JOHNNY CHRISTMAS
Ivy Pochoda
Over in the Gulf I got some bad ink. Prison style shit. Given all the bad things that happened over there after the towers fell and the bad things I did, this was the least of my worries. But still. I brought home enough scars that I didn’t need this one.
It was supposed to be my girl’s name—same girl who would visit when I was locked up in the Brooklyn House of D on Atlantic awaiting trial for one of the things I narrowly escaped having pinned on me. Like many of the girls whose boys were locked up, she stood outside the jail and hollered at me. Voice like the A train screeching into Jay Street.
When I shipped out, I wanted her name on my arm to remind me someone cared enough to shout herself hoarse in the dark.
Problem was, the name came out all lopsided like it had been slurred by a 2 A.M. drunk. Didn’t heal right either, what with the sand and sweat and all out stress of war. And that heat. Ten thousand pounds of heat.
BACK IN BROOKLYN THE world kept spinning in my absence. While I was in basic and then three tours in the desert, my neighborhood got a fresh coat of paint, some fancy lipstick, croissants instead of rolls. You’d have seen it coming if you were paying attention instead of causing trouble. I don’t have to tell you what came and what went. That story is everywhere and there’s a bunch of quasi old-timers like me haunting the last dive bar in Cobble Hill who will fill your ears with that shit.
Let’s just say, we fought, the world got more expensive, it was harder to find my place when I got back. And I still had that tattoo on my forearm even though the girl was long gone and the Brooklyn House of D shuttered. Rumor had it, and still does, that someone’s gonna turn it into luxury housing, but ask me, the juju in that place is gonna rain nothing but bad luck. So I figure it’s best to let it sit and let ghosts be ghosts. Sometimes it’s okay to be reminded of the way things were instead of transforming them into something better.
Regardless. The neighborhood started filling with families and cool kids. And bistros. Boutiques selling Brooklyn back to locals and newcomers. A cat café—whatever the fuck that is. And between it all on Smith, next to the last of the last old school diners, a tattoo shop—Black & Blue. Not that there’s anything special about that. So much ink on the kids these days if you came from space you’d think they were born
with it. But what caught my eye about this place was the art in the windows. Fisheye, wild style paintings of the hood like I remember it. The Wykoff PJ’s. The BQE over Atlantic Ave. And a big old painting of the Brooklyn House of D. Down in the corner of that piece the artist’s name—Johnny Christmas.
Who the fuck wants to paint a jail, I don’t know. But there was something in that painting that got me.
Started to happen that every time I walked past the place, my forearm began to itch. Like Lorraine’s name was dying to jump off my skin. Sometimes I’d peer in at the dudes at work. A bit older than you’d imagine. More my age than not. Worn out, like myself.
Time came when I met a lady serious enough that Lorraine’s presence on my flesh started to pose a problem. And next thing, a week before Thanksgiving, when I’m fixing to be trotted out in front of her whole family, I found myself inside Black & Blue scanning the books for something to erase my past mistakes.
A clock I thought. Because time is supposed to heal all wounds even though I know this is a lie.
THE GIRL BEHIND THE desk was a sagging pincushion of piercings—speaking of past mistakes—and asked me if I had a particular artist in mind for my cover up.
“That guy work here?” I said, pointing to the House of D art in the window.
“Johnny Christmas? Come back this evening.”
I’M NOT GOOD WITH faces—paying attention to them I mean. When you’re trained to kill and to expect to be killed, you learn pretty quick not to spend time making eye contact. You never know how quickly someone’s going to exit your life and how. Better not to make attachments.
All of which is to say, I didn’t take much notice of this Mr. Christmas, even when he was about to ink my arm. Over the years I’ve become a taciturn guy which solicits a taciturn response.
I could feel the needle before it hit my skin and before it hit my skin I heard him say, “Lorraine, huh. Let’s get her gone.”
And then I knew.
I would have known it anywhere.
This wasn’t any Johnny Christmas. No Christmas about it. What we had here was a straight up Jew. And not just any Jew. This was Mikey Goldfarb. One of the baddest boys I encountered in the Brooklyn House of D.
“LORRAINE. LOR-FUCKING-RAINE.”
