christmas city

It was the summer before my senior year of high school when I worked at a local Christmas superstore in Northern New Jersey. Out on the highway somewhere past Red Lobster and before the turnoff to the mall it occupied a large square building. During the off-season they referred to it as “Summer at the City” even though everyone and their mother called it Christmas City year-round. Some names die hard and this one topped the proverbial Christmas tree. It was fun to say while simultaneously evoking images of Santa’s wonderland smack dab in the heart of the New Jersey suburbs.

During the off-season the massive two warehouse-sized floors of artificial Christmas trees and wrapping paper were replaced with patio furniture, grills, and other summer yard-garbage. The store was owned by a family who were also the largest manufacturer of artificial Christmas trees in the world, or so all their boxes said. True or not, we didn’t know before the internet was around to clear up such boastful claims.

When I was 10 or 11 my parents decided to trade Unitarian spirituality for utilitarian Methodism and had my sister and I baptized. It was a sad ceremony held after Sunday mass to an empty church either to not embarrass us or to spare the congregation the pathetic sight of teen baptism. Far from a southern dunking-in-the-river rebirth, this was just two awkward kids standing by a ceremonial birdbath while the minister tapped water on our foreheads and recited a few words in the middle of an uncomfortably unoccupied sanctuary.

Why the Methodist church, I’m not sure. We were very Italian in a town with no Italians and the Methodist church was blindingly white in color and congregation. But the local options were limited to Unitarian, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Methodist. We’d done the first and my mom’s gripping Catholic guilt would never allow her to be a family of half-assed Catholics. I’m naive to the intricate differences between Presbyterian and Methodist but from the window shopper’s perspective of a 10 year old it appeared to be a toss up of which group of boring people you wanted to spend your Sunday morning with.

When it was finally my turn to be baptized, I felt nothing. No awakening, no lightening bolt of spirituality, not even the annoyance of having to be baptized a year or two shy of puberty. It was just a guy in a funny robe tapping my head with stale water while I looked forward to brunch. It is safe to say the Unitarian church had ruined me. Going from “extended family” picnics of spin-art and zip lines with the most diverse and interesting people in the town (“the druggies”) to this version of Methodism was like leaving the Gathering of the Juggalos for an Eagles concert. It would have taken a lot more than a splash of water to make a believer out of me.

Aside from the cheese omelette after the ceremony, I was also gifted a Star Wars digital watch and a pair of godparents who had been my parent’s best friends during our pre-baptism years. My godmother was an artist who was also the creative director for Christmas City, so like all quality careers in this country it was the family connections that got me in.

Into the warehouse at least, which was the back corner of the lower floor, through a pair of swinging doors past the lines of grills and patio furniture. If the sales floor was the dating app profile pic and flirty text, the warehouse was the awful date with the person in their more accurate and absolutely disheveled form. Stuff piled everywhere, chairs on chairs on chairs, open grill boxes with a stolen handle blocking the path. A complete and utter shit show, and a guy named Doug ran it all.

Doug was North Jersey guido to the max. He even drove an IROC-Z which you might know from its 80s joke fame:

Q: What does IROC stand for?

A: Italian Retards out Cruising

A joke offensive on two fronts yet still funny, or it would be if you had met Doug. I cringe at any mention of the word retard in this sense but there is no better way to say it in the parlance of the times; Doug was a classic Italian retard.

And cruise he did. This guy cruised so hard that his one trip a year was to Daytona Beach for Spring Break. When he first told me it took me some time to wrap my head around the idea. It never occurred to me you could skip the whole college part and just go straight to Spring Break, but Daytona Doug had it all figured out. He would even whip out one of those white envelopes of photos the developer gives them to you in and spend twenty minutes telling me the story of every wet t-shirt and blurry motel shot.

In appearance, Daytona Doug looked like he skipped leg day everyday as he was all shoulders all day long. Unfortunately, he emphasized this with the shortest short-shorts that maximized the extreme poultry-esque physique of his chicken legs. In fact, he wore the same exact thing everyday: high tops – loose, the aforementioned short shorts, and a nipple-revealing tight tank top whose name brings us to our second politically incorrect term and a bonafide New Jersey classic; the wife-beater.

Not only was he top heavy, but he had an odd hunch to his back that was really pronounced whenever he’d pop a cigarette aggressively out of his mouth like someone who had just started smoking, which he probably had as Doug didn’t exactly smack you as someone who had figured out who he was yet. Smoker? Sure, let’s try.

Daytona Doug also spoke exactly like you’d guess he would…

“Yo, Steve….you get any pussy this weekend or whaaaat?”

In Doug’s world, everyone was a “fuckin’ faggot” who wasn’t “gettin’ alotta pussy…” And even some who were getting a lot of pussy were still fucking faggots. Basically everyone was a faggot, unless they were a pussy (not to be confused with “getting pussy”). But there were also “fuckin’ pussy faggots”, which was something else all together. Either way, some combination of these three words monopolized the sound that came out of his mouth. I’d brag that of the four dock workers, I was Double D’s favorite, but the bar was so low because we were all a bunch of fuckin’ pussy faggots. I just happened to have gotten him high one time.

