The X-Mas Spirit

“Any specials today?”

“Sure, whatever you like.”

“Perfect. Just gimme a pint, please”

She charged me a dollar– one fourth the normal price– and I paid with a twenty.

“Keep the change,” I said neutrally but penetratingly. It was the most sincere gesture I made in a long time. That was the night I had become a more sincere person. The bartender was a petite woman of about sixty with weathered hands and a gold ring. She didn’t know me, but she welcomed me like family.

“How’s your Christmas, Johnny?”

My name isn’t Johnny, but names didn’t seem to matter that evening.

“Been an interesting night, I gotta say. I’ve never been so motivated to do something with my life and I don’t remember the last time I’ve felt as ambitiously emotional as I do right now.”

“Sounds like the Christmas spirit alright, but that’s the last thing I’d expect to hear in a dive bar like this. Look around you.”

I looked around. It seemed like an ordinary night at any other hole-in-the-wall pub, but that’s exactly what troubled the bartender. I knew what she meant.

“Bridgette, lemme tell you what I’ve just been through,” Her name probably wasn’t Bridgette either. “Whatever you see here, I’ve got you beat…

“My parents were never really religious and Christmas has never really meant anything to me at all. Frankly, it’s just a day off of work, which is fine by me. I usually spend the day with a handful of my Jewish friends. My girlfriend doesn’t celebrate Christmas, either. I’d be with her tonight, but her kid brother is in town for his winter break and they’re hanging out all day. I’m gonna join up with all of them in a bit. Her brother's great, I haven't seen him for about two years. He's really like my own brother, ya know. So anyway, today was pretty much an ideal lazy Sunday for me until about seven o’clock this evening, when I met up with my buddies to go bar hopping. We had an impossible time finding a place to knock a few back and so one of us had the bright idea to go to a strip club-“

Bridgette wasn't able to hold back a loud laugh and she slapped the bar with the palm of her hand. I knew it seemed like an ironic way to spend Christmas night, and that’s why I went. I'd thought I would be in for a good laugh, too.

“So we made our way over to The Admiral, you know that one?”

“Yeah,” Bridgette said “that place has been around forever.”

“Right, well it was everything you see on TV: beautiful naked women, sexy waitresses serving cocktails, and the place was packed wall-to-wall with men from every walk of life handing out singles and fives and wolf-whistles…. Just like you’d expect.”

“Yeah I went to one of those places once a long time ago just for kicks. Same thing.”

“So my buddies were having the time of their lives. The girls were great, the service was excellent, and pounding down a couple shots was just what the doctor ordered. We were all thinking that spending Christmas in such an off-beat way was a hoot!”

Bridgette poured me another pint.

“So sure, I was going with the flow until I saw out of the corner of my eye there was this girl. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, and a real knock-out. She goes up to this guy, winks, and sits in his lap. You could tell the guy was a regular. The guy slips the girl a twenty, she kisses him on the cheek and wishes him a merry Christmas. The guy was grinning ear to ear and watched his girl head in back. We made eye contact and he winked at me. You could tell he was on Cloud Nine, I swear.”

“Sounds about right!”

“Yeah, but that wink was the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Johnny, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Look, I turned around and I swear this place was packed wall-to-wall!”

“And..?”

“Bridgette, lemme ask you- what the hell kind of a man spends Christmas at a strip club??? These people had nowhere to be, nowhere to come home to, and no loved ones waiting for them. I swear to God, the place was completely filled with loneliness.”

“Son of a bitch, that actually gives me the creeps…”

“And the combination of intimacy and anonymity that the men were paying for just made the holiday seem like a tragedy, too.”

Bridgette pulled out two rocks glasses and poured a measure of Johnny Black in each, handing me one.

“Anyway, my buddies are still back at the strip joint. I don’t think they were as shaken by it as I was. The girls weren’t so bad, come to think of it. Anyway, like I said, the whole thing was just so unsettling that it made me feel like I really need to do more with my life. I’m never going to go to a strip club again. I’m never going to let myself become one of those men who had no families and no passions. Look here,”

Then I rolled up my sleeve to show her something I wrote on my arm during the cab ride. It was a short list.

“A few of these things really just clicked. Here are some things that I need to do. My life depends on it, really. I just can’t end up like those men. Tomorrow morning when I get to my computer, I’m going to write my boss an email telling him that I deserve a promotion, and then there’s this other thing…”

Bridgette and I talked while mulling over our glasses of scotch. She made all of her Christmas patrons feel like family, and there was indeed a type of solidarity in the bar that evening. It didn’t get under my skin the way the men at The Admiral did.

