A Murray Christmas to All (Part 2)

by David Benjamin

Author’s Note: In Part 1, as you might recall, Murray Lefkowitz, the drunk Santa banished from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, applies for a sleigh-driving job with Kris Kringle, but has to assembly a team from his milieu — the down-and-out dregs of New York City. The sleigh squad Murray recruits includes a junkie hooker, Joy Tuddah, a hotel hustler named Fingers (real name, Rafael), an ex-con can collector named Muhammad and an embittered military veteran with a missing arm, Stan Seasons.
Once the team is organized, Kringle sends a sleigh to pick them up in Washington Square Park and flies them to the North Pole

# # #

[Saint] Nick had been right. Their first day in Santa’s workshop nearly killed the five refugees from the mean streets of Gotham. Stan Seasons tried assembling bicycles with one arm and fell so far behind the elves that he was pulled off the production line. He ended up in the robotics lab, where Handy Andy, one of Santa’s elfin machinists, proceeded to fashion Stan a new prosthetic arm.

Meanwhile, after several hours in the Barbie Department, Joy went into heroin withdrawal and had to be padlocked in a plastic playhouse with a case of the screaming meemies. Murray had similar troubles with alcoholic heebie-jeebies, which sent him into a violent rampage in the Sports Wing, wielding a Louisville Slugger in one hand and a bowling ball in the other. Before he could be tackled by a dozen burly elves and wrapped into a badminton net, he had smashed a half-dozen foosball tables, reduced a hundred video tennis games to smithereens and set back skateboard production by 48 hours.

Meanwhile, Rafael collapsed from exhaustion and had to be wheeled to the infirmary. Muhammad tried—and failed—to hide himself in the kitchen behind Mrs. Santa’s colossal cast-iron wood stove. He ended up with second-degree burns.

Despite their rocky start, however, Murray’s Don’t Call Me That Gang within the first week were all back on the line, earning their room in the elf barracks (where their feet tended to hang off the ends of the beds), their three squares a day and their wages of twenty Santacoins a day.

In the second week, they began a crash course in sleigh navigation. Murray, whom Nick chose as the pilot, studied high-altitude topography and weather patterns under the tutelage of Howdy Cloudy the aeronautical elf. Joy was taught reindeer wrangling by a pixie named, predictably, Bambi. She learned how to feed, clean, curry and hot-walk the five spavined steeds assigned to their sleigh, led by Adolf the Cleft-Palate Reindeer, with Vomet and Stupid, Numbnuts and Nixon.

“Only five?” Joy asked Bambi on the first day.

“Originally, besides Adolf, there were eight,” said Bambi, sadly, “but the others, poor little Flasher and Cancer, Yonder and Blitzkrieg, well, they caught Chronic Wasting Disease and all just sort of shriveled away.”

“Gross,” said Joy.

“By the way, honey, watch out for Numbnuts,” said Bambi. “He bites.”

“Oh.”

“And Nixon’s a leg-humper.”

Together, Murray, Joy, Rafael, Muhammad and Stan Seasons hurriedly learned the craft of steering an unstable, top-heavy sleigh, loaded with goodies, through an ice-cold stratosphere against gale-force headwinds. Taught by a brilliant young elfette named Poodgy, Muhammad proved especially good at managing simulated sleigh flights.

Christmas Eve came faster than anyone expected. Or wanted.

“I’ve always hated Christmas,” muttered Stan.

When Murray’s team arrived in the sleigh barn to begin their night’s work, they discovered that Snarky, the sarcastic elf, had named their sleigh “Titanic.” He painted the title on the sleigh’s fuselage, along with a cartoon effigy of Joy, nude, drowning in the ocean.

The Titanic’s crew, with Murray Lefkowitz in the driver’s seat and Joy at his side soothing the reindeer and gently patting Numbnuts on the rump, included Muhammad in the elevated observation seat handling the pontoons and rudder. Rafael worked the radar set and Stan Seasons was in charge of a stack of Santa bags fifteen feet long and twenty feet high.

Poodgy was there, too, in a strictly advisory role. She snuggled in beside Muhammad, holding his hand. Another elf, a teenage intern named Twinkly-Dinkly, was along for the ride.

