Kick Me (2 page)

ARMY-ISSUE ELF

I
was selected to play the lead elf in my school’s Christmas pageant when I was in the first grade.

I’d like to think that I was picked because someone thought I was bursting with unharnessed talent, that by merely looking at me they could see I was something special, a miniature Laurence Olivier just waiting to spring my talents upon the performing world.

Unfortunately for my ego, that’s not the case. The only reason I got the part was because my voice was louder and better suited to be heard in a cavernous gymnasium than any other kid in my class.

I don’t really remember the specifics of my recruitment into the world of theater. I just remember that one day I came home and told my mother I needed an elf costume.

“An elf costume? Hmmm . . .” My mother had an annoying habit of pondering things that I felt a person should immediately grasp. She and I had seen plenty of TV shows and commercials with elves in them. We’d watched the perennially creepy Rankin-Bass production of
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
on TV together at Christmastime enough for her to know what one of Santa’s miniature helpers wore. Personally, I was always terrified by the stop-motion antics of Herbie, the elf who wanted to be a dentist, and his tribe of oddly articulated cohorts, whose mouth movements were almost as upsetting as the way the Abominable Snowman’s fur moved around unmotivated whenever he walked. But Herbie and company were the fashion standard for any elf wanna-bes and a good guide for any parent looking to outfit his or her son. The problem was, it seemed that my mother had never really focused on the show in all the times she’d watched it with me, and now it was going to be my job to help her figure out how the hell an elf dressed.

When my father came home that night, my mother informed him of my wardrobe needs. “We’re supposed to make an
elf
costume for Paul,” she said in a tone that bordered on incredulous.

“An
elf?
” said my father, immediately annoyed. “How are we supposed to do
that?
”

“I don’t know. You’d think the school would make the costumes
for
them.”

This then sent my mother and father into a half-hour-long discussion about where their tax dollars were going and what disrepair the school district was in.

It’s not that my parents couldn’t afford to outfit me. On the contrary, my father owned an army surplus store called Ark Surplus and had done quite well for himself. My dad called the store Ark Surplus for two reasons. One, he was a religious man and felt that the word
ark
represented protection and security, a name and image that would give his customers the reassurance to know his store would be there for a good long time, taking care of all their army-surplus needs like a nurturing mother hen. The second, and far more important, reason that he called it Ark Surplus was that by having his store start with an
A,
he was guaranteed to be the first business listed in the Yellow Pages under the heading “Army-Navy Surplus.” Apparently, if you’re a person who’s looking for stuff the army doesn’t want anymore, the first name in the book is good enough for you.

If a kid’s father could own any kind of business, an army-surplus store is about as good as it gets, falling short only of a toy company or a roller-coaster factory. Ark Surplus was packed to the rafters with every kind of tent and hat and canteen and army uniform ever made, not to mention all kinds of low-rent sporting goods, products that were a name brand only if you lived in Taiwan or China. Spelling and syntax mistakes on the packages were more numerous than in a first grader’s “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay. Items such as rubber rain ponchos sold in packages emblazoned with phrases like “Puncho to keeping rain off arm and logs” and “Super hi-fi re-inforce zipper tooths,” which featured artists’ renderings of a man in a poncho whose ethnic grab-bag of a face indicated that his parents must have been an American GI and a Vietnamese prostitute, were but the tip of the iceberg of merchandise for sale in my father’s store. He was fond of saying that he had made most of his money off the “hippies and yippies” who, in the mid- to late 1960s, descended on his store to buy all his army jackets, shirts, and fatigue pants as part of their protest garb. The Vietnam War was a dark period in our history, but to my dad, it was all green.

