I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ’TIS THE SEASON

  THANKSGIVING

  THE HOOKER AT ROCKEFELLER CENTER

  CHRISTMAS MORNING - The Sun Rises on Our Hapless but (Somewhat) Hopeful Hero

  IT IS BETTER TO GIVE . . .

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 11 : 07 A.M. - Dashing Through the Shower, Losing My Mind Along ...

  WE INTERRUPT THIS BOOK TO BRING YOU A MAJOR CATASTROPHE

  CHRISTMAS DAY, HIGH NOON - If Clothes Make the Man,Then Why Don’t We All Dress ...

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 1:00 P.M.

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 1:15 P.M.

  MEDITATIONS OF A JEWISH SANTA

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 1:45 P.M. - Here Comes the Old Giftless Jew!

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 2:00 P.M. - 6,500 Calories, Not Counting the Three Bottles of Wine

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 5:30 P.M. - If It’s Really over the River and Through the Woods, ...

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 6:00 P.M. - Outeating the Christians; or, Is a 10,000-Calorie ...

  CHRISTMAS, 11:45 P.M. - Another Christmas Comes to an End, and Our Hero ...

  AN ABNORMAL APPENDIX - The Chairman’s USO Holiday Tour

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY LEWIS BLACK

  Me of Little Faith

  Nothing’s Sacred

  Riverhead Books

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York 2010

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA •

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) •

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) •

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India •

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by Lewis Black

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Black, Lewis, date.

  I’m dreaming of a black Christmas / Lewis Black. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44499-3

  1. Christmas—Humor. 2. American wit and humor. I. Title.

  PN6231.C36B

  814’.6—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.

  Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my mentors:

  George Carlin , Kurt Vonnegut, Professor William Geer,

  and my uncle, Julius Kaplan

  INTRODUCTION

  The Uplifting and Heartfelt Story of How This Book Came to Be

  No, your eyes are not deceiving you. This is a book about Christmas (or the “holiday season,” if you’re deranged enough that you have to call it that), written by your old friend, the essence of the Christmas Spirit, Mr. Mirth himself, me.

  How did this come to pass? How did this glorious miracle occur? What star in the East was seen by yours truly that inspired him to write this book?

  Well, now, there’s a story.

  Every memorable Christmas story has its beginnings in the yearnings of the heart. Not mine, of course. But somebody else’s. I have naps to take, after all. In truth, Dear Reader, it wasn’t my idea to subject you to my deepest, most personal feelings about this time of year. I know better than that.

  A while ago I was having lunch with my editor, who over the bread basket turned to me, his youthful eyes filled with hope, and asked, “Any thoughts on a new book?”

  Right. Like I had been devoting all of my spare time to coming up with a concept for a book that would keep me chained to my desk for the next year, pining for a real life that was just outside my window.

  “Not a one,” I replied happily. “Besides, I thought I’d brought book publishing to its knees with my last one. Ever since that book came out, your industry has been in a tailspin.”

  “Really?” he asked. “I thought that was the recession and the shifting technological landscape.” (Yes, he really does talk like that.) “Did you cause those, too? By the way, can I have your breadstick?”

  “No. I want it. Besides, nobody reads anymore. People have no time for that kind of stuff. What’s important now is a constant flow of vital information that one can access instantaneously. You know, like who has a new blog”—Christ, I hate that word—“or a new sex tape for sale.”

  “Are you sure you want that breadstick?”

  “For crying out loud, no one wants a whole book of thoughts or some fictional flight of fantasy,” I continue as I crunch on a breadstick I don’t want. “People want things in real time. They want to know where to eat, to shop, to drink. They want it to be close. They want to know how to fucking get there. And if the phone would tell them who to fuck, they’d go and fuck them, and I mean that on all levels of the word. And they want to know right now, not by chapter 7. It could be too late by then. For God’s sake, there are Twitter books. How can that even be? But it is. We are getting to the point where authors won’t even have to write, THEY’LL INSTALL A CHIP IN THEIR HEADS AND THEN YOU CAN GO TO WHOEVER GETS THE TECHNOLOGY FIRST AND THEN YOU CAN JUST LISTEN TO THE BOOK AS THE AUTHOR THINKS IT! TALK TO ME AGAIN ABOUT A BOOK WHEN YOU HAVE A CHIP INSTALLED IN THIS !”

  I punctuated my point by pounding my head, which actually quieted the voices in my head for a minute or two.

  “Are you finished?” my editor asked quietly.

  “You’re the one who’s finished.”

  “Did you hurt yourself ?” he pressed on. “Do I need to call somebody?”

  “What are you, a Boy Scout? No, I don’t need anybody called.”

  “You insist on pounding your head like that, you’re going to do damage. More damage than you’ve already done, I mean,” he added.

