Death Might Be Your Santa Claus by James Hippie

      Taber Andrew Bain CC



Death Might Be Your Santa Claus
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     Darcy was one of my girlfriend’s sponsees, a recovering heroin addict she had met at some meeting or another. Like a lot of people in her recovery circle, my girlfriend identified as an addict/alcoholic. I had done my share of drugs as well, but at the end of the day I considered myself just a run-of-the-mill alcoholic and identified as such. It didn’t sound quite as glamorous, but this was one of those cases where I couldn’t see any benefit to padding my resume.

     One Saturday my girlfriend volunteered me to help Darcy move out of her apartment and into a new place. When I complained about it she tried to make me feel guilty for not wanting to help a newcomer. I was new enough in sobriety myself that I would let her pressure me into doing things I didn’t want to do. One way she did this was by claiming it was an “AA request.” According to her there was an unwritten law in the program that forbade one from turning down an AA member’s request for help. I later learned that just like in civilian life, you were free to turn down any request you pleased, AA or otherwise.

     There was another guy that got suckered into the ordeal, another recovering drunk they found at a meeting. I was introduced to him, then immediately forgot his name. This happened to me all the time in those days. In the program you’re constantly meeting new people, so I started calling everyone Bill. It was a way to simplify things. 

     Whether helping us was an altruistic move, or whether Bill just wanted to hang out with two attractive women all day, I didn’t know. Maybe he fell for the “AA request” line as well.


     Darcy lived in an old apartment complex in Silverlake. Her apartment was on the third floor near the rear of the building. There was no elevator, which meant we had to navigate everything through a labyrinth of stairs and narrow hallways. Darcy hadn’t done much packing, so there was a lot of standing around while she and my girlfriend filled up boxes for us to carry down to the parking lot.

     I stacked as many boxes as I could into my 1986 Mercury Cougar and Bill’s truck, then we drove them to the new house she had rented in Echo Park. Bill and I unloaded the boxes and stacked them in the empty living room, then drove back to the apartment to wait for them to fill up more for us. It was slow going, but most of us were unemployed. It wasn’t like we had anywhere else to be.

     My girlfriend had told me that Darcy was an artist, and I spotted a stack of canvases leaning against the wall in the apartment. Having aspired to be an artist at one point, I was curious and looked through them. There was a series of small paintings of butchered meat and amputated limbs, and another stack of abstract canvases that may or may not have been complete. I didn’t think they were very good, technically speaking. I had only spent a short amount of time around her, but Darcy struck me as a flake. I guessed she was probably infatuated with the idea of being an artist and all the pretentious bullshit that goes along with that. I had been the same way when I was her age. She was only 20 years old, so I didn’t judge her too harshly. She still had plenty of time to figure it out.

     When we had emptied most of the apartment, the girls walked to Starbucks while Bill and I tried to figure out how to get the larger pieces of furniture out of the building. Most formidable of all was a king-sized mattress. We struggled to stand it on end, then discussed how to get it down to the car. Neither of us was looking forward to carrying the dead weight of the mattress down three flights of stairs.

     Bill lit a cigarette and walked out to the small balcony and looked over the ledge.

     “I say we throw it off here.”

     I walked out to the balcony with him. I could see our cars in the parking lot three stories below. It was literally the shortest distance between the two points. The problem was the weight of the mattress. It had to be over 150 pounds. It didn’t seem like a sound idea.

     “If this lands on someone it's going to cripple them.”

     “Then let’s not drop it on anyone.”

     I couldn't argue with that logic.

     We leaned the mattress against the railing and grabbed it by the bottom edges, then pushed it over as hard as we could. It fell down to the parking lot and landed with a loud thud.

     When we walked down to load it onto the car we noticed that the mattress was now bent. It had landed on one of its corners, and the weight of the impact bent the springs so that the corner now stuck up at an angle with a permanent flip.

     “Shit. I didn’t think that would happen.”

     “Fuck it. We’ll leave it facedown and hope she doesn’t notice.”