His store was also where almost everything we used in our house came from. For years my father had brought home small bottles filled with a yellow liquid that the army had produced as insect repellent for soldiers in the jungle. It had a toxic smell and turned your skin into an arid wasteland within minutes of application. However, it definitely kept the bugs away. Whenever I’d see my friends’ mothers spraying them with Off!, I’d feel a sense of superiority, knowing that I was warding off mosquitoes courtesy of the United States armed forces. It wasn’t until I was sixteen years old that my father informed me the government had made him stop selling his bug repellent several years earlier because no one knew what was in it, and indications were good that whatever its active ingredient was, it wasn’t something that should be put on human skin.

“Why’d you let us keep
using
it?” I asked incredulously.

“I don’t know—it just worked really well” was his disturbing answer. And that was my dad in a nutshell.

I also never encountered a real piece of toilet paper until I went away to college, because my father would stock our bathrooms with the industrial toilet tissue that he bought at a discount from his government wholesalers. It had all the softness and absorbency of typing paper and acted more like a frosting spreader than a piece of toilet tissue. Once, while on a sleep-over at a friend’s house, I went in his bathroom and for the first time in my life used a piece of quilted toilet paper and had a religious experience. It was around this time that I started to curse the day my dad ever owned an army-surplus store.

However, as a first grader who was simply trying to get an elf costume for the Christmas pageant, I knew exactly where that costume was going to be pieced together.

“All right,” said my father with a sigh. “I’ll take him down to the store this weekend and we’ll figure something out.”

A few days later, we went into Ark Surplus and started scouring the aisles for anything that was vaguely elflike.

“This looks like a hat that an elf would wear,” said my mother, picking up an olive drab green watch cap, similar to the one worn by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees.

“What kind of pants do elves wear?” my father asked as he poked through a shelf filled with hunting clothes.

“I think they wear shorts,” offered my mother.

“Yeah,” I chimed in. “They wear shorts with suspenders.”

“Well, I don’t have any shorts here. At least, none that’ll fit
him,
” my father said, frustration rising in his voice. It was Sunday, the only day my father closed his store and the vision of himself passed out in his chair with the Sunday paper lying uselessly on his stomach was obviously dancing in his head as he tried to unlock the fashion mysteries of the North Pole workforce.

I don’t know why my parents didn’t try to find a book that had a picture of an elf in it that they could have used for reference. Maybe it was pride, or maybe it was the fact that my parents had no real use for the accoutrements of Christmas. My father always bought our tree at the local YMCA but that was about as far as Christmas decorating went in our house. The same red spray-painted foam balls with macaroni glued to them that I had made in preschool adorned our trees until I left for college. My mother had no patience for decorating, so one rather moth-eaten-looking Santa doll she had won in a Kiwani-Queens bingo game became the sole representative of holiday cheer in our house. My father spent most of my childhood telling everybody at Christmastime, “Christmas is a holiday for kids. Anyone over eighteen who expects to get Christmas presents should have his head examined.” This Scrooge-like theory stopped at his store’s cash register, however, since he still made lots of money off Christmas surplus shoppers, scary people who liked to buy old army helmets, bayonets, and dummy hand grenades as presents for their loved ones. But whatever their true feelings about Christmas were, my parents felt they could pull an elf costume out of all this former soldier gear. And I had no choice but to trust them.

We came home that afternoon with a bag full of army issued goods. The search for elf shorts resulted in my father’s grabbing a pair of olive drab (or “O.D.,” as surplus hipsters called it) green U.S. government boxer shorts and two black nylon straps. These straps were usually used to lash down an ammunition box but were now going to serve as my merry suspenders. The question of footwear had stumped all three of us, and so a long pair of O.D. green socks and a lengthy piece of foam rubber had been harvested in the hopes of approximating an elf shoe.

“Okay,” said my father with determination, “let’s get to work.”

He and my mother went about constructing my elf outfit. I put on a white button-up shirt from my closet and stepped into the army boxers, which my mother then hoisted up, practically lifting me off the ground and giving me an army-issue wedgie. My father took the black nylon straps and taped the ends inside the front and back of the boxers, creating a suspender-like effect.

