And here, with my mouth unhinged a nanosecond before I could summon a desperate plea for help, is the moment I stopped believing in God.

You can laugh at the absurdity of that statement, but to a seven year old boy just happy to be at the mall in his brown saddle vamp square toe boots, getting molested by Santa Claus while trying to avoid looking into his dead, cracked out eyes is a little traumatic.

At this point in my life I knew of no evil greater than my friend Jake stealing my favorite Lion King collectible plastic cup, of which I had secured five of the eight advertised. I was a good kid, complacent to be alive and shuffled from home, to soccer practice, to school, to Jake’s house. Going to the mall on a Saturday afternoon was not alarming, and the promise of actually meeting Santa for me was like promising a little girl a unicorn. Honestly, though, if someone promised me a unicorn today I would be all over that, as long as it was a bad-ass unicorn that impaled the people who tried to stop us from doing whatever it is that unicorn-human duos…do.

Anyway. The real trouble began when I was close enough to “Santa’s Workshop” to notice that every child trudging through the exit line wore the face of someone who had just seen pure evil. Their eyes were bleary; their gaze focused somewhere far-off...a place I hoped never to be. Something was wrong. But, being a seven year old, I had shinier things to worry about.

Without warning it was my turn, and from nowhere Esteban, Santa’s flaming gay Elf, had me by the arm en route to Santa’s throne of tears. No, no, no…this wasn’t Santa at all. This was obviously a ruse. Did they think I wouldn’t be able to tell that his beard is fake? And why was that Elf named Esteban? He wasn’t even Hispanic. The world began to spin around me as I tried to make sense of it all. The musty smelling, faded backdrop, the neckbearded camera operator. Then, a brilliant flash from all directions. Did he just touch my penis? No seriously, I think he just touched my penis. Someone definitely did. Santa grumbles and Esteban has me again – up, quickly shuffling in some direction. By now I am sobbing for my mother – that wench! How could she abandon me with a man who smelled like Hennessey and regret? I also smelled human feces, but I’m not prepared to blame him entirely for that. Like I said, it was a blur.

The rest of the day is gone from my memory, as is much of my early childhood.

I open my eyes, a single tear running down my cheek as I clench the unearthed photo tight through white knuckles.

I thought it was lost forever. But here, thirty-one years later, those same terrified eyes retrace the contours of every detail from that horrible moment. They say we need to keep “Christ in Christmas” and I tend to agree, because there’s no way anyone has a picture of Jesus molesting them when they were seven.

That day was the beginning of a downward spiral for me. I was nearly expelled from my elementary school after I bit a school nurse on her arm-flab. You know, the jiggly part of the upper-arm that every school nurse and lunch lady has? Yeah I bit that, and to this day I don’t know why. I don’t know why I did a lot of things.

I quickly learned that the world is full of lies, and everybody, including myself is in perpetual lying mode. People are paid to lie to you. Marketers, politicians, pundits, Amy Birchler (you know what you did). Even teachers, firemen, and friends will lie to you. Santa was just the tip of the iceberg. Also, that particular Santa was found dead near some train tracks by a movie theater by my house six months after this photo was taken. That’s largely irrelevant but there hasn’t been a good time to really tell you, and I was worried I might forget. You may think it’s a trivial detail but I think it’s important for his character to have some resolution. He was survived by his mother Nancy and his Doberman, Lucy.

My teenage years were rambunctious and fueled by an excess of alcohol and libido. I wanted to fuck everything that moved and several things that didn’t. I trusted nobody but used everybody. I’m thirty-eight years old, now, and starting a new job in exactly forty-four minutes. Mom says it’s a chance to start something new, something without any previous setbacks.

I glance down at the Polaroid. “Season’s Greetings,” I read the partially out-of-frame banner aloud to myself, shaking my head. A painful smirk. Or was it a grimace?

A faint rushing sound becomes increasingly louder and I remember I am standing in front of my bathroom sink. The faucet is relentlessly vomiting water which dances around the basin violently. I blink. Hesitate.

A flick of the wrist and the bent and wrinkled photograph is no match for the barrage of bonded hydrogen and oxygen molecules. It swells slightly before the image begins to fade away, distorting the magical moment that changed me forever.

I look back up at the man staring at me in the mirror. I adjust my itchy, strap-on beard and velvet suit. I take a deep breath of the body odor of dozens of mall Santas past, a mild stench that envelops me constantly while I’m trapped in the costume.

I remember Oppenheimer’s famous quotation of The Bhagavad Gītā: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

I narrow my eyes.

Now, I am become Mall Santa, destroyer of Christmas.

tl;dr: Justin Bieber actually has a nice voice, guys.