"Lawrence"

Jon Sindell copyright 2008

This is a favorite story in part because of its social commentary. Your comments, as always, are most welcome.

"Lawrence"

In Lawrence’s soft smile were sculpted the loving acceptance of parents resigned to a slow-thinking son, and the loving support of a brilliant big sister who’d passed up the chance to live with college friends to guide her one-year-younger brother through one last perilous year of high school.
It had always been thus. Walking to school on Lawrence’s first day of first grade, Mercy had cheered her brother with the promise of a flying saucer at recess. Smiling sweetly to the classmates nearest him as the kids tromped giddy and nervous out to the playground, Lawrence tumbled out the news that his sister was bringing a spaceship to him–and they could ride on it! Jasmine–tall, pretty, and bursting with confidence–tittered at Lawrence when Mercy arrived with a saucer-shaped cookie; a pair of tentative girls behind Jasmine stood like wee ladies-in-waiting, observing the scene with slowly dawning grins. Mercy comprehended her brother’s plight and marched back to the cafeteria to spend her allowance plus two borrowed bucks on flying saucers for all three girls. When she returned, the girls were perched atop the monkey bars while Lawrence munched below them and gazed up as if they were high wire angels. When the tribute cookies were eaten and the sated angels floated down to ground, Mercy extended her arms into Buzz Lightyear wings and led the three girls, with Lawrence in the rear, on a soaring, banking, careening space caravan to the outer reaches of the little kids’ yard, the other kids gaping with envy and awe. The three girls adopted Lawrence that day, and kept him all year.
Lawrence was Mercy’s living doll, and she cherished him suchly. In their yard, at the park, at the playground he was her wind-up doll. She’d crank the oversized key in his back and send him on a tottering, high-stepping march towards thorny bushes, hard benches, the model boat pond, a wheeling, snarling frenzy of dogs, or the basketball court where the rough kids played, she chasing after to alter his course with a turn of his shoulders to avoid disaster. Slowly the game evolved: How close to the hazard before she would turn him? Close, very close, and he never slowed and never shed character, and she never failed to turn him at the last. Indoors he was her dress-up doll: a pirate, Cowboy Woody, Gandalf, Mulan. In her precocious fourth grade psychology phase, she dressed him in their mother’s white nightgown and studied his reaction with notepad in hand: “It’s so comfortable, Mercy. I feel like a queen!” The sweetness of his smile overwhelmed her clinical curiosity and the mischievous impulse which it disguised. She flung the notepad onto the floor and pulled the nightgown up over his head. “I’ll get you some king clothes, Laurie, complete with a crown.” She kissed the squeaky-clean hair atop his head. Never again did she mess with his mind.
Instead she was straight with him, straight with him always. “Is Santa Claus real?” he asked her at eight. She shook her head no, and he smiled like a scientist who’s just had a rebel theory confirmed. Because she was straight, his trust in her grew. “Where do babies come from, Merse?” he asked at age nine. She pulled the anatomy book from the reference shelf and showed him a womb in all its wondrous intricacy. He furrowed his brow and spent hours sketching a longitudinal section of the uterus and ovaries with such faithful detail that his impressed teacher posted his “smiling cobra” on the classroom wall. Two days later Lawrence asked, “How do the babies get in there, Mercy?” She showed him the page of male anatomy. “I’ve got those!” “Do you?” she deadpanned, forgetting his lack of irony until she saw him innocently reaching for his zipper. “Laurie, I’m joking! Of course you’ve got those.” “So you don’t want to see them?” he rejoined, confused by her uncharacteristic rejection of his offer to share. Ennobled by a sudden appreciation for the enormity of her role, Mercy intoned in her best grown-up voice, “No, Laurie, you don’t show `em to anyone. They’re your own private jewels.”
“Mmm, jewels,” he drawled like Homer Simpson. Then he stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and set to drawing a cross-section of male gonads, which he decorated with
ruby-red and emerald-green glitter gel.
In fifth grade he came home full of doubt. “Am I slow, Mercy?”
“Sure you’re slow, Laurie. You’re like the Internet when we had dial-up.”
Lawrence savored this image as he poured orange soda down his gullet. “I’m slow, like a snail. I’m slow, like a sponge. I’m slow, like SpongeBob!”
