The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,25
wizened retirees.
There’s a lanky, gray-haired man named Vernon who wears pleated khakis and a plaid sport shirt. He comes over and shakes my hand, letting me get a good look at the lapel pin dangling from his chest. Around a green marijuana leaf, the words read LEGALIZE MY MEDICATION. He seems sharp-witted and vivacious. If he’s suffering from a debilitating illness, Vernon gives no sign. After chatting with him for a moment, Marlene leads me up the steps to where Chas is grilling burgers.
“Is Vernon sick?” I ask her under my breath.
“He’s not sick,” she says. “He’s a doctor.”
“Oh.”
Chas flips a patty before turning. “Well, what do you think?”
“I was expecting more vegans, to be honest.”
“There’s some salad if you prefer,” he says, cracking a smile. “We’re a motley bunch, I admit. We’re for a thousand different things and against a thousand others, but the thing we have in common is that we insist on being heard. How about you?”
It feels like a sales pitch. “I’m not ready to sign on the dotted line or anything. But I appreciate the invitation.”
Again he smiles. “No pressure. Why don’t you show her around inside, Marlene?”
She opens the screen door and motions me inside. The interior comes as a bit of a shock. The bungalow has been stripped to its bones, the wood floors polished to mirror finish, the trim and the walls painted sterile white. The furniture looks like it’s straight out of the Design Within Reach catalog (a more accurate title would be Design Out of Reach), steel-and-leather chairs and sofas known best by the name of the designer. They’re arranged more like museum displays than objects meant for sitting on. I can understand why Chas entertains in the yard.
“What does Chas do?” I ask.
“His family is loaded. They’d have to be—to name their son Chas, right?”
“I guess so.”
The dining room has been converted into a library, the books perfectly aligned at the lip of the shelves. I’d be afraid to take one down for fear of ruining the line.
“How did you meet him?”
Marlene shakes her head. “This takes some explaining. He was protesting at a pro-choice rally. Protesting against the rally, I mean.”
“Chas is pro-life?”
“He’s not pro-anything. Or anti-anything. He’s just . . . Chas. He was holding this sign he’d made. A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO KILL, it said. Screaming at the top of his lungs, but clearly he wasn’t with the other pro-life people. They seemed kind of scared of him, to be honest. And somehow I got into a shouting match with him, and he started cracking up. We talked for a couple of hours, and I only realized toward the end that he didn’t care at all about the cause. It’s the experience, that’s his thing.”
“The experience of being pro-life.”
“The experience of being anything. I’m not like that, don’t get me wrong. Most of us aren’t. But for him, that’s all it is, a release. He says he doesn’t understand how people can get so worked up about things, so passionate. He wants to, though, which is why he does this.”
Glancing around the room, what she’s saying makes sense. This is the lair of someone who doesn’t get passion. So squared away, so cold. But still . . .
“You don’t feel like he’s mocking you?” I ask. “I mean, he’s basically faking it.”
“To him, it’s like creative nonfiction. He’s after an artistic truth rather than a literal one. And to be honest, seeing it through his eyes, I kind of understand. Everybody in the world is pro-choice, basically, but not everybody is out there marching. The experience adds something. Even if you don’t believe in the cause.”
“That’s a little hard to get my head around.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Some of us go with Chas and try it. We made a bunch of NRA signs and went to a big Second Amendment demo. I thought I’d throw up at first, but if I tuned out the words and just felt the emotion . . . I don’t know, I kind of fit in.”
“I can’t imagine protesting something I wasn’t against.”
“Neither could I. It’s weird, I know. But if you stick around Chas, that’s the kind of thing that happens. He opens your mind to things in a strange kind of way.”
Once the burgers are gone, along with most of the beers in the Igloo cooler, I install myself in one of the folding chairs to see what will happen next. I’m determined to see the afternoon through, even if