on Christmas day. And mom and I went to her brother's house while the police tore our apartment to postage stamp size pieces trying to find any clue that would help them catch a bigger fish. And of course, given how hard they were looking ... they found something.

Dad's journal. Where he had listed every fuckin' red cent he had laundered, every ounce of cocaine he had held, and every person that he knew had been killed by that mafia connection.

But, not the man's name. And no amount of interrogation could get it out of him. And he told them his journal was simply a fiction story he was working on. That he hoped to become a writer. And they could not find a single shred of proof that it wasn't.

So they charged Dad with money laundering and tax evasion for all that money, and I was basically told, by my mother, that he was going to go away till after I got out of high school. Or later. Possibly ... much later. Strangely enough, I wasn't too broken up over that. He and I were not close. Had not been close for years. He was never there to be close to. I had school, he had his work. We meet at dinner to watch TV together, and that was all I ever really saw of him. On the weekend, he was never there. He always had something important he had to go do with friends.

Or, alone.

It was the alone part, those trips when he disappeared till Sunday afternoon by himself, that would destroy my life.

A couple of Christmases later.

By that time, I was in my mid-teens, and it had been a couple years since I had seen my father, I was at that point in life when things you never knew about began to come to light. I'm sure everyone has one of those times. You discover your parents are into BDSM, or that your father can only get off if he's being ass fucked by your mother. You know what I mean, weird shit you didn't really want to know about, but learned anyway.

Dad ... well, I'm sure everyone have had police detectives show up at the door, on Christmas fuckin' Eve, of course, to ask if Dad had been here. See, the prison they put him in was for nonviolent criminals. Money launderers. Tax evaders. It was never really meant to hold a serial killer.

Yeah, of all the goddamn Christmas presents to get handed to you. "Oh, by the way, it seems your father has killed about forty people, in a dozen cities, and he murdered two guards with a shiv and stole a car."

They had him on work release. He was the perfect prisoner up to that point. Just doing his time, spending most of it reading and writing.

When he got free they searched the cell he shared and they talked to the guy who lived there too. His cell mate was ecstatic that dad was gone. Apparently, dad had that man terrified for his life. Dad had gotten drunk on prison hooch one night and in that drunken state dad had told him about all the people he had killed. Specific, person by person. And in great detail.

Dad's cell mate told the guards and police that. They sent dad's DNA to a dozen detectives in cities hundreds of miles away. His DNA matched the evidence they had, and now there was a manhunt for the man I called father. The man who had changed my diaper was also a brutal killer. A mass murderer--who was proven guilty but not convicted yet--was who taught me how to pee standing up.

The FBI put mom and me into a hotel, in another city, far from home, on Christmas day.

I fuckin' hate Christmas. Really fuckin' hate it.

From what we learned later, apparently Dad ran to his "friends" and they needed all that knowledge he still had in his head. Computer passwords, account numbers, and the digital locations where he had filtered their money through. There were millions of their dollars they had not been able to get at since he had been in prison. So they hid him ... till it hit the news exactly what else he had done. They might need him but they sure as hell didn't want to be caught hiding him, not after that.

So they told him to leave.

That will never, to my dying day never, cease to amaze me. The Mafia, Al Capone type mafia let him simply walk away after he told them what they needed. I've watched enough movies; I would have put money on it that they would have had him sleeping with the fishes. Nope. Off you go you sick murdering bastard, and Merry fuckin' Christmas to you.

I have to give it to dad. He's a smart man for a psycho killer. He stayed away. Went underground. Keep killing, yeah ... I'm pretty sure of that. A tiger can't change his stripes, a leopard his spots or a mass murder his hobby. But he kept it low-key, hiding the bodies better.

Now my birthday is on the day after Thanksgiving, yeah I'm a Black Friday discount kid. I had just turned eighteen less than a month before and I was at the shopping mall. The day before Christmas. Looking for a nice gift for my mom, fighting the crowds to buy what I should have bought a month back. And that was when I saw my dad.

With a beard. Dressed as Santa.

I pulled out my phone and called Mom's cell phone. Why that was my first action I don't know but it was. To tell her where he was suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world.

My uncle answered the phone.

I heard but didn't hear my uncle telling me to get to the hospital. That mom had been attacked and they had her in the E.R. and were trying to keep her alive. I didn't focus on what he was saying because I was looking at my dad, in that hated blood red velvet Santa suit. He had walked to the center of the Christmas village and was looking around at all the shopping mothers, happy children, bored fathers, stupid teen girls, hoping to get laid teen boys and the one mall security guard who was not paying attention to anything but a woman with big tits in a tight sweater.

I was walking towards my dad when the words sank in, and I knew it had been him. How many times had I heard him say shit like "I'll never leave you for another man if I knew I was going to die." How many times?

I was only feet away from him when he smiled and undid the big, thick, shiny, black belt holding his red coat together. Our eyes met as it was opening and he was pulling out the sawed-off pump shotgun. For a half-second there was no recognition. Then his eyes went wide.

"Henry?"

As I reached him, and my hands closed around that shotgun and I pulled it from his startled grasp, I acknowledged that ... yes, I was Henry. I was his son. And then I emptied eight 12 gauge shells into his face, at point blank range.

And that would be why I'm here in a jail cell, on Christmas Eve, for the murder of a mall Santa named Carl Gusta.

Yep, I fuckin' hate Christmas.