Christmas Scam at the Wurlitzer Store

We never celebrated Christmas when I was child.

I grew up in a Jewish home — well, sort of; I didn’t go to Hebrew school and we never kept kosher and my maternal grandmother had just the tiniest obsession with dragging me off to see the life size Baby Jesus at St Patrick’s Cathedral every Shabbes before Christmas Eve — and while we were surrounded by the trappings of the holiday, we never actually initiated any Christmas activities. We had no tree, no stockings, no eggnog, and no Yule log, except for the one that burned for twenty four hours on Channel 11. Every Christmas, I would watch it in a catatonic stupor and invariably drift off, imagining that those were the peals of the non-existent churches in my Queens neighborhood instead of car alarms.

Still, every family has their own ways of marking the holiday season, and we were no different. Over Christmas, my best friends down the street filled stockings and went ice skating at Skyrink or Rockefeller Center, and came home to hot chocolate laced with tiny, industrially-fabricated marshmallows, and plates of golden, broiled, buttered toast sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. One year, we spent the holiday with friends who lived a few floors up from us in our apartment building. I don’t know what is more vivid: the memory of my friend’s big brother — a large child — getting his head stuck for hours in a cherry red football helmet that my father had bought him, or the half pound of sugar that their mother had decided would make a flavorful addition to the pork meatballs that were a regular part of their Feast of the Seven Fishes.

When they were very young, my friends were taken to sit on Santa’s lap at Macy’s; one year, my mother and grandmother turned the thumbscrews until my father relented and plunked me down on the lap of the truly fabulous 1970 Santa who asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

An electric menorah, I said happily, meaning the kind with the orange bulbs that you turn a little bit to ignite. They flicker constantly no matter what you do, like a sort of Judaic disco ball.

As I got older, my holiday desires and needs changed fairly radically: I began playing the guitar when I was very young, and by the time I was eight, I was fanatical about it, always hoping that my holiday would involve strings or picks or capos or that 1939 Martin D-28 I coveted. A few years later, when I started taking piano lessons, I infuriated my teacher, a short French man with a red combover; he was incensed that I could play as well as I could by ear, and proceeded to torture me with technique and theory. He eventually quit when he walked in for my lesson one pre-Christmas afternoon and found me staring at the ceiling and playing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by heart, using both hands.

“Your daughter ees petulant,” he said to my father, who just smiled, handed him a five dollar bill and wished him a happy holiday. He never returned.

That Saturday, my father announced that we would be spending the day together while my mother was working part-time in Manhattan as a fur model.

“We’re going to the mall,” he said, as we drove out along Grand Central Parkway and then south, on the Cross Island. I assumed it was to do some shopping, but he had other plans, and as we ambled through the glittering corridors of 1970s consumerism — there was a store called Magik Candle that sold black light posters and spewed bilious clouds of incense into the air, and tee shirt shops where you could choose iron-on appliques featuring everyone from Loggins & Messina to the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter — he steered me along until we got to an enormous, carpeted showroom lined with pedal organs. And it was there that we began a special holiday tradition all our own.

When we got to the Wurlitzer store that first year, the salesman — a thinnish guy with greasy dark hair, dressed in a russet brown polyester triple weave suit with a sprig of fake holly stuck in his lapel — stood loitering nervously around the entrance to the organ showroom, looking like Mr. Bean.

“Bet I can teach the little lady how to play in no time flat–” he gloated to my father, slapping him on the back and winking at my diminutive, snorkel parka-wearing self as we pretended to stroll past on our way to the mall steakhouse next door, for a frozen Beef Wellington and virgin eggnog snack.

“I guess,” my father replied, shrugging his shoulders while I stood there.

“Why don’t you give it a shot, honey,” the salesman beckoned. “Let your daddy hold your coat, and sit right down over here.”

I took my parka off and handed it to my father while the salesman pulled the bench away from an enormous, four foot-wide pedal organ that sat on a low riser near the entrance to the store, its red levers marked TUBA and SOUSAPHONE and BOSSA NOVA. He flipped the ON switch and the organ purred like a kitten.

“Let’s set the beat for you,” he said. And he pressed another button marked RHYTHM, and a muffled, electronic uptempo began, untethered to any music or melody, like an arrhythmia.

“The keys are marked with numbers, honey, so just press the ones that correspond to these—”

He propped the EASY ORGAN 1-2-3 sheet music for Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas in front of me and pointed to the color-coded, numbered notes.

“Think you can do it, sweetie?” my father asked, feigning sincerity.

“I’m just not sure, Daddy –” I whined, looking over my shoulder.

“Come on, honey–” the salesman implored, impatiently. “You’ve already got your rhythm section. Let’s give her a whirl—Go on and play some Christmas jingles!”

A small crowd gathered around behind me, laughing at the fact that my feet didn’t even reach the pedals. I  pushed up my sleeves, took a deep breath, flipped the BOSSA NOVA lever to the ON position, and played the single-note version of The Girl from Ipanema, which I’d picked up from recently listening to my parents’ new Astrud Gilberto album. In the years that followed, I’d go on to play Delilah, The Green Green Grass of Home, and eventually, the first four bars of Positively Fourth Street, just like Al Kooper.

“That’s not very Christmas-y,” the scowling salesman said through his teeth that first year. He was embarassed and confused and hopeful all at once, and as he stood next to me on the riser, sweating, his face flushed a deep, holiday red. The crowd applauded wildly as I climbed down and took my coat from my father.

“Wow–” my father said to the salesman. “I guess it really is a cinch!”

“She’s a natural,” the salesman admitted. “I can have this baby sitting in your living room in time for Christmas dinner —” he added, taking a cordovan leatherette pad out of his jacket pocket to write up the order.

“I don’t think so,” my father replied, handing me my parka and ushering me away as the salesman blanched. “But thanks all the same — and Merry Christmas.”

A few minutes later, my father and I were sitting in a booth at the steakhouse next door, listening to the Muzaq version of Ave Maria, and sharing a Beef Wellington before heading back to Manhattan to pick up my mother.

My father took thoughtful sips of his gin Gibson from a small martini glass.

“I think we really got him — didn’t we,” he mused, pulling the tiny onions off their little plastic sword one by one.

“I guess so,” I said, sucking up my fake eggnog through an unraveling paper straw. I felt badly that we’d just bilked this guy out of the hefty commission he was certain he’d made, while onlookers quietly ran silent computations, envisioning their children flipping a switch and suddenly being able to play Lady of Spain, right out of the gate.

“Maybe someone else will buy one,” I added brightly, silently wondering exactly how many Wurlitzers could possibly ever be sold in the course of one Christmas season.

“Could be,” my father said, slicing into the tufts of puff pastry wrapped around the meaty hockey puck. “Could be.”

We ate in silence that afternoon and during all the Christmas afternoons at the mall for years that followed, until I got too old, and too good at playing keyboards for it to be funny anymore. It was years before I understood that the holiday was not about the mall and the Christmas consumerism and taunting the poor shlub with the plastic holly in his lapel, who probably never unloaded one damn organ; even though we lived in the city, it seemed to me to be about peace and quiet, and coming in from the bitter cold, and powdered hot chocolate with marshmallows that tasted like styrofoam, and the burnt sugar rime on the cinnamon toast that my friend’s mother down the street made every single Christmas, and still does. Each year, she eats it quietly before her adult children arrive, sitting alone in her kitchen and listening to an old vinyl Caedmon recording of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, while the dusty, unremarkable spinet piano of their childhood gathers dust in the corner, next to the tree.