Necessarily
BY JASON GANTENBERG I JULY 24, 2008

For Charles Bukowski, who would hate this story.

I wanted a Christmas tree. I didn't know why. I had no fucking clue, and I hate Christmas, but I wanted one so I decided to drive around until I found some for sale. I drove around for hours watching shoppers jam up the doorways of electronics stores and toy stores and churches, but I didn't see a single lot for Christmas tree sales. I didn't see a car with a fir or a Scotch pine strapped to its roof. What is this shit? I thought. Where have all the flowers gone? My father used to take us out, my brother and I, when we were kids, and the city would be littered with trees.

XMAS TREES, $25

All over the place, there would be Christmas trees. Up your ass, there were Christmas trees. In the dishwasher. Under your pillow. One year, we even got to cut one down ourselves. I remember feeling like a tough son of a bitch with that axe in my hand.

I must have driven fifteen or twenty miles before I found a sign advertising white pines at a gas station. The trees were around back, and I walked up to a man with a thick brown beard. The motherfucker looked like Paul Bunyan. He wore an orange hunting hat and a green jacket, and the patch on his left breast pocket read "Columbia Lumber." "Howdy," he said.

"Howdy."

I took a stroll through one of the aisles and was immediately disgusted. These trees were sickly. I hated white pines anyway, but these looked worse than most—needles covering only about half the tree, branches cracked or bent. I imagined they were all infested with parasites and tried to remember what killed all those trees in the Smoky Mountains. It was some insect, wasn't it? A fungus, maybe. Whatever it was, these were retarded trees.

"Is this all you got?"

He lit a cigarette. "Yah. Sorry. It's Christmas Eve. Most of 'em been bought up already."

"You got one of those for me?"

He handed me a smoke. "You might wanna try the hardware store."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yah. They oughta sell 'em."

"Alright. Thanks for the smoke."

I climbed back into my little car trying to get the cigarette lighter to work, but the thing had been broken for years. It didn't click like a normal car lighter was supposed to. No. You had to work that thing and spin it around in there, feel when the coil made contact with the block. It was like working on a woman. Sort of.

I leaned out the car window to yell at the woodsman, "Hey! You got a match or something?" He didn't hear me.


***


The hardware store was full of people, but the place smelled like freshly cut wood. To the right of the main entrance sat a large inflatable Frosty the Snowman holding a snow globe and singing a carol. I didn't know which one. I had forgotten all of them a long time ago.

I walked up to one of the cashiers. She was busy, and there was a long line of people pushing carts full of tool sets, two-by-fours, screws, copper el pieces. You name it. All the wives were gearing their husbands up for post-holiday fix-ups and had no shame whatsoever about wrapping up a batch of presents for their own benefit. Husbands are dumb, though. They only think about being robbed after signing the divorce papers, and in retrospect, realize that the bust-ass bathroom plumbing job fell into their hands only because Marge or Betty or fat Susan gave them a new wrench set for Christmas. He even remembers what she said when he opened the box. "See, honey? Now you can fix up the bathroom like we were talking about?"

I was a stupid husband once, too.

"Hey," I said to the cashier and pointed to Frosty the Snowfuck. "Can't you shut that thing up?"

She smiled and said, "I'm sorry, sir."

I shrugged and walked away to find my Christmas tree.

The store was huge. Why did a hardware store need to be this big? If half the people used half the things their wives bought at one of these places, the store still wouldn't need to carry all this shit. It was consumer masturbation. That's what it was. The process of buying is more fun than possessing anything. Sometimes tearing the packaging off is as good as it gets.

Pretty soon I was lost. I had wandered into an aisle full of lighting fixtures and light bulbs. A skinny, pimple-faced stock clerk was kneeling down to refill one of the hooks with candle-shaped bulbs.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"I need a Christmas tree. Somebody told me you sell 'em."

"Certainly."

He led me through a maze of aisles, and I tried not to look at all the tools and various other pointless accessories. At one point, I slammed my knee on a shopping cart that someone had left in the middle of an aisle and was cursing to myself when the clerk stopped me in front of a four-foot tall box. "Here you are, sir. These are all the trees we have."

It was a fake one. One of those trees that come in four interlocking parts with the lights built in and everything. The whole thing just plugs right into the wall, and viola! Christmas tree.

"What the fuck is this?"

"Excuse me, sir?"

"Stop calling me 'sir!' What the fuck is this shit? Doesn't anybody sell real goddamned trees anymore!"

"I'm sorry sir."

"Axes," I said.

I sighed like a canyon and pressed the sides of my eyeballs the way that I do whenever I feel I'm about to do something very bad.

 

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