     We drove the last of Darcy’s things over to the new place in Echo Park and unloaded it. Bill and I dragged the mattress in and put it face down on top of the box spring, but you could still see the black stain from where the corner made impact with the asphalt and that it would no longer lie flat. Darcy walked by and noticed this, stopping to press down on the corner to see if that would straighten it. She frowned and walked away without saying anything. I felt bad, but only a little.

     It was after 9:00 pm by the time we finished moving everything. Darcy didn’t have anything to feed us, and of course she didn’t have any money. Bill left and went back to wherever he came from and my girlfriend and I went back to her apartment. The move had taken all of our Saturday and we were exhausted and starving. But we had stayed sober that day, and I guess that was something.

     A week later my girlfriend and I were watching a movie on TV when her cell phone rang. It was someone from a nearby hospital. Darcy had been dropped off unconscious in the emergency room with my girlfriend’s phone number written on her arm in magic marker. It looked like an overdose.

     I drove my girlfriend to the hospital while she reached out to various contacts, trying to find someone who could notify Darcy’s family. Darcy was in the ICU when we arrived.

     Over the next few hours the story started to emerge. Darcy had taken off from a meeting with some guy she met and they drove up to Griffith Park to get high. Darcy OD’d and the guy panicked. By the time he dumped her in front of the emergency room she had stopped breathing. The doctors had her on a ventilator and were running tests, but it didn’t look good.

     In the darkened room in the ICU Darcy looked like she was asleep, the only movement being the slow rise and fall of her chest as the ventilator breathed for her. Occasionally her body would twitch or jerk slightly and everyone would run to the bed, thinking she was waking up. It was explained to us that this was just an unconscious motor response. Darcy was brain dead. It was just a matter of letting the family say their goodbyes to her before they gave the order to pull the plug.

     When Darcy’s family arrived I felt my presence was no longer necessary. My girlfriend stayed behind while I took a walk around the hospital grounds and looked for a place to have a cigarette. I was having conflicting emotions about the whole thing. All these death-worshiping kids kneeling at the altar of Keith Richards and William Burroughs, they were almost asking for it. Death was so cheap and easily attainable. Why didn’t these beautiful children see that?

     But they were young, so what the fuck did they really know? I had managed to survive past the “and leave a good-looking corpse” stage of the game, and at 38 mortality looked different to me. I had a better idea of what there was to lose. All the years that I had thoughtlessly pissed away, Darcy wasn’t even going to have that. It was a waste.

     A memorial was held at a Hindu temple overlooking the Pacific. All of Darcy's Hollywood recovery friends showed up in their punk rock finery. They looked ridiculous wandering around the grounds in their miniskirts and high heels like they got lost on their way to a nightclub. My girlfriend and I ended up getting into a fight; she was joking around with some kid from a meeting that caught a ride with us, making bitchy jokes about the other mourners like they were judges on a fashion show. It was disrespectful. I didn’t want to go to begin with, and if she wasn’t going to take it seriously it was a waste of my time to be there. Time and how you utilized it was becoming increasingly important to me. 

     A minister brought by the family got up and began to address the small crowd. I looked around at everyone gathered there by the lake on that bright, cloudless morning. It was a pointless tragedy that brought us all there, and the longer we stayed sober the more tragedy we would see. Not everyone was going to make it, and the odds of us surviving were not in our favor. That much seemed clear. I wondered how many of us there would still be around in a year? Or five years? 

     I thought about getting manipulated into helping Darcy move, the house full of boxes, unfinished paintings, the destroyed mattress, all of it for nothing. If I had known she was going to top herself a week later I could have just skipped it. It’s tempting to say it happened for a reason, like there was some lesson to be learned from it, but it was just random circumstances. A lot of people are just a week away from making a bad decision they won’t live long enough to regret. 

     Maybe that was the lesson. Someone’s going to give up their seat so you can keep yours for another day, so appreciate it. You never know when it’ll be your turn.

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James Hippie is the author of The Punk Called Rock, Terminal Jive, and the poetry collection XX.  His writing has appeared online at Horror Sleaze Trash, Unlikely Stories, Terror House Magazine, and Literary Yard.