The Gloucester Clam

There are plenty of reasons to love the holidays—even for people like me without children in their homes or Christ in their hearts. The carols and the twinkling lights are obvious charms. So too is the scent of evergreen and wood smoke. Subtler but equally potent is the way holiday advertisements persuade me of my generosity. According to the moral calculus of Target and Best Buy, all I must do is lavish gifts on my materially comfortable friends and family, and I’m excused for the past fifty weeks of being a garden-variety asshole.

But more than anything, I love the holiday season because it’s the one month when my year-round eating habits suddenly seem normal. At Christmas dinner, nobody bats an eye as I politely exchange my china for a wooden cutting board—then methodically erect three edible tiers. Using rolls and biscuits as cobbles, I first lay a sturdy carbohydrate foundation. Next, I spoon the casseroles and potatoes into a sort of quivering, cream-based mortar. Then on top I carefully assemble a flavorful façade of meats—which, at any holiday meal in my native South, will include roast beef and turkey, as well as ham studded with cloves and salted with the tears of Gwyneth Paltrow.

For me, a holiday meal is not so different from an average Tuesday night in April. The fare may be simpler and less butter-laden—salmon over rice, let’s say—but the result is the same, calorically-speaking. Because when I say “salmon,” I mean “a salmon”—or, at least, as much of the slippery devil as I can wrestle onto the top rack of my oven. True, I may steer clear of the eyeballs and fins, but otherwise I go after sockeye like a hibernation-wasted Kodiak bear.

In my household, I do the grocery shopping and cooking. It’s good exercise to crisscross Market Basket with racks of beef ribs and a burlap sack of potatoes slung over my shoulders. Moreover, it would be cruel to force my wife to handle so much food that she will never eat—and unfair to encumber her with the ceaseless task of keeping my stomach topped off.  When, as is often the case, hunger pangs awaken me at 3 AM, I only have myself to blame.  That’s what I get for not capping the evening with a glass of warm milk and a large pizza from Mike’s.

My wife knows that, when it comes to food, she has only one responsibility, which is to keep her hands and arms away from the chipper-shredder that is my mouth. The comparison is only a slight exaggeration. As an eater, I am not only immoderate, but also indiscriminate. When people tell me about their distaste for olives or their gluten sensitivity, I listen sympathetically—but with profound incomprehension. The notion of a meal “not sitting right” is, for me, a pure abstraction, like division by zero or leftover bacon.

Dining outside my own kitchen, I always feel a certain anxiety about getting enough to eat.  After all, at dinner parties it’s stressful to excuse myself, when everyone else is chatting over half-eaten pie, and go rummaging for more calories. I generally have a pretty good nose for the whereabouts of the hosts’ pantry. But it’s sometimes hard to judge—in the heat of the moment—which snack foods their children are least likely to miss.

At restaurants, especially fancy ones, things can get awkward.  A recent exchange went like this:

Waif-like server with sleeve tattoo: “Finished with this, sir?”

Me (looking down at a bay leaf and a cleanly gnawed bone): “Yes. I’ll have another.”

Server: “Another merlot, sir?”

Me (avoiding my wife’s imploring eyes): “No. Another dish, please.”

Server (smiling and searching my face to confirm the mischief): …

Me: “Another lamb shank.”

Server: “Oh.” (Pause.) “Yes, I can box up another to go.”

Me: “No, I mean to eat. Like, now.”

Wife (helpful and considerate, as ever): “Or, you know, whenever it’s ready.”

Server (dazed, recalibrating, ashamed for me): “Yes. Okay.”

Me: “Thanks for understanding. It’s a problem I have.”

Server (slinking away): “Mm hmm…”

Me: “Miss?”

Server: “Yes?”

Me: “Another merlot as well.”

At this point, I suspect you are picturing me as a large man—or perhaps some mythological hybrid with a chambered stomach. So I feel compelled to state that I am, in fact, 5-foot-8 and decidedly stringy. You can go ahead and carry on about how lucky I am to eat what I want and get away with it. I won’t protest. But let me remind you that the calorie is a unit of thermal energy—and the laws of chemistry cannot be escaped. So you might, more accurately, picture me as one of those old-timey, coal-fired boilers. But since I’m not attached to a steam locomotive, all my heat must be dissipated through my pores.

