The Christmas Bus Straight to Hell
On Santa, the Anti-Christ, Nazis, and grace
I always kind of hated Christmas. When I was a kid I thought Santa despised me—You’d better watch out!—and would torture myself trying to be the perfect child for about four weeks every year, precisely from Thanksgiving until December 26th. It wasn’t so much about getting good presents—although I will not entirely discount that motivation. It was more about some grand annual reckoning I dreamt up in which I needed to prove myself worthy of my parents’ love. And by “my parents,” I mean a twisted amalgam of Santa, my actual mother and father, baby Jesus, adult Jesus, God, Buddha, J. D. Salinger, my English teacher, and the Anti-Christ.
About that last one. At a far too tender age, I unearthed a tattered paperback of The Omen during a family beach vacation, devoured it at one sitting, and was immediately scarred for life. Between the horrifyingly vivid writing of David Seltzer1 (humans and jackals sexing it up! nannies with their heads twisted off!) and my giant illustrated children’s Bible, I cobbled together a rococo mythology in which Satan walked among us in short pants and a British schoolboy’s jacket and the Apocalypse was always just around the corner. This was also the first serious manifestation of my (entirely self-diagnosed) OCD, in which I developed2 elaborate schemes to avoid all instances of the number 6 and its multiples. All my ability to do math in my head I credit to this period of my life.
So my annual Goodness Festival was quite a torturous affair, what with trying simultaneously to love baby Jesus, get adult Jesus to pay attention to me, avoid being sucked into a burning lake of molten lava for all eternity, and prove I deserved a Holly Hobbie doll. For weeks I was an insufferable goody-goody: I would promptly clear the dinner table without being asked, volunteer to do extra chores, simper sweetly at every word out of my mother’s mouth. It was exhausting. You would think that as soon as the presents were safely wrapped and under the tree I could relax and let up a little—but no. I knew that as soon as the paper was ripped off all the boxes and my sister and I were sitting, glutted, among our mounds of new toys, I would have to face the Anti-Christ alone. Santa and baby Jesus would retreat for another year and it was up to me to figure out how to avoid the number 18 and defeat the forces of evil for the next 11 months. While all the motivation I felt to ostentatiously dust the living room every 15 minutes drained away, I still knew that I would have to go through the whole thing again in less than a year.
As soon as I was old enough to start ignoring Christmas I did. Or at least I tried. I got pretty good at dreaming up excuses for why I couldn’t travel home for the holidays, which got a lot easier when I moved to Vancouver: “The airfare is so expensive! I can only come once a year! It’s more fun in summer anyway!” I know it pained my parents, but we were long past the point at which I could explain to them that my childhood was a long and lonely misery and I wanted to put it, and them, as far behind me as possible. But this story is not set during that long period of Just-Us-Two Christmases Scott and I enjoyed in the misty damps of the Pacific Northwest.3 The events I am about to relate happened during a Christmas that slipped through the cracks, when we were living less than two hours from my folks in the same state and it was hard to justify skipping the annual family Noel. This story takes place on a Greyhound bus between Charlotte and Asheville, North Carolina.
I’m not sure how it came about that Scott and I agreed to take a four-hour bus ride to visit my parents for Christmas that year. Surely we owned a car? I have no memory of taking a bus back afterwards, so how did we get home? But those details are not important now. What is important is that for well over an hour of that bus ride, Scott napped while I listened—involuntarily—to a conversation in the seat behind me. The seat backs were very high, padded and quite plush, so I couldn’t see the two men conversing even if I’d turned around to look. The voices seemed fairly young, the speakers sounded white, and the accents were straight out of Cornpone Central Casting—the twangiest, syrupiest, golldarnit-est Appalachian good-ol’-boy voices it is possible to imagine.
I tuned in partway through.
“So it’s not like it was my fault,” said the first voice. Let’s call him Jim.
“No way, José,” replied his friend (who shall be known hereafter as Bud). “How was you to know?”
“Damn straight. It’s not like anyone told me I could get into trouble for that.”
“Fucking unfair is what it is.”
The voices lapsed into a companionable silence.
“So I had these tickets to Woodstock 3,” Jim went on, “and then I have a meeting with my fucking parole officer that same day! What are the odds?”
“That is just bad luck,” Bud clucked in sympathy.
“There is no way I am missing that concert. I have been waiting years! Fucking years on the inside. There is just no way.”
