Cold Christmas

The deep inside of an office holiday party

“Pick a number, Todd,” Andy says into the microphone in his hand. He’s standing at the front of the small banquet room at the fancy restaurant in downtown Chicago where our thriving little company is having its employee Christmas dinner. We are a crowd of maybe 30, seated at two long tables, bathed in wonderful warm air, oblivious to the negative-degree winds swirling outside the iced-up windows.

I strain to bring Andy into focus, and then give up and stare over at a blank wall, which appears to be pulsating. I squint; and thankfully, no, it’s just a stationary wall. I feel the faint stirrings of the Beast awakening in me. I’m sitting totally still — I’m almost certain of it — as I watch the nincompoop Todd, at the far end of my table, try to burn holes into Andy’s face with his eyes.

“Come on, Todd, pick a number,” Andy says, unfazed. It’s time for the new hires to haul their asses upfront and humiliate themselves. It’s the skits.

Todd, a new employee, is a massive Kansan, and none too friendly. Beside him, lost in his shadow, sits his wife, who hasn’t smiled or even had a facial expression the whole evening.

“Gimme ten,” the big man says.

Andy reaches into the baseball cap and finds a slip of paper. “Number 10,” he reads. “Burn the U.K. flag,” he says, his grin stretching out to unnatural proportions. “You’ve got to burn the U.K. flag.”

It’s just a joke. There’s no flag of the University of Kansas, Todd’s alma mater, but he doesn’t see the humor. He glares at Andy, his nostrils atremble. From my seat, I can just about hear the scream of a train whistle blowing somewhere inside Todd’s massive head, but it’s probably happening in my own. It’s the Beast seeking to breathe life into something — anything — which is what it does.

Todd is unmoving, his eyes narrowed down to Bunsen burner-like flames. They’re communicating to Andy that he’s relatively small as humans go, and that it would be easy, even enjoyable, to dislocate just about any part of his body.

Andy suddenly breaks up laughing. “Just kidding, I love Kansas!” he roars. “Kidding! Come on, Todd.”

And he probably does love Kansas. But not because he’s necessarily been there. It’s due to the loyalty of the gridiron. Andy is all sports, all the time. Like most of these people, he lives to drink and toss off one-liners and watch ball games and spew out pretty much whatever nonsense bubbles into his head. Yet even with his disarming charm, the concrete pillar in the too-large jacket isn’t laughing.

As for me, I am wavering in an icy indoor wind, shackled to a wooden stake, feeling the flames crackling at my feet. I know, I know. I’m just sitting here, sated by a free meal, awash in hooch just like everybody else. But the rumbling is starting to radiate out to my appendages.

I had moved here from Seattle about six months ago, where things were largely understandable. I had never met people like this. I am the company’s junior programmer, earning my wings. But I seem to be melting, in so many ways.

Directly across from me is the company’s newest hire, Dottie, nervously squirming beside her husband Rob, whose eager, smiling face is hidden behind a huge digital camera he is pointing everywhere. Dottie appears to be trying to become a part of him. Oh, Dottie. Poor Dottie. She’s probably praying she won’t be called on for a skit. She’s painfully shy, and no wonder, what she must have endured throughout her life, being burdened by such heavy acne, even now in her fifties, which covers much of her face from chin to scalp. On winter days, her cheeks glisten with the sheen of a medicinal cream that shines brightly in the overhead fluorescents. The sales guys snicker at her constantly.

But she’s not without her defenses. There’s real danger in Dottie’s eyes if you look closely at them, a moist, malevolent cat-like power behind the laser-like pupils that float behind the large eyeglasses. Every once in a while, she will lash out when she’s pushed too far, her eyes flush with unblinking malice, her stare positively murderous, before she retracts back into passivity, her power retreating back into the shadows.

“Dottie!” Andy calls out.

Oh, jeez.

Dottie jumps up as though tazed. Her pupils expand, then shrink down to dots.

Immediately, involuntarily, she is traveling. She’s taking a trip back in time. She’s crouched down in the crawlspace under the stairs, in her father’s house, reading a novel in the flashlight’s beam, imagining that she’s someone else, someone who is living life instead of hiding from it. She’s not in this city, state or even time zone. She’s flown off to somewhere tropical and exotic, where she gets to be sexy and bold, or impish and coy, a place perhaps drawn by Graham Green or Michael Ondaatje. She’s away, away … down the pages, across time.

“Dottie!” Andy roars. “C’mon! Get up here. You’re first!”

Big Kansas stares at her, slit-eyed. He doesn’t give a shit about Dottie— crazy old bird, a hippie chick from Northampton who will never figure into his life and so she doesn’t actually exist for him. But his companion, the wife, smiles slightly, taking in Dottie’s twisted grimace.

“No way,” Dottie mumbles through clenched teeth.

A chorus of C’mon Dottie’s rapidly grows louder.

Surprisingly, her husband Rob says, “You can do it, Dottie.”

She turns to him, her eyes a wet fury. She whispers in his ear and immediately he stiffens like a post. All around, jeers leap and dance and jump and spin, the room seeming to have shrunk down in size. Rob sets the massive camera down beside their To-Go box, two pieces of chocolate cake, untouched.

“C’mon,” he urges.

“You obviously don’t want to get laid tonight,” Dottie says loud enough for everyone to hear.

The ensuing silence is gravitational and all-consuming. Tumultis interruptus. When the group can restrain themselves no longer, Howard, one of the sales guys, yells out, “TMI! TMI!”

