“Your money’s no good here tonight. Can’t accept it,” he said, turning away to appease the loudmouth drunk who was cursing him for neglecting his empty glass.

  The motel was within stumbling distance, even in a blizzard, and I deserved to get a little buzz going after the shitty day I’d had. I tipped the shot glass to my lips and let the whisky burn my throat. The bartender looked like a college kid, barely of legal drinking age, tall, square jawed, with bright green eyes and a mop of floppy hair. He had the type of sharp features that would grow into a rugged masculinity as the soft layer of baby fat around his jaw and chin melted away with age. His voice, even when shouting, had an eager-to-please pitch that was slightly feminine, but his imposing size, six feet two or three, with broad shoulders, kept him from seeming swishy or obviously gay. He winked when he caught me staring at him—nothing lascivious, just a friendly gesture, his acknowledgment to a stranger who’d wandered into his bar that we were kindred spirits, fellow travelers, despite the obvious twenty- or twenty-five-year difference in our ages.

  “What’s your name?” he asked as he splashed Absolut and cranberry juice into a glass for a tough-looking babe who’d wedged herself into the crush of drinkers, staking her claim with an elbow planted firmly on the bar.

  “What’s his name, Jason?” she slurred as she gave me the once-over, her piercing stare made even more unsettling by a lazy left eye.

  “Jimmy,” I said, using the name I’d been called in my Appalachian boyhood. In New York City, I am known only as James.

  “What did he say, Jason?”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Where’s he from?” she asked as she fumbled with a crumpled pack of cigarettes. I figured I was safer admitting I was a New Yorker than I had been in the tow truck. And I had an odd, irresistible urge to impress the young bartender.

  “La-di-da,” she sneered, unimpressed. “You’re too old for Jason, Mr. New York. You hear that Jason? He’s too old for you.”

  Something across the room caught her attention and she suddenly lost interest, making a beeline for the jukebox where the dyke in the snowflake sweatshirt and a mullet-coiffed fireplug were looking awfully cozy, singing along to “Merry Christmas, Darling.”

  “Who’s she? Your mother?” I joked, pretending to be miffed by the concerned intervention.

  “Who? Wendy?” he laughed. “You got to be kidding. No. That’s my mother,” he said, pointing at Miss Snowflake. “Aunt Wendy’s her girlfriend.”

  I figured I was stone drunk, hearing strange voices and hallucinating that a lesbian militia had invaded this hillbilly backwater on Christmas Eve. I tossed back another shot—my third, or was it fourth?—and cradled a mug of beer while Jason placated the restless natives demanding another round.

  “I love New York,” he shouted at me as he worked the taps. “I’m gonna move there.”

  Sure you are, kid, I thought, and snickered. Your senior class probably went to Manhattan for a field trip. Times Square was awesome and Wicked changed your life. You’re going to find a great apartment like Will’s from “Will and Grace” and land a fabulous job as an assistant to a fashion designer or Broadway producer who will recognize you as a genius. In a year, maybe sooner, you’ll be rich and famous and have an even richer and more famous boyfriend who will always be faithful and, after New York legalizes gay marriage, you’ll have a beautiful wedding and an announcement in the Styles section of the Sunday Times. Christ almighty, I thought, shocked by my cruel cynicism. When did little Jimmy Hoffman of Parkersburg, West Virginia, become such a misanthrope?

  “Right after I graduate,” he declared.

  “You know New York is pretty expensive. Maybe you should get a job first,” I replied, as gently as possible in a loud, obnoxious barroom. I was feeling paternal and sentimental, remembering the little hick from Parkersburg who spent his entire four years at UVA imagining his wonderful life in the bright lights of the magnificent island he had only seen on television and in the movies.

  “Oh, I have a job. I interned in a recording studio last summer, and they offered me an apprentice engineer position. I start in June.”

