STORIES
- from Robert Knightly (a/k/a Santa)
The gang of kids are belonging to members of the Society of Friends (Quaker) Meeting House in Flushing, Queens, circa late 1990s, early 2000s. It’s the second oldest Church in the U.S., started in 1692. I was a member (for a time), and Rose and I married there in 1995.
I Was The Best! ….
by Robert Knightly
Two years ago was my 47th year of dressing up and going on stage as Santa Claus— carrying The Standard, we Santas call it. And I still get performance anxiety, although you’d think I’d be beyond such a thing by now? No Way. Those expectant little faces that turn to me and fix me with their unselfconscious stares always give me pause until I bounce through the doorway and shout in my deep Santa baritone: “Children! Children! Where are the children???”
Of course, I am in my red velvet, white fur-trimmed jacket, pantaloons and droopy cap with a jingle bell on the end, my own salt-and-pepper beard (more salt now) having been allowed to grow long, carrying a green laundry bag stuffed with small items: a paper fan in a gauze bag for girls, a kaleidoscope for boys, and sex-neutral games that included tens-of-thousands in fake money (a big hit). The too-big cap used to slip down over my eyes ruining many a mom’s picture of her child on my knee, until my wife Rose cured the problem with a safety pin.
Know this, mine is no chintzy, off the rack Santa suit. I paid a C-note for it at an exclusive Santa Claus emporium in the West 20s on the edge of Manhattan’s Garment District in 1989, the year I went to work for the NYC Legal Aid Society as a criminal lawyer. The store threw in a spiffy pair of black simulated-plastic boots that covered the tops of my shoes to complete my accessories. I was expecting to encounter a more demanding audience among the lawyers and their children than the cops I’d just left. Not to worry, same kids.
My Great Impersonation ended in 2022; I aged out as all us Clauses do, in time. But there was another reason I called it quits. That story I’ll save for next time.
Besides Legal Aid, my show travelled. I’d go on at my wife’s family’s Christmas party in Springfield, Mass. She’s a Smith, one of twelve, all still with us and propagating. There’d be several generations at the Party, sixty to seventy people, including a couple dozen children of an impressionable age: meaning I could con them into believing I was the Real Thing. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so; children need their imaginations fed by the likes of me, not video games. What could be wrong with a gang of small children, after my noisy departure from the home, running back and forth from windows facing east to windows facing west, looking for reindeer pulling a sleigh, one of them yelling: “I see them! I see them!”?
When I enter a room full of children, I don’t walk like any man, I bound; I scuttle; I walk bowlegged like Quasimodo, all the while calling the children to me, my outstretched fingers making come-hither motions, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!” all the way. After all, I am not just anybody. The best is when a four-year-old runs, arm outstretched and leaps into my arms. Then Iula goes on one knee and her sister Lily goes on the other, and I gather to me as many as I can.
Mothers’ cameras get busy, and at this moment the children are my captive audience, awaiting The Word. I say it: “You are a GOOD BOY/GIRL!” This they need to hear off the bat, reassurance to their anxious little selves. Next, Lily, Iula, Razi, Kimberly, Julie, Jennifer, Scott, Tom, John, Avi, and all the others whose names I can’t remember but whose faces are unforgettable, tell me their names. Then, I ask and they answer in close-up whispering what present they want Santa to bring them on Christmas Eve. Often, I can’t make out what their little voices are saying, but no matter. I sternly advise all that they must tell their mommies what they just told me: that’s the “Chain of Command.”
Where It All Started
In 1975, I first assumed my alternate identity, although truth is, it was assigned to me. I was new to Brooklyn’s Eighty-Third Precinct in Bushwick, having just been booted out of a soft-touch—a writer/reporter on ‘Spring 3100’, the NYC Police Department’s in-house magazine. I’d been swept up in ‘Operation All Out.’ With the City on the brink of financial default and about 5,000 cops having been laid off, bodies were needed to fill the emptied police cars. I was one of the bodies.
The annual Precinct Christmas Party—for the children of the cops, firemen, and any neighborhood people in need of a Christmas Party—was just around the corner. Based on my body-type, I was asked by the Precinct Union Delegate to volunteer to be Santa Claus (that’s how he politely put it: “body type” and “volunteer”) since their regular Santa had recently fallen down a flight of stairs “in the line of duty.” Of course, I recognized this was a Command Performance. The PBA delegate assured me that they had just the uniform for me, white beard, gloves, and red cap with tinkle bells on the end.
