It
is both Christmas and not, all at once.
Regaining
consciousness upon the carpet, a naked Brother Skunk feels himself to some
degree cohere, his initial and understandable confusion displaced by the spoken
prayer he may or may not have brought back from his unconscious state.
And
which too, may or may not be spoken,
Skunk: When she first told me what she’d
be doing I had to ask her what she meant. Not that I didn’t know, but no
daughter should ever need deliberate her father’s relationship to pornography.
the
distinction being between those words he understands himself to say and the indeterminate
sounds actually emanating from his mouth.
Skunk: This is our first Christmas
without her mother, though in truth she was barely here a year ago. We did visit
with her in the hospice for all that was worth, but I don’t know if she ever even
knew we were there, and then, by year’s end, she had left us.
His
words create and inhabit their own logic over which he is at any given moment
only ever partially in control, relating to his Uncle Jesus these memories of
events never having actually taken place.
Skunk: And it has so upset us both this
Christmas, the number of cards coming and coming and coming with every mail but
still addressed to the family, from people who even this whole year later seem
somehow to have escaped the news of our bereavement.
In
truth, his loose foot had become ensnared by the coiled multi-coloured lights
anchored fast to the wall plug, the soft ankle yielding to its understanding of
whatever pressure had been brought to bear upon it, and he had buckled to the
floor, the dull blunt ache continuing to occur across the side of his face as
he prays and each tooth there a little looser in its gum, his ear throbbing hot
from the impact, while the still recent and actual bereavement is manifest in
his scalp’s already scabbed and newly raw bald patches wet with a blood yet to congeal.
Up
briefly on his elbows he observes his illuminated foot, trapped in its tiny
lights, with an interior heat roaring out amongst them from off the tumescent
and still swelling flesh, while from somewhere to the edge of his head and
complementing the smell of himself and the house both comes the soft stink of
an unopened net of chocolate coins spoiling in the summer heat, located as he
is at this point of equidistance between actual Christmases.
Skunk
(as if somehow reading the words from off the smell itself): John. Fitzgerald.
Kennedy.
again,
Skunk:
John. Fitzgerald. Kennedy.
and
a third time,
Skunk:
John. Fitzgerald. Kennedy.
These
weeks he has somehow managed to force himself on and on through this wretched
daily grind of inebriation and malnutrition, lacking all notion of when or even
how he might stop himself, resigning himself only to the inevitability of his eventually
being stopped.
With
enough focus he can still recall his every childhood Christmas spent with his mother,
their cardboard box of decorations retrieved from the attic, its coloured
baubles of which every year at least one would implode within her shaking fist,
a glass too fine to break the skin showering its tiny shards to sparkle like
glitter amongst the carpet’s coming months.
Skunk
(rubbing his hands over his face): It’s… the goddamn heat. The, the…
though
his skin has long since ceased to accurately register the temperature of its
environment.
Skunk
(locating now the whiskey bottle within his shifting vision, and tapping at its
black and white label): You work for me.
then
louder
Skunk:
You work for me.
breathing
Skunk:
Not… It’s not the other way around.
His
body of habit remembers itself into the recovery position, sour breath
moistening that carpet most immediate, the wire of lights further tightening about
his foot.
Skunk (bluntly): And then she died, and
that was that. ant was thrown fully for a loop. Having been on target to pass
the requisite exams to get herself away to university, she simply never went
back to school after last Christmas; this past year it’s just been her and me, both
moping about the place and neither of us knowing quite what to do with the
other. To say I was relieved when she told me she’d got herself a job would be
to understate it, but when she told me what it was, I was not so.
antler:
God, Dad, It’s not like I have to have sex
with anyone.
Skunk
(clutching his head in both hands): Right, right, which, you know, in terms of
reassuring job descriptions…
Skunk: It’s a late night phone-in tv
channel, and all she has to do, she tells me, is wriggle around in her
underwears and talk to the guys who phone in over the four hour shift. She got
the gig only because it’s midnight to 4 am on Christmas morning, and most of
the girls who do this sort of thing won’t, for their own reasons, work those
Christmas shifts.
Advent witnessed a deal of ugly back and
forth on the subject that covered neither of us in glory. I’m not proud of some
of the things I said, and I know now for fact she would say likewise of
herself.