  I couldn’t picture this big country boy, handsome but unpolished, his vowels thickened by a mountain drawl, surviving the city. I was probably confused, hearing only bits and pieces of the conversation, distracted by the noise. Did he say he’d been an intern? Where? Doing what? I’d already forgotten. I was moving beyond a pleasant buzz, well on my way to becoming staggeringly drunk. Time to cut myself off, find my way back to the motel.

  “Cheers,” he said, pouring two more Crown Royals and proposing a toast. “Nice to meet you, Jimmy. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.”

  He swallowed his shot and winked again. His cheerful boyish smile made it impossible for the gesture to look as dirty and suggestive as he intended.

  “Don’t you be disappearing on me. Mom says I have to close the bar tonight.”

  I stood by the bed, trying to steady myself, rocking on the balls of my feet.

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming,” I croaked, hoping to silence the persistent pounding that had roused me from blissful oblivion.

  I opened the door and threw my forearm across my face, shielding my bloodshot eyes from the blinding sunlight reflected off the fresh, clean snowdrifts. I was greeted with a “Merry Christmas!” and an awkward peck on the cheek as the boy swept by me, a large bottle of water in one hand and a paper cup of steaming coffee in the other.

  “I figured you’d need these. And I wanted to make sure you were awake. You look like you could sleep through the day. Here, drink this first,” he said, handing me the water.

  I chugged the entire bottle without taking a breath. My dehydrated body could have absorbed three of the five Great Lakes.

  “How’s your head?”

  Not bad actually, considering the amount of alcohol I’d consumed the night before.

  “You almost bit off my fingers when I forced you to swallow those aspirin last night.”

  “You know too much about hangovers for a kid,” I protested, my raspy voice cracking and breaking like a pubescent boy’s. Christ, was I smoking last night too?

  “My mother owns a bar. Remember?”

  I did, vaguely. It was coming back into focus. The noise. The whisky and beer. Someone pulling a pistol and waving it at a girlfriend. Pissing on my shoes at the urinal. Something about Boston and the Berklee College of Music. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”…me standing on the bar singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Falling on my ass on the ice. A pair of dykes laughing and swearing as they dragged me from the car and threw me on the bed. This boy, Jason, yanking off my pants and pulling the blanket up to my chin, wishing me sweet dreams as he closed the door behind him.

  “I gotta get back to church for eleven o’clock Mass. I’ll pick you up around twelve-thirty. You didn’t forget, did you?”

  I must have looked perplexed.

  “You’re coming to my mom’s for Christmas dinner. It’ll be fun.”

  He grabbed my unshaven cheeks and kissed my stale, sour mouth.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that since the first minute I saw you,” he said, blushing as he turned to leave, leaving me stunned, my knobby knees shaking and my boner stirring in the baggy crotch of my boxers.

  According to Jason, three-and-half-million cars exit the turnpike through Breezewood every year, but not a single soul actually lives there. We sped past the last stoplight and plunged into the wilderness, my still bloodshot eyes protected from the snow glare by a pair of borrowed sunglasses.

  “You’re not kidnapping me, are you? I don’t want to end up like Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” I chuckled, joking of course, but slightly apprehensive about leaving the last evidence of civilization, such as it was, miles behind.

  “Don’t worry. You’re in Pennsylvania. The serial killers are much cuter up here.”

  He reached over, squeezed my knee and growled, doing a damn good imitation of a buzz saw.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Nice.”

  “Do you know how old I am?”

  “Old enough to have a lot of gray hair.”

  Well, only since last summer, when I stopped coloring it after the famous cable news anchor I was blowing in the Meat Rack on the Island commented that my hair was the same shade of purple as the bruise on his elbow.

  “What makes you so sure I’m gay?” I challenged him, changing the subject.

  “Um…could it have been…maybe…let me think…the P-town sweatshirt you were wearing last night?”

  “What do you know about P-town?” I asked, sounding awfully petulant and irritated for a man who was about to turn only forty-four.

  “I told you last night. I live in Boston.”

