nothing for christmas
originally made for VAMP storytelling showcase 12/2024
a few years ago, i was shopping in the mega-target in clairemont with my mother, as i always do, because of our shared grey gardens complex. she’s a little feral with her unbrushed blonde hair, stumbling into everything as an unstoppable force. her actions are overruled by her emotion in any individual second. i’m the one who has to stop her.
i’m looking through the row of fluorescent-lit lean cuisines when i hear a hiiiiii. i look over to see my mother with the stretched smile of a pageant girl who wants to win. to my horror, she approached aaron.
i hadn’t seen him in over 15 years. he was lanky, hunched over with airpods stuck in his ears. he looked like an average post-college age kid, almost monastic in an oversized grey hoodie. looking at me with the kind of blank stare that seemed like someone who couldn’t imagine violence even if he tried. he was unrecognizable.
i couldn’t bring myself to say much to either of them. my mom has always been the type of person to act friendly with those who have hurt me. i didn’t expect to ever see him again, but i know that misbehaving men exist in every corner of the world.
you are dark, depraved, dangerous, and delicious. one of the most recent testimonials of my art and writing, sent in an unsolicited message from an anonymous 60 year old man on fetlife. not my exact target, but i’ll take it.
fetlife is like facebook for kinky freaks and people looking for hot hookups with people who are willing to kidnap them. i’m only there to find events, but as long as i have a visible face, it’s open season for any man with the courage to fire off a thoughtless opening line they wrote to grab my attention.
i post a couple pieces of my art there, but the first thing in my bio is the link to my website which includes writing with graphic depictions of brutal sex and violent men. i don’t like being seen as an edgelord, i’m only using the language i understand. i use fetlife as a tool to see how people respond, because the best testing ground for perverted art is the audience most likely to understand it.
it has mixed results, but it’s something i’ve learned to deal with. it’s worth it for me to keep trying anyway, because i was raised to keep quiet about anything i had to say, in fear of the consequences. i refused to write for years because it felt like an intrusion of my inner privacy, when i already didn’t have any.
when i wanted to write, my head parsed my thoughts as sensitive information being transferred into the hands of the enemy, and would immediately self-destruct to a blank slate before it could spill out.
my parents were the kind of people who insisted they keep their eye on me, and expected me to stay within their line of sight at all times. i was homeschooled from first grade until my high school graduation. it wasn’t some kind of weird cult thing, but a conscious choice to make sure i didn’t go anywhere. they created their own panopticon, made for one person.
any deviation from their expectations would be met with day-long circular interrogations and violence, where i wasn’t allowed to move until i agreed to comply. i would respond by saying nothing at all. it made my life hell, but silence was the only answer.
my dad primarily used my isolation to sleep with me daily throughout my childhood. my mom wasn’t aware of it at the time, but knowing her as an adult, i’m not sure she would have done anything even if she had known.
i would never write, and almost never speak in the presence of others. my parents forged and wrote all of my essays and creative writing until i graduated. i was nervous to create art that involved personal sentiment, because i was afraid of what i’d let out when i thought i wasn’t in their presence. i was always being watched, whether they were there or not.
the only connection to others that i could find in art was through dance, because it didn’t force me to give concrete answers. body articulation was a coded language that i could use to speak without being heard by my parents. all they could see was movement.
i found my outlet in taking weekly classes with some kids from my girl scout troop who were more people i witnessed rather than real friends. as someone who largely couldn’t speak, my father stepped in to be my proxy for social interaction.
whenever i would go somewhere to interact with anyone remotely in my age group, he’d sit directly next to me, and engage them in conversation as if he were just another one of the kids.
my social group included my dad and i, along with three other girls - one of whom was the troop leader’s daughter - and her brother, my age. aaron had a known proclivity for violence, usually reserved for brand new televisions, stuffed animals, and the few unlucky souls who ended up in his path.
he found his ideal target in a chubby, mute homeschooled kid who didn’t have much, but was guaranteed to never, ever fight back. every week, when i would see him at our meetings, he would stand close to my face, stare deep into my eyes with an unmistakable fire, draw his arm back, and sucker punch me in the stomach until he got distracted by something shiny to break apart. when we started taking classes together, the attacks only worsened. the better i got at dance, the harder i’d get hit for trying.
the closest i got to any kind of consolation was from my dad, who sat me down after one particularly brutal episode, and put his hand on my knee. he only does it because he likes you. i hated that because it wasn’t true, but i think it made me see aaron in a different light. my father was never afraid of intervening. if he cared, he could have shoved that kid away without a second thought. he wanted it. we were both children made to fit his model of affection.
