A Christmas Morning In Little Aleppo

The sun came up over Little Aleppo, and so the Morning Tavern opened its doors, no matter that it was Christmas. Fisherman and drunks and women who lied to their husbands about being joggers were waiting on the sidewalk on Widow’s Way, and the bartender in the tank top had room for them all. She had black hair under a Santa hat, and tattoos sleeving her arms. No one had yet fed the massive chromed-out jukebox, so it was quiet but for the grumbling and unwanted poetry. Scrabbling on the roof. Rats again, the bartender thought, or maybe something’s gotten loose from Harper Zoo again.

The fat man in the red suit entered, sat at the bar, took off his white gloves, stuffed them in his pocket, looked like he wanted a cigarette.

The bartender said,

“Egg nog?”

“Cutty and Sunkist,” the man replied.

“That’s an awful particular drink.”

“I’m a real special guy.”

The bartender, being a bartender, had heard variations on that sentiment from just about every man she’d ever poured a cocktail for. She found the Cutty, spritzed in the orange soda from the gun, added some more Cutty because, fuck it, it’s Christmas.

The man sipped the drink, nodded, sipped again. He stared off into space, which was impressive given that there was a wall six feet in front of him.

The bartender said,

“You look familiar.”

“You should smell me.”

“Tough night?”

“Not tough.”

“Long night?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, it’s over now.”

“Nah. Still got Hawaii.”

She smiled, professionally, and dawdled down to the other end of the el-shaped bar, stopping to pull two pints of Arrow Brown. (Arrow Brown was a stout that was advertised as “the thickest, brownest, flattest beer we’re legally permitted to sell.”) The Morning Tavern was filling with all sorts of humanity and other mammals: the insomniac, the sozzled, folks with dead families, saxophonists. There was a woman who called herself the Empress of Spokane, and insisted everyone else did, too

When the bartender came back to the red-suited man, she said,

“Another one?”

“Another one. You got a radio?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you turn on KHAY?”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot,” the bartender said, and clicked on a transistor behind the bar. She did not need to adjust the frequency; it was already set to 107.7…

“…on your FM dial. You know where to find your pal Frankie Nickels. She’ll play you the hits. That was Christmas Head by The Snug, but you knew that. I hear the boys are back in the studio, or at least in their lawyer’s office. There’s percolation to the situation, least that’s what I hear through various grapevines.

“But it’s Christmas, cats and kittens, and so you know what’s coming. Turned into a bit of a tradition. Didn’t mean it to, but apparently you all like this story.

“So I’ll tell it again.

“Some stories are too good to hear just once. Some are too important and we’re all so damn thickheaded. Gotta hear ’em over and over to get ’em to sink in. This one starts back in the fogginess of time. Real long ago. Before we had pinball machines, and before we had mirrors, and before we had hot-air balloons. Before we had bridges, even. Before we even learned how to write our names.

“We invented war.

“And it was real static for hundreds of thousands of years. Bunch of our young men sprint at a bunch of your young men. At first, everybody had a stick. Later on, we figured out how to make swords. Whoever won got to march on the loser’s lands and steal all their stuff and rape all their women. Greeks, Chinese Romans, all them empires you slept through history class on: bunch of guys sprinting at a bunch of other guys.

“Guns are a lot more recent than you’d imagine. And they only got worth a damn real recently, in a historical sense. There’s a reason all them Redcoats had bayonets affixed. Still a bunch of guys sprinting. Civil War saw the Gatling Gun, but just a little bit. Armies were still charging in the 1860’s.

“But it’s the new century, and we got a new war for a new world. Globe got all connected up in the 20th century! Should’ve thought twice before laying all them railroad tracks and telegraph lines! Should’ve known what would come with it! Some dippy Archduke gets shot and the whole planet goes kablooey, man, ha ha ha.