The 'Copter Santa
The day of the party, the NYPD spared no horses. The Mounted Unit was on hand to give the kids a ride around the track in Bushwick Park, across the street from the Church Hall, locale of the event. Also, an E.S.U. (Emergency Service Unit) truck equipped with the ‘Jaws of Life’ that ESU cops use to cut people out of car wrecks, and the ‘Heavy Weapons’ employed at hostage scenes, the kids could see and touch. But the piece de resistance was Santa Claus—he was flown in on a Police Bell Helicopter, which then hovered over the Park as I descended an eight-foot rope ladder to the ground, in Santa gear, bag full of toys tied to my back like a green cloak, amid a horde of screaming children in numbers such as to excite envy in the Pied Piper.
Santa then hot-footed out of the Park, followers in tow, across the street to the aptly named St. Nicholas’s Parish Hall. I know I did good because I had encores over the next six years until I was Promoted to Sergeant and transferred out.
One Christmas, the Daily News did a feature story on newsworthy Santas around Town. They christened me “the ‘Copter Santa”. Nice, but what I will always remember is the smiley face of a small child.
New Authors Journal - Winter 2025
STORIES
Rikers Island, New York
The Rikers Island Bar
by Robert Knightly
I’m driving over the Francis R. Buono Memorial Bridge for the nine hundredth time (figuring once a week, four times a month,
times twelve months, times eighteen years). The bridge connects the Queens mainly to Rikers Island, which is floating in the
East River and a mere hundred yards off the runways of LaGuardia Airport.
Rikers Island is the main New York City jail, housing 12,000 or more inmates at any
given time, depending on how tough on crime the NYPD chooses to be. Rikers Island is America’s largest
penal colony, a city of rolling razor wire far as the eye can see. I’m en route there because I’m a lawyer
assigned by the Criminal Courts to defend a fellow who claims to be “indigent” (no dough to hire a
lawyer), so he gets me, whom the inmates call “an 18-B” (short for the section of the County Law), as
distinguished from “a real, paid lawyer,” whom they’d hire if they could. I pay no mind; I’ve heard it all
before.
I get to drive onto the Island in my own car with a lawyer’s pass from the guard booth. Civilians have to
bus it onto the Island after taking trains from every corner of the City to catch the Q100 at Queensboro
Plaza, last stop “the Rock” (as the inmates call home). I get my visitor pass at the reception center, go
through electronic surveillance, and head for the bus depot outside. Ancient yellow school buses queue up
in their stalls: five separate lines go to ten jails spaced out over 415 acres of mostly landfill. As I wait to
board my bus, this Kirk Douglas western, The Big Sky, is playing in my head—green movie valleys filled
with fat cattle versus my electrified fences topped with barbed wire near and far.
Bus #3 delivers me to my destination, the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, where my client is housed.
The funny thing about the jails, they’re all named after people: the Rose M. Singer Center (women’s jail); the
George R. Vierno Center; the Anna M. Kross Center; the George Motchan Detention Center. Do you get the
picture?
All dead. I can’t help wondering if Otis Bantum would approve of ‘the Bing’—solitary for the
incorrigibly violent—being housed in his jail. Nobody will admit knowing how the Bing got its name; I
suspect it’s onomatopoeia for the sound a nightstick makes when banging off the head of an inmate.
Today I’ll see my new client, Enrique. He resided in Washington Heights among a legion of illegal
Dominicans, of which he is one. He was arrested a week ago for selling a couple of “20s” of cocaine to an
undercover cop. I interviewed him in the feeder pens behind Manhattan Night Court, but it did not go well.
Enrique doesn’t know English. Unfortunately, the court interpreter was a Cuban who abbreviated Enrique’s
fulsome responses to my questions into either “yeses” or “nos.” (You had to watch the Spanish interpreters:
they had fierce prejudices against defendants from countries other than their own).
Yesterday, by phone, Enrique informed me through his English-speaking jailhouse buddy that he won’t
take a plea—he wants a trial. This pernicious idea is endemic to the Rock. Inmates always phrase it as
“wanting their day in court.” It is the product of the Rikers Island Bar, a hardcore cadre of inmates who,
during long stretches in Upstate prisons, have honed jailhouse lawyering to an art. Daily they counsel
innocents on their cases, bad-mouthing the advice of 18-Bs like me, filling heads with legal fantasies. Their
fees are assessed in the prevailing currency: cigarettes, sex, whatever. There’s a law library in every jail on
Rikers, each staffed by a civilian librarian. The Rikers Bar is as old and as active as any of the County Bar
Associations.
Plea bargains are the local currency of the justice system. No way can the courts give every defendant a
jury trial. As a reward for not being difficult, defendants plead guilty and get far fewer years in prison. But
insist on your day in court and you get hammered upon conviction. Contrary to the opinion of the Rikers
Bar, Enrique will be convicted at trial because the District Attorney has physical evidence and witnesses-
which I don’t, and seldom do.
I must steel myself for the coming battle. I must erase the word “trial” from Enrique’s mental slate.