the night at the bazaar del mundo was one of our last performances on our tour of recitals across strip malls and cheap church venues put on by our dance company, so that middle class suburban families could get their money’s worth after weeks of corralling hordes of children into minivans and hundreds of dollars of classes. compared to the other places we would perform at, this one was in a truly recognizable location. it felt like the big leagues.
the bazaar del mundo in old town, as it originally existed, wasn't what anyone would call historically accurate. it was like the rainforest cafe with the precise theming of a disney park for people who are looking for the feeling rather than the experience of colonial mexico.
it was known for one thing - being really beautiful. technicolor landscaping and decor that felt like no other place in the world - especially around christmas. their courtyard was filled with thousands of sparkling lights and electrosynthemagnetic musical sounds, with a massive christmas tree beside their stage, which held the centerpiece of their exhibition: a historic nativity scene made in the 1800s by settlers in san diego.
the premise of our dance was simple. it was choreographed to a cover of the 1950s novelty holiday song nuttin for christmas, by 2000s all-star band smash mouth featuring the great rosie o’donnell.
the song is a narrated drama by a tween boy, warning other children of his horrendous fate by recounting his misdeeds starting from his first minor indiscretions, leading up to committing heinous felonies. there is no hope for this child. his actions would ultimately result in the worst punishment imaginable. he is getting nothing for christmas.
the girls were the backup dancers, wearing the kind of skimpy ms. claus costumes that these days would prompt a middle aged conspiracy theorist to send death threats to the dance company and any venue that would have us. aaron was our leader, a naughty little elf who was there to stand in for the narrator with his extreme and reckless breakdancing. he was also pretty good at it.
i don’t know if it was just the energy that night, but it felt like we killed it. we had strangers and members from other families coming up to us to say how we - and i - did, and for once i felt like i had truly connected with others through my art. it almost made the violence i had endured for months feel worth it. after the show, we hung around the bazaar until even the check-in tables had been dismantled and we were the only ones left to celebrate together. aaron stood next to a black steel chair about 20ft away, staring down at his shoes as he shifted his weight from side to side in silence.
it was the quietest i’d ever seen him. at some point, i felt something running towards me at full speed. all i could see in the blur was a single arm pulling back. wham. he completely knocked the wind out of me. after that, i closed my eyes real tight for a full minute, waiting for the next impact as i struggled to breathe. it never came. all i could hear was the sound of little pattering shoes growing quieter. i opened my eyes, and tried to recover a reappreciation for my small artistic efforts. then i heard the crash.
i turn my head behind me to see mary and joseph lying on the ground, and a manger spilling hay beside three other guys, slowly tipping over from the shaking hand of a small blonde boy.
i think he reacted that way because i did great. while i was hunched over in pain, witnessing some great act of destruction brought on by my actions - for once in my life, i felt like i fucking won.
he was quickly stopped by a small team of security, and the damage was minimal enough that they didn’t need to press charges against this little seven year old for the attempted assassination of jesus christ. that was one of the last times i saw him as a kid. it eventually became a family joke about the insane kid who tried to wreck some historic nativity scene. anything i had done was erased.
when i ran into aaron at target, i realized that the vision i had for him as an adult was created from the perspective of a forensic artist doing age progression pieces. i imagined him with the same general shape and features, only older and more rugged. harboring that same violence in his eyes just waiting to spill out. there was no hope for him.
in reality, he was just a guy. from my later “online research,” aaron seemed like a well-adjusted, and deeply loved person. when i saw him again, i thought: if he can find the grace to redeem himself, why can’t i? isn’t that the real christmas gift?
my parents split when i was 15. as an adult, i still live with my mother, who i have chosen to love, but will never trust. i do what i can to help her, but she’ll never know my world because i refuse to share it with her. i see my father all the time in order to keep our precarious status quo, and i’m not sure if that will ever change.
the important thing is that after seeing aaron, i began creating the art i truly wanted to make—crude little drawings in ms paint, once described as “if francis bacon made cut-outs like matisse.” i started writing poetry and stories, often from the perspective of abusive men. it’s important for me, because i’m sharing what i have learned.
my art especially appeals to the kind of people who have a fixation on extreme brutality that makes the marquis de sade look like walt disney. it’s the same as every community. most of them are deeply kind and supportive, but there will always be men in my life who use violence to try to get what they want.
the difference now is that it’s easy to know what to do with them. they can try anything that comes to their mind, but i know the one thing they’re good for. material to be used. and that’s the gift that keeps on giving.