Eventually I got myself resigned to the thinking
if it was something I never saw, it would be something that had never happened,
so when it came to it, when she’d left on Christmas Eve with her bag of new
clothes such as they might be, I went upstairs with the conviction of a child: the
sooner to bed, the sooner to sleep, the sooner to wake up on Christmas morning.
At my age of course, this is no longer
the way things work.
When I do subsequently wake up and check
the clock it’s still a quarter of midnight, and against every one of my better
judgements I take the shotglass, its heeltaps, and whatever’s left in the
bottle of Jack Daniel’s with me downstairs and put on the tv.
Entering the channel’s number brings up
a blue holding screen with its logo adapted for the season, and a notice
advising me their programming will begin at twelve o’clock.
The
videocassette in the player begins again from where it was previously stopped.
Skunk: Following the final minute’s 60
second countdown, she is suddenly there onscreen, our only daughter stretched
upon some fluorescent-lit, Christmas quilt-covered, padded platform, and framed
between two plastic Christmas trees.
My stomach aches.
If you don’t know these channels, and contrary
to what I might have previously suggested I’m no expert, here’s how they work:
the woman on screen has a phone and below her various graphics scroll past, phone
numbers, charges and such, encouraging people to call in so she can entertain
them, presumably to enhance their masturbation. The economics might be based either
on delaying their ejaculate to keep them on the phone as long as possible, or alternately
finishing with each quickly so as to get through more callers.
No casual viewer can hear the ensuing conversation,
so the silence is filled with the most innocuous, synthetic dance music any
amount of listening to would drive a sane person otherwise.
On occasion this music will mute out and
the woman will swap over to a microphone to speak with the viewers, passing on
whatever information, and then the microphone goes off, and the music returns.
While some of the shows are a deal more
explicit than others, the general momentum seems to be that as time goes on,
the woman takes off what little clothing she might be wearing, though again if
there’s any logic to the timing of this, perhaps in response to a caller’s request,
or a producer’s request, or done during a lull in order to entice further
callers, it is beyond my fathoming.
During such lulls the woman will continually
waggle her phone at the viewer as if to say “Look, you can see I’m not using
this, give me a call”, combined with a come-here thing with the index finger of
her free hand.
What makes me feel so bad of course is
that I already knew all of this before I had her explain it to me.
She picks up the microphone and
introduces herself,
antler: Hi guys,
her voice audibly attempting to
circumvent its nervousness
antler: and a very merry filthy
Christmas to every one of you. My name’s Peggy Jean and if you’re thinking
you’ve never seen me before you’re absolutely right. This is my very first time
on here so which of you lovely dirty guys is going to be the first to pop my
cherry?
Skunk: Oh Jesus Lord, oh Jesus Lord.
We are close enough for me to know for
sure she is still actually a virgin so to see her peddling her virtue like some
commodified incentive makes my heart retch.
His
stomach acts on impulse to combat its own vomit reflex.
Skunk: Did she just say her name was
Peggy Jean? I locate these two words together on screen below some on rotation
and redacted photographs I assume to be of her, though I can’t, indeed do not wish to, discern
any actual detail as would confirm this.
antler: I’m all yours for the next four
hours so give me a call and I promise you will not regret it.
at which she puts down the microphone
and picks up the phone.
With the music resumed she begins a sort
of arrhythmic dance, swaying to and fro on her Christmas-quilted platform,
still proffering the shaking telephone to the camera.
As an epiphany I recognise its weakness,
but it suddenly occurs to me that every one of these girls on every one of
these channels, and truly they are legion, has someone, not necessarily her
father but someone, who might be watching them in such similar anguish.
My sense of timing comes subject to the
whiskey, but it seems to me all time has passed in no time, and again she is
collecting up the microphone,
antler: Hi guys, where are you all? I
know it’s Christmas Eve, but I’m here waiting for you and I’m feeling hot and
horny. Which of you dirty, filthy, guys is going to be my first caller? I’m
waiting
this time I mute her voice ahead of the
music, watch her mouth form words I have no interest in hearing.