“So now you got machine guns. Good ones, too. Spit fire for hours and hours, and not need a break. Bullets the size of your thumb, 600 of ’em a minute, pumping downrange at three times the speed of sound. Set one up every couple hundred yards and that’s all she wrote, cats and kittens. In a world without tanks or air support? Better than the Great Wall, or Hadrian’s Wall. Who needs bricks when you’ve got a Browning?

“Under intense stress, the human will dig. Didja know that? People caught in burning buildings, the investigators often find scratch marks by their bodies. When the situation becomes primitive, so do we. Those first soldiers in 1914? They heard those machine guns and they dug straight down until they had themselves a nice trench.

“Nothing good has ever come from a trench.

“Everybody settled in real quick. Got the English and French–and ain’t they shocked to finally be on the same side in a conflictagration–on the left; the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans are in the middle; the Russians are on the right. That’s what the maps say. That’s what the books say.

“There were scared, cold children in holes being shot at for reasons absurd. That’s what your pal Frankie Nickels says.

“Nobody listens to deejays anymore.

“19 years old, 20 years old. Sign up, boy! Ain’t no legs gonna spread for you ‘less you sign up! Poor little bastards never saw the world coming. This is 1914. Just the start of the stupid. Trenches got dug out all nice and reinforced with wood and cement later in the war, but in ’14? They were holes. Naked mud. This is Northern Europe. Chilly up there starting around September. Best to be indoors, with a roaring fire and a bottle of whatnot and someone feisty to hide under the blankets with. Anywhere but a hole in the mud getting shot at.

“Home by Christmas. This was the general consensus, and you know what I tell you about that general consensus, cats and kittens. Run! Trust in General Motors, General Mills, any general but the general consensus! It’s usually just the laziest thought available. The boys will be home by Christmas, all the London papers trumpeted in the Fall of 1914. Roundabout December, they stopped printing that.

“Boys! Should’ve been living with their mamas. Learning how to lie to girls. Drinking with their buddies. Reading books. Writing books. 19 years old. 20 years old. British, German, who cares. Just little boys got told to do wrong by old men should’ve known better.

“O, those old men. They had read their books. O, they had read their books. And all them books defined war as a bunch of young men sprinting at a bunch of other young men, armed. And so that’s what the old men ordered up. ‘Over the top,’ that’s what they called it. Get out of the hole which was keeping you so safe from the machine guns of the enemy, and run forwards towards them machine guns.

“It had to work eventually.

“Christmas rolled around. It does that. And we’re not ever gonna know who started the proceedings, but there was doings transpiring. Strange alterations in the expected, ripples reverberating all up and down the betting line, people acting all funny. Seems that Christmas got a hold of one of them boys, 19 years old, 20 years old, never been away from home for the holiday before, and that boy started subordinating all melodic-like.

“Harmonizing with the enemy, ha ha ha.

“Carols! Those German boys started singing Stille Nacht and those British boys sang Silent Night right back at ’em. Line’s 400 miles long from north to south, so we ain’t talking about everyone, but enough to make a difference. Boys started singing at each other. And no one was shooting. This was Christmas Eve, and no one shot at each other that night all the way until dawn, which was cold and clear.

“When it got light enough, the British boys could see that the Germans had set up Christmas trees along the tops of their trenches. Not real trees, I guess. They were jerry-rigged, ha ha ha, but they were good enough. Christmas tree don’t have to be big to be beautiful, just has to mean it. And so the boys sang at one another until they couldn’t take it no more and someone popped his head up.

“Can you imagine? The Yuletide spirit is one thing, but sticking your head out of a trench in the First World War One? That boy’s balls grew three sizes that day, cats and kittens.

“Didn’t get blown off, though. Brit, German, we ain’t never gonna know who was the first, but he didn’t get his head blown off. Started walking towards the other boys, the boys he had been told were his enemy, and I’m gonna bet his opposite number was already out of his hole and walking towards him, and then they met in the middle and shook hands and wished each other a Merry Christmas.

