Goodwill Toward Men

For Davy, who still loves Christmas.

Davy sped down Clinton Highway with single-minded purpose one cold November evening. Rain beat against every side of his mom’s red Toyota Corolla, the road temporarily obscured with each downfold of the windshield wipers.

My toes clinched inside my threadbare black Chuck Taylor high-tops. Davy wasn’t driving recklessly, exactly, but his enthusiasm for Christmas seemed a bit adventurous when contrasted against the slippery pavement.

“I love Christmas!” he said, dragging his menthol Camel down to the butt before pitching it into the rain. “Lowe’s better have some good trees.”

“I’m sure they will,” I said reassuringly, “but let’s try to get there in one piece, shall we?”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he replied, and fished another cigarette out of the pack. “We’re gonna buy a big tree this year, and I’m gonna make decorations for it and I think do, like, a gold and silver theme.”

Davy’s devotion to the holiday season was remarkable considering his family was as poor as ours. Christmas usually brought out the worst in me. I was either grieving the loss of Daddy or angry over receiving generic charitable gifts sorted by gender, along with dusty leftover cans of peas.

Davy never shared my despair, for which I was grateful. Christmas was his favorite time of year, and I didn’t want my radioactive Grinch spirit to dampen my best friend’s joy. He was insanely exuberant about the holidays.

He had to be to buy a tree in the middle of a monsoon two weeks before Thanksgiving.

“Turn on my Mariah Christmas CD,” he said. I hoisted the heavy black canvas case that held his music collection from the backseat and unzipped it. I flipped through the bulky pages.

“Aerosmith…Beatles…Beatles, 1001 Sound Effects, Green Day,” I read. “‘Mariah Carey Merry Christmas’,” I said, and pulled the CD from its slot. On the cover, Mariah was wearing a red velvet jumpsuit trimmed in white fur. She looked pretty, but also like some pervy elf fantasy come to life.

“Can we please not objectify women at least one day a year?” I wondered aloud. “It’s Christmas, for Christ’s sake.”

“I wouldn’t mind dressing up as Santa,” chirped Davy.

I chose not to reply and loaded the CD into the Discman wedged between the two front seats. The Corolla didn’t come equipped with a CD player, only a cassette player. The Discman was attached to a wire that was attached to a cassette-shaped adapter that fit inside the tape slot. It allowed CDs to be played in the car, as long as one kept the speed steady and didn’t hit any potholes, paper cups, or acorns.

We were still listening to the first song, “Silent Night,” when Davy pulled into the Lowe’s parking lot.

“There are the trees!” Davy exclaimed as we screeched into a parking space on a half-donut, extinguishing the engine as well as Mariah’s operatically endless run of the phrase heavenly peace.

I reluctantly got out of the car and walked quickly to the live tree display. The rain still poured, but the only thing that would make me run anywhere was a Godzilla attack. Davy piled into the middle of the tree selection immediately, engulfed on all sides by Fraser Firs and White Pines.

I watched quietly for a few minutes, the rustling of the trees the only indication Davy was still alive. I was cold. My flannel, Stevie Ray Vaughan t-shirt, and thin magenta bellbottoms were only warm enough for dashing from the car to inside. They weren’t cutting it tonight.

“Have you found one yet?” I yelled into the trees. “I’m cold.”

Davy emerged long enough to peel off his gray jacket. He handed it to me. “I’m still looking,” he said, and wandered back into the parking lot forest in his own short-sleeved t-shirt. I put on his jacket and tried to be patient.

After what seemed like forever, Davy returned triumphantly. “I found the perfect tree!” he said, and gestured to the Lowe’s employee that he was ready to pay. Sap, reflected by the outdoor fluorescent lamps, glistened on his forearms, and his hair pointed in a half-dozen different directions. He looked as though he had wrestled both Paul Bunyan and his ox for their holiday bounty - and won.

Davy paid and went to get the car. I stayed with the tree. He let me keep his jacket on, despite the fact we were both soggy and freezing. Somehow, he wasn’t fazed, still cheerful and comfy as a North Pole reindeer. It was sickening.

  Davy parked in the fire truck zone and pressed the trunk release. It flew open with a pop, revealing a surprise.

                The trunk was completely full of bags of garbage. Household garbage that someone, namely Davy, had forgotten to toss into the subdivision dumpster.

Rain fell from the sky and beat a rhythm on the plastic bags. Pah-rump-pah-pah-pump.

We stared in shock. “Oh my God,” Davy moaned slowly. “I forgot the trash.”

                “What are we going to do now?” I asked, taking a puff off my inhaler in response to both the damp weather and my consternation.