  Yes, yes he did. Berklee College of Music—he’s a dual major, studying music production and engineering, because he needs to make a living, and performance, because guitar is his passion, the most important thing in his life. He’s going to support himself working in the studio and play at every open mike in every coffee-house and dive bar in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Queens even, until he gets his big break. He made me ashamed about sneering at his dreams, this kid who was so much better prepared to take on New York than a certain naïve young alumnus of Charlottesville who’d arrived in Gotham with a degree in English and great ambitions, only to discover that the hiring editors at Scribner’s and Knopf weren’t interested in anything on his resume except the score on his typing test.

  “I’m glad you don’t have a boyfriend,” he said, his goofy grin illuminating his face. “I like older guys.”

  I smiled and shook my head no, discouraging him, then turned and stared at the pristine fields outside the window, thinking about someone I hadn’t seen for many years, a ghost from the long-ago past when I liked older guys too.

  Wendy was sprawled on the living room floor, her head and shoulders wedged between the wall and the Christmas tree.

  “Flip the switch,” she shouted, apparently not passed out, then bounced up on her feet, as the locomotive of a classic Lionel Pennsylvania Flyer O-Gauge model train successfully relaunched after derailing off the platform.

  “It never runs off the track where it’s easy to reach,” she sighed, resigned to the misfortunes of model railroading. The display under the tree was damn impressive: two freight trains and a passenger line running on multiple level tracks through a scale model of the Town of Motels.

  “Aunt Wendy, you remember my friend Jimmy from last night?” She took a deep breath and drew herself up to full height, an impressive five two at best. She seemed a bit softer than last night, in her fuzzy white holiday vest with red yarn candy canes embroidered on the panels, but her voice was as intimidating as it had been in the bar.

  “He’s still too old for you, Jason. But I’m not your mother,” she said, her lazy eye drifting toward the train platform.

  “Leave him alone,” the lady of the house barked, setting a tray with an orange cheese ball and Ritz crackers on the coffee table.

  My heart jumped in my chest, unfairly convicted and sentenced for a crime I hadn’t committed.

  “Look,” I blurted, “I’m not planning on robbing any cradles.”

  Jason’s mother cocked an eyebrow and grumbled in a low, threatening voice.

  “What’s the matter? Our Jason isn’t good enough for you?”

  “Ma,” he pleaded. “She’s just messing with you, Jimmy. Ma, leave him alone. It’s Christmas.”

  She giggled apologetically, a tough woman turning unexpectedly shy and girlish as she capitulated to her child.

  “Jason, why don’t you tell your friend to have a seat.”

  “His name’s Jimmy, Mama.”

  She extended her hand for a formal introduction.

  “Kay Previc. Very nice to meet you. Again.”

  She cut a wedge of cheese and offered it to me on a cracker. Aunt Wendy poured out four glasses of sparkling cider and proposed a toast.

  “I don’t keep alcohol in the house,” Kay announced. “We see enough of that at the bar. No need to bring it into our home.”

  I felt defensive, suspecting she’d made a wrong assumption about my relationship with alcohol based on my completely out-of-character behavior the prior night.

  “I’m not a big drinker anyway,” I asserted.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a drinker. That’s how I put food on the table and gas in the tank.”

  I simply nodded, it being obvious that even my most conciliatory attempts at polite conversation would be challenged. Aunt Wendy tossed back her cider, twitchy and nervous, resigned to the imposition of Prohibition in the household.

  “It’s very nice you could join us today, Jimmy,” Kay declared after a long, awkward silence.

  “Thank you for having me,” I mumbled, swallowing a mouthful of dry, salty cheddar.

  The strain of trying to entertain me was exhausting. Kay quickly abandoned any pretense of playing hostess and sank into an easy chair in front of the television, falling dead asleep during the second half of a Pistons/Mavericks holiday show-down. Jason suggested we go for a walk, obviously wanting to take advantage of this opportunity to spend a few a moments alone. He gave me a wool cap and a pair of gloves and looped a scarf around my neck, pulling it gently, a solicitous, maternal touch. The rubber boots he handed me fit well enough over my shoes, a little large maybe, but manageable.

