This is Graham McFaye Wishing You and Yours a Very Merry Christmas
Every idea Graham McFaye had in the past month had been a bad idea. He walked into the Sumnerville Tavern on the evening of December 21st, 2008. That was a bad idea. He had brought along a ‘date’ of sorts, Amy Vanderbeak, his old high school sweetheart. That was an even worse idea. All of Graham’s ideas had been bad ideas. He was on a hot streak of bad ideas. He took off his red knit skull cap and silently vowed to be belligerently drunk by the end of the night.
The adorably precocious Amy Vanderbeak unbuttoned her pea coat. Always the courteous one, and a little too eager to subvert preconceived gender roles, she looked up at Graham and said, “you grab us a booth, and I’ll get the first round. Okay?”
Graham touched her face. He ran his thumb in a circle around her chin and said, “sure kiddo. Whatever you say.”
“Don’t touch me Graham.” She turned and walked to the U-shaped bar in the center of the room.
Graham shoved his skull cap into the pocket of his army surplus trench coat and sat down at a booth against the wall.
The Sumnerville Tavern was not a place that young folks frequented. Graham was 24 and Amy was 14 months to the day his junior. It wasn’t just their age, but also their attire that made them stand out. The six or seven haggard men sitting around the bar were almost uniformly dressed in dusty boots, tattered jeans, torn jackets, and baseball caps. Under his trench coat, Graham was wearing a pair of brown slacks and a red and green striped sweater reminiscent of the late Kurt Cobain. Amy was dressed in a blouse, a pleated skirt, red knee-high socks, and saddle shoes. Not only did Graham think her ensemble was pretentious, but also out of character. The Amy Vanderbeak he remembered wore formless corduroy pants and flannel shirts dotted with cigarette burns.
The Sunmerville Tavern was decorated for Christmas. Yellowed paper cut-outs of rosy cheeked Santa Clauses and majestically adorned Christmas trees were stapled into the pressed-wood paneled walls. Plastic snowflakes dusted with blue sparkles hung from the water stained ceiling tiles. The one television over the bar (a relic from 1970-something, complete with rabbit ear antennas) had a string of colored lights running along the circumference of the screen. The jukebox in the corner (its selection didn’t extend much beyond Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seager, and Meatloaf) was draped with ratty strands of silver garland.
Amy sat down at the booth with a pitcher full of beer and two frosted mugs. Her hair wasn’t like Graham remembered either. It had been a ruddy brown color that grew in long greasy ringlets down to her shoulders. Now it was dyed black and cut into a crisp bob that curled around her ears. Graham decided that she most certainly was trying to look like Ayn Rand. He filled her mug, then filled his own and immediately took a generous gulp.
“You know, it’s funny,” Amy said, “I’ve passed this bar a million times, but I’ve never been inside. I bet Sterling would just love it.”
Graham swallowed more beer and smacked his lips distastefully. “You should have gotten bottles. They let the draft beer sit in the kegs forever at this place. It always tastes funky.”
“Well, I bet Sterling would just love it. Even the stale beer.” Sterling was Amy’s new boyfriend. Whoever the lucky guy was, he must have been doing something right. Amy hadn’t shut up about him since they met in September.
Amy Vanderbeak was something of an oddity in blue collar Sumnerville. Her father was an optometrist and non-practicing Jew in a town where most people thought Judaism was synonymous with Atheism. Her mother was a chain-smoking housewife with no particular religious affiliation. She volunteered at the local Humane Society, nursing home, and rather paradoxically, the YWCA shelter for battered and abused women.
Graham took another gulp of his beer and raised his glass. “Cheers.”
Amy raised hers. “Cheers.”
“Bottoms up to better days.” He drank
“Bottoms up to . . . hold on, hold on just a second Graham cracker. I refuse to drink to that.”
He swallowed. “Why?”
“I don’t know Mr. Doom-n’-Gloom. Guess.”
“It’s just a toast Amy.”
“Well, it’s not a very good one. Tell me Graham cracker, just tell me, how can things get any better than this?”
Graham had to admit it was impossible to imagine how things could possibly get any better for Amy Vanderbeak. Aside from being enamored with some guy named Sterling, she was a 4.0 student at a satirically liberal arts school in southern Ohio. She had already spent a semester in Prague, and would study abroad again in Florence before graduating in the spring with a B.F.A. in art history.
Graham hadn’t told Amy he dropped out, and didn’t plan on telling her either.
She looked especially radiant that night. Her milky skin was practically glowing with pride in some accomplishment still unknown to Graham. She smiled at him. Even in the buzzing red light from the Budweiser sigh above, her teeth shimmered like pearls.
“You’re in a good mood.” Graham finished his first glass of beer and poured another. “What? Did you win the lottery?”
“No. Better. I couldn’t wait to tell you. I almost told you over the phone.” Unimaginably, things had somehow managed to get even better for Amy Vanderbeak. “Remember the internship I told you about?”
Graham took the bait. “The one in New York?”
“I wasn’t supposed to hear back until February, but I guess my application was pretty impressive.”
“You got it?”
“I start in the fall.”
