Chapter 14

Grant: Bloody Santa on the Lawn

There’s a scream.  A Jamie Lee Curtis scream that makes me think of deranged slashers and the sticky floor of the Clearview Cinema. The scream ends abruptly, replaced by a string of obscenities shouted by a familiar voice. At first I can’t place it. A man’s voice, deep and soothing even though it was saying things like “Get the fuck off me you teethy little fucker!” The voice sounds strange, like it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. A voice I was used to hearing with a little less bass. A…..holy hell, it’s Stu McLundy.  Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy!  I look out the little peephole in my front door and there he is, holy shit there he is. And he is in a goddamn Santa Claus outfit. Shit like this just doesn’t happen in Greener Valley. But it did, didn’t it? Well, ho ho holy fuck. It’s time to see what this whole end of the world thing is about.

“Stu.” I call out to him in a half whisper, half yell. One of the Fetterling kids is tugging at him, trying to pull him to the ground, and it looks like Stu is about to go down. I want to get his attention and get him into the house as fast as possible, but I don’t want the evil toddlers to notice me. I’m about to whisper to Stu again when he doubles over and pukes all over the Fetterling kid and my lawn. I wait a moment before I react. My mind can’t reconcile the scene before me with reality. I feel light headed and sweaty, like a panic attack is about to kick in. I close my eyes for a second. Open them. Santa is still puking. Close my eyes. Open them. The Fetterling kid is letting out a scream and Stu is clutching his chest. Close my eyes. Sway a bit. Then I think to myself. It is Saturday, December, 1st. I am in my house in Greener Valley, New York. I am 35 years old. My parents’ names are Rose and James. I have an ex girlfriend name Cherilynn who moved to California last week.  I recite all these things in a rote fashion because that what keeps me from having panic attacks. Sometimes I just do multiplication tables. Especially the seven times tables. Those fuckers are hard.

My panic attack staved off for the moment, I decide to play hero and go fetch Stu from the jaws of five year old death. Terri is standing behind me at the door, telling me it’s my duty to go help whatever survivors there are. “Don’t you know anything about surviving a zombie attack or the end of the world? You have to stick together or die. Don’t you play video games?” I don’t remember any kind of “stick together or die” in Donkey Kong, but I take her word for it. I walk out the door as nonchalantly as possible, grab Stu – who seems to be done puking for the time being – by his Santa collar and pull him up. We come face to face as he tries to stand on his own and I’m greeted by the all too familiar smell of alcohol making its way out of one’s body. Whether it’s through your mouth or your ass or your pores, last night’s alcohol will always find a way out of you. It’s never pleasant. Especially when that smell is drifting off of someone else and it’s mixed with the lingering odor of fat person sweat.

Santa Stu is drunk. Normally, a drunk, vomiting man in a Santa suit would make children scream in horror, but this is no normal day, and the kids are letting out a very different kind of scream.

“Stand back, kids. The alcohol content of this man is not meant for children to consume!” I have no idea what makes me say that. I guess the absurdity of the situation calls for even more absurdity. The Fetterling kid tilts his head and looks blankly at me. A couple more zombie tots are milling around and they all stop and look at me, too. I freak out that I’ve drawn their attention and figure this is it, they’re all going to gang up on me and I’ll be gummed to death by baby zombies while plastered Santa lays face down on my lawn, mumbling the words to “MacArthur Park.”

And then Sasha the Incontinent Wonder dog is there, biting one kid, chasing down another, barking like she not twelve pounds, tops. She runs in a circle then breaks off from the circle and pounces on the Brown kid. The kid wails and cries – not the cry of an eight year old but the cry of some hideous beast that has eaten an eight year old’s soul – and then Sasha leaps onto little Joshua Fetterling, pushing him to the ground. He lies there growling and Sasha lifts one leg and unceremoniously pees on the boy’s face.  I want to laugh. I want to laugh and cry and scream and just make this entire ridiculousness stop. It’s like tripping on acid when things get too crazy and you want it all to go away and maybe you strip naked in the middle of a WalMart parking lot and run between cars yelling “This isn’t real! You can’t stop me because this isn’t real!” and then you see your very real Literature of Western Civ professor and, instead of wondering what your professor is doing in a WalMart parking lot at 3am with what appears to be a prostitute, you wiggle your dick at him and say “This isn’t real, either!” but you figure out in the next second or so that it is so very, very real and you want the earth to pick this very moment to spontaneously combust because the reality of the situation is too much to bear. Yes, just like that. Except with rabid, screaming children. And a drunk Santa. And a peeing dog.