Never mind that it was snowing that fucking inconsequential snow that hasn’t made up its mind whether to stick around on not—the sort where the wet flakes hit with a sound like a bug on a windshield. Never mind that it was wet, cold, and fucking miserable. We were all in the outdoor exercise pen up top the Brooklyn House of D because from there we could see down to the street. And down on the street was where our girls were hollering up at us.
It was coming up on Christmas which meant the activity down on Atlantic was popping. I don’t mean the cabs and jittery Christmas lights—but that too. I mean the crowd outside the jail clamoring for our attention. The closer to the holiday, the more tricked out the women got—antlers and Santa hats, jingle bells and light up sweaters. The colder it was, the skimpier some of them dressed.
Just thank fuck Lorraine wasn’t the type to give the goods away for free.
“Yo, Davo.” I heard her nasal Italian voice. “I fucking love you, Davo.”
That was my clue to shout,“I fucking love you, princess.” Normal times, men like me wouldn’t have been shouting about love in front of each other. Normal times, men like me wouldn’t have been freezing our nuts off in a shitty outdoor gym.
But there’s nothing normal about cooling your heels in a cinderblock pen while waiting for trial.
My crime—tangled with the wrong Mexican outside a bar where I was too young to be drinking. The evidence—the mess of his nose and shard of his tooth implanted in my knuckle.
Fact is, I did what I did so I counted myself lucky Lorraine was down there shading her eyes from the falling mess, trying to tease me out from the rest of the dudes clinging to the ex-pen’s fence.
“I fucking love you, Lorraine.”
Not much more to say than that. Not with the other twenty or so dudes yelling at their girls and their girls yelling back. Sex talk. Baby talk. Fucking promises. And let me tell you, some of those ladies had pipes that could blow your house down. Blow your house and then some.
Lorraine and I had this thing—she’d be the last to go, as would I—toughing it out after the crowd thinned. Usually one or two ladies gave her a run for her money but with weather like we were having, I knew Lorraine would have them beat.
Except not that night. One by one the other women peeled off until it was Lorraine and someone I swore I’d never seen before, though it was pretty hard to tell from a couple of hundred feet
up.
It was coming up on dark but I could still see this woman wasn’t like the rest—older, huddled, covered. Couldn’t make out much of her besides the fact that she was carrying some kind of candlestick, now and then sheltering the flame from the slop dropping from the sky.
If you made the effort to come visit your boy or son at the jail, I woulda bet he’d get himself up to the ex-pen. Except for it was just me looking down on Lorraine and this lady. And let me tell you, it was the loneliest thing in the world—her holding vigil for exactly no one.
THE NEXT EVENING, SHE was back. This time there looked to be an extra light on her candelabra.
Before I got called inside, I heard Lorraine once more. “Yo, Davo! You got a Mikey up there?”
Mikey Goldfarb—well, he wasn’t like the rest of us. Smart kid it seemed. But dark. Dark as fuck.
It takes all kinds in the House of D. Lots of dealers and thieves. A few stick-up guys. Some repeat offenders and car jackers. Mostly misdemeanor charges.
And then there was Mikey Goldfarb—the nerdy kid with the dead-eyed stare who ran over his grandmother’s landlord on Pacific. Not ran over. Pulverized.
Story went—Goldfarb targeted the guy from half a block away. Saw him in the crosswalk, bending down to pick something up from the street. He must not have been a fast moving motherfucker. But anyway.
Story went—Goldfarb sighted him, crosshairs style. Then, pedal to the metal, accelerated down Pacific, miraculously taking his grandmother’s Caprice from basically zero to sixty in a few seconds.
Story went—the landlord had no chance. Car sent him flying across Hoyt. That would have been enough. But Goldfarb kept driving. Ran over the guy again, the Chevy’s left tires crushing him from pelvis to skull, deep into the asphalt of Pacific Street. Or so they said.
“You got a Mikey up there?” Lorraine called again. “Sure fucking do.”
“Tell him to come see his grandma.”
Now, this was before I learned to keep my head down and my eyes to myself. This was before I learned that not everyone’s business was my business and the best way to stay out of trouble was to keep quiet.
