Collections - 24. Happy New Year

2020

A tedious short explanation about young Rich and his love for holiday letters, a very sad and tragic comedy

(Sorry, Will)

The history of my New Year’s letter began accidentally on Christmas Eve 1968, when it seemed there was nothing to watch on the seven black-and-white TV channels coming into my parents’ house except various competing versions of A Christmas Carol. So I squirreled up in my garret bedroom, unpacked my typewriter, and started a long, time-passing letter to friends, I think specifically to Jan Campbell and Jim Erbe. And I guess when it was finished, I thought it funny enough to type a couple of carbon copies and send them all out, if not the next day, then soon after, probably filching stamps from my parents’ desk.

When I got back to school, I remember some people asking, “Did you get Rich’s Christmas letter?” so I guessed it wasn’t embarrassing and also guessed I was onto something – at that point, not a lot of people were writing holiday letters. I hadn’t made a lot of copies because I was just heading into grad school and didn’t have much money. But I had a little because I had a Christmas break job filling tax form orders with Steve Cohen at the print shop owned by the parents of one of our high school friends, Art Grand. I could also have run copies off on their Xerox machine but don’t think I did,.

The next year I think I made ten copies, maybe using carbons again or maybe walking to the copy shop near the railroad station about a mile from my folks’ house – though I was finally driving by then. I wrote the letter at my parents’ home because, though I had my M.A. and was working full-time, the deal was that I still came back to New York for Christmas. Besides, I got to see my grandmothers and some Broadway plays.

I didn’t keep copies of either of those letters, but I do have one dated 1970, and after announcing the year, it proclaims, “Welcome to Rich Eisbrouch’s Third Annual New Year’s Letter – brought to you by Xerox, the most redundant name in advertising.” Counting backwards, something I can still passably do, I deduce the original letters began in 1968. “Elementary” – which is about the level of my math proficiency. Nah, I lie – I’ve always been good with easy numbers and intelligent women.

Why did I keep these letters? Less ego than Jan Campbell’s once telling me they were funny, and I respected her opinions. Of course, several years later, married to Jim and perhaps already the parents of two kids, Jan said, “You know, I was rereading your old letters, and I don’t know why I thought they were funny.” So she tossed ‘em. The whims of change.

Anyway you look at it, the letters had to be less pretentious than my Christmas cards of the time, especially considering how unpolitical I was and have been throughout my life. One homemade card began modestly, on pleasant, ocean blue construction paper, and was sponge-stenciled with the white word, “Peace.” Not bad – unassuming and almost pretty, with a universal message. But another, fiercer card was on blazing orange paper, chosen to say... er – in the Albee euphemism – “Screw You!” especially when nestled among more angelic, traditional cards. And on each piece of this heavy orange paper, in black letters, I typed, “Don’t they know there’s a war on? Doesn’t anybody care?” Defendable thoughts, even if lifted from more incisive minds, but perhaps not the best season to protest. I was particularly embarrassed when the card appeared on the polished mahogany baby grand of my near-Victorian grandmother. But she loved me, and what the hell – heck – a card from a grandson is a card.

That card went along with the holiday dorm room decoration my freshman roommates and I crafted for a competition two years earlier. We created a miniature of the Berlin wall, stretching across two built-in desks and a bureau, silhouetted against a night sky created by our unscrewed-from-their-usual-places florescent desk lamps and colored with borrowed blue gel. Front and center of this desolate wall, which was topped with miniature barbed wire, was a tiny cross and wreath. Below that was hand-scripted, “Christmas isn’t always happy – Berlin 1965.”

We almost won the room competition – the prize probably being a six-pack of orange Fanta, and a bag of Cheetos – and a lot of the guys on our floor came in to marvel. But our down home, conservative, uncomfortable Ohio dorm counselors wriggled out, deciding our idea was noble but something of a downer. “Besides,” they justified, “it’s a room decorating contest, and you’ve only decorated one part.” And even though the rest of the room was dark – in that Japanese theater, “If I’m dressed in black, you can’t see me” tradition – the counselors could easily spot the three-foot-square, Playboy rabbit logo made from fun fur glued on burlap. That hung on the wall over our bunks – four of us shared the room. The counselors felt it, “Undermined the esthetic.” Yeah – you try believing that coming out of the mouths of recent Ohio farmboys.