“Your slow, like Heinz ketchup. You’re slow, like home cooking ... like Dad’s stew, and how good is that! There’s a whole slow food movement thing, Laurie, and do you know why? Because fast food sucks.”
“I’m slow like slow food. My mind’s like beef stew.”
“Yep. Yummy and warm, with great stuff bubbling.”
She was always pouring new things in the pot. Tidbits, arcana, the trivial facts that made school more fun: headless chickens and roaches that lived, the details of strange celebrity deaths, the peccadillos of puerile kings. She served up weighty matter, too, savvy observations about how the world worked: “The principal’s only mean because she’s got a boss, called The Superintendent. And she’s only mean because her boss is the governor, and he used to harass women. Groped `em, in fact.” Or: “They only sell soda to make money for the school, Laurie. They don’t care if it makes kids fat.” Or: “Sure it’s a great country, but some of the guys who started it had slaves–and women couldn’t vote until nineteen-something.” He received these facts always with his head bowed over some manual task–building Legos, practicing knots for Boy Scouts, stringing beads, folding origami–with skill derived from entire days devoted to craft. He employed the head down strategy in school as well to avoid the sting of the teacher’s disappointed gaze when he lacked comprehension. Mercy knew not to ask him questions and besides didn’t need to, for she could intuit the gaps in his knowledge. “You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff for some reason, but the Bible is totally against Harry Potter–it says you’re supposed to kill wizards with stones! And gay people, too, that’s Dumbledore two ways. I can show you the chapter, bro–chapter and verse.”
He widened his mouth as if punched in the gut.
“Lawrence my man, half of what they tell you is great in life ... isn’t.”
He rotated his head like a dog trying to understand the master’s odd behavior.
“But hey, half of what they tell you is bad ... is good!”
“So you tell me.”
She did. How ads couldn’t be trusted, how “Happy Meals” were unhappy for people who got fat and sick, how teachers got fired if kids didn’t do well on the standardized tests they both hated so much–this was the reason teachers made him cry, why they’d given her the medal she’d flung into the tree. She told him how Dad made his cuticles bleed because he was scared about losing his job, how Mom needed their sweet hugs when her blood sugar was low, how 9/11 was not our fault, sure, but we too had done bad things, had attacked Iraq for no good reason, put leashes on their men, killed thousands of regular people with bombs, not soldiers only Lawrence, but old woman and kids–
“Wha?” He had just put his remote controlled battleship in the pond, but turned to her with narrowed eyes that wished not to see.
“They act like only American dead people matter, L, but the bombs we drop kill innocent people along with the bad guys. And everyone acts like it doesn’t matter! And do you know why? Because they’re not us!”
He scrunched his face to dam up the tears, bent for a huge rock which he raised overhead and brought crashing down upon his ship.
“All those so-called great civilizations they tell you about, Lawrence, they hardly even mention they all had slaves. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans all had `em. And we had `em, too. They were cool in ways, sure–but slaves, little brother!”
“Show me,” he said, so she took him to the museum to see a painting of a pyramid beneath which straining slaves pulled massive blocks of granite beneath the eyes of muscled overseers with whips; then she rode him on her bike to the library where she showed him a photograph she had found of a fugitive American slave with lash marks on his back as thick as rope-cords. She could see the distress in his rounded eyes and mouth, so she checked out Spartacus to lighten his mood. He gazed in awe when dozens of slaves doomed themselves by stepping forward to proclaim: “I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus!”
“I’m Spartacus,” Lawrence mouthed in wide wonder.
Years later in high school a tenth grader named Wieder was cornered against his locker in the hall. “Say, Wieder Man, is it true that you’re gay?” It was Boyce, the leader of a four-jock pack that formed a semicircle around Wieder. Wieder lowered his reddening face, which Boyce took as confirmation of the obvious. Wieder was in fact gay; worse for him, he was fighting a terrible crush on Boyce, who was tall, blond, and lean, and spent hours in the weight room as Wiederman covertly watched his desperate efforts to bulk himself up against teasing jocks who said he looked gay. “Hey, that’s alright,” said Boyce in a honeyed voice laden with sympathy. “We all need to be who we are, you know,” words lifted verbatim from a recent assembly lecture on tolerance. Boyce rested his hand on Wieder’s shoulder, raised his thumb and brazenly stroked Wieder’s cheek while one of his pals chortled and another faked retching. Wieder raised his
blue-eyed gaze to Boyce’s in tremulous stages till at last he gazed directly up into eyes shining with the knowledge of their own seductive power. “Just admit it,” cooed Boyce, leaning close to allow Wieder to feel his warm breath and see his lips pucker. “Just say the word, dude. Come on. Be yourself.” It was the seminal moment of young Wieder’s existence, terrifying and wonderful. “Say you’re gay,” murmured Boyce. “Say it. Come on.” Wieder blinked, and tears flushed from his eyes onto Boyce’s hand. Boyce disgustedly flung the drops. “Say it!” he snapped. “Say it! Say you’re gay!”
