Making the Most

This is a Tuesday story. I posted a Monday story as well. Real quick, though, I'm interviewed at Scryptic. Go, read it. But, more importantly, the complete Elk's Run is available in Previews. I edit this book, I love this book - the print rights were purchased by Villard (a division of Random House) and the book comes out in March. Go tell your comic shop. Now.
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This coming Saturday is my company Christmas party. In the movies (and on TV), company Christmas parties tend to look like a good time. Young(er) people getting drunk, photocopying asses, and making out in the storage closet. When you work in defense, your parties aren’t like that at all. You usually end up going to same hotel and eating the same food and listening to the same DJ and making fun of the same people.

So you have to make the most of it.

December 2000 I went to my first holiday party. Robin even came in from Boston to go accompany me. This was shortly after I got my first big win at TAO so I was a little bit of a big shot; 22-year-old kid brings in a mid-six-figure contract four months into his time at the company. A lot of the folks at the party knew of me and wanted to meet me – it was exciting (and Robin was impressed as well).

The food was good, the drinks were free for the first two hours (but Robin and I crashed the wedding next door where the drinks were free all night), and as the old folks started to trickle out the young(er) folks danced a bit. Mainly Robin and I. At the time the next youngest person in the whole company was mid-thirties (and that’s including administrative staff).

I worked for an OLD company.

But we had fun and come December 2001 we were ready for another good time. Robin’s company party was at her office – it was fine but, you know. Meh. Mine was at the same hotel again. Same menu. Same attendees. Same DJ. Same music. My boy Mike was at TAO now as well – Robin and I thought we had someone young to hang with until he ate some ravioli made with some pesto (after the waiter told him there were not nuts) and Mike had to get rushed to the hospital.

Robin and I got liquored up and danced by ourselves again.

December 2002 was the same thing. Again. Except this time Mike didn’t almost die.

December 2003 was the supposed to be the same thing. But, having enough of the blahs, I got up on the dance floor and sang James Brown’s, “I Feel Good.” I was shaking my hips and doing spits – making suggestive eyes to my old-ass coworkers’ wives and getting them to giggle. Most of the people at the part apparently hated it but, whatever, I felt good. I knew that I would.

December 2004 and I was no longer at TAO. After a 6-month stint at one or the largest defense contractors in the world I found myself at an employee-owned company making good money. Our party was at a cramped restaurant, I was only working at the company for two weeks so my interaction with folks was low – I didn’t really know anybody except for the two folks I came over to the new place with.

But it was a new atmosphere, new food options, and new conversations. No dancing, however, and after the party a bunch of my coworkers made their way to the bar but I didn’t go over there with them – Robin and I just headed home.

The company realized that we’re getting too big for a restaurant thing so Christmas 2005 we were on a dinner cruise. We sailed the Potomac while eating food and dancing. The car was open all night and the younger folks (and my current company is MUCH younger) got wasted. After the cruise we went to a bar in Alexandria and drank some more. Good times for all.

However, a bunch of the older folks at the company didn’t like the fact that they were trapped on a boat for four hours so this year we’re not on a cruise.

We’re in a hotel.

The same hotel my Christmas parties at TAO were in.

And I’m sure the parties will be there from now on until I retire.

Where’s the snow?

Today’s the first day I brought my winter jacket out of the closet and it was mainly for stylish reasons – I could have easily gotten away with a sweatshirt. Where’s the snow? The sub-zero weather? We’re digging into December now and I’m still biking around with a fleece on.

Didn’t it seem to get colder earlier when we were kids? I remember going sleighing in December with my pops. Prospect Park – we’d pack up a thermos of hot chocolate and bring the wooden sled as well as the red, round sleds; the ones that spun out of control all the way down the hill.

My dad would always bundle me up until I was sweating. We’d be with my cousin Luis and start with the smaller hill – the baby hill. Two of us would sleigh down the hill while the other watched over the hot chocolate thermos. We’d try to be goofy about it – sleighing down the hill on my dad’s shoulders or something similar. I remember that there was this creek that was quite a few tens-of-yards out from the bottom of the slope – it was nearly impossible to get enough momentum going to get close to that creek yet every time I went down that hill I was afraid I was going to fall in.