She seems too alert to the presence of others
in the room; I have no idea of their number, the production looks basic, but too
much time spent seeking reassurance from adjacent others might dispel the narrative
myth that has to be sustained in such a set-up, i.e. that the caller and the woman
on screen are sharing some manner of intimate interaction, and not being leered
at by a thousand other isolated souls momentarily masturbating away their loneliness.
When she begins to conscientiously focus more on performing to the camera I
imagine it is the result of having been instructed so to do.
Time passes, Christmas creeps on into its
own occurrence, and our only child begins unbuttoning her new blouse live on television.
antler: Time to unwrap your present,
guys
nerves visibly biting the colour from
off her lips.
I offer her mother a silent apology, yet
recalling too how back when we met she would herself watch these and other late
night channels, when she was of an age with antler now.
Oh, she is so very slight; there is
nothing at all of her.
A
flung hand relegates the emptied shotglass to the carpet, accepting the bottle now
over everything else.
Skunk: In the willed abstraction of it
all, I wonder at the producers’ thinking. Do they budget for no calls at this
time on Christmas morning, and is my daughter therefore some manner of
sacrifice, an offering to dead air? Absent any call, and therefore subsequent
delivery of any single unit of currency, will she be fired?
These thoughts circle each other and collapse
down amongst themselves, cascading into still others before any individual one
is fully formed.
When was the last time I saw her
naked? As an infant? Would any parent
even actually remember: first comprehensible words and first steps, yes, but the
last time you saw your child naked? Lifting her from out the bath and into a
towel, something so small and vulnerable, weighing less than food; rubbing whatever cream onto whatever rash; examining
each various cumulate playground bruise, and then… no more. Almost overnight it
seemed she had become her mother’s daughter, and part of my role was to step
back and permit that happen.
But as her father I will never not recognise
those intimate signifiers as might pass un-noticed by others, witness here her
habitual scratching at a rash appeared under her arm and on her shoulder from a
localised psoriasis exacerbated by the new underwears, which unless they’re
washed before worn she well knows new clothes will have a habit of doing.
Keep going.
Skunk:
You have to keep going.
Skunk: A layer of moisture filmed upon
her eyes becomes now a degree more reflective as she understands herself central
to that vortex of her own collapsing self-esteem, realising this simultaneously
brave and stupid attempt to establish some new identity for herself is failing.
Still she is still our daughter, and
regardless our family still our family.
Contrarily, I now find myself hoping that
someone does indeed call, for her, and still too that no-one does, that this defines
itself her first and final shift, and having confirmed this latter as
eventuality time starts to drag in the speed of its passing.
One minute… then another… each too
slowly crawling itself from off the four hours, or however much now remains
thereof.
Skunk:
Christ on my left side. Christ on my left side. Christ on my left side.
Skunk: Finally, having sat clawing with
frustration at the tight flesh of my forehead until I can feel the blood’s heat
risen up as fresh welts upon its surface, I cross the room and collect the
telephone from out its cradle, and having crawled back to squat mere inches from the screen, concentrate on entering
each individual number from the flashing graphic.
cog:
Lights, please?
falling
into himself.
cog:
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping
watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them,
and the glory of the Lord shone round about them. And they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you tidings of
great joy which will be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the
city of David a saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign
unto you. Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a
manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host,
praising God and saying, ‘Glory to god in the highest, and on earth peace,
goodwill toward men.’”
He
is now flat upon his back, at danger of suffocating upon his stomach’s own ejected
waste.
cog:
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
Skunk: Her face manifests the exact
moment she understands to have herself a caller, a massed confusion of grief,
terror, and apprehension.
In the telephone I can hear her voice
but failing to register the words it carries, talk across her,
Skunk: ant it’s your dad. Cover yourself
up and come on home.
and now her latent tears pool and spill
over, fall from her face as she tries to conceal her nakedness with her free
hand,
antler (grabbing too at the quilt): Oh
Dad I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.
Skunk: It’s okay. You’re okay. Come home
antler,
her tears now prompting my own
Skunk:
please just come back home,
wiping
at his face
Skunk:
and Merry Christmas.
Sunlight
crawls on, up over the windowsill and in through the curtains; it is damn near
four o’clock, again, and Brother Skunk blacks out into the morning of his
incipient birthday.
