THE SORROWS OF SANTA

by Irving A Greenfield

With the exception of a white beard, he wore the red uniform of his calling. We shared a small, round table in Starbucks, a short distance from the department store where I was sure he worked. A portly man, with a large square head, and large facial features, he looked as if he were deep in thought or sad, possibly both. If smoking was allowed, I imagined he’d be smoking a curved pipe.

Ordinarily, I keep to myself. I’m an observer, a people watcher, and Starbucks is a wonderful place to do that – – watch people. Perhaps it was the excitement of the season that caused me to say, “How’s it going, Santa?”

He gave me a baleful look, and in a deep voice said, “It’s a good gig.”

From the sound of his voice, I thought that any conversation we might have had was aborted before it could begin. But I was wrong, because after a pause, he said, “I’m not sure I can take it anymore.”

I immediately thought he was responding to an overbearing supervisor. I knew nothing about the world of Santa Clauses, other than that they were supposed to be jolly. But the man sitting opposite me was far from being jolly; he was in fact morose.

I sipped my coffee. The man didn’t seem to be in a conversational mood; and I wasn’t about to intrude on his private time. My attention shifted to a lovely looking young woman, seated diagonally opposite from me. She too, was sipping from a cardboard cup with a plastic top. There were two very large shopping bags close by, on her left side. Despite my age, I enjoyed looking at her. She wore very little makeup, and her cheeks were still rosy from the cold outside.

Young women, especially good-looking young women, possessed a gaiety about themselves that young men of a similar age seemed to lack . . . Had I been years and years younger, I might have been brash enough to introduce myself to her, and let the proverbial chips fall where they will. But now the pleasure was completely voyeuristic, and maybe a little imaginative. Aging changed many things, but not my gender.

“I have to make a decision,” my table companion said abruptly.

My attention switched to him. I waited for him to elaborate. But he was in no hurry to continue; and his reticence gave me the eerie feeling that we were engaged in a conversation, but I knew that wasn’t the case. I sipped more of my coffee, while I waited for him to speak. I was tempted to look at my watch, and count the seconds or minutes before he spoke again. But I didn’t. Instead, I looked at him, and silently began to count. When I reached a hundred and he still hadn’t spoken, I returned my attention to the young woman. She was prettier than he was, with his pockmarked face and doleful expression.

For courtesy’s sake, I made another count after a few minutes, and reached eighty, before he again said, “It was a good gig.” Obviously, he was weighing the financial benefits of his job, against whatever else was on the other side of the scale.

“And my boss doesn’t bother me,” he added a few moments later.

That eliminated one of the possibilities I had previously thought about.

“It’s the kids, the poor ones, whose mom or dad paid five dollars for me to lie to them.” His eyes became watery, and he brushed each one of them with the back of his hand, before taking another sip of his coffee.

Suddenly, I was in deep water, doing a mental doggie paddle. I did know how deep the water really was, or where the shore was.

“Those poor kids want what other kids want. You know what I mean. And there’s no way in hell they’ll get anything but a poor substitute. . . .”

I was a child during the depression years, and my family was poor. Yet somehow, my mother managed to scrape together enough money for me to visit Santa Claus, and asked him for a set of electric trains. But when Christmas morning came, I wound up with a set of wind-up trains, a sad substitute for what I’d envisioned, which was either a set of American Flyer or Lionel. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t convince myself that my wind-up trains were better than either of the possibilities I believed I would get. I lost my faith in Saint Nick, and I am sure that betrayal started me on the road to the cynic I became – –

Barging into my thoughts, the man said, “Sometimes I feel like jumping up and yelling, ‘I’m a fraud, the whole thing is a fraud, especially when I get one of the really poor ones.”

I shook my head, “That’s not the way you want to go.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he looked at his watch and announced it was time for him to leave.

I watched him disappear into the crowds of late afternoon shoppers; then I looked at the table, where the young woman was sitting. She was no longer there. But two young men wearing woolen stocking hats, sat opposite one another. Both had ragged looking backpacks nearby.

Finishing my coffee, I sat at the table awhile longer, thinking about the man dilemma: if he quits, he loses income; if stays, he’d have lost something of himself. Which would be the greater loss to him? I felt my lips tighten. I didn’t like a problem that put me or other people between a hammer and an anvil, the rock and a hard place, which was where he stood. There was nothing I could have said, or done, that would have helped him chose. That he would have to do on his own.

My interest in the man’s problem waned, and I drifted into my people-watching mode. Starbucks was crowded, and the noise level was up. It must have gotten colder outside, because people who now came in, were more bundled up than those who were here earlier. Twilight had already settled on the street. Headlights were on, and the street lamps glowed, their bases resting in pools of yellow light.

I looked at my watch; it was time for me to go home and tell my wife about my day, which was not much different from my other days, except for having met a disenchanted Santa. I disposed of my empty coffee container, and walked to Seventh Avenue, where I was lucky enough not to have to wait for a number twenty downtown bus. The streets we passed were festooned with holiday decorations, and practically all of the passengers were holding the results of their Christmas shopping.

Suddenly I felt tired, a bit weary. Traffic was slow, and became slower when we approached the streets leading to the Holland Tunnel. But as soon as we passed them, we moved quickly, and I was shortly at my apartment door. It opened before I opened it, and there was my wife, Irena. She threw her arms around my neck and fiercely pressed her face to my chest. Ordinarily, not an overly emotional woman, she was sobbing and simultaneously telling me the police were looking for me. I seemed to have become “public enemy number one.”

When I was finally in the apartment, and managed to calm Irina, I learned that I was allegedly responsible for hypnotizing a man, who caused mayhem in Macy’s toy department.

Suddenly, I started to laugh. I laughed so hard tears came to my eyes, and I began to hurt.

“I listened too long,” I managed to sputter and continued to laugh. But then I realized it wasn’t funny; it was sad, and I stopped laughing. He needed a reason, an excuse to do what he wanted to do and I was it.