Free A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle Page B

folded shorts and polo shirts I hadn’t worn since I was five.
    I drove fast, always in a hurry, and stuffed the glove box so full of tickets it looked like a napkin dispenser in a restaurant. I dated (women, whole thundering herds of them, looking – in vain – for another Jane). I parented. Cooked. Cleaned. Managed my dead father’s crumbling empire – you’ve heard of him, Sy Tierwater, developer of tract homes in Westchester and Dutchess Counties? – and paid bills and collected rents and squeezed down the window of my car to add my share of Kleenex, ice–cream sticks and cigarette wrappers to the debris along the streaming sides of the blacktop roads.
    Want more? I drank wine, spent money, spoiled my daughter and watched her accumulate things in her turn. And just like you – if you live in the Western world, and I have to assume you do, or how else would you be reading this? – I caused approximately two hundred fifty times the damage to the environment of this tattered, bleeding planet as a Bangladeshi or Balinese, and they do their share, believe me. Or did. But I don’t want to get into that.
    Let’s just say I saw the light – with the help of a good nudge from Andrea, Teo (may he rot in hell or interplanetary space or wherever) and all the other hard chargers down at Earth Forever! Forces were put in motion, gears began to grind. I sold the house, the cars, the decrepit shopping center my father left me, my wind surfer and Adirondack chair and my complete set of bootleg Dylan tapes, all the detritus left behind by the slow–rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth. Friendship. That’s what got me into the movement and that’s what pushed me way out there on the nakededge of nothing, beyond sense or reason, or even hope. Friendship for the earth. For the trees and shrubs and the native grasses and the antelope on the plain and the kangaroo rats in the desert and everything else that lives and breathes under the sun.
    Except people, that is. Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.
    I’ve got no health care, of course – nobody does, the whole system long since gone bankrupt, and don’t bother to ask about Social Security – but they’re happy to see a paying customer hustling through the emergency–room doors. Whatever it takes – and in this case it won’t be much – they know Mac is good for it. Maclovio Pulchris. It’s a magical name, better than cash, because you can only carry so much of that – Mac’s my Medicare and Social Security, all wrapped up in one. And now I’ve got Andrea too, a woman who breeds emergencies, one night of love and here we are. She’s lending me support – literally – as we crabwalk through the doors, Chuy somewhere behind us, hurtling up the ramp of the parking structure as if he’s trying to launch the 4x4 out of the atmosphere. ‘What’s the problem?’ the attendant wants to know, a monster of a man who looks vaguely familiar (Swenson’s? last night?), his nose, lips, scalp and forearms a patchwork of skin cancers past and present. ‘It’s nothing, moron,’ Andrea says, and there’s that snarl again – ‘he’s just bleeding to death, that’s all.’
    Then it’s the ordeal of the forms – there must be twenty, twenty–five pages of them. Andrea squeezes up close beside me, her big thumb still locked in place over the wound, the woman behind the desk yawning, the intercom hissing, somebody strolling off to find a ligature of some sort and wake one of the doctors out of his trance. All the windows are boarded up because they got tired of replacing them every third or fourth day, and the quality of the light is what you might expect from a high–end mausoleum. Depressing. Depressing in the