You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas by Augusten Burroughs Read Free Book Online Page A

loved Christmas almost as much as me, though for clearly different reasons.
    My father studied my documents. “Gold nuggets!” he said, alarmed. “What on earth are you going to do with gold nuggets?”
    I said, “Polish them.
Have
them. I don’t know. I just want them, that’s all.”
    Now he removed his reading glasses. “Well, son, I don’t think you would be as happy with gold nuggets as you think. Often, this natural gold that you want, these nuggets, as you call them, are contaminated with pieces of rock—almost a kind of dirt—and—”
    “What do you mean,
dirt
?” I said. “Gold doesn’t come with dirt stuck on it. I’ve seen pictures.”
    He said, “No, that’s not true, now. Gold does indeed sometimes have little pebbles mixed in with it. And even a kind of dirt. It’s not especially pretty. They have to melt it down to make rings and whatnot.”
    I looked at him with my eyes narrowed to see if I could detect a lie. He sounded suspiciously like my older brother, who lied constantly about everything. It had been my brother who told me there was no such thing as Santa Claus. “Not anymore there’s not,” he’d said. “Santa worked in the off-season at a shipyard in Amsterdam and he was killed in a forklift accident.”
    I’d been mortified and believed him unquestionably. Only that night because I asked my father where they’d buried Santa’s body did I learn the truth. He wasn’t really dead. He never existed.
    Having already believed for many years that Santa and Jesus were the same person, I was kind of relieved to actually be done with him. He never really had made any sense to me.
    But my father did not appear to be playing a trick on me.
    “Can’t you wash it off?” I asked.
    “I’m afraid not, son,” he said. “The little pieces of rock are embedded within the gold.”
    I snatched my list back and crossed out
Gold nuggets.
“Okay, forget those,” I said. Then I wrote in
Gold bars.
    All my father said was, “I don’t know about that.”
    I raised my eyebrows in challenge. As far as I was concerned, Christmas was my yearly paycheck and I wasn’t about to accept any deductions.
    “Did I ever tell you,” he said now, leaning back in his chair, “about the year I received a chimp as a Christmas present?”
    Now I was certain he was lying and I didn’t find it funny. “You never had a chimp.”
    “I most surely did. Your grandfather bought it for me overseas and he had it shipped all the way to Lawrenceville, Georgia. We kept it in a big ol’ cage in the backyard. Boy, was that one mean chimp. If you tried to get up close to him, he’d be liable to pee on you. And if you went anywhere near the bars, he’d try and bite you. Oh, he was just a mean, nasty animal.”
    “You kept it in a cage?” And I imagined a little person-monkey dressed in overalls and tap shoes, clutching a harmonica in one hand and a banana in the other, being jammed into a cage.
    “We had to. Son, this was a wild, wild animal, taken from its home in nature. Not some TV chimp dressed up in human clothing and trained to do silly tricks,” he said, with disdain.
    I said, “You never mind the outfits and the tricks, can you still get chimps as pets?”
    He told me he wasn’t sure, but he expected that you could. Although you would be foolish to want one. “People are under the false impression, from these TV animals, that chimps are fun, almost human companions. Well, I can personally tell you that they are aggressive, hateful creatures that throw their own bowel movements at you. They growl and snap like the worst dog imaginable. They are just terrible, terrible animals.”
    Of course, I knew this was untrue. I knew the monkey only resented the cage and the pencil-twirling Goody Two-shoes that came out once in a while to inspect it. A chimp needed love and tenderness, just like a person. It also needed a glitter headband, a bib, and a tambourine.
    I once again snatched my paper back and