Graham drank more. “Amy, that’s great!” It came out louder and more enthusiastically than he had intended. “You’re right. Things can’t get any better than this. I’d like to propose a toast, another toast. Forget about my first one. It never happened. Tonight,” he raised his glass, “tonight, we drink to you Amy Vanderbeak. I would wish you all the luck in the world, but we both know you’re not going to need it.” Graham meant the comment to be only half as sarcastic as it sounded. He drank again, not sure if he was elated or envious.
“Thank you, thank you.” She took a birdie sip from her beer. “Oh, but poor little Graham cracker, here I am blathering on and on about me, and I haven’t asked anything about you. How was your semester?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s . . . let’s just talk about it later.” By later, he meant when he was drunk.
Amy shifted her weight in the booth. “What about next semester? Have you scheduled your classes?”
“I don’t want to talk that either.”
“You don’t want to talk about school at all?”
“Nope.”
“OOOOOOhhhhh-kay.” She changed tactics. Maybe Graham would be more willing to discuss extracurricular activities. “What about that play you were in, the one you were so excited about?”
“What play?”
“I can’t remember the name. Sterling could. He’s got a memory like an elephant, remembers everything. He likes the theatre too, adores the theatre. This very same thing happened with him. I was telling him about you and your big part in the play and he asked what the play was. I got so embarrassed because I couldn’t remember. Anyway, you said you had a big part and that the playwright was a favorite of yours.”
Graham swallowed more beer. “Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“The play was Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, and I didn’t just have a big part. I was Vladimir, practically the star of the show.”
“That’s right. It was Waiting for Godot. Sterling will flip when he hears that. He loves Beckett, adores Beckett.” Amy took another tiny sip of her beer. She stared at Graham, waiting for him to elaborate. He didn’t. He just poured himself some more beer. Amy leaned across the table expectantly and said, “well?”
“Well what?”
“How’d it turn out?”
“I don’t want to talk about that either.” Despite his many painful faults, Graham had an almost religious devotion to the craft of stage acting. He was also fiercely and emotionally protective of his favorite playwrights. They were not just authors or artists, they were prophets. Graham considered Beckett to be a messiah for the alienated and disillusioned. As an after thought, Graham added, “I didn’t like the director’s vision.”
“What didn’t you like about the director’s vision?”
“What’d I just say Amy? I don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t like the director’s vision and I didn’t like what one critic said about my performance. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“What did the critic say about your performance?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He pounded his beer mug on the table with each word. “I. DON’T. WANT. TO. TALK. ABOUT. IT.”
The bravado didn’t sway Amy. She read it as buffoonery and fired back, “quit it Graham, just quit it already. You called me up tonight. You invited me out tonight. Here I am trying to make conversation and now you don’t want to talk about a thing. Not a single solitary thing.” She sat back in the booth, narrowed her eyes at Graham, and took a sip of her beer.
Graham heard a gruff but joyous voice call his name. He turned in the booth and a saw a tubby man with broad shoulders rapidly approach. “I’ll be damned,” the man said, “it’s Sean’s little shit kicker Graham McFaye.”
“Oh, yeah, umm, hello Mr. Kurchowski.” Ted Kurchowski was the second shift supervisor at American Rubber Works Company Incorporated. Graham had worked at his parents’ factory part time during the summers and learned from first hand experience the hazards of being recognized as ‘Sean’s little shit kicker’ by often disgruntled, sometimes even terminated employees of American Rubber Works Incorporated. Thankfully, Ted Kurchowski didn’t seem disgruntled, and Graham knew for a fact that he hadn’t been terminated.
Ted gave Graham three clavicle-rattling pats on the back. “I was just working with your brother the other day. He’s doing a helluva job.”
Graham shifted in the booth uncomfortably. “Yep, Nole’s a real work horse all right.”
Ted Kurchowski unzipped his coat. “Hey do you mind if I join you?”
Under normal circumstances, Graham could think of nothing more awkward and potentially dangerous than knocking back a few with one of his father’s underlings. But given the circumstances and Graham’s mood on that particular evening, he seriously considered the offer.
Ted Kurchowski was staring at Amy. “Aren’t you a pretty little thing. What’s your name pretty little thing?”
“Amy, Amy Vanderbeak.”
Ted looked back at Graham and shot him an exaggerated wink. “I’m sorry to interrupt Graham. I didn’t know you were here with such a pretty little thing.” He shot another exaggerated wink, as if the first one wasn’t sufficient. “Say, it seems like your well has run dry.” He point at their empty pitcher. Graham had drank most of it himself. Amy was still on her first glass. “How about another one on me?”
Graham stood up. “That’s very kind of you Mr. Kurchowski.” He picked up the empty pitcher. “But I owe Amy the next one. I was just about to refill it when you walked in.”
In a surprising act of affection, Ted wrapped his arm around Graham’s shoulders and escorted him to the bar. “Let me at least buy you a shot while you’re up.”
Graham eased out of Ted’s embrace as politely as possible. “That’s okay Mr. Kurchowski. You don’t have to do that.”