Looking at the pile of gifts and goodies towering above him, Stan turned and said, “Christ, Murray. This fucker’s never gonna get off the ground.”

With that, Murray raised his whip and flicked the rear end of Adolf, the Cleft-Palate Reindeer, who—lacking a nose that glows—had a miner’s helmet strapped between his antlers. Adolf shook his horns, kicked his feet, turned on his halogen headlight and flew upward into the frigid North Pole night, followed dutifully by Vomet and Stupid, Numbnuts and Nixon, and a sleigh crew consisting of a suicidal drunk, a junkie hooker, a professional onanist, a mugger of the elderly and a one-armed, hair-trigger ex-Marine with PTSD.

Not to mention Poodgy and Twinkly-Dinkly.

“Holy shit,” said Stan. “We’re in the air.”

“Until we crash,” mumbled Fingers.

Their route carried Murray’s crew into regions where, most every Christmas eve, children expected little more than rat turds in their stockings. To these bleak and desperate regions they delivered not Cabbage Patch Kids, tricycles and X-Boxes, but shoes and socks, loaves of mold-free bread, eyeglasses, flak jackets, cornmeal, lentils, dried fish, fresh fruit, Spam, clean underwear, tampons, pickaxes, second-hand t-shirts, soap, salt, mosquito nets, insecticide, hydrogen peroxide, quinine, iodine, antivenin, sunglasses, scissors, tweezers, cigarettes, cellphones, wind-up radios, Swiss Army knives and a hundred other glamourless items necessary for day-to-day, hour-to-hour survival in the underbelly of the world.

On several stops, they found themselves dodging anti-aircraft fire. They stopped jingling their bells after a sniper in Syria clipped two points off one of Vomet’s antlers. Vomet retaliated fragrantly by unloading nine pounds of deer apples. As they descended toward a dwelling in Yemen, they were overtaken by a Saudi drone that blew up the house before they could deliver their yuletide bounty.

Their sleigh ride sent them through Haiti, El Salvador and Nicaragua, to Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Xinjiang and East Timor. They ventured into Somalia and war-torn Ethiopia, then on to an impoverished village in Mali, where, as she handed out candy canes and Legos to little kids, Joy was kidnapped by Touareg guerrillas. They dragged her into a windowless room, where she was stripped down, spread out and about to be raped to death. In the nick of time, Murray, along with Muhammad, Rafael, Stan Seasons and Twinkly-Dinkly burst into the hovel, each wearing a Darth Vader helmet and brandishing Star Wars light swords. The Touaregs were so dazzled and bewildered by this display of powerless force that Joy was able to slip from captivity, after which the whole crew cheezed it for the sleigh, which escaped potential disaster with only a few dozen bulletholes on its fuselage and a flesh wound on the tuchis of Adolf the Cleft-Palate Reindeer.

At their stop in South Sudan, the parents of a darling little girl took one look at Muhammad and decided that he belonged to a tribe they hated. He was bound and gagged, marched into the village square and set atop a heap of oil-soaked garbage, to be burned alive as a sacrifice to a local deity named Adu Jamaja the Conqueroo.

But Joy cried, “No, you don’t!” To save her old boyfriend, she literally hypnotized the bloodthirsty villagers by improvising, sinuously, with talent she never knew she had, the Dance of the Seven Used Goodwill-Store T-Shirts, stripping each t-shirt away with excruciating grace and alluring languor. As Joy tripped the sedative fantastic, Murray circulated on the fringes of the mob, handing out Twix bars and mini-Oreo cookies while reciting the mind-numbing text of Good Night, Moon, a story that had put him to sleep every night of his infancy.

After 45 minutes, Joy was down to a camisole and a pair of hand-me-down lollipops. The villagers were propped up, dozing, against one another. It took but a moment for Rafael and Stan to untie Muhammad and spirit him back to the sleigh, which then silently soared into a starless African night.

