Santacon

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

I am at a Marriott on Long Island. Perhaps the same Marriott I slept in two years ago after attending my friend’s wedding and almost burning down the Hooter’s next door. I’m not sure. It’s impossible to know. In my memory, the Marriott was more pyramid-like--a giant mausoleum for the legions of business travelers who had passed through its doors. Today it just looks like a big empty hotel. But everything’s less spectacular today. I’m there for the LexisNexis Long Island customer appreciation dinner. I came because the email specifically mentioned prime rib, and on the chance that sexy, single female librarians (I’ve found that there is about a fifteen percent chance of finding them at Lexis/Westlaw-funded receptions) and/or eccentric people telling quirky stories are in attendance. One for three. At least they weren’t lying about the prime rib.

I am seated next to two middle aged women who look at me in the same way as the mothers in Lake Oswego, Oregon—like I represent something that they aren’t so sure about. In this case, it’s probably the entering of dudes into their profession. To them, I look exactly like what I am. A youngish, overeducated Brooklynite with a crappy beard who will probably be making fun of them on a blog within a week. With a dozen or less people in attendance, this is not like the major librarian meetings. It's small. All women and a couple of old guys in weird sweaters. I can’t even find a couple of guys willing to stand next to the open bar and discuss whether the Patriots really should have won last night--so on this evening, I can’t even enjoy the stupid niceties of professional functions that most people get sick of. No, here it’s all, 'Why I moved when my kids left for college,' and 'Who bought American Lawyer Media?' It’s a grim vision of my future. It’s like an almost silent knitting circle.

Is it any wonder that I was, at this point, already planning to spend my Saturday wandering around the city drunk in a Santa suit?

Saturday, December 8, 2007
I wake up at 9:30 a.m. Santacon starts at 10 a.m. in the West Village. On Saturday, I can’t even wake up on time for debauchery. That’s how I roll. It’s 11 by the time I’ve roused my compatriot and we are santa’d and ready to leave. I eat the crumbs of a pot cookie that’s been sitting in my freezer since I went to see Transformers (ask me why it’s the best movie about the war on terrorism other than Syriana) and drink half a shot of the absinthe that’s been sitting around since I watched the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie so that I can get through the subway ride . . . and the walk to the subway.

It’s Saturday morning in Park Slope, and the toddlers are out in full force. Seeing two Santas—one Jewish—in the same place causes a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. One woman playfully accuses us of confusing the children. Other children—and parents—are just happy to see Santa whatsoever. I suddenly realize how psychotic this tradition is. Anyone drawn to wearing this gay apparel is a drunk lout, and once donned, parents enthusiastically throw their children at the wearer. What are they thinking? An Asian man wishes Daver a happy Hanukkah. We persevere through the fog of confusion and get on the subway.

People on the train stare, despite the fact that we are, in my estimation, the second most ridiculously costumed people in our subway car, after the Rastafarian cleric with enormous dreads balled up inside a giant rainbow colored hat and a huge necklace of the largest beads in the world. I guess we are just more out of the ordinary on the 2.

On the ride, we meet two other santas. One who has been attending Santacon, and Burning Man, for years. She explains that there is a huge relation between the two. I guess that makes sense. The other is a French woman who spends most of the ride caking herself in a seasonal makeup design she has planned. Both have costumes of much nicer fabric than our flannel santa suits.

It’s about noon when we arrive at Times Square. The tourists aren’t as happy to see us as the Park Slope toddlers. They know what we’re about. They’ve seen the others. Southern black women sneer at our display of sacrilegious, crazy whiteness. Business travelers poke each other in the ribs as they make fun of us and mentally reinforce what a wonderful, powerful ruler Giuliani must be to have tamed all of this weird, and possibly gay, shit.

We immediately come upon a santa breakdancing circle.



Santas are standing around, drinking whiskey from Pine-Sol bottles. Not having planned as well, we head into the bar for a beer.



A few minutes later, we get a new text message from the Grand Dragon Wizard Santa, or whatever he was calling himself, saying to head to Grand Central. So we finish our beers and oblige. Just outside the bar, we see Reverend Billy, mingling with some santas.



About halfway to Grand Central, the Santa King sends another text message, saying to hold up for a few minutes and stay at the bar instead. His exact words are "Santa still needs a beer." The directions are obviously becoming less reliable and more incoherent, so we head to Grand Central anyway.


(We see this guy on the way to Grand Central. You know exactly what's in that box.)

This is what we see at Grand Central.





(Rather than looking jolly, I look proud to have just sent 100 men to die for mother Russia in the Battle of Stalingrad.)

After standing around Grand Central for a few minutes and meeting up with a couple of friends, we pack ourselves into subway cars and head downtown.



On the way to Tompkins Square, we meet up with other santas at a bar for a couple of hours.



And then, after briskly walking through Tompkins Square,



no longer impressed with the sight of hundreds of similarly costumed people in the same place,



we go into another bar. Eventually our group becomes separated, and I end up dancing in a sea of santa costumes somewhere on the Lower East Side.



At about 8 p.m., I am in the East Village, very drunk and stoned and helping another santa walk her sister’s goldendoodle (which looks exactly like a poodle but doesn't act like a prick).

I’m sure that the New York Santacon is the only Santacon that can legitimately end with helping a cute girl walk a poodle. In Santacon's first couple of years, in San Francisco from 1994 and in Portland from 1996, it was partially fueled by the same undercurrent of undirected anarchic rage and disgust that permeated many on the West Coast in the 1990's and led to the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999 (and I think has mostly culminated in a series of Jackass spinoffs). When I was trying to get information on Santacon earlier in the week, I saw that one organizer was using a police report from one of those first Santacons as the picture on his MySpace profile. The Portland and San Francisco Santacons have developed a reputation for being somewhat dangerous. That is not necessarily a bad thing, as this reputation largely comes from doing things like invading department stores, which is right on target for an event that is supposed to be, in part, an anti-consumerist statement. New Zealand, on the other hand, has begun to develop a reputation for hosting a violent Santacon. But I guess you can expect that from a rugby-based culture. Santacon's West Coast genesis and popularity are no accident. Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle are quickly developing traditions of large, drunken Mardi Gras and St. Patrick's Day celebrations at which no actual Catholics or Irish are present. With a total lack of traditional culture, and thus a lack of drunken festivals, people have taken to creating their own.

Conversely, New York is New York. As this post says of Santacon in New York, it's probably not even the only time of year when "stockbrokers and ex-theater majors can put on a red suit, or tights and a wig, drink a lot, and attempt to pick up other stockbrokers and ex-theater majors." And that's what I did. Whereas the West Coast Santacons of the 1990's were about disrupting commerce and adult children who wanted an excuse--any excuse--to fuck with authority, this picture pretty much sums up New York Santacon 2007:


a hot, midriff-baring Asian girl posing with two police officers while I fuck up the picture because I'm paranoid about the heavily armed National Guardsmen who are just off camera.

At 11 p.m. I wake up in casa de goldendoodle, reassemble my costume, and exit. But first, I take one beer from the fridge, on principle, and leave her a note (I’m a gentleman). At ground level, two girls are exiting a cab, saying things like “What a psycho,” and “That was the most frightening experience of my life.” I didn’t find the driver to be that psychotic. He just had the kind of old world disregard for traffic safety and laws that comes about when the rest of life becomes too circumscribed.