Ted ordered two shots anyway. The bartender set them down next to Graham’s fresh pitcher. Ted sat down on a barstool and picked up his shot glass. “Come on! It’s all right. I won’t tell your old man. Besides, you wouldn’t let me drink a shot alone now would you?”
Not wanting to violate some alcoholic code of conduct, Graham relented. “No, I guess I wouldn’t want to do that.” Ted sent the whiskey down the hatch. Graham did the same, thanked his new drinking buddy, and returned to the booth with his refilled pitcher. As soon as he sat down he filled his beer mug to the brim and drank from it greedily. “I swear to god that they water down the liquor at this place.”
No matter how stale the beer was, and no matter how watered down the liquor may have been, both were rapidly starting to take their effect. Graham guzzled down half of the second pitcher in no time while Amy slowly and purposefully nursed her first glass, and only after much hesitation moved onto a second. The bartender appeared at their booth with another shot compliments of Ted Kurchowski. Graham’s speech started to slur.
A Tom Petty song played on the jukebox.
Graham half-listened while Amy talked about Sterling. “He just makes me want to be a better person. Have you ever met someone like that? He’s so kind and friendly to everyone. He’s so patient too. He volunteers at the Mental Health facility twice a week.”
Graham asked, “does he shove lithium down people’s throats?”
Amy didn’t like that comment. “No. He’s studying movement therapy. He leads aerobics classes.”
Graham laughed so hard that slobber dribbled down the corner of his chin. He told Amy that a movement therapist named Sterling was exactly what she deserved. She didn’t like that comment either. Graham thought he was being very clever.
He went up to the bar and bought a shot for himself and Ted Kurchowski. He sat back down at the booth and told Amy “I’m sorry I’uz nast-tee earlier. I’ma havin’ a ruff time right nauw.”
Graham kept half listening, which became more difficult as he became more intoxicated. Ted Kurchowski sent another shot to their booth.
There were two moments from that night pristinely preserved in Graham’s memory. They left lasting impressions and couldn’t be erased or forgotten no matter how much he drank.
The first moment occurred when Graham and Amy were smoking outside of the Sumnerville Tavern. Graham was uneasy on his feet and breathed heavily out his mouth. It was bitterly dry and cold. When Graham flicked his lighter he thought his fingers were going to snap apart. The smoke he exhaled turned blue in the floodlight over the parking lot. He watched the red taillights of rusted pick up trucks driving down the road. Amy didn’t say much. She was annoyed and tired and wanted to go home. She smoked her cigarette in deep angry drags. Graham remembered that he had lost his virginity to Amy Vanderbeak at her parents’ summer cottage on Lake Erie when he was 17 years old. He later found out that she had already given it up the previous summer to a vacationer from Fort Wayne Indiana in the very same summer cottage on Lake Erie. He never told her she was his first, but assumed she knew based off his poor performance. Amy finished her cigarette first and went back into the bar. Graham looked up. He looked at the black telephone poles and the black telephone wires silhouetted against the frozen purple sky. He thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
The second moment was far less pleasant. Amy was driving Graham home in her father’s Subaru. It was a little past last call. Graham couldn’t remember leaving the bar. Amy was driving very fast and kept saying, “you wonder why you’re so miserable Graham. You bring it on yourself really, and what’s even worse, I think you like it. You’re a glutton for pain and misery. And you know what? I don’t like you’ll ever change. You’re 24 years old now for Christ’s sake.” Graham realized that he was madly in love with Amy Vanderbeak. He always had been and probably always would be. His stomach felt sour. He couldn’t look out the window for fear of throwing up. The motion of the car was as if someone had hung Graham upside down from his ankles and was swinging him in circles like a lasso.
Amy parked her father’s Subaru in Graham’s driveway. She left the engine running. Graham tried to invite her in, but couldn’t get the words out. His hands wouldn’t work right. It took him forever to take off his seatbelt. “I’d like to go home before sun rise,” Amy said impatiently. Graham fumbled against the door, trying to find the handle. First he rolled down his window, then he locked the door, then he rolled up the window, then he unlocked the door, then he rolled the window back down again. Despite his efforts and experimentation, he had yet to open it. Amy was exasperated. She got out and walked around to the passenger side.
Graham saw her profile in the headlights. A gust of wind kicked up. It fluttered the lapels of her pea coat. The two curls around her ears bounced up and down with her deliberate strides. She looked beautiful and strong.
She opened the passenger side door and Graham fell like a hostage from a plane onto the snow and ice. He flailed his rubbery arms and legs in an effort to stand up. He rolled over onto his knees, his chin buried in the snow and his rump sticking up in the air. He felt a bitter churning in his stomach, planted his hands palms down in the snow and raised his chest off the ground until he was on all fours, and then immediately threw up. The warm mucus and bile melted a basin in the ice and collected into a syrupy brown pool. Graham sputtered and coughed for a while, then stood up just in time to see the tail lights of Amy’s father’s Subaru disappear down his driveway. The gust of wind abruptly stopped. Graham inhaled and exhaled the dry cold air. He could feel it enrich his blood. Silence echoed through the trees.