Christmas Is A-Comin'

Drunks have Christmas too, you know. They might not choose the finest wines, or delight in creating holiday cocktails which warm their spirits, entertain their guests or have cutesy little names like “santa’s sleigh” or even something so delicious and comforting as “hot buttered rum”, but they break out all the stops too, enjoying the colourful lights at their local watering hole, the strung up holly made from aging, bleached out plastic, right down to the big mounds of drunken puke, frozen and transfixed in the snow out back in the alleyway, a mound of holiday regret, which will thaw properly when the first spring comes. You know it’s springtime when the piles of icy puke start melting and seeping into the sewers. Warms the cockles of your heart it does.

Bing was one of those – happy, seeming, jovial and robust. Not in stature, but in character. In his day he sang all the greats, even creating the greats as he went. Cavorting, cocktail in hand, delta shape at his mouth releasing a stream like a bow and arrow, of warm, thick tones and one of the most carefree singing voices ever put down on record. But after work, what was Bing like? When the cameras weren’t on, the Andrew sisters had gone home, and his sweaters needed to be dropped off at the Chinese Laundromat. Those stains are always hard to explain, but the Orientals didn’t really care one way or the other. Long as you paid in cash and remembered them at the holidays, you could bring in a set of underage, blood soaked panties and they wouldn’t bat an eye. Bing always remembered those that assisted him at the holidays. Gifts for the ladies especially, in all forms, shapes and sizes.

Thing is, Bing was a perfectionist. He needed to be in control, all the time. Funny for a man who had everyone else doing for him practically every day. I guess not funny at all, as the man craved the position of director. The worst thing you could imagine is waiting in the dark room for him, panties all a flutter and with the knowledge that this demented and manic man was about to enter “all in” as they say. You’d be happy in the knowledge that you were servicing one of the greats, and that was enough most of the time, but somehow…the alacrity at which Bing would switch you from one position to the other, one deviant scenario to the next, would seem misplaced. You almost doubted that he was even getting any pleasure from any of it. Your humiliation, that is. Oh, don’t get me wrong. When tanked up on martinis and uppers, Bing would come at you from all sides, slap happy and usually with a bit of a jolly, especially around the holidays. Santa Claus just came to town, now flip over and lift your skirt (he ordered them special from the boutique for which you needed the not-too-often passed around business card –red with black lettering, ornate and far too shiny in its lamination. You could see it, in fact, if you looked up from your duties (it’s the singing of the songs during that are the Most hard to swallow, if you will – Jing a ling, hear them ring and all that), there it was. He carried the card in his back pocket day and night it seemed. You’d be there, in your Fräulein outfit, stripped to bottoms only, on your knees, Bing’s bingness practically belting you in its anxious carriage, struggling to hit every part of you it could, while Bing barked orders about calling it “the Big Bing”, “His Royal Heinous King Bing” (HRH King Bing), “Mount Bing” and the best of these, droning in your ears until he plugged those up too, was “Bing’s Drummer Boy” (followed by his hands clapping like a Nazi over your ass always, because Bing only ever slapped you on the ass half heartedly when he was done). The card there, upturned and falling out of his folded pants pocket, was never bent, or ripped, always looking like new, and yet – not even the Chinese wash seemed to fade or tear it at all?

Wish you could say the same thing about your ass, when Bing had his holiday feast at your table. He sucked and slurped like an old man eating soup, and what’s worse—right in the middle of his control freak variety hour, he would switch on you. He’d start to cry, maybe call for his mother, and crawl up into the fetal position like an angry toddler who didn’t get what he wanted for Christmas. You’d have to hold him, stroke his thinning head hairs, and tell him he was great. That rock n’ roll was in fact not here to stay, and that Elvis Presley was just a fad. (Didn’t you know deep down that you would service Satan himself for an hour with Elvis? Some friends had, and they still aren’t walking right. But smiles on their faces, indeed there were). I mean, having to comfort the likes of a drunken Bing as his alcoholic revelry moved its way to a late night hangover, it wasn’t all that bad – his occasional angry fucks were angry to just him. He wouldn’t know rough sex if he tried. Bing had an old man’s soul, probably even when he was 20 years old. Inside he was all wrinkles, and balding skin, a soft gait and a gentle hand which was better with a microphone singing to millions about a White Christmas than it was trying to make you come “that way” since the “other way” was fraught with problems. He saved the belt for his kids, so there was none of that either. Pity, spanking would have been the one thing that turned you on, but nope – Bing didn’t want it that-a-way. And Bing gets what he wants, especially this late in the advent calendar.

This was the inebriated sleigh ride down the dark alleyway outside the bar at the holidays. The dark alleyway leading to Bing’s rotten, fearful soul. The man sure could sing, though. You think of this, as you think of all those other hapless drunks at Christmas time, swilling their cheap whiskey and allsorts down their throats, and trying to cram their manhoods down yours every chance they could. Bing was no different. Still, you never knew the exact level of humiliation, emotional pain or physical discomfort you were in for, when you waited there – in the position, eyes down and hands on the floor, and in the dim light that seeped under the door you felt his tiny footsteps. In the darkness of the room (Bing never let the lights go up, he might implode for all that his fame’s boredom had created that he was afraid to see with his own eyes), you wondered just how you got here. Again, this festive holiday season. Still, the shadows of red and green from the Christmas lights across the street cast some sort of holiday cheer onto you, as his footsteps grew closer, and all you heard in your head, numb as it was to all the sounds and feelings it was about to drown out with your own special elixirs of denial, was that beauteous, baritone voice, possessing that vim and vigour that he always had at the beginning of the evening, when he was still happy drunk and didn’t have to worry about the stains on his sweaters (which he never removed)…that voice, menacing and sometimes extreme in its averageness, singing in upbeat tones…“Buh-boo-boo-bah-boo!”

~ M. Lucia