Red Vest Christmas

I spotted my piano teacher studying the suits on sale through the window of a men’s shop. He himself was dressed in a suit underneath a tan trench coat. 

He was smoking. 

You could smoke in the malls those days. He would smoke during the piano lessons, too. A suave Italian guy with dark black hair. He smoked with style and grace. 

To this day, I still associate the smell of cigarette smoke with the crisp white pages of sheet music. 

Christmas music played from the loudspeakers. Shoppers were everywhere. Everyone was happy.  It was back in the days before Christmas lost its little something. When it was still viewed through the eyes of youth. 

The water fountains in concourses worked back then, shooting jets of water into the air while spotlights imbued them with a rotating schema of colors. 

Sometimes the spraying pattern synched to the rhythm of the music. It was really something.  

During the 80’s they took the fountains away, I suppose because the maintenance became too much of a pain in the ass. Or the world stopped being fascinated by water fountains.

I loved to linger in the World War II section of D. Dalton’s bookshop. There were maybe five or six titles dealing with World War II. I had a hell of a time deciding on which one to select. 

It was long before Amazon and Borders, and Barnes & Nobles. There was a certain charm in not having all those choices. You took comfort in having your selection curated by someone who knew better than you.

You could do all your Christmas shopping right there at the mall. Cross each family member off your list as you hit JC Penney, Strauss, Spencer gifts, and B. Dalton’s. 

In the center of the mall, where the main concourses came together, there was the Santa Claus set-up. Kids with their parents waited in line for their photo op with Santa. There was something sacred about this ritual of revealing your wishes to someone who had the power to make them come true.    

A train track circled the Santa area offering rides, and I was always struck by the mechanic on constant standby ready to fix a frequent malfunction. 

The woman working the register at JC Penney with the painted-on eyebrows and half-moon reading glasses on one of those metal chains would always make a comment about how perfect your gift selection was, then make you aware of the special they are running on bath towels. 

The bit about the bath towels would fly a mile over your head.

On the way out there was the video arcade. 

Old retirees wearing red vests worked the place and would reach into the pockets of their vest and pull out a wad of cash and hand you five ones in exchange for a five-dollar bill so you could feed it into the token machine. 

I once asked one of the guys in the red vests if they ever played the games. 

“I get so tired of these damn machines by the end of the day,” he said in disgust.

The place was a cacophony of bells, clanging noises, sirens, and explosions so I got his point.   

My favorite game was Tank Battle. I got to be pretty good. I had advanced up to the level of where the enemy tanks coming at you were some kind of futuristic versions of tanks. They were too fast for me, and I stagnated at level. 

I remember when I was in the Army stationed in Germany saving the world from Communism, I got stuck with battalion Duty Officer every Christmas. It involved sitting in a small room manning the telephones and going around and doing security checks. The shift lasted 24 hours and alway seemed a complete waste of time. 

Later it donned on me that the battalion Adjunct, when making out the list, put the single guys down for Christmas duty then backed into the rest of the schedule. 

What a racket. 

The smart-ass comments I left in the duty log was my revenge. 

25 Dec 1989 1315: All quiet on the western front. Everything secured at the battalion headquarters. Men's restrooms still smell of sewage, somone needs to check into it for a broken line or something. Such matters are beyond my expertise.

25 Dec 1989 1600: The guard house at depot 972 reported in for commo check. The land lines appear to be functioning. Hopefully the Russians will not get wise to the fact that our main telephonic switch station is located next to the supply room and an easy target for infiltration. Such an interdiction could be accomplished by using specialized equipment. Advise further investigation by communication specialists.     

Every Christmas day my grandmother used to have a huge get-together at her house there on Hudson Drive. My mother had six brothers and three sisters. The house was full of life. I never knew half my cousins. 

My uncle Ed fought in WWII. He was in an artillery unit attached to the 82nd Airborne and won five battle stars including Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. 

The Battle of the Bulge occurred at this time of the year in 1944-1945 and I always associate it with Christmas. 

One year I got the strategy game, ironically called, “Tank Battle” for Christmas and brought it to my grandmother’s house for the Christmas day get together. It had American and German tank plastic game pieces that you maneuvered around a terrain gameboard. 

I thought maybe my uncle could tell me a little something about the tanks.   

It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that the last thing in the world he wanted to think about on Christmas day were goddam German tanks.