We’d always warm-up on the baby hill a bit, gearing up for the real reason we went to Prospect Park when it snowed – Suicide Hill.

Suicide Fucking Hill. I’d come running out of my bedroom the Saturday morning after it snowed BEGGING my dad to take me to Suicide Hill. That hill was monstrous as a kid – the fact that you had to walk up a staircase to get to the top of it was mind-boggling. There’d be a line of kids walking up that staircase, each of us taking a step at a time, watching kids fly down that hill packed so densely that collisions were routine.

Suicide Fucking Hill. You’d get to the top of the hill, get a good running start, and take off with that sled beneath you. There was nothing worse than a bad takeoff on Suicide Hill – the kind where you tumble off of your sled and roll down the hill for a while. You try to regain your footing but kids are aiming for you, taking out your legs and getting you to flip on your as. If you fell of your sled going down Suicide Hill you’d end up at the bottom ten minutes later with open wounds, bruises, and a mild concussion.

Suicide Fucking Hill. Going down face first on a wooden sled was the best – snow kicking up and making your face freeze. You couldn’t see a thing like that; between the chunks of eyes depositing in your eyes and your face being stretched back from the colossal speeds you flew blind all the way down, taking out kids as they scramble for their misplaced sled.

The funny thing about Suicide Hill is the fact that, come spring time, it looks like a baby hill. Seriously – I remember looking at Suicide Hill without snow on it and being so disappointed, you could hardly get a good roll going down the hill when it was grassy. For some reason snow made that damn hill a Black Diamond. The place to be in Brooklyn after a snowstorm.

Suicide Fucking Hill.

I Said Daily, I Meant Daily

Busy day and I really don’t have a story ready. So I’ll just freestyle a couple of holiday-themed anecdotes.

Christmas 2001 Robin came to visit me from Boston. She took the bus, 8-hours, and was spent by the time she got in. She gets to DC only to discover that I didn’t buy a tree. We went to Cleveland Park to see if we could find someone selling a tree. There was some organic mart with these little four-footers out front so we purchased one. We couldn’t take it on the metro so I just said I’d carry it home – it was only two one metro stop, after all, probably a little over a mile walk, and the tree was light. Well, after walking three blocks, uphill, I realized I made a very big mistake. Not wanting to look like a wuss, however, I continued to carry it all the way home. The anguish on my face was apparent because every five minutes Robin would ask, “Are you sure you don’t want me to carry it?”

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One year Santa came to my grandma’s house. I knew “Santa was in our hearts” at this point so I asked my mom who was playing Santa.

“What do you mean? That’s Santa.”

No-one would tell me. I don’t think it was a family member, I remember as a kid thinking it was my Grandfather but then my Grandfather showed up. Looking at pictures of the Santa, now, I still have no idea who he was. I don’t think his red nose was from the cold, though – Santa looks drunk in those pictures.

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Speaking of grandma’s house, we’d always have a big Christmas Eve thing there where all seven brothers and sisters (plus the grandparents) would give gifts to all of the nieces and nephews. So, the night before Christmas you were guaranteed at least seven presents and they were always the things on your list that “Santa didn’t get a chance to make,” so they weren’t shitty gifts at all.

The adults would torture us. They’d set some time for us to open the presents and it was always hours away. When the time came they’d start taking pictures of us and setting up cameras and finding all these excuses to hold us up even more.

Let’s put this into perspective. The cousins consisted of me, my sister, Luis, Andy, Amanda, Samantha, Keisha, Tatum, Christina, lil-Mike, and, on occasion, big Mike from Arizona. Eleven kids. Each kid gets a minimum of seven presents. There were at least 77 presents under that tree and the adults just kept fucking with us. 77 wrapped-up presents waiting to be torn open. And my mom was using her spit-finger to wipe peanut butter off of my face so I’d look good for pictures.

Torture.

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