“Yo, faggot. You got weed? Let’s smoke…”

So we sat in the IROC like two Italian retards not cruising and smoked a bowl while he jammed something as predictable as everything else about him on the stereo, like probably Bon Jovi but I don’t remember exactly. Maybe Whitesnake. Not for the music’s sake of course, but to flex the power of the sound system. I just knew after that day I was his number two even if I was selected from an assortment of rejects.

The rejects did have names. There was James, who had that look in his eyes like he was always looking past you. Something else was going on in his head that had nothing to do with unloading semi-trucks of patio furniture. In no uncertain terms he let you know that he knew no one liked him and he didn’t care one bit.

At the job we taped a lot of boxes, so you would get used to not reloading the tape guns and just using the rolls. When it was time to cut the clear tape, without thinking we’d bite the edge and the tape would rip. One day, Daytona Doug (aka Dougtona) asked James to tape a box in front of us all just to make a point. When the time came, James asked for scissors instead of using his teeth, failing the test and earning him an extra special Double D pussy faggot badge of dishonor.

The other coworker was Jesus who was seventeen – a fact I remember only because he had the job to pass the time between joining the Marines and actually being old enough for bootcamp. Apparently just because you had to be eighteen to join the military it didn’t mean you couldn’t sign up early and wait. He was a really nice guy, very quiet with eyes that expressed he was seeing most things for the first time. I don’t think he knew what he was getting himself into as the Gulf War began shortly after he would have finished boot camp and I thought about him often during it.

Lastly was the rich kid, which would usually be my title at a job like this as I did show up everyday in a gold Audi 5000, but this kid was actually the son of the tree king, so he blew in and out sailing on the winds of nepotism. If the family had a vacation, or a pool party, or pretty much anything the rich kid was out of there. When he was there he did the work of 1000 rich kids, which is to say…almost nothing.

There was one other guy who I barely remember anything about except that he drove a Triumph TR6 convertible which seems like a fancy car for the job but maybe he was also a fellow friend or member of the artificial tree family. I once mistakenly referred to his car as a Fiat and he responded with such flabbergasted indignation that for the rest of the summer I made it a point to continually refer to the “Fiat” without the slightest hint that I was doing it on purpose to annoy him.

Most of our job was to pull orders for customers who had just put together their purchase on the large sales floor. If Tony Soprano and his wife went out to get a new pool set, this is exactly where they would have gone, stylistically and geographically. The furniture was all white-framed with colorful plastic strapping and the tables were always white trimmed with frosted glass and a hole in the center for what I would call an umbrella but is professionally referred to as a parasol.

Unfortunately for the real life Tony Sopranos, when they came to get their orders there were two problems. The first being that every single piece of furniture in the warehouse was scratched. Every. Single. One. I don’t know where the mysterious trucks arrived from, but it always looked like drunk monkeys packed them. Chairs on top of chairs on top of tables. Sad attempts to bumper a corner with broken cardboard. Rolled cellophane used as a magical cloak of repair half way up or down a crooked stack of chairs. A real mess.

The second problem was that we were sometimes-stoned 17-year-olds and no one had properly taught us how to affix a table and two chaise lounges to the top of a Cadillac with polyester twine. There were several approaches to this, mine would most coincide with “spider on caffeine” on the chart of spider webs spun by spiders on different drugs*. Twine everywhere, which you had to do when you had a Tony Soprano yelling in your ear while doing it.

Mostly, the job was boring. If it had been now I would have spent a lot of time looking at my phone, but instead I mostly sat on a box while Daytona Doug laid his hightops on the mess of paperwork on his desk and waxed unpoetically about yet another Daytona exploit. I’m not sure I can overemphasize how much this guy’s life completely revolved around spring break. On a good day we might make a ball out of packing tape and use old wrapping paper tubes as bats to get a game of loading dock stickball going, but that was the extent of the workplace hi-jinx. Most of the time was spent waiting for customers or waiting for trucks to unload, two things that didn't happen that often.

At the end of the summer I went back to school, leaving Doug and the dock behind forever. I’m sure we had a goodbye of some kind but I don’t remember it. I guarantee Doug’s last words were some combo of pussy and faggot though, albeit with a inflection that suggested endearment which he was also capable of using them as on the rare occasion. As much as I make fun of him, Doug was the best part of the job but at Christmas City that bar is as low as being the favorite of the pussy faggots.

Christmas City is no longer there which you could blame on the other Christmas superstore opening directly across the highway (wtf?) but the reality is more likely that the shit show could not go on for much longer. The place always had that desperate feel of a store on its last legs even though it was probably running that way for years.

Shortly thereafter my godparents moved upstate and stopped speaking to my parents and – by association – my sister and I. Why I'm not sure but I guarentee  there were three sides to that story. Apparently my godmother was going to quit retail and eventually just be an artist, though I don’t thing she ever did.

My godfather worked at a thumbtack manufacturer, the kind that those color thumbtacks neatly arranged on a piece of white cardboard and are tightly wrapped in clear cellophane come from. Apparently the owner was going to leave the company to him, but I don’t think he ever did.

And I sit here today, writing this and thinking of this version of myself. Young and dumb and about as confident as Daytona Doug was of his smoking habit. Sliding through this workplace like a condescendingly observant tourist, too proud to realize I was just another foolish character in someone elses story.

A fool I always promished myself I'd someday learn to love, but I don't think I ever did....but I'll get there eventually...

...Christmas City.