Chapter 1

In early November, a new banner across the Orpheum Theater went up saying: Welcome to Christmas, the happiest time of the year. Coming soon.

Far as I could tell, Christmas was when children danced around like clowns on crack. Besotted parents cavorted around them like ninnies in a stupid race. And the rest of us stood back waiting for the inevitable explosion.

Despite how it started, Christmas had been morphed by the rich into a season of greed. It had nothing to do with whether a kid was good or bad, but how much money his folks had.

Take the kids I knew down at the shelter. Shit, they could be as good as little angels, and the best they’d ever get was someone’s cast-off pity. That wasn’t going to do them a damned bit of good when the holiday parade of who-got-what started at school.

All Christmas did, as far as I was concerned, was make poor kids feel worse and rich kids feel more powerful and more ready to rub everyone else’s nose in their misfortune. We all knew, where you started was pretty much where you ended up in life.

The Christmas miracle was a lie that should have been shot in the head and buried eons ago.

Fortunately, here in the bowels of the old Orpheum Theater, the only Christmas merry-makers left were ghosts of vaudevillians, chorus girls, and corrupt managers, and the live help.

Those of us who weren’t going from office party to Cocktail Land were left here to sweep the floors, squeegee jizz off bathroom walls, pry gum from under seats, and oust anything that moved after the doors were closed and locked.

I’ve been called cynical, a Scrooge, a vulture perched and ready to rip the eyes out of the season. It wasn’t true. I was as big a sap as the next guy.

I was working here at the Orpheum, wasn’t I?

Even after a hotshot investor type bought the building and threatened to give the Orpheum the Wonderful Lifemakeover, I was still here.

The stately Orpheum might be closed to the public for renovation, but as the longest-paid employee, I was one of the lucky bastards kept on during the project.

I would have had a ringside seat to the transformation of the rock-solid bastion of the Orpheum into a three-ring extravaganza embodying the holiday season.

The old and tired would magically become the happy, jolly, sugar-cloying cotton candy dream of eternal riches and pleasure. We were putting up a new face over the dismal truth.

I was the child of a crack-house mother and a drugged-out absentee father. No Christmas ever invented could make me like, much less enjoy, the happiest time of the year.

But that didn’t mean the world around me wasn’t trying. The Orpheum was being pushed and forced into a merry mold. The fa?ade was sandblasted on Monday, and an industrial cleaning crew landed today.

“Hey, you!” the new general manager, a dumpy troll of a guy who showed up in a three-piece wool suit, yelled at me.

“Yeah.” I didn’t offer any more. I’ve had a lifetime of twenty-nine years to learn that doing anything other than acknowledging when kahunas yell at you was trouble that you asked for.

“I’m Mr. Mason. What’s your name, kid?”

Kahunas liked to be told everybody’s name but never remembered them.

“Mick.”

See? Nice, short, simple. And still, sometimes you got cuffed for speaking up. Not this time, thanks.

“How long you worked here, Mick?”

Kahunas also like to “get to know” their minions by asking shit they could easily look up if they really cared about the answer.

“Seven years.”

Ever since five managers ago, when someone came down to the shelter and asked for a half-dozen guys to staff the place.

That manager had been a product of the shelters, too, and said he was trying to give back. Nice enough guy, just had no clue how to manage a theater, especially a movie theater where the film offerings went from art house one year to porn the next couple and then back again to art. He had lasted through the porn dip but was fired during the art phase because he liked to jack off more than he liked to manage.

“Ya see, Mick, I need somebody who knows this building to make sure the guys I’ve hired do a good job and clean all the hidden places. The new owner says we’re going to have kids and parents in here, so I don’t want them finding any unwelcome surprises.”

This new manager, Mr. Mason, sounded okay. Not quite friendly, but bossy like he should.

Someone younger than me and round-eyed na?ve would have thought we could have been buddies, all in the spirit of the season, right?

I knew through experience Christmas cheer didn’t extend that far. I knew not to engage. He was the boss, and we both knew it.