We drove out to a tree farm and sawed down our own tree and fought bitterly throughout the entire process. After much debate I ended up acquiescing to Victoria’s nominee, which was the biggest, tallest tree in sight. We had high ceilings, she reasoned, so we might as well use them. It was dark, the place was closing, and as I knelt on the frozen ground, sawing our tree, a gaunt old woman in an oversized flannel jacket walked up and stared at me working for a while, taking puffs from a handrolled cigarette. The sawing was much harder than I imagined it would be, and I was sweating and shivering simultaneously. My sawing hand was a block of frozen flesh and bone. I finally looked up at the woman and told her, through clenched teeth.
“We’re almost done here.”
“No, ya ain’t,” she told me, flatly, and sauntered back to her trailer.
Victoria towered over me, visibly shaking in her stylish but thin black overcoat, and impatiently expelled two long white streams of breath from her nostrils. It had been a long, stressful day. After dating for four years, this was going to be our first real Christmas together. This was the year we’d decided to officially Get Serious. That is, this year we had invited both of our families as well as our straggler friends with nowhere else to go to dinner at our one-bedroom apartment in Lakeview. After a nightmarish blur of gift and grocery shopping—battling ugly mobs of other half-mad procrastinators—we had idiotically left getting a tree to the very last. And there was still half a trunk to saw through, before the long ride home, an apartment to clean and decorate and a rather elaborate dinner to get started all by about noon the next day.
“See?” I yelled up at her. “We would have been here an hour earlier if you could have gotten off the phone with your mom when I asked you to! Everything is like a god-damned three-legged race with you!”
“Oh, give me a motherfucking break, dude! We’d have gone right down to the wire anyway because you can’t ever make your mind up about anything. Annnything.”
“Dude?” I pointed a numb finger at her. “DUDE? Don’t you EVER call me dude!”
She sneered.
“Are you serious?”
I sat up on my frozen haunches.
“Am I serious? Am I serious? Yeah, I’m fucking serious. I’m serious as a fuckin’ heart attack. Don’t call me dude! I’m not your buddy.”
She muttered something.
“WHAT?”
“FUCKING NOTHING!”
I felt like getting up and hurling the saw into the woods, but I just kept dragging its cold, jagged teeth against the frozen wood and sap. I had to. In the past, we had always just gone to our respective relatives’ for Christmas. But we had responsibilities now.
When the tree was finally felled I strapped the goddamned thing to the roof of her car and we fought the whole ride back to Chicago and all the way through trying to get the undersized fucking tree stand to hold up the gargantuan pine. We threw some perfunctory, hastily purchased ornaments on it and collapsed into bed. I think we continued fighting even as we both began to dream. And somehow, I think we started fighting again even before either of us was fully conscious in the morning. And we continued fighting until I realized that all was lost:
It was almost 10:00 AM when we emerged from the bedroom to confront all the mess; unwrapped presents strewn across the floor, dinner unmade, and the general environment entirely unswept, undusted, unvacuumed. There was probably not enough time to get it all done, I realized, even if we started working right then. But that was totally impossible because first we would have to stop fighting, then we would have to co-exist in angry silence for a period of time, then we would have to be sort of civil with each other, and eventually we could think rationally enough to get to work. There was simply no other route from a fight of this intensity to productive activity. In my fury at this recognition, I picked up one of those two legged silver nutcrackers which sat festively on an end table next to a bowl of pecans, raised it up in the air, and hurled it down at the floor. Only instead of hitting the floor it hit the arm of a leather chair and was propelled violently back up at me in such a way that one of the arms of the device impaled me perfectly in… the nuts.
I fell to the ground and curled up in agony and began frothing at the mouth, when I looked up and saw Victoria doubled over, fighting and failing to suppress laughter. This enraged me, of course, but even in my agonized state I couldn’t stop laughing either, and the fight was instantly over. We got everything done and it was a great Christmas. We had a delicious dinner, and a truly festive exchange of thoughtfully selected gifts, and after all of the highly jolly guests left, I sat in the leather chair sipping brandy, turning the nutcracker over in my hand. Victoria sat across from me curled up on the couch with a mug of tea clasped in both hands. The way her long shiny hair fell down across the shoulders of her turtleneck made her look so beautiful, so elegant. If there ever was such a thing as The One, she was certainly it. I sat there thinking about the moment in our fight when I knew all hope was lost.
And I realized that, at that particular point in our conflict, nothing short of a savage attack on my testicles would have satisfied Victoria. A nutcracker suddenly crushing my nuts? A coincidence? What are the odds? This was clearly a miracle.
It taught me a lot about the true meaning of Christ, and helped shape me into the man I am today.
A single Buddhist.
Don De Grazia is a full-time fiction writing professor at Columbia College Chicago, where he also earned his BA and MFA. After completing his master’s thesis, American Skin, De Grazia sent it off to London’s prestigious publisher, Jonathan Cape, who offered him a contract. In January ’98, American Skin was published in the U.K. Hailed as an American classic, the book was so highly acclaimed by critics that it caught the attention of publishers around the world, and in April 2000, American Skin was released in the U.S. by Scribner. A flood of positive reviews appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the San Francisco Examiner. It is now in its fourth printing and was recently anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Fiction. A member of the Screenwriters Guild of America, De Grazia is currently adapting the script for American Skin. He has written for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, and other publications. He resides in Chicago, where he is at work on his second novel, Reel Shadows, a chapter of which appeared in the March 2009 issue of TriQuarterly. De Grazia is also the co-founder of Come Home Chicago, a series that celebrates our city’s unique storytelling tradition with readings and entertainment held at the legendary Underground Wonder Bar.