They flew next to Gaza, where—from the sleigh—they saw a small boy hugging a mound of dirt in a ravaged cityscape. When they landed, they discovered that below the mound was the child’s dead mother, killed on the street by a spray of bullets from unknown guns. By then, the sleigh had been emptied of everything but two bags. One held no gifts, just a lot of empty bags, a half-gross of Saltine crackers and a hundred pounds of candy corn.

Haltingly, the boy told Murray that his father was also dead, vaporized by a stray missile. Rafael, who saw something familiar in the little boy’s plight, said, “Let’s take him with us.”

Murray almost said no. But then, seeing tears in Rafael’s usually stony eyes as he cradled the little boy’s dusty head, Murray said, “Nu, what the hell. It’s Christmas.”

“Fine,” said Stan, “but frisk the kid first.”

They wrapped the boy, whose named was Oz, into a blanket and flew away before the Holy Land could pump him full of shrapnel.

Their last scheduled stop was Washington, D.C., where the mystery of the last bag was solved. It was a huge load, tightly sealed, with Stan’s name stenciled on it. Following Stan’s directions, Murray steered to sleigh to the Veterans Administration building and hovered over its chimney.

Stan untied the last bag, which was the biggest of all, and began dropping its contents down the chimney. Murray, Joy and the Don’t Call Me That Gang watched as hundreds of attachable, detachable, interchangeable electronic prosthetic arms and legs, hands, hips and electronic knees — all designed by Handy Andy — poured down pell-mell into the VA. When all had been unloaded, and Stan had shaken the bag to make sure it was empty, he removed a note from his pocket and added it to the the strange cargo had had just delivered.

No one else saw the note, but here’s how it read:

To all the luckless, loyal guys — and brave women — who’ve been shot, blasted, burned, broken, maimed, amputated, crippled and sacrificed on the altar of freedom, democracy, Big Oil and the chicken brass at the Pentagon…
Seasons Greetings
Stan

As the sleigh lifted off from Washington, Murray then took out an envelope, given to him by Nick and not to be opened ’til all the loot had been delivered. He smiled as he read and directed the reindeer toward a small town in upstate New York. When the sleigh landed on the snowy lawn, Joy looked around in alarm.

“This is—” she began.

“Home,” said Murray. “Your mom and dad have been looking for you, crying and praying ever since you took off.”

Joy said, “I can’t go back there.”

“You’re here,” said Murray.

“Kid, you’re gettin’ a second chance here,” said Stan. “Don’t fuck it up.”

“I don’t know,” said Joy. “They won’t …”

“Oh no,” said Twinkly-Dinkly, “they will. I read their letter to Santa.”

“Whose letter?” asked Joy suspiciously.

“Your mom and dad,” said the elf. “Actually, there were, like, twenty letters.”

“They sent letters to Santa?” said Joy. “They’re grownups. They don’t believe in Santa Claus.”

“Any port in a blizzard, kid,” said Murray. “Your folks were desperate.”

“All they want for Christmas,” said Twinkly-Dinkly, “is you, honeybunch.”

“But,” said Joy, “they always hated me.”

“Did they?” asked Murray. “Really? Hate you?”

“Okay, maybe not hate,” said Joy. “But they didn’t understand me.”

“Jeez,” said Muhammad, “you’re a teenage girl. Who understands teenage girls?”

Murray took Joy’s chin in his hand, “Joy?”

“What?”

“Do you understand you?”

A light went on in the house. The front door opened and a head popped out. Then another head. Joy stood up hesitantly. A gasp of recognition from the doorway, followed by slippered feet trampling through the snow. The rest of the scene is too saccharine and sentimental to record here. Suffice to note that the sleigh departed bereft of Joy.

Thin shafts of a frozen pink dawn were caressing the ice pack as Adolf guided the brave and battered Titanic back into its slip in the reindeer barn. It was only then that Murray’s team turned to notice that Poodgy and Muhammad were making out passionately in the back seat of the sleigh. Subsequently, they were married and they lived more or less happily ever after, shuttling seasonally between Fort Myers and the North Pole. Poodgy and Muhammad also adopted Oz, the orphan from Gaza, and got him inducted as an honorary elf. His elf name was Ozzie.

On Christmas Day, Nick gathered Murray, Muhammad and Fingers in his office.