Images flow into the group’s collective mind, of Dottie’s slender body with its knife-edged angles enveloped beneath the expansive Rob, a Boa constrictor squeezing the life out of a defenseless little squirrel. Such images crowd out all thought and sensate data, threatening to derail the hard-won drunken buzz. My nerves are right at the edge of the edge. The Beast lolls in the discord.

Dottie, oblivious to her faux pas, is puzzled by the stunned silence and the nervous chuckles. In her mind, she’s fit in. She’s one of the guys. She sits up straight and triumphantly, and smiles in that modest way of hers that doesn’t stretch the skin too much.

The empty space in the room seems to be speaking now if only I could understand it…

The whole crew — the boss William, his coquettish wife Connie, the new sales chief Bob, and Michael and his bland Barbie date — none of them care about any of this. They probably aren’t even here. As for me, I’m about partway here. When they speak, their words sound garbled, as if bubbling up from the depths. I think they’re talking about going across the street to The Iron Horse, a rowdy pub, but I’m not totally sure. I’m dealing with my own problems here.

“Rubio!” Andy bellows, as Dottie slides, relieved, back into her private world.

All eyes turn to Rubio, the only man of color within shouting distance. Rubio’s life is too sprawling and complex to understand. We only know that there are numerous ex-wives and kids and former employers and business ventures and who knows what else, that push and pull at him. You get the feeling that the smirking, pencil-stashed Rubio always does something to piss people off. But, on the other hand (the more important one) he’s a technical genius, a huge earner for the company. Clients are constantly seeking him out to develop the critical software that runs their back-end systems (unlike Todd, who only does patches).

“Six,” Rubio calls out.

Andy plunges his hand into the cap and reads from the paper: “Sing a song about the company.”

Loud cheers all around. This will be so good. Everyone wants to see Rubio do something, anything. He’s razor-tuned to what people want, you never have to worry about Rubio being contrary. He’s a pleaser. And he’s pleased decades’ worth of folks — at least at the start. You get the feeling that follow-through may not be his strong suit.

“No problema,” he says, as he begins to scrawl lyrics on a napkin.

The woman sitting beside him, his wife/girlfriend/ex-wife/date/hooker, who is more woman than her spaghetti-strapped fire-engine-red dress can contain, takes Rubio’s arm and attempts to drag him up front. The crowd is back to cheering and hooting now that the disturbing (but not atypical) Dottie interlude is over.

But Rubio is not quite ready. So, his lady friend sashays up front, clears her throat, and proceeds to belt out a drunken ditty about how her dad turned into a bitter old fart and tried to keep her from forging out on her own, and how Rubio saved her. Totally inappropriate. But brilliantly funny.

When she’s finished, Rubio stands up and tears up his napkin in frustration, and throws the shreds into the air, which rain down like spent fireworks. He walks up front, gently nudges aside his date, and begins to sing, and he’s even better than her. He sings about us in the room in a way that’s dead-on accurate and improvisational, his voice a Sinatra-like coo. He finishes and takes a bow to loud applause.

Immediately, we hear chants of “Dot-tie! Dot-tie!” from Michael, a sales guy, and the gears begin to turn as people consider whether to push poor Dottie again. Wouldn’t that be fun! Man, this is a tough crowd. Dottie’s face is frozen in a horror stare. But the group decides not to venture any farther up into her goulash. Michael hoists up his beer in a toast to, well, anything. Fuck it! He whispers to the long tall woman in the black dress sitting beside him who hasn’t uttered a single word all night. She turns and gives him a wet kiss.

The managers — Bob, Michael and William at table one — are big earners. Huge houses, expensive cars, attractive spouses, entitled kids. They never stop thinking about business. It wakes them in the night, their subconscious minds chipping away at supply chain problems. They are machines. Money making machines. They make notes late at night, you find emails tagged 4:33 a.m. in your inbox. The rest of the crew are strictly working-class, though everyone’s on a level playing field tonight.

“Iron Horse!” Michael screams.

Soon we are donning our coats. We pass through the lobby and step out into the freezing downtown nightscape. The sidewalks are tickly coated in ice. We shuffle right into the howling winds. I nurse an unsettling feeling that the air is laughing at me as I pull out a Chapstick and attempt to stave off the drying of my lips.

The restaurant’s glowing red sign above us shakes violently in the gusts as if it is trying to break loose and crash down on the oblivious creatures beneath it. The sign holds. Probably none of these folks, my coworkers, would care if it fell and hit them. That would be great! What a story to tell. They don’t care about much of anything right now. Not the wind, nor the cold, nor the next moment coming up to meet them. What they do care about is the money. And the booze, and the laughs, and the ball games, the jokes, and the petty cruelties they can inflict on the weak.

They know in the end that it’ll be fine — which is exactly what I don’t know. As I watch them walk off laughing into the night, slipping and falling, clutching at each other, pulling that person down, laughing, too numb to care, I think to myself, what a useful skill is this business of letting go totally, of not looking for anything beyond pleasure and the dulling of pain.

Dottie and Rob grimace their goodbye and start to speed-walk toward the parking lot, and I wonder what that drive-home conversation will be like.

I take a long inhale. My nose hairs freeze up. I clamp my fingers down on my nostrils and squeeze down, simply for the novelty of feeling the crunching sensation. I fumble around in my pocket for my keys and click the fob, hoping that my vehicle will announce itself from somewhere in the vast asphalt expanse. I hear the distant chirp, determine the direction. Even though the cold is stinging the exposed skin of my face, I drink in an unfettered breath, feel the spaciousness of walking in the dark night, and start on my way to whatever will be next, holing that maybe I’ll understand it.