  “Never mind. It’s like a pinball machine up there. I’m just whacking it to get it out of the tilt mode.”

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  “An idea? Are you kidding me? Seriously. Ideas are the next thing to go. We are moving rapidly into a world of ideacons. They’re like those stupid emoticons, only they pretend to express an idea. Just like you don’t have to feel the emotion, pretty soon you won’t have to be bothered by thinking, either.”

  “That’s good. Save it for the page.”

  “The page? Are you talking about paper? You’re killing me here. It’s all going to be on a screen.”

  “It’s still a book.”

  “What book?”

  “
The one you should write about Christmas.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? A Christmas book based on all the memories I don’t have of it, because, lest you forget, I am a Jew.”

  “Lewis, Dickens was a Jew.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “He wanted to be.”

  “Not at Christmastime, he didn’t.”

  “That’s your book.”

  “That’s not a book. It’s barely a sentence.” The voices in my head were starting to clear their throats again.

  “Glenn Beck wrote a Christmas book.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. Called what? Santa’s a Tubby Socialist, where Glenn analyzes why a fat man—dressed in red, no less—distributes gifts to every single child to teach them the heinous act of sharing? I’ve got news for you: Santa doesn’t bring anything for the Jewish kids, because they already worship a Socialist God of their own. I’m sure Glenn’s even got a chapter about how President Obama believes in Santa more than the country he may or may not have been born in.”

  “Not even close, Lewis. But if Glenn Beck can write a book for Christmas, so can you.”

  “And as every mom used to say, ‘If Glenn jumped off a roof, would you?’ ”

  “Well, if I could get his publishing rights, I would. But I know you can write a better book about Christmas, Lewis.”

  “You son of a bitch, taunting me with Glenn Beck. If I can’t write a better book than he does, I should jump off the roof. What makes you think I should write a book about Christmas?”

  “You’ve been Santa twice. They asked you to play Scrooge in a huge production of A Christmas Carol.”

  Yes, you read that correctly: me as Scrooge. My career, Dear Reader, has been a strange one, with twists and turns as weird as anything cooked up by Stephen King or the writers of The Hills. But playing Scrooge, that was truly an odd one. As far as I know, no one I have known in my forty years in the professional theater ever even considered the possibility of my playing Dickens’s most famous Christmas-hater. (Or if somebody had thought of the idea, he’d mentioned it to someone else and the other person had died laughing.)

  If the casting wasn’t strange enough, the play’s producers were offering me a small fortune to play the role, in huge theaters around the country. (The reason I mention that they were willing to pay me a bunch of money that felt to me like the kind of money you get in pro sports is that at the time the economy was tanking—badly. A Christmas Carol starring Lewis Black as Scrooge—it sounds like the producers were Bialystock and Bloom from The Producers. Theoretically it makes a bit of sense. I mean, who better to play Scrooge than a bitter, angry Jew?)

  As ludicrous as the whole idea was, it didn’t stop me from picking up the script and looking at it. (And who knew what might follow if it worked? Lewis Black as King Lear? Lewis Black as Macbeth? Lewis Black as Mama Rose in Gypsy?) As I read, I was shocked to find out how big Scrooge’s part is. Somehow I remembered it as just a bunch of “Humbugs” with an occasional “Bah” thrown in to spice things up. Nope, Ebenezer yacks a lot. More than is really necessary, to be honest. He goes on and on and on and ON, in order to show everybody what a prick he is. I might have had a stroke memorizing all that shit.

  Fortunately for my few remaining brain cells, the show never happened. The producers couldn’t find a cast that could help me sell enough tickets for the thing to make financial sense.

  Which is why I’m sitting at lunch yelling at my editor about Glenn Beck. “You know, I didn’t end up playing Scrooge.”

  “And that’s my fault? Come on, Lewis. This is better than being Scrooge. You can write about him. You can talk about how you would have been the definitive Scrooge. How you would have been remembered for your work, like that actor Booth was.”

  “Because he killed Lincoln.”

  “No, the other one. Shirley, I think her name was.”

  “I wouldn’t have been the definitive Scrooge.”

  “Then tell them why you would have been a lousy Scrooge. Tell them whatever you want. It’s your book.”

  “I don’t want to write another book. I don’t have to write another book. Writing is hell. It’s brutal. It’s hours of sitting by myself in front of a piece-of-shit computer, spewing out my guts and then dealing with you and your whiny notes. ‘You need a better joke here. I don’ t understand this paragraph. This doesn’t make sense.’ ”

  “I don’t give whiny notes.”

  “All notes are whiny.”

  “Lewis. Listen to me. If you write another book, the public might begin to believe you are a writer.”