“Where’s Stan?” asked Murray.

Nick just shrugged. Then he said, “Muhammad, you’ve already gotten a gift I would have been powerless to bestow. You have a family.”

Next, Nick said to Rafael, “You’ve been wasting your talent, Fingers. Take this.”

He handed Rafael a compact disk. On the cover, it read, “Flying Fingers: The Piano Stylings of Rafael Rodriguez.”

“That’s me,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” said Nick.

“What’s goin’ on here?” protested Rafael. “I didn’t record this!”

“You will,” said Santa, “as soon as you start playing the piano again.”

“This shlemiel plays the piano?” said Murray.

“Like an angel,” said Nick, “until the terrible day he was molested by his piano teacher.”

“This shlemiel was molested by a piano teacher?” said Murray.

“Don’t call me that,” said Rafael.

Nick ignored this exchange. “The CD comes with a piano,” he said to Rafael. “Yo, Kookie!”

At this, Kookie, the head elf, snapped his fingers. Four other elves rolled a Steinway into the room. “Play us a little ragtime, Fingers,” said Kookie.

At first, Rafael hesitated. But the lure of the keyboard was too powerful. He sat down at the piano, tinkling away at first with a Scott Joplin tune, then moving on to snatches of Chopin, passages from Mozart and a thundering blast of Beethoven. The elves went wild. Nick wept openly. Rafael hugged Murray and whispered in his ear, “Thank you, thank you.”

“Hey,” said Murray, “all I did was pick up a want ad in the alley. I thought it was porn.”

Santa offered Murray nothing that day. But, the following morning, Santa gave Murray a coupon good for three months of boot-camp rehab at a maximum security health spa in California. When he got his release from the spa one day in early spring, Murray found a sleigh waiting for him in the driveway. Kookie was at the reins. Murray recognized Santa’s first-team reindeer, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen.

“Climb on, ace,” said Kookie.

Hesitantly, Murray took a seat beside Kookie. “Where are we going?”

“Where else?” said Kookie. “Fort Myers.”

“I’m not sure I want to—”

Before Murray could finish the sentence, the sleigh was aloft, soaring upward and eastward at dizzying speed.

A few hours later, an elfette named Dearie led Murray out to poolside at Santa’s summer compound. Nick was under an umbrella, dressed in a bright red terry robe, silk ascot and sequined flip-flops, sipping a piña colada. Directing Murray to a chair, Nick said, “Something to drink?”

“Club soda,” said Murray.

“Attaboy,” said Nick.

Nick settled in and looked around. He’d never seen elves in bathing suits and aloha shirts before. But there they were, lounging by the pool, drinking cocktails and playing croquet on the lawn.

“How’d it go?” asked Nick.

“It was rehab hell. I just about died the first week,” said Murray. “Y’know, I wasn’t strictly sober when I was up there at the Pole.”

“Oh, I knew that,” said Nick.

“You’re everywhere,” said Murray.

“You better watch out!”

They were both chuckling as Dearie arrived with Murray’s fizzy water. She also delivered a gift box.

“What’s this?” asked Murray.

“Sort of a belated Christmas present,” said Nick. “Go ahead. Open it.”

Murray tore off the bright paper and lifted the lid. Inside was a velvet Santa suit, with patent leather boots, a meerschaum pipe and a tassled red hat. Murray was bewildered.

“You’ll have to put on a little weight,” said Nick, “and let your beard grow out. You can’t get away without whiskers, you know.”

“You mean, I’m getting another shot at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade?”

Nick laughed. “Sorry, Murray. By Thanksgiving, you’re gonna be four months at the North Pole, wrangling elves and working your jolly red ass off.”

“Say what?”

“Look, Murray, I’m a tough old dog, with emphasis on the ‘old.’ I’ve had my day in the midnight sun. Last Christmas was my 233rd. I can’t stand the cold anymore. And frankly, this new generation of elves? I don’t like their music and I can’t speak their language anymore.”

Murray didn’t understand.

“Murray,” said Nick, “unless you decide to go back to the streets, climb back into the bottle and piss away the rest of your life, you are officially—as of right now—Santa Claus VII, the latest in a noble line.”

