A Friend of the Earth Read Free

stupefying Shigetoshi Swenson, the bartender, who can’t be more than sixty–four or – five. The thought of that scenario wakes me up, just as surely as it ever did, and the next minute I’m in the bedroompulling a sweater from the bureau drawer (black turtleneck, to hide the turkey wattles under my chin), thinking, No time for a shower and I’m wet enough as it is. I find a semi–clean pair of jeans hanging from a hook in the closet, step into my imitation–leather cowboy boots and head for the door – but not before I finish off the ensemble with the crowning touch: the red beret she sent me the second time I went to jail. I pull it down low over the eyebrows, like a watchcap. For old times’ sake.
    There’s a whole crowd out on the road, storm or no storm, commuters, evening shoppers, repair crews, teenagers jazzed on a world turned to shit, and I have to be careful with the wind rocking the car and the jolts and bumps and washed–out places. This used to be open country twenty–five years ago – a place where you’d see bobcat, mule deer, rabbit, quail, fox, before everything was poached and encroached out of existence. I remember stud farms here, fields running on forever, big estates like Mac’s set back in the hills, even an emu ranch or two
(Leaner than beef, and half the calories, try an Emu Burger today!)
. Now it’s condos. Gray wet canyons of them. And who’s in those condos? Criminals. Meat–eaters. Skin–cancer patients. People who know no more about animals – or nature, or the world that used to be – than their computer screens want them to know.
    All right. I’ll make this brief. The year is 2025, I’m seventy–five years old, my name is Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tierwater, and I’m half an Irish Catholic and half a Jew. I was born in the richest county in the suburbs of the biggest city in the world, in a time when there were no shortages, at least not in this country, no storms (except the usual), no acid rain, no lack of wild and jungle places to breathe deep in. Right now, I’m on my way to share some pond–raised catfish sushi with my ex–wife Andrea, hoist a few, maybe even get laid for auld lang syne. Or love. Isn’t that what she said?
For love?
The windshield wipers are beating in time to my arrhythmic heart, the winds are cracking their cheeks, the big 4x4 Olfputt rocking like a boat at sea – and in my head, stuck there like a piece of gum to the sole of my shoe, the fragment of a song from so long ago I can’t remember what it is or how it got there.
Down the alley the ice wagon flew … Arlene took me by the hand and said, Won’t you be my man?
    This is going to be interesting.
    The parking lot is flooded, two feet of gently swirling shit–colored water, and there go my cowboy boots – which I had to wear for vanity’s sake,when the gum boots would have done just as well. I sit there a minute cursing myself for my stupidity, the murky penny–pincher lights of Swenson’s beckoning through the scrim of the rain–scrawled windshield, the Mex–Chinese take–out place next door to it permanently sandbagged and dark as a cave, while the computer–repair store and 7-Eleven ride high, dry and smug on eight–foot pilings salvaged from the pier at Gaviota. The rain is coming down harder now – what else? – playing timbales on the roof of the 4x4, and the wind rattles the cab in counterpoint, picking up anything that isn’t nailed down and carrying it off to some private destination, the graveyard of blown things. All the roofs here, where the storms tend to set down after caroming up off the ocean, have been secured with steel cables, and that’s a company to invest in – Bolt–A–Roof, Triple AAA Guaranteed. Of course, everything I ever had to invest, every spare nickel I managed to earn and everything my