Eventually, I left Bridgette’s bar. It was really a timeless place; it was more of a concept of a spent evening than it was a tangible location. Fine by me. That night– that Christmas– was a landmark in my life. It was the night I went home and proposed to my girlfriend.

We Are Frankenstein's Monsters.

An open letter to a woman who approached me in a bar. Anti-Semite.

“You love gold. You love gold. You are a Jew and you love gold more than anything. You are not a man. You are a Jew.”

I have Polish blood and a German name. How do you think that happened?

Have you read Frankenstein? Most people would say that it’s a story about a man who creates a monster. I would nuance, however, that it’s a story about a man who turns a creature into a monster. The man is called Victor, and the monster is called a monster because Victor decides to see it that way. In the story, the night that Victor encounters the creature, he has a nightmare about it. When he wakes up, he believes it to be a monster. Being so viscerally controlled by his fear of this other being, Victor becomes blind to the creature’s humanity. This is why the creature, in Victor’s eyes, is a monster. Victor’s fault is that he allows himself to perpetuate a cycle of demonization, pushing the creature farther and farther away from humanity.

A meta-analysis of this story begs the questions: How does monstrosity come to be, and what is it actually?

My answer to the first question is that Victor’s experience is too frequently taken to a very large scale: when someone has a nightmare, he will describe it to another person, and the second person will have a similar nightmare and share it with a third person, and so on. In this way, the same nightmare can spread across an enormous group of people and such a group will share the same idea of monstrosity.

My answer to the second question is that monstrosity is a fiction manifested in the eyes of the beholder. It occurs as the effect of fear forces a person to see something that it is not, which rebounds on itself. For the convenience of the following thought experiment, I will discuss two fictitious characters: Sam and Dave. If Sam has reason to doubt Dave, he will begin to think of Dave as a collection of his own doubts, rather than the person Dave actually is. As Doubt is a concept which often leans towards negative, Sam will begin to dehumanize and eventually demonize Dave. You must keep in mind that no matter how Sam feels about Dave, Dave remains static: he is the same person whether Sam doubts him or not. For the purposes of this letter, let’s assume that Frankenstein’s creature was also a static character. It was in Frankenstein’s imagination that the creature was a monster. Furthermore, Frankenstein’s imagination created his reality. Similarly, Sam’s thoughts create his reality: Dave is no longer a person, but a thing to be doubted, nay, Dave is the concept of doubt.

Who, then, creates the more profound reality? It was certainly not Mary Shelly’s creature who dictated his stature as a monster; it was those around him.

For literally thousands of years, society has persecuted Jews for the same reason. Jews represent the other in a population. Just as Sam grows to see Dave as a notion of adversity, so too is the other seen as a dehumanized concept rather than a people. When society strips the other’s humanity, it begins to see the other as monstrous. Although the other itself has not changed at all, it is nonetheless a true monster as far as society’s reality dictates. It follows suit to say that even though a Jew is just a man, he is seen as– and deeply believed to be– a monster.

So, to the anti-Semite who approached me at that bar, I say that I am only what you choose to see me as. I will also remind you that every hundred years or so, you beat and torture and murder us until finally you chase us out of every area in which we try to build a home. We adapt. We survive and carry our things on our backs to new places when we need to. We become immigrants. From generation to generation, we seem to have been a nomadic people, always running. Every time we arrive some place new, we have foreign accents and foreign traditions which only perpetuates our otherness, which then provokes your demonization. When Victor had his nightmare about the creature, his mind created the monster; when you have your nightmares about an other, you create your own monsters.

7/7 (Paul)

Part I

When everything was said and done, Paul looked himself in the mirror one morning while shaving. As he lathered up, he paid careful attention to his extremely muscular, six-foot-four stature, to his deep-blue eyes and his thick, blond hair. An outside observer would immediately say that there was something wrong with Paul today. The somber look in his eyes was one that no one, not even Paul himself, had ever seen before. Something had clicked that seemed to have changed him overnight.

The week leading up to this morning, Paul had been the shining pinnacle of a go-getter young man who was the apple of everyone’s eye. He was a man who led life on his own terms, no matter what; he had never not been in control.