I didn’t fully appreciate just how sweaty I am until a few summers ago, while vacationing with my extended family near Cancun. Our resort offered a variety of amenities, including six pools and one cramped gym. Inexplicably, it was the only place on the grounds that lacked air conditioning, and its ceiling was scarcely tall enough to accommodate a hoisted dumbbell. On my first visit, I hopped on a stationary bike and commenced to ride with my usual gusto. With my headphones on and engrossed in a trashy telenovela, I was at first oblivious to what was unfolding. My aerobic output—stoked by the resort’s all-you-can eat buffets—had combined with the gym’s jungly heat to generate the perfect metabolic storm.  Eventually, I became aware of some commotion behind me. I turned to find two hunched maintenance workers squeegeeing sheets of my perspiration toward a drain hole in the corner of the rubber floor. Ever mindful of guest safety, they had placed yellow cones along the perimeter. Piso mojado, they read—which, I think, translates to “sweat gully.”

When I returned to the gym two days and many churros later, the gym attendants recognized me immediately. One wide-eyed woman hissed over her shoulder, “Mira! Look!” Her colleague wheeled and, perhaps dubious of American bilingual education, muttered a string of epithets that could have served as a vocabulary unit titled, “Odors of the Barnyard.”

One reason I moved from the South to New England was that I was tired of being el cerdo, the pig, for nine months of the year. Here in Gloucester, I can usually count on bitterly cold winters to provide a respite—or at least an excuse to layer over the dark stains that bloom across my chest and back. Normally, after Christmas dinner, I like to slip out the back door, open my jacket, and let the steam rise off me like a piping soufflé. But this year I’m headed back South, and word is they’re calling for record heat. Who knows: maybe this will be the year I find religion once again. If there’s any truth to those carols—“Away in a Manger” and all the rest—the Baby Jesus was never too good to consort with the likes of me.

There is stuff to like about the holidays. There’s a lot of free booze around, for instance. It’s less socially awkward to crank down an entire tin of cookies in the middle of the workday than at other times of the year, so bonus there. But beyond these specific advantages your beloved The Clam finds much of the rest to be a massive pain in the dong. We would happily trade the  month-plus pageant of consumption and groupthink for a compressed week of vapid hype culminating in an orgy of binge-eating/power drinking, making it tolerably more like every other week of the year for us. But trade or no, the point remains: The October-January extended “Festive Quarter” has gotten fully the fuck out of hand. It’s exhausting and unnecessary.

In fact, we find the encroaching holidays share many parallels with one of our favorite genres of literature: The Zombie outbreak narrative. Observe:

STAGE 1- September:

Walking into Costco you are shocked by the abrupt first flare-up, a full aisle of animatronic decorations just days out from Labor Day Weekend. Your avoidance response is identical to finding a mangey one-eyed raccoon on your back porch in broad daylight. “I want no fucking part of this,” you say, putting as much distance between you and it as is possible.

STAGE 2- October:

The outbreak is no longer isolated to select pockets and is developing more rapidly than anyone expects. Confusion reigns, with stores, pop radio and the inflatable holiday decorations on lawns around town showing a strange mixture of symptoms. Mostly it’s the increasingly virulent but generally harmless Halloween strain which clears up after about a week. But more and more you notice evidence of the much longer-sustaining early-onset ChristmasN2 mixed in with the otherwise benign pumpkins and skeletons. The sickness has obviously gained a foothold and won’t be going away.

The government seems powerless to respond. “Which holiday is that guy dressing as Santa for?” you ask in a climate of growing unease.

STAGE 3-November:

It’s now obvious something is seriously wrong. Going out in public is no longer safe as it’s become impossible to tell which locations have been infected and which remain clean. Example: You know from experience the bathrooms on board commuter rail trains are like a particularly nasty porta-potty bouncing around inside a giant maraca, so you pop into a nearby Dunkin Donuts to use the loo. Upon entering you are exposed to a full five seconds of “Wonderful Christmastime” at full volume. You retreat, realizing getting splashed with blue dookiewater is less risk than being subjected to an additional stanza.

