It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas...PART I

There isn't anything inherently interesting about Belmont Park. It is a palace of brown-ish mottled linoleum; a paragon of utalitarian pillars and towering windows with a grey-tinted view of the track beyond, below. Occasionally you'll hear the stutter-thunder of horses racing by, accompianied by frenzied yells and protestations from the men in the stands. It isn't cheering--cheering is something people do when they're having a good time. This is the sound of men straining, through the sheer force of their own wills and the power of their nicotine-choked voices, to carry their horse across the finish line to glory and enough cash to get themselves home tonight. After the bar. The light is flourescent and therefore sickly bright, making what few shadows fall, fall puke green and weak. People are not there to make friends. They chat with one another, they talk of horses and of close calls and of previous small victories, but outside of the track, when they're not on the betting line or staring up at one of the many monitors showing the progress of the race being lost at the moment, they are strangers. Of a kind. Obviously, they're all pitted against one another. Everyone wants to bring home all the money. Everyone wants to have their problems solved with the motion of those legs out there, with the speed of their hooves, with the infallibility of a horse's need to get the hell away from where they are if they so choose. They'd be loathe to admit it, but they're actually all part of the same huge splaying family; they are all cut from the same cloth, they are all here for the same reason and will all go home to the same lives, with very little variation. Some are addicted, and will ruin their lives and the lives of people they love here, pumping their income into the track, providing the money it needs to keep its flourescents on, to keep the glow from the monitors bright upon their faces, filled with hope and hunger and fear. Some are just here out of curiosity, that may or may not burgeon into entire lost paychecks one day, depending on their luck on this maiden voyage. They all think they want to be there, but the truth is they have to be. It is something in their wiring. It is as necessary as a marriage. Not being here is as unthinkable as not having a beer with dinner, as not sharing that off-color joke with your cousin from Philly once a holiday. I am not here because I want to be. I am here because I was told to come. My parents, such as they are, think that this is an acceptable form of family pre-Holiday togetherness. The truth is: my stepfather needs to be here, and we're too afraid to tell him we're staying home, my brother and mother and I. I couldn't care less about horse racing--I'd rather see these horses from afar, watching as they roll and curl over the landscape of Montana, one unstoppable, rich brown wave of sinew and muscle and mane. Instead I catch grainy glimpses of them, burdened as they are, with absurd man-shaped tumors clinging desperately to their hair, to their backs. The place is as decked out as I suppose it can be for Christmas--there are thin cardboard Christmas Character cutouts taped to the walls, to the incongruently red pillars, some are on the betting windows themselves. Weak lights on strings cling to the railings on the ramp leading into the main hall--a wide open expanse to hold all the various lines and clusters of men and their soon-to-be-departed money. There's the occasional oversized plastic candy cane--some are lit from within, some sputter uselessly, some are dark and hollow. I joke with my brother--grabbing one of the dark ones and pretending to whip it off the ground and engaging him in a desperate swordfight that will determine the future of one or both of us. He laughs and runs to the other side of the hall, pretending to grab his own. "Knock it off," is the curt warning we get. We both glance at him, to see whether or not he's all that pissed. The lidless, beady stare we get back confirms he'd really much rather we'd stop, and he's prepared, as it turns out, to resort to fisticuffs to bring about this occurence. We knock it off, seperate, look around at our surroundings. There's nothing else to do. Nobody here looks anybody else in the eye. They're all looking at their tickets, at their wallets, at the monitors, at the windows, at the horses so far away out there, so fast. The only one who gets looked in the eye is the guy behind the window, the guy who takes your money, the guy who, if this were a sane and just universe, would be able to bestow upon you riches beyond your imagining. He's their connection. He's the last vestige of familiarity between the handing over of your hard-earned dough and the vast unknowable chasm of Chance. He also couldn't give less of a shit. He's got his own ponies to watch. He's got an awning over the living room window to fix. He's got kids, who need presents, and the wife who never gets his dinner right. He's one of them, but vastly more powerful, more desirable, than anyone in these men's stilted view of the Universe in general. And looking him in the eye is as good as looking at anyone else here in the eye--he can do no more for you, really, than anyone else. We're asked if we're hungry. "Not really." "But they have hot dogs here." " No, I'm good, I just had breakfast." "Come on, get a hot dog or somethin', I don't know how long we'll be here." Now, to the objective observer, this exchange would appear, perhaps, to be amiable--a father figure concerned for his youngsters' well-being. They can't really know just how fraught with danger this dialogue actually is. What is really being said is this: "I'm showing a definable point of interest in your happiness, so as to over-ride any possible complaint of displeasure you might concieve of at having to come to this sad place for reasons that are very clear to your mother and I but which you have yet to understand or comprehend." "I acknowledge your show of good will for what it is and do not wish to let you off the hook so easily--the promise of shitty food that will make me sick later is not enough to make up for the misery this place brings me, or the discomfort I feel in the presence of you and your woman--ahem--my mother. Besides which, the food would be so distasteful that it would actually make me even more miserable than I already am." "I am pushing the point. This is the only concession you will recieve from me today or, perhaps, at any point in the near or distant future. This option of food, it would seem, is quite preferrable