![]() ![]() Suddenly, size did matter: Large packages lurked until late in the game, deemed high-risk by contestants who drew early, impregnating the night with foreboding. ![]() “You always worried that you were gonna end up getting Cactus Man,” he recalls. Phil, a Nashville attorney and retired Frisbee player, remembers a dramatic tension that would rise to a crescendo at those parties and the “adrenaline rush you would get” when your turn came to choose a gift. He had ceased to torment only me now, he menaced an entire community. Even after we all moved out of Gale House, after we twenty-somethings turned into thirty- and forty-somethings, familied up, and bought houses, one thing held firm: Cactus Man Christmas. For the next decade, he reappeared every year under the tree at the Ultimate Christmas party. What did matter was that I was finally free … or so I thought. I don’t remember who “won” him that first Christmas, but it doesn’t matter. Cactus Man fit into most of those categories. By law and by honor, presents could not be refused and ranged from things you might actually want to comical objects to lewd items with purposes we didn’t care to imagine. I tried sneakier methods to cut ties: At a Gale House Halloween Party, I awarded him as first prize for the costume contest, but the winner stiffed me, declining to claim his trophy.įinally, at Christmas, I devised a winning strategy: wrap up Cactus Man and put him under the tree for the Gale House Dirty Santa gift exchange - which, given our competitive tendencies, could get rather Machiavellian. Maybe some secret part of me didn’t truly want him gone. But every time I stuffed him into a closet or left him in the yard to rot, he’d pop back up by the bedroom door with a note stuck to his cactus: “Don’t deny me,” one note said. I struggled to rid myself of Cactus Man, as he would eventually come to be called. Someone paused at a prurient Hell’s Angel cactus planter and said to the others, “We have to buy that for Kim.” That weekend, on the drive home from a tournament in South Carolina, one carload got off at a garish fireworks emporium to browse the kitsch. Anything could happen there and usually did. I shared a big brick bungalow on Gale Lane in Nashville with three of my Ultimate Frisbee teammates, and “Gale House” was celebration HQ for the city’s tribe of Frisbee folk during the late 1990s. The succulent, as it were, made the man.Īt the time, it wasn’t unusual for odd things to turn up outside my bedroom door. What did matter was his most outstanding anatomical feature: a long, skinny cactus reaching skyward from a gaping-pants-shaped planter. He appeared at my threshold late one night, uninvited: a hideous ceramic figure in biker regalia, about a foot tall - not that size mattered. FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This essay originally appeared on December 17, 2019. ![]()
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