Which didn’t mean I relished the idea of searching out Goldfarb. Kid gave me the heebie jeebies. Didn’t talk much. Didn’t come up to the ex-pen. Mostly sat in his cell staring at the wall—cold as stone. Still as a fucking statue.
One of the boys timed him. Motherfucker went nine hours without moving
Like I already said, coldest boy in the House of D.
But you can’t leave your grandmother to cool her heels in the snow. Some shit just isn’t right.
So I found Goldfarb—you guessed it—sitting on his cot, staring down his cinderblock wall.
He didn’t look around when I said his name. “You had a visitor down on the street today.”
So still I could hear him blink if he so chose to do so. “Older woman looking for you.”
Let me tell you, I’d seen rocks with more life than this guy. “That’s some cold shit, Goldfarb,” I said, “leaving an old lady out there in the snow.”
Before I left, he turned his head—a scary slow-mo movement that froze me to the spot.
“You ever hear someone’s sternum crack under a threethousand-pound car,” he said.
Didn’t blink. Barely opened his mouth to speak. “You ever hear it.”
Back then, these words were some straight up psychokiller, horror movie shit. After my first tour, they acquired real meaning.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Don’t tell me about cold,” he said. Then, like he was moving through molasses, rotated his head back to the wall.
THAT NIGHT THE TEMPERATURE took a tumble. Our cells trapped the cold, the cinderblocks ice to the touch. Our breath hung like storm clouds.
In a few years, people would remember this week as one of the coldest in ages—the whole city iced over. The sidewalks frozen solid. From up top in the ex-pen, we could see people inching down Atlantic, gripping storefronts, signposts, and mailboxes for balance.
Buses jackknifed across the avenue. The city stopped dead.
But that didn’t deter the women. They lined up below the jail like a bunch of deranged carolers all singing a different song to a different man.
And in the middle of it all, not singing, was Mikey’s grandma, still holding those candles.
“Yo,” I said to no one in particular. “Someone wrestle Goldfarb out of his cell. Asshole’s grandma is down there freezing her titties off.”
And maybe to escape the cold or maybe because we were all looking for an excuse to mess that quiet motherfucker up, two dudes did just that.
So here was Goldfarb, no jacket or nothing. They walked him over to the fence.
“Yo, Lorraine. We
got Mikey here. Tell his grandma!”
The women below parted for Goldfarb’s grandmother and her candles.
It must have been below zero that night. But Goldfarb didn’t shiver. Didn’t even rub his hands together or jam them in his pockets. Just stared down at this grandmother like he stared down his wall. Kept on staring until those damn candles burned down to nothing.
Now I’ve seen some pretty messed up shit since. I’ve seen bombs fall on schools.
I’ve been in ground battles in marketplaces and taken sniper fire.
But nothing has ever scared me as much as that look Goldfarb was giving his grandma. Stared down at her so hard and unblinking, it’s a miracle his eyelids didn’t freeze open.
Then he turned his back and headed for the stairs.
“The fuck is going on here,” I said. “Goldfarb, she holding a vigil over your cold, dead soul?”
“It’s a menorah, motherfucker,” he said.
AFTER THAT, THE RUMORS about Goldfarb began to swirl. When you’re locked up, everything becomes epic. As far as I know, he’d barely said a word to anyone since he came in, but suddenly everyone knew everything about him.
Lurker.
Creeper.
Virgin.
Orphan.
That summer of all the dead cats—Goldfarb.
That empty warehouse that burned down with the homeless dudes inside—Goldfarb.
And so it went.
THE HOLIDAYS WERE A strange time inside. Lots of forced and trapped joy. An extra carrot cake at dinner courtesy of the bakers at Rikers. Tinsel drooping in the cafeteria. A plastic tree in the day room frosted with fake snow. The crappy TV playing It’s a Wonderful Life even though we all goddamn know it isn’t.
This was around the time that there was a push to get Kwanzaa on the holiday calendar and some of the tougher customers had been grumbling to the COs that they were being disrespected by the presence of the sole Christmas tree. Like that tree was responsible for all of their systemic ills or what have you.
Never mind that these were the same dudes whose women stood outside decked out as Rudolph the Horny Reindeer.
But anyway. We were inside and the real joy was outside and there was no amount of tinsel or holiday music that could distract from this fact. ...
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