I’m not sure if the rabbit had yet been joined by a hand-painted, two-foot-long wooden plaque reading, “Never trust a virgin.” That doubtful wisdom was lifted from the title of a song in an obscure Broadway musical set to Offenbach tunes and starring Cyril “Captain Hook” Ritchard when he wasn’t playing planet-hopping aliens. At least – tying back to our anti-war theme – the show was based on Lysistrata. Of course, all the guys in our dorm probably thought that only girls could be virgins, while possibly the most untrustworthy of that itchy bunch was sleeping in my own bed.

From 1968 to 1985, I looked forward to writing the New Year’s letters on Christmas Eve, then having them Xeroxed, and mailing them to arrive by January first. The list of friends and relatives – why spare them? – also grew to more than ten. In 1986, I got my first computer and a dot matrix printer, which made my writing by repeated revision and typing with four fingers and a thumb much easier. Plus, I could print out the letters – and labels! – so no more cramped hand. But elegant? Well, if you squinted, the tiny dots almost turned into letters, and people might also ignore the ragged paper edges where I’d amputated the printer feet. Ten years later, when some of my friends began to cautiously nose onto the Internet, I started to send the letters electronically. Still, it was several years before I stopped sending the bulk of them by mail.

Then came Tom, and I needed to make my twice-annual social appearances at his church, to prove he had a presentable, if non-believing, partner. Those visits usually happened on Christmas Eve and Easter and meant my letters had to be written before Santa wanted his midnight cookies. Around the same time, we started to spend Christmas in Tucson with Tom’s mom, then in Reno, when she moved in with Tom’s sister and her family. But by 2010, Tom and I were back in Tucson for the holidays. By then, he and his sister owned the now empty family house, and it seemed only logical that someone should occasionally use it. There was certainly no thought of putting it on the market: the housing bubble had burst in overbuilt-for-investment-Tucson and defaulted condos were being given away with Fanta and Cheetos.

The house is still pretty much in the pre-Internet age – the boxy TV has rabbit ears. There once had been dial-up, when people’s phones didn’t ride in their pockets, but that went the way of smoke signals. So my letters had to be written and sent before we left LA, usually by December 12th – sort of twelve days before Christmas, but not close enough to warrant cigars. By then, I’d also begun to send Tom’s Christmas cards, because it appears my sparrow brain is better suited to repetitive, if pleasant, tasks.

By default then, my New Year’s letter became a Christmas letter, and paralleling that, Christmas trees crept back into my life. Actually, they never left, though for many years, they appeared unseasonally as props – and let me tell you how much fun it is to chase down Christmas decorations in April in Roanoke. Still, I was raised having Christmas trees – it was part of early Jewish-American assimilation – though I’m not sure where the pink metallic kind my grandfather liberated from The Tavern On The Green’s overstock fit into Talmudic tradition. My even knowing how to decorate a tree partly came from the kindness of Christians – in high school, I helped deck Nancy Garfield’s and Chuck Gleichmann’s family evergreens – though Charlie’s tree was plastic and assembled like spiky Tinker Toys. My design sense also came from being frequently stuck in Jeff Levin’s den with nothing to read besides Better Homes and Gardens or Ladies’ Home Journal, while waiting for him to finish some meal or other.

My artwork certainly has nothing to do with religion – anyone’s. I edged away from that soon after my bar mitzvah, following another long exodus of formerly Jewish boys. And that orange Christmas card was my penultimate political protest, the last being – as Lanford Wilson phrased it in one of his plays – “queering out of the draft.” Principled? Me? Nah, I learned ethics from Alfred E. Neuman. My “Run away!” from politics was also enhanced by then-idealistic Steve Cohen’s disappointment with the gerrymandering of Al Lowenstein’s 1970 congressional district. So except for liking Phil Och’s string-strummers – which I came to late, in my mid-1970s retreat from Broadway crap... er... music – I marched away from politics.

But this year, Tom and I aren’t traveling to Tucson, not because we’ve already moved there – ha! – but because now is the time for all good folks to stay in their homes with their critters. I don’t have to explain that, because, unfortunately, you all know. So the New Year’s letter has happily returned to being just that.

Tom and I have been careful this year – and probably very lucky – but others around us have been less fortunate. So we wish you all our best for the new year, and send this appropriately timed greeting. And you’d think that, having gotten through that ramble, I’d spare you my annual short story. “Like... uh... isn’t this it?” No, I wrote something different for that, and it’s kind of cute. But thinking reasonably, I won’t include it. This doesn’t hurt me – there’s no offense taken. I’ll just record it for YouTube.