In his college years, Paul quickly become the kind of guy who could pick up any girl at a bar (and he did). Hand-in-hand with this attitude, Paul expressed himself with such confidence that many people over the years perceived it as cocky. Frankly, Paul was pretty cocky. It didn’t help that Paul didn’t know the meaning of the word modesty. As credit is due where credit is deserved, however, it should be noted that Paul indeed was an exceptionally eloquent talker (when the occasion called for it): he always looked his target in the eyes, never flinching, and whether he found himself at a bar with his friends bellowing out a list of chicks he’d banged with that week, or if he was smooth-talking his friends’ fathers into giving him an internship for the summer, the attention in the room always gravitated towards him. That was what he liked and that was how he commanded his audiences. Any group of people who he couldn’t attract in such a manor, Paul found wasn’t worth his time and he frequently disregarded them as “pussies,” or “hipster douche-bags.” It goes without saying that Paul was a tiger of a man: he was by nature aggressive and at the top of his game.

Paul’s go-in-for-the-kill personality came about initially because he was adopted at the age of eighteen months. His adoptive parents raised Paul as their own and they loved him more than anything. Now, Paul did in fact have an older sister that the adoption agency had pleaded with the adoptive parents to take as well, however, being relatively naïve and set in their ways, the couple was steadfast in their belief that they wanted their son to be an only child so that their attention towards him would never be divided. Even as far as he ever made it into his adulthood, Paul never knew about his sister.

Despite the incident with his sister, one could say he had the ideal childhood. Paul's parents showered him with affection and support. He grew up learning to solve his problems and always to strive to put himself in a better situation with every step he took in life. Things always worked out for him and he was very proud of all of this. As far as his parents were concerned, their son was as good as they come. Consequently, Paul’s self-esteem into his early teenage years was his strongest attribute. As he drifted off to sleep some nights, he would stare at the posters on his bedroom walls. He wanted to be just like all of his heroes: Indiana Jones, Batman, Jesse Owens, and the like. What greater image of strength and masculinity was there, Paul wondered. It’s not hard to see why his subconscious planted the seed that he himself would one day be just as great as these characters.

Back to the more-relevant present. In and after college, Paul’s the concept of “always put yourself in a better place” had begun to take a new form. Because he always succeeded in his realistic, global endeavors, such as getting a perfect score on every test and being more physically fit than his peers, he started searching for more subjective means to succeed. In that, Paul sought after impressing and helping out his friends. He did this not because he enjoyed it, but he found that this provided the most natural route to get people to like and support him. Over the years, Paul did everything from enlist key members into his college fraternity, to secure jobs for people who already admired him, to simply leaving big tips for waitresses who were nice to him.

It worked. Paul every morning when he admired himself in the mirror, he felt stronger and stronger. The world truly was his oyster and he always found pearls. More than that, though, it's as if he told the pearls where to go so that he could pick them up. Again, Paul was  always in control. It’s not hard to imagine how somewhere along the line after college, Paul developed something of a God-complex. It was only natural for the world’s MVP, he believed in the deepest part of his subconscious. If one ever stopped to think about what would happen if Paul were to get dealt a poor hand in life, one would realize that the end of the game would be disastrous. Paul wasn't a loser.

Part II

As far as the dating world was concerned these days, Paul, naturally, was at the top of his game. One night in particular, he brought a model home from a bar. Frankly, he was only interested in sleeping with her because she was a model and he wanted to prove to himself how well he could do. In fact, it wasn't a challenge for him; he had seduced her without even thinking about it and unfortunately for Paul, he never stopped to think that maybe he should have given it a second thought. The model, Gaëlle, on the other hand, wanted show him off to her coworkers in order to gain a leg up on her competition. In fact, that’s how Paul landed his new job the very next day. When he drove Gaëlle to work the morning after they met, she invited him inside the agency for a cup of coffee and succeeded in introducing Paul to one of the higher-ups in management. As his eloquence and confident demeanor supported his every aim in life, Paul made such an impression that he was hired on the spot to work as an entry-level junior manager. It was effectively a commission-based position; the better Paul did with his assignments, the more say he would get in the company. Paul was a natural. During his first week, Paul was even assigned to manage Gaëlle’s portfolio. Naturally, he awarded her a few extra shoots that week.

Soon, Paul met Gaëlle's roommate, Eva. He ended up spending a few weeks with her because she was very attractive and also intriguingly-sly. Even though she was certainly the most cunning of all the women he’d been with of late, he eventually found out that she came from a very rural family in Kentucky. A back-woods girl wasn't going to cut it for him. Dating a redneck certainly wasn't going to make him proud when he showed her off to his friends. He dumped her that evening.

What Paul didn’t realize, however, what that Gaëlle had given him HIV on the night they met.

Part III

The week after Paul had started his new job, he realized just how many perks there were to it. With his combination of physical beauty, his tiger-like approach to life, and his professional power over the girls he represented, Paul eventually slept with two-thirds of the models with whom he worked; he also found that when he went out to bars, the line “I’m in the modeling industry. I might be able to get you a gig, if you wanted,” worked every single time.

