Little Black Book

Its early afternoon in mid-January and I am in the second day of a road trip, driving my newly purchased old car west on I-40, slowly approaching the Texas panhandle. There is very little traffic but we have all slowed to a crawl due to an icy rain. The storm is moving east and I am moving west, so I am hopeful that I will reach New Mexico by nightfall. I haven’t decided on my final destination yet, but it will be in the southwest part of the country and it will be somewhere warm. This journey west is the result of a series of odd events that I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around. It started two days ago as I was walking through my neighborhood to the grocery store.

For the past five years I had lived with three roommates, all friends from college. We shared a rented house in a suburb of Chicago. Until six months ago I had been employed as a technical writer for a small software company where I created user manuals. It was tedious work but it paid well and I was good at it. Some unfortunate behavior on my part led to my termination. I had an affair with my manager’s fiancé.

The truth is he did not truly want to marry my manager, Ana. At an office event where there was way too much free alcohol available, former fiancé confided in me that Ana was overbearing and had pushed him into proposing. I sympathized, as I also found her overbearing. He had been trying to find a way to break it off with her. Apparently, I was the way. It worked. They broke up. While Ana couldn’t fire me for having a relationship with her fiancé, she did fire me for what she deemed a workforce reduction. After five years of drudgery I wanted to leave anyway, and a warmer climate had been in the back of my mind for years. I literally hate cold weather.

My unemployment checks were barely enough to cover food and my share of the utility bills. In a few months my savings had been depleted and my car had been repossessed. I could not pay my share of the rent. My room mates were willing to forego rent if I agreed to assume all domestic tasks from cooking and cleaning to handwashing their “delicates” to shoveling snow. I agreed.

So, three days ago, which was a Friday afternoon, I was walking to the local grocery store for the items needed for a taco and margarita party my roomies had planned for that evening. Along the way I found a little black notebook sticking out of a snow drift. I still don’t know why I put it in my jacket pocket, but I did. Later that evening while the party was underway I encountered an odd and sort of nasty little man by the name of Nick who had plaster casts on his right wrist and right foot. He said the little black notebook belonged to him. He lost it when he fell off the roof of a house, which explained the broken wrist and foot.

He first spoke to me in the kitchen as I was putting the final touches on my taco tray. I assumed he was one of the party guests but then he just sort of disappeared. I assumed he had joined the others in the living room while I was focusing on my taco tray, but he would have had to move really fast. My brain was not yet ready to accept what really transpired. When I asked my roomies and their guests who he was it was clear that no one knew him. We then assumed he was an intruder so the house and yard were searched. There was no trace of him. I have no history of making up stupid stories for attention but everyone decided that is exactly what had happened. The party guests eventually went home and Nick reappeared in the kitchen as I was cleaning up afterwards.

He told an unbelievable tale of being on a mission to collect items from people who had done bad things as children and should have been on the “naughty list” but who had still been rewarded along with the children on the “nice list.” After seeing him literally disappear and reappear out of thin air a few times I had to accept that he was, indeed, a supernatural being. His name was Nick, as in St. Nick.

Nick had raided a homeowner’s liquor cabinet during one of his collection calls and had fallen off the roof in a drunken stupor, breaking wrist and ankle and knocking himself out cold. Concerned neighbors called an ambulance and Nick was transported to a hospital where he was heavily medicated so the doctors could set his broken bones. The medication prevented him from using his supernatural abilities to heal and travel, apparently, via magic. Once he had regained some of his faculties he attempted to retrieve his black notebook only to witness me pocketing it.

I was highly skeptical but then told me to look at the list of names in the little black notebook. I was quite shocked to find my name at the top of the list, along with the names of my roommates Juliette, Louisa, and Isabelle, and Isabelle’s fiancé Brian. Nick told me we had all committed some youthful transgression and had been intended to receive harsh reprimand via a stocking filled with coal, but instead we had received very nice Christmas presents leading us to assume bad behavior was not only acceptable, but would result in rewards. His mission had been to reclaim the Christmas presents or something of equivalent value, as a sort of spiritual restitution. We were expected to learn the lesson we were supposed to have learned as children. Failing to learn those lessons had resulted in all of us developing unfortunate character flaws leading to lives as somewhat dysfunctional adults. We became a promiscuous party girl, an adulterer, a liar, a thief, and a big cry baby. We were destined to repeat our dysfunctional patterns until we made restitution.