I drag Stu into the house and he just stands in my doorway, shaking his head as if to loose the day’s events from it. I guess he does a good job of that because he says “What in the fuck is all this?” He gestures to everything; the earthquake-type mess of my house, the painting that’s drying on the easel, Mrs. Beasley and Terri standing at the window looking like two conspirators in a diabolical play, Sasha the Wonder Dog squatting on my rug and Stu’s own attire of a bloody Santa suit. “I mean, what in the goddamn fuck?”

I give him a brief rundown of the day’s events as I know them and he nods in all the right places and raises his eyebrows in all the right places and it all comes back to him so he says the words that seem to be the mantra of the day: “We’re all fucked.”

So now in my house we have Terri the Neurotic Teen, Mrs. Beasley the Clairvoyant and her dog, and Stu the Drunken Santa. There are feral children outside, my neighborhood looks like it imploded and I’m pretty sure that not everyone in Greener Valley is going to live to tell this tale. Just so we’re all up to speed here.

Stu is lying on my couch mumbling the words to “MacArthur Park.” While his cake is melting in the rain, Terri tends to his wounds.  Well, let’s not say tends. Let’s say she’s applying Neosporin to bite marks on his arms and covering them with paper towels because I seem to be out of Band Aids.

“You know, I took a first aid class in ninth grade. We had to take it if we wanted to be certified babysitters, which is like, pretty stupid. I mean, certified? I need a certificate to watch my next door neighbor’s bratty little kid? Whatever. Not everyone you babysat for wanted to see the certificate but a lot of them did. I think it just made them feel better that someone who knew CPR and how to apply a gauze pad was watching their kid so they wouldn’t be so anxious when they were out fucking people who were not their spouses.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just a teenager, Grant, but I’m not stupid. I mean, maybe sometimes the way I talk make me sounds stupid and sometimes my mental health issues make me seem stupid, but I am not stupid. I’m just a teenage girl so I sound like a teenage girl a lot, but I’ve seen a lot of shit, Grant. You have no idea what goes on in this town. And most of the time I was babysitting, the husband and wife were not out together. Whichever one was working late, the other one was out getting laid. Or drinking. Or doing drugs. It’s like they never got out of high school.”

“High school kids go out drinking and doing drugs and getting laid?”

“Oh come on. You weren’t in high school that long ago. You know damn well what we do. I don’t get you older people. It’s like once you become an adult you’re required to put on this act like Greener Valley is all wholesome and perfect. You know it’s not. I don’t know why everyone in this town pretends like it’s a beautiful world here. So much shit happens and everyone just goes about their business – the holiday parades and festivals and all that shit and then they go home and act completely different. You know what Grant?”

“What?”

“If this town is doomed, we deserve it.”

I move the curtain back a bit and look outside. “I think that’s an understatement Terri.”

She finishes paper toweling Stu and I hand him two Vicodin and a glass of water. He swallows the pills without even asking what they are. He looks like a man who is about to quit.

And suddenly I feel like quitting. I don’t want it to do this anymore. I know I eventually have to figure out what’s going on out there and something tells me I was meant to sleep through all the bullshit that came before this. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think I’m meant to be a hero. You know, me and my ragtag team of misfits are gonna save the world. They’ll make movies about us. I wish Harrison Ford didn’t get so old. He would make a great me in the movie version.

I really don’t know what to do at this point. I can go walk around outside and see who else is alive out there and piece some of this together. I probably shouldn’t have drugged Stu until I asked him a few questions. But I have a feeling all I would have gotten out of him was something about how he’ll never have the recipe again.

It finally occurs to me to ask Terri what happened that morning.