Part IV

Several weeks after starting (and excelling) at his managerial job, Paul woke up on a Tuesday morning with a bad fever. He hadn’t had a fever since he was a kid, and the flu wasn’t going around or anything like that, and so he called in sick and went to the doctor. The doctor seemed to recognize Paul’s symptoms and recommended an immediate blood test. In the mean time, Paul was given the standard advice that he should drink plenty of fluids and take some Tylenol. Paul’s fever went down the next day and he went back to work. The next week, he got a call from the clinic. They asked him to come in at his earliest convenience to meet with a nurse regarding the results of his blood test.

Part V

On the morning after he found out about his condition, Paul looked himself in the mirror while shaving. As he lathered up, he paid careful attention to his extremely muscular, six-foot-four stature, to his deep-blue eyes and his thick, blond hair.

It didn’t matter him that he had spread HIV to twenty-two girls, including Eva and the many people it would spread to from there. It didn't even matter to Paul that he was going to die. What Paul couldn't cope with was the simple fact that he wasn't going to die on his own terms. Something else– something bigger and stronger– was now dictating Paul's fate. He didn't know what it was like to be out of control and starting that morning, it began to tear him up on the inside.

In one week, Paul's depression will get the better of him and he will quit his job.

In two weeks, Paul will wake up with another fever. He will look at himself in the mirror again, anguished, and notice the deep-purple circles that have formed under his eyes from stress.

Within six months, Paul will completely have dropped out of touch with his friends and colleagues because he will be too ashamed to explain himself. His peers will hardly notice his absence.

In a year and a half, Paul will realize what he will have to do to take back control of his life, or at least end it on his own terms.

6/7 (Eva)

Part I

One hot summer’s day in West Bourbon County, Eva looked up at her big sister, Scarlett, with bewildered puppy-dog eyes. College. Her big sister was going to go to college. No one in her entire family had ever gone to college. Eva was so proud of her big sister, and as the days got closer and closer to when Scarlett finally was going to leave West Bourbon County, Eva found herself more and more anxious. Her anxiety was a mixture of pride, second-place esteem mentality, and competitiveness. She also found herself, incidentally, slightly out of place as she struggled to find her identity (she never did end up finding it, but we’ll read about that later). Eva’s sister had passed the benchmark and now what was Eva supposed to do?

Their parents were naturally extremely warm and welcoming; they loved each of the two girls for the individuals they were and there was never any comparison in their eyes. In Eva’s eyes, however, this meant that her parents had relatively low expectations for her. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, actually, because it made Eva grow up with an incredible drive and motivation to do just as well as Scarlett.

And that’s precisely what happened. When it came time for Eva to go to high school, she went in with the idea cemented in her mind that Scarlett had succeeded with flying colors with her 3.2 GPA. All Eva then wanted was a 3.2. High school was tough for Eva- there was no question about it. She had naturally been the more social of the two sisters, and she came to the harsh realization during her freshman year that maintaining any kind of social life was a full time job for a 15-year old girl. The newest fashion, the new mindset, the subtleties of working your way up the social chain, the fine line of being popular with the boys while at the same time not coming off the wrong way to the girls…. Eva could barely keep her head above water during her freshman year. By the end of it, her report card indeed made her parents proud, but it just wasn’t good enough for her. She needed that 3.2.

Two things happened by Christmas Break of her sophomore year: in chronological order, Eva learned that she was to become an aunt. The details at first were a little vague, but Scarlett was definitely pregnant. The second big event was that Eva was pulling a solid 2.75. Again, this was absolutely fine as far as everybody else was concerned. Why do any better? West Bourbon County was the kind of place where everyone knew where they would end up even before they started. As far as her grades were concerned, her current situation still wasn’t good enough. Eva needed to switch gears; she would do whatever it took to get her 3.2.

During the two-week Christmas break, Eva came to the rather mature realization that in order to accomplish her goal, she would have to give up something else. By the time school started again, she started the habit of spending more evenings at home studying and ignoring the text messages from her girlfriends. They would only slow her down. For the first week or so, this sudden antisocial behavior was acceptable in her clique because she made the excuse “my phone was broken,” followed by “the moron at the shop lost it.”

As is natural in high school, the girls expelled Eva from their group. They gossiped behind her back, saying that she was a bookworm and a slut because she was just trying to get the handsome math teacher to notice her. No matter. Eva was glad to be let go; there was less in the way of her goal.

