Stealing Christmas

When I was sixteen, one of my many roommates in California was a girl from Texas named Jenna. She’d come out west in search of fame and fortune as a dancer, like Nomi Malone in Showgirls, but things weren’t really working out in her favor. Jenna loved to dance, but not half as much as she loved to drop acid and take eight-hour baths. She’d spend the entire afternoon in the bathtub, lounging in lukewarm water, quietly humming to herself and staring slack-jawed at the wall. As long as you didn’t need to bathe, she wasn’t any trouble. It was like living with a very quiet mermaid.
Jenna had a Greek boyfriend named Nicos, who’d come over and sit on the bathroom floor next to her. Many nights I’d tell them goodnight, then get up the next morning and go in there to pee, only to find them still wide awake, sitting in amiable silence.
One day in early December, Nicos came over, had sex with Jenna, and then told her he couldn’t handle how serious they’d gotten. This was fascinating to me, as I couldn’t recall them ever having a conversation more than five sentences long. Jenna was so distraught she didn’t leave her room for the rest of the day. I worried about her being out of the water for so long.

I was tempted to go in her room and mist her down with a water bottle, like they do with beached whales.
Nicos called later in the day, but it was just to tell me he’d left his wallet in her room when they had the pre-breakup sex, and he’d be by later to get it. I decided to improve the mood in our house and make Christmas cookies. Our oven had never been used, so it was a pretty big moment. As my first batch was baking, Jenna appeared in the doorway.
“Do I smell cookies?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I walked over to the Fairway and got some baking stuff, you know, for the holidays.”
“Did Nicos call?”
“Yeah. He left his wallet.”
That brought a new wave of tears, interrupted by the oven timer. Then we stood in the kitchen, scalding our tongues on freshly baked peppermint cookies.
“Dude, this is so perfect. We needed some motherfuckin’ Christmas up in this dump, ya know?”
Suddenly, Jenna perked up. She had been fortified by the Christmas cookies.
“We need a tree! And ornaments!”
“And if we had money, we would get them.”
“Dude,” she said, smiling. “This one’s on Nicos.”
We hopped in Jenna’s convertable, and went down the mountain to the Target in Hemet, spending all of Nicos’ cash on ornaments, lights, tinsel, and ribbons. Then we went to a roadside Christmas tree farm and picked out a tree. That’s when Nicos’ MasterCard was declined.
“That motherfucker didn’t pay his credit card bill,” said Jenna. “I knew he’d find a way to screw me over one more time.”
We left, disheartened. We had all the trimmings, but no tree. I tried to look at the bright side. We could still deck the halls, so to speak, and then hit up our roommates for tree money. Jenna came to a stop in a supermarket parking lot.
“I’m gonna get cigarettes. Will you drive us home? I’m exhausted.”
I climbed into the driver’s seat as Jenna went into the grocery store. She returned seconds later and banged on the window, yelling for me to put the top down before running away again. I got the roof down on the convertible just in time to see a fir tree running full-speed towards the car. Jenna threw the tree in the back seat and jumped in beside me.
“I found a tree! Haul ass!”

Apparently the supermarket was selling trees out front, and had made the regrettable error of leaving it momentarily unmanned. We considered it divine intervention.
Later we sat in the living room, eating cookies and admiring our work, when there was a knock at the door. It was Nicos, whom we’d held such ill will toward a few hours ago. But his unexpected generosity had cheered us up considerably, and brought holiday joy to our home. Now we would give a gift in return: A life lesson about leaving your wallet at someone’s house when you break up with them.

Bending the Rules

“You don’t understand. That is a twenty dollar bottle of moisturizer.”
“Sorry, sir. It’s over the three-ounce limit.”
I’m standing in the airport security line, flying for the first time in a few months. Somehow, I missed the latest memo on insane travel restrictions. As a result, I’m now locked in a standoff with a man who has obviously had this conversation umpteen million times.
“If I bend the rules for you, I gotta bend ‘em for everybody else,” he says, and tosses half of the contents of my shaving kit into a trash bin.
I’m on my way to Vegas, to serve as Man of Honor at my roommate Kit’s marriage to his boyfriend, which will be perfectly legal in all fifty states.
It’s complicated.
Kit is a guy who was inconveniently born with girl parts, but he’s been working with medical professionals lately to correct that little error in manufacturing. His boyfriend Terrence was also born with girl parts, but he took care of that a few years ago. So now Terrence has a driver’s license identifying him as “M”, while Kit is still at this early stage classified as “F”. We’ve got an “M”, we’ve got an “F”, and we’re ready for Vegas. The best part is, even after Kit becomes legally classified as “M”, the marriage will still be valid. So I’ll finally have the satisfaction of seeing a legally married gay couple- it just took a pair of tranny boys to figure out how to do it.
Pause for a moment, and picture how long it took me to explain this to my mother.
A few hours later, I’m smoking under a palm tree outside the Las Vegas Marriage License Bureau, watching Kit and Terrence through the plate glass window. It’s almost midnight on a Saturday, so the cast of characters inside is pretty entertaining. One window down from my couple is a very drunk pair of college kids that stops talking to the clerk every ten seconds to make out. And one window down from that couple is an Asian businessman who appears to be marrying a middle-aged whore.
Speaking of middle-aged whores, my cousin flew to Vegas once and then drove all the way out to The Mustang Ranch with the express intention of losing his virginity. He had grown tired of waiting and really wanted to get the first one out of the way, so he engaged the services of a professional. Apparently the one he selected was having a really bad week, because she started crying before they even got undressed. They offered to get him a new girl with a sunnier disposition, but apparently nothing kills a hard-on quite like a sobbing hooker.
But I’m digressing. Back to the transsexual wedding. The next morning, we’re up bright and early to head over to civil court and get this marriage thing taken care of before brunch. The judge performing the ceremony looks exactly like one of the Skeksis from “The Dark Crystal”, if it were going as Bea Arthur for Halloween.
Even though we know we’re here on a technicality, thanks to that “F” on Kit’s license, it’s still very jarring to hear him called by his legal (female) name. And Judge Skeksis keeps saying that name over and over, as if reassuring herself that the “bride” really is a “woman”. In all the planning of this blessed event, I don’t think any of us ever considered the fact that Kit would be referred to as someone’s “wife”, which is patently absurd. Kit’s twice the man I am, in half the size, which technically makes him four times the man I am, I think. Math is hard. But then it’s done. Kit and Terrence are legally married. The fact that these two people could marry, but only when one was finished with his gender change and the other was just getting started, speaks volumes about how insane the whole argument against gay marriage really is. But today is encouraging, because my friends got what they wanted, and we got to bend the rules a bit.

And remember what the airport guy said: If they do it for some people, eventually they’ll have to do it for everybody else.