                “We’re gonna have to find a dumpster. I think there’s one at Kroger.”

                Kroger was all the way at the other end of Clinton Highway, near Merchants Drive. I sighed, irritated but resigned. This was a familiar feeling – between my friends and my mom, annoyed acceptance of someone else’s hijinks was the emotion I carried with me most frequently.

                “I’ll be in the car,” I said, handing Davy his jacket and leaving him to explain to the Lowe’s employee her new babysitting duty. Back inside the Corolla, I cranked the engine, and the bright intro to “All I Want for Christmas Is You” jingled festively. Instantly, I pressed the Discman’s power button to off.

                “Not now, Mariah,” I snarled. “Santa left his bags of trash in our sleigh.”

                Davy returned to the driver’s seat, and we headed to Kroger. The rain’s intensity had slowed but the windshield wipers were still needed. The interior of the Corolla had warmed up and the cozy combination of the heat and the sound of the wipers was making me drowsy. We still had so much to do – get rid of the garbage, go get the tree, take it back to Davy’s house, unload it. And we hadn’t eaten dinner yet, either.

                I tried with all my might to take it in stride. Then, Davy said, “Hey! What happened to Mariah?”

                He thumbed the power button back on and Mariah’s insistent vocals screamed to life.

                “I love this song!” he said happily.

Of course, he loved it. Everybody loved it. In fact, Mariah required it, her beautiful voice pursuing Christmas cheer as relentlessly as she did the tune’s absent beau. I was the lone dissenter – a garland-draped mannequin trapped in a Macy’s window display with two turtledoves for company.

We finally pulled into the Kroger parking lot. “See?” said Davy. “I knew there were dumpsters here.” He drove up next to them, then used his headlights to illuminate the rusty doors.

“Oh no!” exclaimed Davy. He put his face down on the steering wheel and gestured upwards with his right hand.

GOODWILL DONATION DROP-OFF was written across the dumpsters in white paint.

“I thought these were Kroger’s dumpsters,” he said with disappointment.

We sat in silence for a moment. The CD player stuttered forward to the next track. Mariah began to croon “Oh, Holy Night.”

Suddenly, Davy flung open the car door, popping the trunk once more. Surely, he wasn’t doing what I thought he was doing.

He was.

“You can’t be serious!” I called after him. “You cannot leave your household garbage in the donation dumpsters!”

“Hurry up and help me before we get busted. Lowe’s is gonna close soon. Or do you want to spend the rest of your senior year locked up in juvie?”

A mad twinkle had appeared in his eye, something akin to the look of an axe-wielding Santa in a B-movie. I knew then nothing would deter Davy from delivering his tree home that night. If I wanted to be asleep in my own bed before sunrise, I had to help. I got out of the car.

Davy opened the door of the dumpster, but it barely budged. “It’s full,” he said shortly.

Other previously donated bags, ones definitely not full of old PB&J crusts and funky-smelling paper towels, already ringed the blue metal rectangle. “We can just leave the trash propped up against it instead,” he decided.

We went around to the back of the Corolla and grabbed the garbage.

  “Fall on your knees and hear the angel voices…”

If Mom ever found out I was acting trashy at the Goodwill while listening to a song about our dear Savior’s birth, she would smack me upside the head with a stocking full of coal.

And I would deserve it.

“Sorry, baby Jesus,” I said guiltily, hurriedly setting two stinky bags next to a cardboard box full of empty Mason jars. I tried to find the silver lining. At least we would not be contaminating the interior of the dumpster. A Yuletide miracle, some might say.

Davy closed the trunk and returned to the car. “Let’s get out of here,” he said and slammed his door shut.

We peeled out of the parking lot, leaving our shameful donation behind.

Despite our fastest efforts, we caught the traffic light at the corner of Clinton Highway and Merchants anyway. Davy lit up another cig nervously, waiting for the green arrow so we could flee.

Lifelong poverty had taught me one thing about the holidays – some were good and some were bad, but every single one was a crapshoot. This Christmas would be the same. But did being a willing participant in the world’s worst charitable contribution portend calamity?

Nah, I thought. Christmas was about togetherness, peace on Earth. I was hopeful Jesus would turn the other cheek, the one not focused on the Goodwill dumpster, and forgive me.

I craned my head to the right and caught a final glimpse of the leaning garbage bags, shadowy and slick with rain. I quickly concocted a story in case we still got caught.

I would disguise my involvement as a work of outsider art, the gar-bage my general commentary on this time of year.

Davy could always blame Mariah.

The light changed and we headed back down Clinton Highway for the final time that night, racing toward a perfect holiday season.

A drawing from my 1995 journal