“Peace on Earth and all that.

“All their brothers-in-arms followed, leaving their rifles behind. Nobody had much in the way of stuff, but gifts were exchanged. Tobacco, a fresh pair of socks. It wasn’t about the object, it was about seizing a chance to be kind. Sometimes we forget that human beings are full of humanity. The German barbers cut the British boys’ hair, and the other way ’round. Some of the officers could communicate, but the enlisted men mostly just smiled, and shook hands, and clapped each other on the shoulders. Which was enough, y’know?

“A guy had a ball.

“They played soccer. Tommy versus Fritz. Ground was frozen stiff and full of holes, but they didn’t care. All up and down the 400-mile long line, games broke out. There were no girls to talk to, so they kicked the ball around. 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds. Never gonna know how many, though, but seems a couple dozen. Robert Graves even wrote about one of the games, if you can believe that, but he wasn’t there and you know you can’t trust poets. Doesn’t really matter what the score was.

“Early Christmas supper out in No Man’s Land, together, all the boys sharing their squirreled-away goodies, and then back to the trenches at sundown. Sun goes down real early in December in Northern Europe.

“In the years that followed, the High Command on both sides would makes damn sure to schedule heavy shelling during the holiday.

“Now, I’ve been telling that story for I-don’t-know-how-many years right here on the Frankie Nickels Show on KHAY–Hey!–and I always did wonder just what the moral of it was. Story’s gotta have a lesson, cats and kittens! Otherwise, you’re just listing sequential events.

“When I was younger, I thought the moral was that man was pacifistic by nature and only became belligerent under duress, but I’ve been to the DMV too many times since then to believe that anymore. When I was a bit older, I thought that the soccer games were the important part. That given the freedom to choose so, people would pick playing over fighting. I dunno.

“Lately, I been thinking about those barbers and their customers. About having your enemy sitting in front of you, back turned, and a pair of scissors in your hand. About sitting there with your neck exposed. Maybe we should expose our necks a little bit more.

“It’s good for ya until it ain’t.”

The Morning Tavern had an Old Testament jukebox, ferocious and vengeful and chrome, with 45’s in it that went CHUNK and KASHWANG when you offered up your dime and opinion. Tasteful neon. It was an appliance. P-11. That Christmas song. The Irish one. The guy with the teeth, and the redhead. The sad one that got all the details wrong. Banjos in the arrangement, and the small transistor behind the bar playing KHAY–107.7 on your dial–was drowned out.

The man in the red suit raised his white eyebrows, and nothing else. He was nearing the end of his drink, and the bartender with the black hair and the tattoos asked,

“Another?”

“Quick one.”

She did. He gulped.

“Where do you think faith comes from?”

“Desperation,” the bartender answered too fast.

“Then why do children have it?”

“Children believe in the boogerman. Children can’t be trusted.”

“Sure they can. They haven’t learned how to lie yet.”

And when he said this, the man in the red suit’s eyes glowed. They were charcoal black, and still they glowed, and the cheeks above his beard reddened, and a calm overtook the bartender like she had no rent to pay or food to buy, and that she was encompassed by love and security, and the man tossed back the rest of his drink, threw a hundred on the bar, dismounted his stool, and continued,

“Terrible what becomes of adults. Have you seen my Blitzen?”

He was pointing downwards, so the bartender looked downwards, to where the man in the red suit had taken out his penis and testicles.

“He guides the sleigh.”

“GET OUT! Get out, you sex pervert jackass!”

Which the man in the red suit, having gotten what he wanted for Christmas, did. The door flapped open and shut behind him, and the bartender leaned against the well drinks, removed her Santa hat, replaced her Santa hat, made herself a Cutty and Sunkist and choked it down as punishment; there was scrabbling on the roof audible in between jukebox music, rats again or something got loose from Harper Zoo, and faith was a toss-up as always in the Morning Tavern, which is a bar in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.