Somewhere along the way, Eva’s drive and motivation began to spark a tiny flame of darkness inside her. She knew she was capable of doing just as well as anyone else, but that wasn’t good enough. Eva was also coming to know how good it felt to be better than everyone else, and this fruit was just too sweet to turn away.

Towards the end of her senior year, Eva had surpassed her Scarlett’s 3.2 with a 3.44 and set a new family record. This was trivial, however; to Eva, this wasn’t about greatness: it was about outdoing her sister. Prom was also coming up, and although Eva didn’t particularly care about the dance itself, there was one thing she wanted to take care of: the quarterback of the football team had clearly had his eye on Eva’s ex-best friend. That just wouldn’t do for Eva- that girl needed to be punished for her behavior a few years back. Stealing the date was easy enough. She even let him have sex with her in his car after the dance.

Despite her path through high school, college had no appeal for Eva. She knew Scarlett had made it there and frankly, Eva knew she could do better if she wanted to. No. She wanted something else. Something greater.

Next stop: California.

Part II

While Eva knew she was a little in over her head once she got there, she wouldn’t admit it. She decided to get settled in by working at her uncle’s restaurant. Her uncle, Tim, had been living out in California for the past fifteen years or so working up to a managerial position at one of Anaheim’s finest dining establishments. With the bit of money she had saved up, Eva was able to put a down payment on an apartment she found online, rooming with an intimidatingly beautiful young woman named Gaëlle. The very next day, Eva put on her prettiest face and went to her uncle’s restaurant, The Pearl, to meet him for lunch. Lunch was quite impressive, and The Pearl was certainly the nicest place at which Eva had ever eaten. She and Tim decided that she would start training as a waitress the very next day.

Part III

Right around this time, we start to see a further darkening in Eva. She was no longer the puppy-eyed little girl with a charming, small-town accent. Eva was now a young woman with a malicious habit. Whatever it was that sparked her drive and motivation on that hot summer day back in West Bourbon County, it was something that she couldn’t control anymore. In fact, it controlled Eva. She no longer wanted what others had; she wanted others not to have… at all costs. That's why she began sleeping with her roommate's boss, Paul: she knew that her roommate had had her eye on him for one reason or another. She considered all this a healthy competitiveness; it frightened others, however, because they had never actually seen such a high level of malicious jealousy.

The weeks flew by. Since Eva had (at one point in her life) been something of a social butterfly, she knew how to get along with people. More than getting along with them, however, Eva was particularly successful at manipulating them, their thoughts and ideas, and even their moods. Because of all this, she left work every day with more than twice the amount in tips as the next highest-earning waitress. While this was nice, it no longer interested her. She became complacent as a waitress, and soon felt like there was no competition; there were no other coworkers left to beat. Eva had hit a sort of irritating glass ceiling.

During all this, there had been one thing that kept eating at her. Like her ex-clique in high school, Eva’s ties with her family back home were only slowing her down. The thing that she couldn’t shake was her uncle. It started with his accent; it still reminded her of her upbringing, and that just wouldn’t do: he was one more person that she needed to outdo.

One day towards the end of that summer, Eva waited on a particular customer who caught her eye for some reason. There was something about this young man that intrigued her; she didn’t know what he was after, but she knew that she had never seen such drive in anyone besides herself. Perhaps she had seen him before..? He seemed to recognize her. When he left her a four-cent tip, Eva saw that as an excuse to follow him into the parking lot and see what was going on.

The young man–who’s name turned out to be Wayne– was hesitant at first, but Eva pulled out her charm and disarmed him. With a little coercion, she got him to tell her what he was actually after. Eva grinned as she saw this as a perfect opportunity to accomplish her own new goals. She realized that as the head waitress, she would be a shoe-in for the manager’s position… if only the job were to open up.

Eva would never ask Wayne why he had it out to destroy Tim; she didn’t care. And Wayne would never ask Eva who would replace Tim; he didn’t care. Their mutual interest lay in seeing Tim lose his position as manager.

Part IV

The plan was set. The bomb was going to go off on the Saturday before Labor Day. It wasn’t a real bomb, of course, but in fact was something much more destructive to a high-class restaurant such as The Pearl. Wayne did all the plotting and calculating and Eva was the inside-man.

At approximately six-thirty in the evening on the Saturday before Labor Day, The Pearl was forced to close down early when several customers found dead mice all over the establishment. Eva acted surprised (although she had gone so far as to advise Wayne on the most strategic drop points).

That evening, the California state health department had The Pearl shut down for an entire week. That evening Tim, as manager, was held responsible for the company’s loss of over forty-five thousand dollars in revenue.