Lawn Boy(63)
Andrew actually listened to me when I talked—not like a lot of people, who only seemed to be waiting for their own turn to talk. He asked me about Nate and my mom and Freddy. He said that he wanted to meet them all, that he wanted to come to our house and cook for us. He wanted to know all about the Great American Landscaping Novel. He wanted to be my first reader. He wanted to see my merman and my mushrooms and my pipe-smoking gnome.
After a while, I began to feel like I was talking too much about myself.
“Not at all,” he insisted. “I want to know more. What about your dad? You never talk about him.”
So I began to regale him with what little there was to tell about Victor Mu?oz and the shadow that he didn’t much cast. I told Andrew about the time my dad took me to Disneyland and told me they moved. Most people get a kick out of that story. I mean, it’s pretty funny, even though the experience broke my heart. Even if it largely defined my expectations for the life that lay ahead of me, even if the yearning and disappointment, the sense of possibility that died that day, still reverberated somewhere down deep inside of me. I recalled clutching that chain-link fence in the spitting rain and looking out over the sea of pitted concrete and the half-barren shipyard beyond, the putrid stench of clams assaulting me, the seagulls jeering at me from above. And the whole time I told the story to Andrew, he seemed to vacillate between horror and indignation. He didn’t laugh once. In fact, for an instant, I thought he might cry.
“It really wasn’t a big deal,” I insisted. “I mean, at least he made an effort, right?”
“Hmph,” Andrew said, looking vaguely out over the lights of the strip mall. “My father hasn’t spoken to me in four years. I’m dead to him. He won’t even acknowledge my existence. People ask him about me, and he shrugs or waves me off. My mom talks about me, and he changes the subject.”
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“But it’s my mom who really kills me. Every single time I talk to her, she wonders aloud where she went wrong with me, you know? Like I’m a mistake. And it doesn’t matter who I am, or how decent I am, or how hard I try, or what I believe, or what I accomplish—there will always be something fundamentally wrong with me in her eyes. A parent’s love is supposed to be unconditional. But if my mom had a choice, she’d have me be somebody else entirely.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother felt the same way about Nate and me.
“Dude, you’re amazing how you are,” I said.
“Stop,” said Andrew.
When I looked at him, he sort of grimaced like he was about to get sick, but then I saw that his eyes were brimming over with tears, so I set my hand on his knee and gave it a little pat and tried to think of something lighthearted to say.
“I’m sorry,” was all I could think of.
And that’s when Andrew did a very unexpected thing, something that made me a little uncomfortable: he clasped my hand in his own, and he squeezed it.
Making a Stand
Though I possessed zero street cred as a protester, having never been arrested, detained, gassed, or beaten, Andrew didn’t hold it against me. He assured me that I’d get my opportunity sooner or later. As for him, he’d been arrested twice. Once at the Bangor nuclear submarine base for attempting to serve coffee to state patrol officers and once for chaining himself to the wrong tree. The fact that it was the wrong tree was immaterial.
“These are the sacrifices we make,” he explained.
Maybe today was my day to get arrested, I kept telling myself. Or gassed. Or beaten. But secretly, I hoped it wouldn’t be.
We were scheduled to occupy the southwest corner of a strip mall in Silverdale, protesting a pet store that allegedly purchased their puppies from a notorious puppy mill in Kansas. The previous week, Andrew had sent out press releases announcing the protest. He’d been recruiting aggressively. Moses was bringing his little sister. The lady in sweatpants was bringing her son.
“Gandhi said that ‘the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by how it treats its animals,’ ” Andrew told me in the Subaru as we were passing Skippers. “Somebody has to advocate for these animals, Michael. They can’t advocate for themselves.”
When we arrived at the pet store ahead of schedule, nobody was waiting for us. For the next fifteen minutes, Andrew checked his phone obsessively. I guess he figured there’d be at least one TV crew since he sent out all those press releases.
“Where the hell is everybody?” he wanted to know. “Where’s the commitment? Doesn’t anybody care?”
“They’ll be here,” I assured him.
I knew I was lying, but I think it softened the blow when nobody else showed up. Not even Moses. Not even Sweatpants and her son. So the puppy mill protest wasn’t exactly the March on Washington. Nevertheless, we did occupy space, and nobody could take that away from us. And we carried ourselves with dignity and the requisite amount of moral outrage, hoisting our picket signs high, marching purposefully to and fro in front of the entrance like a pair of armed sentries. Not that there was any traffic to contend with—not like Walmart. Nobody was going to the vacuum repair or Radio Shack. Mostly people were going to T.J. Maxx and Starbucks, and one or two people to the hair salon.
Around noon, we got our first potential convert when an earnest, dirty-faced girl of eight or nine in a grease-stained sweatshirt stopped short of the entrance to read our signs.