  Son of a bitch! Now he got me. I’ve always wanted to be known as a writer. It’s why I went to graduate school, for crying out loud.

  And then I realized: This guy’s not my editor. He’s a crack dealer for my self-esteem.

  “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Of course you can. You’re a writer.”

  “Stop it. It’s like you’re rubbing the inner thigh of my brain.”

  “Think about it. Take long walks. Let your mind run free. We’ll have another lunch soon to talk about it some more.”

  Another free lunch. God, I love free lunches.

  “Okay.”

  So now he’s hooked me. How does he know I’ll write a good book about the holidays when I didn’t even think I could write another book? And why would I want to go through the tortures of the damned to finish it?

  I didn’t take long walks, but I thought about it. And after a while I told him that I couldn’t write the kind of Christmas book that everyone else writes, and that even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. Then I told him what I thought I might be able to write about.

  And you know what that idiot said?

  He said it’s a book.

  I hope he’s right, because here it is.

  A WARNING TO THE READER FROM THE AUTHOR

  Before you proceed, I want you to know that for those of you who have a deep attachment to the season that runs from Thanksgiving to Christmas, or an emotional connection to stores that sell Christmas stuff all year round, don’t read this book. These pages aren’t where you want to be. I am telling you as a friend. Books that will make you shit fruitcakes and gingerbread men and eggnog and holly are everywhere. They surround you like Christmas music in the elevator. This book has nothing to do with you, or with those of you for whom this holiday is one of the cornerstones you rest your life on. You’ll just make harrumphy noises when you read it. You won’t laugh. And you’ll end up hating me. I don’t need that.

  This book is really for the rest of us.

  A COUPLE MORE PROVISOS

  This book contains, like the celebration of Christmas, only 2 percent religion. Think of it as the yuletide equivalent of low-fat milk.

  This book also contains what some people call profanity. I think they’re full of shit.

  ’TIS THE SEASON

  And so it begins anew each year, sometimes as early as August, or as late as just before Thanksgiving. Off in the distance we hear the faint sound of bells, a muffled drumbeat, and a barely audible choir humming a in harmony. What are those sounds? They’re the first sounds of Christmas, the carols that we can’t wait to hear, and they will be played into oblivion until our ear-drums rebel in rage, screaming for silence.

  And is that an elf I see? By George, it is! But, for crying out loud, it’s Labor Day.

  Whenever it starts, though, the Christmas season takes on a momentum all its own, like the running of the bulls. It stampedes through every street in every town, into every shop, every home, and every life, careening through our every waking moment. If we could harness its power, we would never again have to argue about fossil fuels or debate energy policy or worry about our carbon assprint.)

  As this is happening, we Jews stand back and watch in awe. We are like the spectators who stand outside the fence and watch those idiots who have chosen to run with the bulls. And like many of you Christians at Christmastime, the runner
s are drunk and not thinking clearly. You and they are both trying to find the courage to overcome the fear of being gored, either by a bull or by an emotional verbal hatchet thrown at you by a loved one.

  Why would you subject yourself to this kind of madness? Maybe that’s why we Jews are called the chosen people. Because we don’t have to celebrate Christmas, we only have to compete with it. And we don’t really even do that, as Chanukah is proof that we just gave up.

  What’s extraordinary about this time of year to me is that not only has this year’s Christmas arrived, it’s as if every other Christmas that has ever happened before came along, too—the memory of every single one. And it’s not even just your own Christmas memories; it’s everybody’s. Christmas during the Korean Conflict. The Christmas truce of World War I. Christmas in Bucharest. Christmas during the Middle Ages. Christmas at the White House. The list is endless.

  And if that weren’t enough, there are even fictional memories. White Christmas, the movie and the song. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (As I recall, that was some kind of hedge-fund Ponzi scheme.) A Very Brady Christmas. Or Norman Rockwell’s compendium of Christmastime paintings and magazine covers that made every American look as if they were made of cream cheese.

  So many Christmas memories to contend with, so little time and emotional wherewithal to deal with them, it’s an overload. Christmas isn’t a holiday, it’s an emotional tsunami that hits you with a wave of tinsel that engulfs you until you have drowned in a sea of good cheer.

  Every year, all of that unimaginable pressure of finding just the right gift, of seeing everybody in the family, of putting up the decorations, writing the Christmas cards, selecting the perfect tree and decorating it just so, the endless lists of lists of lists—it’s unbelievable. And it’s extraordinary to watch. Whenever I have celebrated the holiday in the homes of others, there is a feeling that hangs over the event, that this Christmas has to be the best one ever, the most ideal, the one like that Christmas when you were young and the world seemed so sweet and you were so innocent. To get back to that time that once was but really never was what you thought it was, because it wasn’t like that. It was just another Christmas and all that that entails.