“What the hell do elves’ feet look like anyway?” my father asked, staring at the long army socks.

“They have shoes that curl up,” I offered.

“I think it’s their
feet
that curl up,” my mother said, as if the idea that only their shoes curled up was an absurd notion.

My father thought for a second, then grabbed a knife and went to work on the piece of foam rubber from his store. He cut two large banana-shaped curls that were almost a foot long and then stuffed one inside the toe of each sock.

“Here, put these on,” he said, handing them to me with a look that said he was convinced he was almost finished with his costuming task.

I pulled the socks on and stood up. My feet now looked like two dark green pontoons. Instead of curling upward, they gently rose at about a fifteen-degree angle. In addition, my feet were now each about twenty-four inches long. My father looked at my “shoes” for a couple of seconds, then nodded his approval.

“Those look like elf feet to me,” he said, satisfied with his creative skills.

My mother pulled the watch cap down onto my head and then she and my father stepped back to inspect me. Their stares made it quite clear they had no idea whether I looked like an elf or not.

“It feels like there’s something missing,” my mother said, hand on chin, thinking.

“He looks like an elf to me,” said my dad with a sigh that alerted the world he now had about five more seconds of elf duty left in him.

“I know what’s missing,” said my mom excitedly and sprinted off to the bathroom.

As I stood there with my dad staring at me with a perplexed look on his face, I didn’t know how I felt. I liked being in a costume, and since I wasn’t able to see myself, I imagined that I looked every inch an elf.

“Why are you playing an elf anyway?” my father asked in a tone that sounded like he was insulted by the very thought of his son portraying a mere peon in Santa’s organization.

“I don’t know,” I said, surprised at my father’s question. “I guess they think I look like one.”

“You don’t look like an elf to me. Well, except for the costume.”

Before my father’s disapproval could scar me for life, my mother ran back in with some cotton balls and a bottle of Elmer’s glue.

“This is what was missing,” she said and proceeded to put glue on three cotton balls. She took two of them and put one on the toe of each sock. Then she took the third cotton ball and stuck it on top of my hat.

She stepped back and looked at me proudly. “
Now
he looks like an elf.”

My parents stared at me. Several seconds passed.

All of a sudden, my mother burst into laughter. After a few seconds, my father caught the fever, too, and soon my parents were sitting on the floor, helpless with hysterics.

I knew tomorrow would not be a good day.

I headed off to school the next morning with my costume in a paper grocery bag. The pageant was scheduled for the end of the day and was to be attended by the entire school. Older kids were going to play the bigger roles in the show like Santa and his reindeer, while it had been left to my class to be the army of elves, mainly because we were all the correct height. Since I had been blessed with a loud voice and good speaking skills, I was to portray the skeptical elf, for whom the pageant was being held. In an act of Charlie Brown plagiarism, my character apparently had problems deciphering what the true spirit of Christmas was and it was up to everyone else in the show to convince me that Christmas wasn’t just about presents and food. Which was ironic because to every single one of us in that elementary school, presents and food were
exactly
what Christmas was all about. But, like the celebrity who endorses a product he’d never use in a million years, we in the pageant were going to try to sell this altruistic bill of goods to our fellow students.

I had a queasy feeling in my stomach all morning. While I was looking forward to being the star of the Christmas pageant, I was having great angst over my elf costume. The sight of my parents helpless with laughter had shattered whatever confidence I had at six years old and so I was quite worried about the reaction I was going to get from my peers.

“What’s your elf costume look like?” I asked my friend Brian.

“I don’t know,” Brian said with a shrug. “It’s pretty stupid.”

I started polling the other kids in the class. They all seemed to think that their costumes were not really very elflike.

“My mom made mine, but I don’t know if she really knew what she was doing,” offered up Amanda, the girl who sat across from me.

“Yeah, my dad made me wear the same crappy elf costume that my brother wore a couple of years ago,” said Mike, a kid who always had some form of bright green visible around the vicinity of his nostrils.