Short-sighted local officials are making the problem worse by creating early infection sites where the sickness can take hold. Wreaths are going up. Public displays are being installed. We are told told not to panic, reassured most of the current activity is only the serious but survivable Thanksgiving Simplex which only tends to take out the highly emotionally vulnerable. “How is this all happening so fast?” is the question on everyone’s lips.

STAGE 4-Black Friday:

PUBLIC EMERGENCY DECLARED. Riots and deaths as the infection has broken out everywhere at once, seemingly from nowhere. The TV and Internet burst with images of victims thrashing wildly and attacking each other while store clerks and police stand helplessly by. Grainy security video shows a neverending loop of sufferers going stark raving bonkers over half price mass-market kitchen appliances, demonstrating the plague attacks neurological pathways first, assailing the parts of the brain responsible for maintaining social norms. To see a mother stomp on a child over a fifteen dollar Black and Decker waffle iron fills the world with horror. Also will not make pizzelle or crepes so not even worth it. Prayers go unanswered.

STAGE 5 -Early December:

Nietzsche once described hope as the “worst of all evils” because it can only serve to prolong inevitable suffering. It has become clear the possibility of a “light outbreak” with “maybe just a few family and close friends” was a fool’s fancy. We are now obviously engulfed in a full-blown Pandemic. Everyone knows at least one seriously infected person and observing their distorted behavior as the malady takes hold is wrenching. The only bright spot (Nietzsche notwithstanding) is the infected still tend to cluster together in retail centers where they are essentially contained. However there are frequent incidents where they break free and maraud through offices and schools in search of new victims. No one is safe. Your pleas for the military to bomb the worst-affected sites prompts only a “wellness check” on your residence from the local constabulary.

Can they not see how all forms of media have become dedicated to the epidemic? Society has been transformed, with everything functioning around managing the outbreak. Citizens mark their homes to indicate afflicted dwelling within and no neighborhood has escaped, not even Chinatown or Brookline. Residents struggle to cope but cannot keep up with the stretched infrastructure and supply demands of a population under siege. Suicides increase. Many turn to alcohol and drugs. Mental health resources are pushed to the breaking point. Your attempt at weakening the assault by introducing Shane MacGowan and Kristy MacColl’s “Fairytale of New York” to holiday playlists has no observable effect. You feel like Gandalf in the Mines of Moria. “They are coming.”

STAGE 6- Late December:

All systems have succumbed to the sheer overpressure of the rampaging epidemic. The gravely infected have broken free and are running amok. What was once pity for the victims gives way to searing rage as survivors search for increasingly scarce sanctuary.  Civil control has broken down, surrendering to the critical mass. The plague is now everywhere: Japan, the International Space Station, even submerged nuclear submarines on patrol have all reported levels of exposure. It’s ability to penetrate every defense defies rational explanation.

Survivors scurry from moment to moment trying to limit exposure. Mostly they stay inside cut off from the outside world, or take to the forests and hills on long walks to keep out of the path of potential vectors. Public places such as malls are no longer option as the newly infected now throng there and yet the military still does nothing. It’s like the flamethrower had never been invented.

Schools and offices are shuttered. Non-holiday commerce grinds to a halt. No sanity remains as “Dominick the Christmas Donkey” blares from speakers, cars sport antlers and red noses. The weakened strain of holiday pathogen used to inoculate Jews for centuries (much like vaccinating with cowpox to prevent smallpox) is now past, but the deranged still shriek “Happy Hanukkah” at them anyway, which is like wishing someone a happy Independence Day in August. Jews, ever the survivors, find their ways to safe houses and secret dining establishments to wait out the remainder of the scourge.

Mercifully it at long-last burns out. Nothing so hot or bright can sustain and first one by one, then as a mass, the hosts succumb. At last, merciful silence.

STAGE 7- Aftermath:

Society has been transformed. Not a man, woman, child or pet has escaped untouched. Citizens’ health and personal finances are in tatters. Relationships are worn thin. Waste Management trucks grind under the strain of hauling away the refuse. Nothing lies ahead but long, dark days of toil as we attempt to rebuild. Assurances of increased vigilance are made, “We’ll keep it small next year.”

You finally emerge into night to watch your cold breath against the stars. You have survived this round, who knows about next? You think of Camus: “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

You remind yourself not to read Camus.