“Me, Santa? I can’t,” said Murray. “Nick, I don’t deserve—”

Nick waved Murray to silence. “Murray, do you have any idea where I was before old Santa No. 5 tricked me into taking over his job?”

“Well, no,” said Murray. “But you haven’t exactly confided in me.”

Nick nodded ruefully. “I know. I’m sorry. I tend to be a little closed-off.”

“Okay, so, open up,” said Murray. “You had a career before you became Santa?”

“A career? Hardly,” said Nick. “I was a pirate on a stinking, broken-down square-rigger out of Port Royal. I raided, raped, burned, fought, plundered and spent half my life so wasted that I couldn’t tell a featherbed from a stack of cannonballs. My predecessor was worse. For ten years before he moved up to the Pole, old No. 5 was captain of a slave ship.”

Murray was astonished. “So, you were—”

“Damn right, Mur. I was just like you. The scum of the earth,” said Nick. “Only worse. Santa Claus V and me, we were downright evil. Slavery and piracy, pillage and plunder. Which is exactly the reason why we got stuck with this job.”

“For being evil?”

“No,” said Nick. “For being evil, and knowing we were evil—and hating ourselves. We had no idea how to escape our own rottenness, no way to make up for all the pain, death and misery we had caused.”

“So, being Santa Claus is …”

“Atonement, Murray. The North Pole was my last chance, and it’s your last chance to do good, to make up for wrecking your life and a whole lot of other lives. Murray, you’ve got at least a hundred years of penance to pay, and every one of those years you’ll be spending five or six months freezing your nuts at Santa’s Workshop with no cable TV. And no women.”

Murray shook his head. “But I don’t deserve the chance, Nick.”

“You think I did?” said Nick. “I should’ve died with a dagger in my guts, drowning in my own blood. But then, one fine day, when the chance fell into my lap, to atone, Murray? Well, I sure hadn’t earned it. But I grabbed it, anyhow.”

Murray stared at Nick but couldn’t see a hint of his past wickedness. Santa’s face was a living portrait of kindness and generosity. Murray scanned the scene, studying the diminutive figures on lawn, pool and house. He didn’t see what he was looking for. He said, “Wait a second, Nick. You said ‘no women.’ But isn’t there supposed to be a Mrs. Claus?”

Nick smiled. “Now that you mention it.” He waved again.

A familiar figure appeared, strolling across the patio in a green elf suit, wearing an apron and a toque blanche. “Introducing,” said Nick, “the new Mrs. Claus.”

“Stan?” said Murray, recognizing his one-armed sleighmate.

“Greetings,” said Stan, whose new, improved prosthesis was tattooed intricately with a Currier & Ives Christmas scene.

Murray looked toward Nick. “Mrs. Claus?” he said. “Nick, have you noticed? Stan’s not a girl.”

“Maybe not, but I can cook,” said Stan. “Learned in the Army. Six months in cook school and then they shove me into the fuckin’ infantry.”

Murray leapt from his chair to shake his old friend’s hand but ended up hugging him. He was surprised at how glad he was to see the old sourpuss.

“So, Mur,” said Nick. “You want the job or not?”

Murray looked again at Nick. The famous “jolly old elf” now looked more weary than merry. Murray turned then to Stan and realized that—just like that day in the Army Navy Store—he held another man’s fragile fate in his hands. Stan Seasons, a lost and bitter castoff from society, had been offered the unlikeliest opportunity—as the wife of Santa Claus—to arrest his downward spiral and restore his self-respect.

Murray, for that matter, faced prospects no better than Stan’s. His thirst still nagged at the back of his throat. He was one bottle away from sinking into a pit of guilt, self-reproach and surrender. The gutter, with its comforting promise of oblivion unto death, still tugged at him.

Murray Lefkowitz hesitated to answer Nick. One more thought troubled him.

“Y’know,” he said, “I’m Jewish.”

Nick’s eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!

Chuckling softly, he replied, “So was Jesus.”

Murray ran his hand over the luxuriant fabric of a Santa suit that was, for the moment, too big for him.

“Well then,” he said. “Ho ho ho.”