to the option of blind violence which may await you for disrespecting me in this fashion, for not allowing me this chance to absolve myself from any wrongdoing thus committed or yet to come. I am even going so far as to show interest in your particular tastes, mentioning as I did the Hot Dog. Turning me down would be most unfortunate. It would show me that you are not interested in what I can provide for you, and my role in life, at least in relation to you, is that or Provider. Remove this meaning from me and you are just another asshole in my fucking way. From this point on, piss me off and I will have no other recourse but to treat you as an enemy." "I am pressing my point as well. I am appalled by you and this place and my mother's complicity and everything the combination stands for. Hot Dogs, if you truly knew anything about me, make me riotously ill and are therefore not at all desirous to me. I am not willing to meet you halfway on this. Actually, from the tone of my voice, you should be able to tell that I am more interested in you saving money for whatever you wish to use it on than for my happiness. Please, I am unworthy of your grace." "I am caught slightly off-guard by your obvious sign of selflessness, one I applaud as being worthy of my attention and indeed mirrors my own sense of charity. However, you are here against your will, and will continue to be, as long as I see fit. This is your last chance for food or any sense of comfort or happiness until you are returned home at some point in the future. Ask for this happiness later and it will be much harder to come by, as at that point the grace period would have been over and my attentions will be turned from charity and towards what I need to focus on to make myself happy. I have very little in this world that quells the rage that churns inside me. Interrupt that small, fleeting window of opportunity, and you traverse on ground I myself fear to tread." So I get a hot dog, and my brother gets a hot dog, and so does my mother. My stepfather can't be bothered. While he's gone my mother tries with her preening, desperate enthusiasm to get us interested in the horse races: "They're so beautiful!" "How fast do you think they're going, really?" "Can you imagine being on one of those?" And, finally, after many attempts: "Well I don't know how long we're going to be here. We want to be home for The Simpsons, right?" These phrases are much simpler to translate, as my mother's motives are much less complex: "I am appealing to your apprecitation of aesthetics by making the observation of the horse's beauty! Like me despite being responsible for the misery you're now experiencing!" "I am appealing to your intellectual sense AND your ego at the same time, asking you a rhetorical scientific question in the hopes that you will take it as aquiesing to your superior knowledge of the material world! Like me despite being responsible for the misery you're now experiencing!" "In a last-ditch effort I am attempting to appeal to your unknowable imagination, on which I have remarked on many an occasion as being quite impressive and beyond my scope, to further stroke your ego and draw you closer to me! Like me despite being responsible for the misery you're now experiencing!" And finally: "Oh, fuck it. I tried. At least you have something to look forward to later. Maybe." We stood, the three of us, my brother and I joking about the horses pooping in each other's faces at high speeds, imagining action scenes atop the horses--a chase scene or two between two G.I. Joe guys my brother had in his pocket (I always made sure one or the other of us had some toys on any long family trips; it was the only distraction from the bickering and hostility that spilled over from the front of the car), generally getting as far away from the situation as we could, more by habit than need. Eventually Mom broke our reviere--"Where's he been? It's been a fuckin' half hour."And off we went in search of him. There wasn't much to search--the place was wide-open, the only places you can lose someone is behind the many pillars, or in the bathrooms, or perhaps in the balcony that pressed the ceiling down from above at a threatening angle, but this was out of the question; only people that could afford to went up there. Being the oldest, I was told to check the bathrooms. I didn't want to mention to my mother that looking at men in the bathroom of a race track might not be taken too kindly by the less savory elements of the race-track-visiting men of the world. I just scuttled in, the dutiful son, furtively glanced at the shoes of the men in there, and peed as much as I had to, washed, and reported the failure to my mother. No bother, there he was: down the hall, standing at a window not frequented by many people. It was bigger and better-lit and unadorned with any Holiday cutouts. Frosty had no place here. There was a staircase nearby, leading up, and to whatever promise lay beyond for those who knew what promise meant. He was deep in discussion with the man behind the window, shifting his weight, changing his stance with the movement of his hands to better convey his meaning to be more convincing, perhaps, to get the point across through any possible language barrier that may exist. We stood there, me and my brother and my mother, looking mostly at the topography of the floor and the way the light from above gave it a ripply, wave-y look, like a lake of milk frozen, its burden at the moment to bear the weight of these bettors until it's allowed to swirl and lap and gurgle once again. At least that's what I was looking at. My mother must have been looking at my stepfather--her "uh-oh" brought me unpleasantly back to the here and now. He walked right over that shiny bit of linoleum, right for us, swiftly. His head swerved from side to side fitfully, not willing to focus on any one thing, his anger ill-contained by the confines of what surrounded him. He needed to be outside. And we needed to get out of the way. My mother caught up with him as he pushes his way through the cold, trying so hard to get into our bones, to tell us beyond a shadow of a doubt that winter is here and wasn't going anywhere for awhile. Or maybe it was just trying as hard as it could to quell the heat of my stepfather's anger as it boiled and sloshed and rose dangerously quick. Spattered invectives reached my brother and I, heads down against the wind, resigning ourselves to what we knew what was to come, and were steeling our resolves, our stomachs, from the impending stress and discomfort this very long car drive home would prove to be.