  The sun had lost its midday brilliance and the afternoon had turned a soft, pale gray. Another storm was massing above the mountain range and the wind was rising, rustling through the bare tree branches.

  “I think it’s going to snow again,” I said, worried about being stranded in this desolate outpost where snowplows seldom ventured, certainly never on Christmas Day.

  “It will be real pretty when it does. Wait and see,” he said, beckoning me to follow him down a steep, ice-crusted lane that descended through a thicket of soaring birch trees.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, turning and reaching for my hand.

  “Sure,” I said, my uncertain footing betraying my false bravado.

  A dog barked in the distance and some unseen creature bolted through the dense undergrowth. Jason was standing at the bottom of the hill, holding a broken branch like a staff. He lifted it above his head and slammed it into the ground, puncturing the sheath of ice beneath his feet. The water gurgled as it raced below the frozen surface.

  “Don’t worry,” he laughed. “It’s only a creek. No danger of drowning.”

  Still, the crunchy crush of yielding ice wasn’t reassuring. I liked my toes too much to lose them to frostbite.

  “We’re standing on the Susquehanna watershed. When I was a little kid I dreamed about building a raft and taking it all the way to the ocean.”

  “Like Huckleberry Finn.”

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “Except I’ve never read that book, but I think I saw the movie.”

  He took a lumbering step toward me, threw open his arms, and wrapped me in a tight bear hug. The dull white sun was barely visible behind a shroud of thin, hazy clouds.

  “My dad shot himself down here when I was eight,” he confided. “On the first day of school after Christmas. The ambulance was taking him away when the bus dropped me off. I burnt down the barn that summer. My mother always says it was an accident. But I started the fire on purpose.”

  He turned away, not wanting to see the expression on my face, and started back up the lane. He stopped when he reached the crest of the hill, waiting for me, and as I stood next to him, he turned to survey the horizon, range after range of the ancient Alleghenies still visible in the dying light, carpeted with hibernating hardwoods waiting, as ever, to blossom again in the spring. Snow was blowing in from the north and the sun finally expired in a last gasp of bright violet streaks that trailed beyond the farthest visible mountain ridge. I thought for a moment he was crying but realized it was only snowflakes melting on his broad cheeks.

  “It is pretty, isn’t it?” he asked, his expectant face looking impossibly vulnerable. “I wanted to tell you about what I did so you would know from the beginning, just in case you might think you could like me.”

  The meal was simple. A turkey breast with sausage stuffing, candied yams, jellied cranberry. Aunt Wendy didn’t seem to have much of an appetite except for the red velvet cake we had for dessert; she excused herself, pleading fatigue, while the three of us cleared the table.

  “Her diabetes is out of control,” Kay fretted. “She refuses to take care of herself. Shoots up with insulin, then helps herself to a piece of lemon meringue pie.”

  I could see she was preparing to embark on her second widowhood, having given up on Wendy as a lost cause. I suspected the younger woman with the mullet was the insurance policy she’d taken out against a lonely future.

  “You boys leave me to finish up in here. Go enjoy the rest of Christmas,” she insisted, taking a scouring pad to the roasting pan.

  “What’s your favorite Christmas song?” Jason asked as we settled on the sofa, the only light the soft glow of the tree.

  “Not ‘Rudolph,’” I swore, cringing at the memory of last night.

  “Good.”

  “‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’”

  He looked exasperated, shaking his head.

  “That’s Easter! Everyone thinks it’s Christmas music, but it’s an Easter chorus! I had to play it as the recessional at the eight-thirty and eleven o’clock Masses today. It was ridiculous!”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “Because the Catholics pay me twenty-five bucks a service. That’s fifty bucks. And the priest gave me an extra twenty-dollar tip. That’s good money.”

 

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