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CHRISTMAS MORNING

The Sun Rises on Our Hapless but (Somewhat) Hopeful Hero

I wake up slowly. It is Christmas morning. When I turn in the bed, there is no one else, just an empty pillow. It is quiet. There are no delighted squeals of children in my living room. No lovely wife calling my name out in a tremolo for me to join them to open presents.

I am alone.

I never feel more alone than I do when I lie there in the stillness of another Christmas morning. When I was younger, being alone never really bothered me, as I always thought I would be married someday and there might even be children.

Although when it comes to children, I have never been absolutely certain that I wanted to be a father. I didn’t have what seemed the natural desire to be a parent that many of my friends seemed to possess. I have never uttered the words “I can’t wait to be a father.” I’ve heard my friends say it. And I’ve always wondered how they knew that’s what they wanted to be. I sure didn’t.

I knew other things, of course. That I wanted to be a playwright, for one.

So why didn’t I feel as strongly about having children? It was certainly easier to have a kid than to become a successful writer. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote but nobody seemed interested in what I had to say. The world doesn’t really want a lot of playwrights—certainly less than they seem to want other types of writers. I couldn’t even get a teaching job with a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting. By the time you finish saying it, you’re broke. Crack whores make more money than playwrights, and they have a driving incentive to keep at it because of their addiction.

I always thought that I wanted to have a real income before I was going to think about having children. Granted, if everyone in this country shared my philosophy, we’d have a lot less children. Which might not be so bad, considering how many miserable people with miserable kids there are out there. These families spring up all over the place because there’s an insane notion in this country that if you have a child, everything will work itself out for everybody. We will just do what we want to and God will provide. I have never understood this notion, and I have watched families live tortured lives because of it. It’s on the back of this kind of wishful thinking that Wal-Mart made its fortune.

I have had a lot of primal urges (and I will keep those to myself, thank you very much), but I have never felt the biological urge to have a child. Or is it biological need? Or biological drive? Whatever it is, I don’t have it. (I never felt there was a necessity for me to contribute to the survival of the species.) My parents weren’t even that interested in having grandchildren. As my mother once so sweetly put it: “You and your brother were enough. Do I really need more of the same? Are you serious?”

If that didn’t upset you, my mother also said, over a lunch recently in Las Vegas, “Ronnie [my brother] and you weren’t my idea. They were his.” Then she pointed to my father. “If it were up to me, we wouldn’t have had kids. But he was keen on it.” And then she said, “I guess that’s not something you tell your child.”

No shit. It’s a good thing Mom waited till I was sixty to break the news. If she told me when I was ten, I would no doubt have spent my life on a respirator.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have those paternal feelings.

Or maybe it’s got more to do with the extremely bad marriage I had.

To put it in the simplest of terms: At twenty-six I married a woman I had been living with for a couple of years. She was pregnant. Five months after the birth of the son that I thought was mine, she announced that it wasn’t. It turns out while we were living together she was seeing another guy. Even though it was more than likely that the other guy was the father, she said that I was, because I was going to the Yale School of Drama at the time. See how an Ivy League education pays off? (The other guy was not only an actor, he was