A Christmas Carl Read Online Free Page A

beige and brown stripes and
     
probably as old as his living room paper. The water stain on the faded ceiling looked like
     
the state of Texas. There was a four-poster bed, two square nightstands, and a thick down
     
comforter. On the opposite side of the bed, there was a tall dresser with a small portable
     
TV resting on the scratched surface. Though everything was old and chipped and ruined,
     
it was also neat and orderly and clean.
     
Carl switched on the TV and adjusted the rabbit ear antennas to PBS. He didn’t
     
have cable television: why should he pay for something when he could get it for free?
     
This was the regular night for his favorite show, Antiques Roadshow . He’d been looking
     
forward to crawling into bed all day, pulling the covers up to his chin, and watching his favorite antique dealers. He liked the shows where idiots thought they’d found something
     
majestic in grandma’s attic and it turned out to be worthless. And he loved the shows
     
where someone found something that some idiot thought was worthless and it turned out
     
to be priceless.
     
But while he was removing his sport jacket, he noticed his show didn’t come on.
     
Instead, there was some kind of Christmas show, with annoying little children dressed in
     
choir robes singing an awful religious Christmas song. Carl checked to make sure he’d
     
turned to the right channel. When he saw he hadn’t made a mistake and that they’d
     
preempted his show that night for a Christmas special, he banged his fist hard on the
     
dresser and switched off the TV. He shouted, “Fucking Christmas. I’m so fucking over
     
it.”
     
He removed his shirt, then his shoes and socks. He hung the shirt on a hook
     
behind the door so he could wear it again and rolled his socks up and stuffed them into
     
his shoes. He had an old washing machine but only used it once a month. He couldn’t
     
understand why people thought it was such a criminal offense to wear the same socks, or
     
the same shirt, two or three days in a row. He didn’t sweat in his clothes, he didn’t do any
     
hard physical work, and he showered every day. It made no sense to over-wash clothes.
     
The less he washed them, the longer they lasted.
     
When he pulled off his pants, Able’s dollar bill fell out of his back pocket. Carl
     
picked it up, turned it around a few times, and smiled. This was the fastest buck he’d
     
made in a long time. He put the dollar on top of the dresser and hung the pants on a hook next to the shirt. He was completely naked now; he didn’t believe in wasting money on
     
underwear.
     
He closed the bedroom door and rubbed his hands together. The heat was only set
     
to go on when the temperature reached sixty degrees, and it felt warmer in his room with
     
the door closed. Normally, on a cold snowy night like this, Carl would have gone to bed
     
naked and slipped beneath the covers. But since his TV show wasn’t on that night, he
     
decided to do a light workout in his room. Carl thought gyms were a waste of time and
     
money. Jogging and push-ups were free. And his lean, hard body was proof that people
     
didn’t have to go to gyms to have good bodies. So he did ten sets of twenty push-ups
     
between his bed and the windowsill. Then he did an intense cardio workout with an old
     
clothes line by jumping rope for twenty-five minutes. By the time he was finished, his
     
bulging chest muscles and his tight stomach muscles were glistening with perspiration.
     
His dark pubic hairs were damp and matted. The bedroom even seemed warmer.
     
So he jumped into a hot shower and started counting. He didn’t believe in wasting
     
water or soap. You could get just as clean in two minutes as you could in twenty. He
     
lathered his body to the count of sixty with basic white soap, then he rinsed it off for
     
another count of sixty. Thirty counts after that, he was standing on the cold black and
     
white tiles