12.22.05
Pond Scum: Saving Us All from Satan's Power
By Steve Finbow
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The Advertisement.“The International Santa Claus Tournament – Ho! Ho! Ho! If you think you’re hard enough. Competitors to fight it out mano a mano at the North Pole, Saturday, 24th December 2005. Light refreshments available. Entry fee – two mince pies and a glass of port. Prize – the winner will hold copyright to the name ‘SuperSanta’ for 100 years. Fighting styles: any. No gouging. For entry details please send email to headelf@sintklaas.com.”
The Competitors.On a hillock, boarded by olive trees, St Nicholas sits. Strewn around him are the remains of goats. Some beheaded. Some eviscerated. He lifts the charred remnants of a foreleg and bites into it. Children scout the outlying bonfires for edible morsels and bring them to him on rough earthen platters. He accepts them with grace. Old women in black sob into their hands, their livelihoods destroyed. Their herds rent asunder by this so-called holy man.
Joulupukki takes his leather cup and holds it underneath the reindeer as it micturates. The liquid is warm and frothy. He tips his head back and drinks. It takes about an hour before the hallucinations begin. There are trees aflame. Stars turn into pine cones. The redness of the ice. The whiteness of the fires. He is naked. The men of the village beat him with branches. He sweats. He stands in their midst and roars to the heavens.
Shengdan Laoren bows to each of the twenty men who stand before him. The men bear gifts – sweaters, mobile phones, socks, gift vouchers, and aftershave. He frowns. He takes a list from his pocket and ticks it with his pen. Five of the men, dismissed, walk backwards to benches strewn with poinsettias. Shengdan Laoren bows again. The remaining men take up the riding-horse kung-fu position. Shengdan Laoren is ready.
Pere Noel, smoking a Gauloise, stuffs rags into a bottle filled with petrol. His hands shake as he lifts a glass of absinthe to his mouth; he spills a drop onto the front page of Libération and wipes it with his sleeve. He is wall-eyed drunk and looks like the mutant offspring of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean-Paul Sartre’s uglier twin brother. His weapon is a white handkerchief. He eschews garlic and onions but enjoys the odd glass of Burgundy.
Black Peter dips his knuckles into vinegar and wraps them in rags. He blindfolds himself and spins in a circle like a dervish. The first blow is to the temple and he stumbles somewhat. Then they are on him, two men dressed in white suits made from cotton wool, their eyes are coals, their noses carrots, their leering mouths made of twigs. Black Peter stands firm. He lashes out and knocks the top hat from an assailant’s head. The second comes in low, Black Peter grabs the man’s scarf – twirls him around and sends him off into the hot sands. “You’re snow match for me,” he jokes.
Father Christmas, finishing off a rather good roast-beef dinner, dons his polished boxing gloves. He gets into the ring and says, “ding-ding”. Two dwarves dressed in green felt suits approach him, circling like small diseased moons. Father Christmas shuffles, dodges, feints, flicks out a jab and then a left cross – the first dwarf goes down in a confetti of sweat and teeth. Father Christmas dances right, jabs once, jabs twice, and sends an upper cut to the second dwarf’s chin. The little man goes down. He goes down hard.
There is a spotlight on a plastic chair. The lights are blue. The air is thick with smoke. In the back room of this club in the depths of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, shackled to the wall, a man with pointed ears begs for mercy. He is naked except for a red velvet thong trimmed with white fur. A large man, who goes by the name of Kris Kringle, also naked, also wearing a red velvet, white fur-trimmed thong, beats him methodically with a rolled up newspaper. As he does so, he sings – Good King Wenceslas (thunk) looked out (thunk) on the feast of Stephen (thunk) as the snow laid round about (thunk) deep and crisp and even (thunk) brightly shone the moon that night (thunk) tho’ the frost was cruel (thunk) when a poor man came in sight (thunk) gath’ring winter fuel (thunk thunk).
He’d arrived at the New York Health & Racquet Club in time to have a low-carb lunch and a Aqua Tai Chi class with the tight-bodied Jewish blond-haired girl, an undergraduate at the New School, he’d been seeing for nearly a week. Santa Claus had booked a later PLYO- BOX class and an Urban Rebounding® & Interval Rebounding workout and was ready for some physical interaction. Goddamn it if he wasn’t going to win this tournament. He’d show those other guys. Those impostors.
The International Santa Claus Tournament –
North Pole, Saturday 24th December 2005.Time: Noon. Participants: St Nicholas – Turkey; Joulupukki – Finland; Shengdan Laoren – China; Pere Noel – France; Black Peter – Morocco; Father Christmas – the United Kingdom; Kris Kringle – Germany; and Santa Claus – the United States of America. Prize: the Undisputed Champion of Christmas.
Black Peter is down first; a roundhouse from Kris Kringle floors him. Joulupukki is next; his brain, addled from the concentrated hallucinogens in the reindeer urine he gargles, means he doesn’t see the leopard-claw punch from Shengdan Laoren. Then Pere Noel; a forearm smash from St Nicholas sends him sprawling in the snow. Kris Kringle whips a switchblade from his sack but is disarmed and dispatched by Shengdan Laoren’s famous crane beak. A headbutt from Father Christmas smashes St Nicholas’s nose and blood drips onto the dirty ice in the shape of robins. Santa Claus knees Shengdan Laoren in the testicles and the brave little guy goes down in a heap, choking and spluttering. Father Christmas steps back, then forward, and catches Santa Claus in the jaw with his steel-toe-capped Dr Martens. Santa Claus falls, props himself on his elbows and rises, claps his mittens together, exhales a cloud of air like the ghost of cake icing and says, “Bring it on!” They collide. The ice shudders and cracks beneath them. Avalanches bury skiers as far away as Scandinavia and Canada. Herds of caribou and moose stampede across the treeless tundra. Wolves howl, their breath steaming in the polar air.
The Winner.
And the victor comes out of the North Pole on a wing and a prayer. Polar bears quiver in his wake. Narwhals, tusks thrust into the air in salute, pirouette in his honour. Walruses, resplendent in their stench, excrete a yellow substance made up mostly of the indigestible parts of clams, cephalopods, crustaceans, and sea cucumbers. His cape, made from the bloodied pelts of ermine and stitched together with arctic-fox gut and krill, bellows out behind him, like a flag, like a comet’s tail, silhouetted against the silver and purple glow of the aurora borealis. On his head, he wears a cap; and on the cap in powdered gold on deep deep red is the legend ‘Santa Claus – SuperSanta.’
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Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.
© 2005 Me Three