According to Nick my unfortunate interaction with my former manager’s fiancé was the direct result of an incident in the third grade where I had given Red Vines to a boy named Bobby LaRosa at morning recess. Bobby LaRosa had promised to marry Christina Weaver at afternoon recess but my attention and Red Vines had changed his mind. He declared he wanted to marry me, leaving poor Christina devastated. I told Bobby and Christina I did not want to get married, that I was just having some fun and sharing some candy, but the damage was done. When pressed by Nick, I had to admit that was the first in an embarrassingly long list of marriages I had prevented. I had acknowledged my transgression and was appropriately sorry so Nick offered me the opportunity to not only clear my name from the naughty list but to also earn the tantalizing sum of $20,000. As he was under the weather and exhausted from his long collections mission, my restitution would be to take over for him, coax a confession from the other four and collect some form of restitution. He, on the other hand, would take a long nap that would let him heal from his recent accident.

The next morning as my roomies and Brian gathered at the dining table for coffee. I devised a way to get the ball rolling on my spiritual restitution project. I told my uber-emoting friends that I had made up the intruder the night before due to excessive alcohol consumption and extreme guilt over causing the breakup of my former boss. I further misled them by telling them I was seeing a therapist had uncovered the fact that my promiscuous behavior pattern, like most adult dysfunctions, was caused be a childhood incident. I told the tale of feeling empowered by preventing the playground nuptials of Bobby LaRosa and Christina Weaver. I declared to the group that I was now fully self-aware and owning my mistakes. To put it all behind me I had to make a spiritual restitution. I intended to donate my cherished prom dress to a charity that would give it to an underprivileged girl. To further plant the idea of giving back Christmas presents I also outright lied the prom dress had been a Christmas present during my senior year. Knowing my roomies loved nothing better than an emotional soul cleansing I was sure they would jump on the bandwagon and be willing to spill their guts and make some form of token restitution. They would not be out-emoted by me, nor allow me to be more self-aware.

One by one my friends did their gut wrenching soul searching and managed to connect the twisted dots of their present misfortunes and some childhood transgression. They willingly made their restitution by giving away an item that represented the Christmas present they had received the year of being bad, just as I had planted in their minds. I, under the guise of continuing my own spiritual healing, offered to take the items and donate them to charity. My true intention was to collect the items and take them to a storage facility where Nick was sequestered, and turn the items in for the reward.

Everything went according to plan. In a shocking twist Isabelle even confessed that, unbeknownst to the rest of us, she had been married and divorced at eighteen. Her high school sweetheart husband had gifted her with a set of flatware on their first Christmas as a married couple. Unfortunately and inevitably, they both grew bored with their marriage and sought companionship elsewhere. When it was discovered they had cheated on each other a fight ensued, whereby Isabell flung the flatware, one piece at a time, at her husband. Only one item remained, which was a small tarnished pickle fork. She handed it to me then, in a fit of givers remorse, attempted to take it back. With $20,000 at stake I was determined to keep it. After a small tussle where I accidentally whacked Isabelle in the knee with a large wooden spoon she came to her senses and allowed me to keep it.

I promptly called a cab and went the storage unit where I knew Nick was waiting. I would turn in the items, and collect my $20,000. At the storage facility Nick accepted the items and was satisfied I had done the collection task to his satisfaction, however he did have some criticism of my methods. He pointed out that not only had I outright lied to my friends on several occasions, I had kneecapped one of them for a pickle fork. He declared that I was likely on the naughty list again. I protested loudly, stating the agreement had been for me to collect the items, and nothing had been said about method. He finally relented and gave me the money.

I immediately purchased this used car, into which I packed all my worldly goods and prepared to leave the frozen wasteland that is Chicago in the winter. Just as I was leaving my house Nick appeared once more and extended a lewd invitation which I promptly declined. This elicited a wicked little laugh from him and he told me if I change my mind I should just whistle, declaring that “Old Nick will always there for me.” It occurred to me just a few minutes later that “Old Nick” and 'St. Nick" are two vastly different entities, and at no time had he come right out and said he was St. Nick.

I have not seen him since, however driving through the howling wind and icy rain westbound on I-40, it has occurred to me I may be heading for a place much warmer than I intended.