My saddest Christmas? Strung out in East Hollywood pretending to have the flu? That happened a couple of times. Or maybe 1997 in Long Beach, going to see "Midnight In The Garden of Good & Evil" alone after refusing to go to the Duggan Family Christmas shindig in Garden Grove. The theater was full of guys like me - misfits, loners, drunks, junkies - many of whom looked even more lost and broken than I had been at the time. As the film progressed, you could hear the audible collective disconnection and disinterest; like some immense lonely energy that permeated everything, including what was on screen. As Kevin Spacey clutches his chest and falls to the floor (seeing Jude Law's ghostly visage) and the credits roll, no one got up to leave. We sat there numb, in some kind of stupor. The house lights eventually came on, and one by one we struggled to our feet and clumsily filed out to face the sun, the shameful light of Christmas Day, and for most of us, I assume, the awful truth about our lives.
These days, the old skylark of my depression, my cohort since childhood, hangs around in the back of my head, lifting weights, waiting for the holidays to sing her loudest melancholy melody. In all the sweet and tender moments that make up my life these days, in all the numerous blessings of my beautiful family near and far, she is still there, flapping those wings, threating the sickening squawks of seasonal sadness. When she comes alive, in her festive feathered fullness, she is a formidable inertia, known to cancel out whole days and even weeks. But no matter how heavy and real the battle might be as it rages onward, I never have to look far to see that it's temporary; that time has a way of slowly taking the venom out of even the worst things, even with her song in my ears.
That skylark is singing today. I hear her trying to get my attention even as I type this. Even after years of being off any kind of junk, I recognize the seraphic sad song she sings and I try to keep the volume from overtaking the rest of the picture. And I count my blessings. I'm not dopesick. I'm not lost. I'm loved beyond all measure.
The ghosts of trauma and the alleyways of childhood do not release us willingly, but the picture gets grainier with time. And that old skylark? She's still in the rotation, but the soundtrack gets a little warmer every year. Someday, somehow, she's going to fly away. But not today.
But it's like the Lady Chablis says: "Two tears in a bucket? Mutha-Fuck It!"
Happy Holidays to all of you, and to kids from 1 to 92.