“No way! Especially when the whole thing is not even your fault to begin with.”
“Fuck yeah! I mean, what was I supposed to do? There was only one way out.”
“Absolutely, man.”
“I really did think about various options, but in the end there was only one thing I could do.”
“I believe you, man. That was a real conundrum.”
“So I asked my buddy Stan if he would do it. He wasn’t thrilled about the idea, but he said he’d meet me in the woods behind my momma’s house. I said I would bring the gun.”
“He didn’t have no gun he could use?”
“Nah. Besides, it was better if it was my gun, just in case.”
“Sure, yeah, that makes sense.”
“For the ballistics or whatnot.”
“Sure, sure.”
“So I find a good, thick tree, and I go stand up against it. And I told Stan to aim for the middle of my thigh, where there’s some padding, right? I don’t want him to hit no bone or nothing.”
“No, that’s good thinking.”
“And I told him not to stand too close, cause it has to look like an accident. There can’t be no powder burns or whatever.”
“Sure—the ballistics.”
“Right, the ballistics. So he backs up about fifteen feet, and his hand is fucking shaking all over the place, and I am legit worried he’s going to miss my fucking leg. But I had to go through with it! I had these fucking tickets to fucking Woodstock!”
“Fuck yeah! You had no choice.”
“No choice!” Jim pauses. “My fucking parole officer is always on my fucking nuts about every goddam fucking thing. There’s no way he was going to let me out of this meeting. No way.” Another pause. “I had no fucking choice.”
“So what then?”
“So get this! Stan, that fucking pussy, refuses to do it!”
“No way! Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I am not! He refuses. Says he’s afraid of fucking it up, doesn’t want to be responsible, blah blah blah.”
“Shit. That motherfucker. So what did you do?”
“I grabbed the gun and shot myself in the fucking leg. I mean, what else could I do?”
“Nothing, man! You had no choice!”
“It hurt like a motherfucker, I gotta say. And then Stan almost wouldn’t drive me to the hospital, that asshole. Said he didn’t want to be involved.”
“Fuck me! What a pussy. So what did you do?”
“Well I had a gun in my hand, didn’t I?” Jim retorted.
Bud chuckled appreciatively.
“I mean, I probably wouldn’t have used it, cause then who would have drove me to the fucking hospital? But he didn’t know that.”
“So what happened then?”
“So get this. They put my fucking leg in a cast, man! From my ankle all the way up to my fucking balls.”
“No fucking way!”
“So I can’t go to fucking Woodstock 3 after all!”
“You are shitting me! After all that!”
“Yeah. Fucking unbelievable. All those years.”
“Jesus. But what could you do? It’s not like you had any choice.”
“Nope. I had to do it. I had no choice.”
They lapsed into silence for the rest of the bus ride. As soon as they were done talking, I let out my breath (which apparently I had been holding for well over 15 minutes) and turned my head veeeeeery slooooowly to look at Scott beside me. Our eyes locked—he was awake! He had also heard the entire tale of Jim, Jim’s parole officer, Jim’s concert tickets, Stan, Jim’s gun, Jim’s momma’s tree, and Jim’s full-leg cast. We stared at each other silently for a moment, afraid to move or speak. I waggled my eyebrows at him, and he twitched his lips back at me. We couldn’t talk because Jim and Bud would obviously hear anything we said—but there was so much to say. It was pure torture, waiting another hour to pull into the Greyhound station in Asheville so we could finally careen off the bus into the parking lot and laugh our asses off.
I spent that hour wrestling with my own inner demons. I was being uncharitable, I was being unkind. I knew nothing of Jim and his history—obviously his was a life much less privileged than my own. Who was I to condescend to him, to mock and ridicule him, even in the privacy of my own thoughts? This was years before the rise and fall of Hillbilly Elegy, but its basic argument was already familiar, and I could cobble together a whole tragic history for Jim out of the cultural flotsam and jetsam available to me: a little bit Jed Clampett, a smidge of Bo Duke, a soupçon of Clyde Barrow. Jim was probably from a broken home, I reasoned: a victim of familial violence, undereducated, perhaps an addict with mental health problems let down by our broken health care system. He made a few mistakes early on, ended up in juvie (you can tell this is the elaborate fantasy of a privileged white person, since the word “juvie” makes an appearance), made some bad choices and worse friends, got sucked into the prison-industrial complex and has been churning in its cruel wake ever since. In some real sense it’s not his fault that he found himself caught between a rock and hard place—even if the rock is expensive concert tickets and the hard place is an implacable parole officer. In some deep way, he really didn’t “have a choice.” His repeated refrain is just a metaphor for the tragedy of the American dream.
