THE NAME'S JIM, but you can call me Beers. Everyone does.
You can also call me Santa, since I'm filling in for the lush who got his ass canned a week before Christmas.
That's department store Santa. I work at La Scala in downtown Minneapolis. It wouldn't be so bad except there are all these "incidents" taking place. I'm supposed to be handling them, doing my real job, instead of entertaining smelly brats who think the world is their oyster. News for ya, kids — there is no Santa, you're not getting what you want, and you're doomed to wind up in a dead-end job getting peed on by someone else's kid sitting on your lap.
Freddie thinks I should go back to the paper. He's a sportswriter I used to work with, until I gave up that drudgery for what I thought would be a refreshing new career. It was a wrong-side-of-40 coin flip. Store detective — not working out so well for me at the moment.
Vandals are damaging store merchandise, customers are getting injured, and good ole Saint Nick has to figure it all out — on the QT, mind you — between hearing the young and greedy recite their wish lists.
I have to depend on whatever brains can be mustered up by Freddie and my two unofficial assistants, Tina in cosmetics and Lena in jewelry. It's like depending on Lucy, Ethel and Fred for sound advice. The girls are smart, but I'd still rather have Sam Spade on the case.
There's a song in my heart. Make that there's a song in my head, an old Beatles refrain: I'm a loser and I'm not what I appear to be.
Yeah, my name is Beers. Right about now I could really use one. Or four. Or twelve.