A Christmas Story

When I was real little
My Dad would tuck me into bed.
“You get to sleep. You know Mr. Jackson is watching.”
Mr Jackson was our chief of police
Scrawny and sixty.
And I imagined him leaning a ladder
Up against my window and shining
His flashlight in to check to see
If I was asleep. “Night,” my Dad would say
And, as I remember it, pausing in
The dark hall way to light a cigarette Bogie style
And then his footsteps going away.
And then no more.
Later I remember going upstairs to bed
By myself. I put the light on
And read “Famous Monsters” a fan
Magazine for those who loved them all:
Frankenstein, Werewolf, Dracula.
And I believed I was right.
Dracula would kick all their asses.
But when I got the book from the library
I didn’t even make it to the village inn.
Too damn scared and even scared
With the book under my bed.

Yes, it was strange in the fifties.
Mr Frank Stefanik who worked in the mill
And lived behind us with his dog Oscar
Saw a flying saucer and it was in the papers.
A week late he fell off a crane. Dead.

Mars is calling. We all were waiting.

At school I had a friend Steve
Who they called “Sputnik”
Since he was smart and as ugly as Bob Dylan at sixty
When he was seven. And you could listen
To the real sputnik beeping on his stepfather’s
Shortwave and we deserved Rod Serling

Yes, he was inevitable. We had all of that
Under Cheyenne Mountain. Waiting.

Steve would come to school
With a big black eye and tell everyone
How he got beat up by black shapes
But we knew it was his stepfather.

And twenty years later I met him
In a bar and he told me
How he was just driving across a bridge
After his divorce coming back
From visiting his kids and pulled over
And just jumped in the river but
Then changed his mind …
And he laughed and we talked
About “Famous Monsters”. He still held out
For the Werewolf but there was
Something else and he did kill himself
Before the year was out.
And I’ll always remember how we
Both leaned on the bar after he told his story.
Waiting for something worse to happen.





       
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