Even so, by the time the bus pulled into the station I was frantic to get a look at him. Maybe I didn’t want to laugh so much any more, but I was still on fire with curiosity. Would his face confirm my back story? Perhaps there would be a glint of tragic longing in his surprisingly soft brown eyes; maybe his work-roughened hands would tremble slightly with a long-surpressed desire to plumb the symbolic depths of To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe he is a diamond in the rough, waiting for a little education, a little TLC, a little sympathy in order to shine. Maybe he just needs a chance.
Scott and I got off the bus before Jim and Bud, and without saying a word to each other we turned sharply and walked to the side of the door as we disembarked so we could get a look at them as they stepped down. Yes, there they were—that was obviously them! Tougher-looking than I had imagined: the one I pegged as “Jim” had a shaved head and a deep crease between his eyes that made him look mean. “Bud” was slightly more pleasant looking, but still not someone I’d want to encounter in a dark alley at night: also with a shaved head, bristly demi-beard, tall and powerful. It was an unseasonably warm December day in Asheville, well over 60 degrees, and both men were wearing jeans and T-shirts and carrying light jackets, showing off their pumped-up forearms and biceps. And then, incredibly, Jim said something about feeling hot and peeled off his T-shirt. And then he turned his back to the small crowd of septugenarians (and us) waiting for the underbelly of the bus to disgorge their luggage. And that is when we saw the resplendant canvas of his naked torso, covered from waistband to nape in elaborate Nazi tattoos. There were swastikas, and eagles clutching swastikas, and black crosses, and SS double lightning bolts, and a bunch of other images whose meaning I did not know and did not care to know but could infer from context. Not only was Jim not embarrassed to be revealing his white supremacist markings to the assembled old ladies and gentlemen just off the bus; he was obviously proud of them and looking for an excuse to get all publicly nude so he could show them off.
And that is where my privileged white lady fantasy about his tragic upbringing peeled away from me like a ghost from a freshly departed corpse and floated off into the towering black pine trees circling the parking lot. Nope, I thought to myself. Nope nope nope nope. Don’t care what the hell was done to him, when, how often, or by whom. That is not a reason to become a fucking Nazi. Game over. No sympathy. Nope.
I am allowed to laugh at him now.
Obviously my refusal to continue extending sympathy to “Jim” was a failure of imagination on my part. In theory there is no necessary stopping point for the spinning of elaborate back stories that enable one to feel empathy for a fellow human being. If I can imagine my way into understanding why he was in prison, or an addict, or violent or irrational, then I should also be able to imagine—fairly easily, one would think—why he might become a neo-Nazi. Indeed, there are whole suites of plausible explanations that have very little to do with being fundamentally evil, or even fundamentally racist or anti-Semitic. The sociologist Michael Kimmel believes it is mostly about toxic masculinity. Tony McAleer, a former member of the White Aryan Resistance and founder of the support group Life After Hate, believes that it’s fundamentally about belonging. And even without these compelling explanations, surely I believe that the practice of radical empathy demands that we ascribe humanity and extend grace to all fellow creatures, no matter how repugnant their actions?
Or—maybe it’s okay for there to be a stopping point beyond which imagination does not go. It’s tiring, all this fantasizing. Life is short, and there are too many Nazis in it. Perhaps it’s not my job to figure out everyone’s back story. Maybe I can just let Jim be his own unreconstituted self, unknown and unknowable. He’s already given me a hell of a story, and to be honest I care mostly about the story. I turned my back on his naked tattooed back, grabbed my suitcase and got into my parents’ car idling by the bus station. They’re bickering already, and barely say hello. Scott and I sit in silence in the back seat. I still have Christmas to face. There are demons enough to fight at home. And after all, I’ve always had a hard time telling Santa from the Anti-Christ.
I was today minus 30 seconds old when I learned that the film came first, and the book is a “novelization” of the movie by the original screenwriter Seltzer. I am genuinely shocked.
The use of the past tense here is entirely conventional.
Yes, I know that referring to the West Coast of Canada as the Pacific Northwest is not only erroneous but borderline offensive, but I can’t come up with a pithy enough phrase here and I don’t want to ruin the rhythm of my sentence.