“I’m gay,” said Lawrence, who had grown tall and thin and had slid through a gap to stand next to Wieder. His hands were passively clasped at his groin and he gazed at Boyce with a sad-eyed, fatalistic frown as Boyce’s face froze at first then rebooted, the boys behind Boyce jockeying like hounds awaiting the alpha’s signal to attack. It would not have been the first such attack: Lawrence had been beaten in ninth grade by a different pack for “hating America!” after saying in class that slavery was evil and that we killed, too. But then in slid Tina, Lawrence’s combative, plump, short Chinese pal from Origami Club. “I’m gay,” she said, thrusting her chin up at Boyce as she grasped Wieder’s hand.
“I’m gay, too.” This was Kayley, whom Boyce had long lusted after in vain. Kayley knew that her dating record belied the assertion, so she pressed against Lawrence’s flank, twined her viney arm in his, and cooed in a precociously smokey voice, “Well I’m bi, anyway,” breathing warmth into Lawrence’s ear.
Foaming, fuming, red-faced and shamed, Boyce managed a feeble “I’ll see you later” at Lawrence, to which Kaley laughed, “Hands off him, he’s mine,” thus perfecting Boyce’s disgrace.
Lawrence dreamed of Kayley through sweat-stained nights, but managed only a bright, shy smile when they passed in the hall. She honored the remembrance of their stand with a smile, but did not stop to talk. He daydreamed too of Tina, lowing at her as they and two other girls folded origami like pioneer girls in a knitting circle, Lawrence unselfconsciously gazing at the lustrous black hair that curled sharply around Tina’s square jaw, gazing at her thick neck full of power and the soft curves beneath her red cable-knit sweater and the skillful hands that turned out flocks of cranes as she chatted of things Lawrence followed but dimly, detecting his interest but protecting his feelings by looking away from his dimly comprehending gaze, unsure how to fill his wide-open eyes. For prolonged eye contact with women there was still only Mercy, and when they locked eyes a circuit of trust flowed between them in alternating currents of question and answer, call and response.
“Is evolution true?” he asked during homework help, looking up from an illustration of the stages of human evolution in his bio book.
“Of course,” she smiled. She could tell from the way he sucked on his lip that more questions were coming, and she gave him time to formulate them.
“So we didn’t start as humans?”
“Nothing started like what it is now, L. Dogs came from wolves, and humans came from these guys–just like chimps and gorillas. We all come from the same primitive ancestors, and became different over millions of years.”
“So we’re cannibals.”
She marveled at his pure simple logic.
“Is that why you don’t eat meat, Merse?”
“I don’t eat animals, Laurie–meat is just a phony word for the animals people murder for food.”
“Murder? How?”
He had opened the spigot, and she let the facts flow. She told him about “Cattle–that means cows and steers, which are bulls who’ve had their testicles cut off–without anesthesia!–and they’re shot in the head with steel bolts and hung from chains, and while some of them are still conscious, they slash `em in the throat and hack `em into pieces with long knives.” She spoke of chickens, shackled, dipped in electrified water and then passed before buzzing rotary blades meant to slit their throats, some birds still conscious when the blade slices their throat, some dodging the blade only to die when submerged in a “scalding tank” thick with boiling water, feathers, and blood. Lawrence choked out the words, “That’s evil, Mercy” with his hand on his stomach, and she said the animals way they lived was even worse. With quiet reverence for the grim truth, she played for him an undercover film of a feedlot where steers stood hide-to-hide in an inches-high sludge of manure, mud, and urine, then showed a film of a factory egg farm where birds stuffed into battery cages lacked the room to even turn around. The camera closed in on a bird’s vacant eyes. Lawrence lowered his head towards the computer screen, his lip hanging low as if he lacked the will to stiffen it, his eyes mirroring the bird’s helpless gaze, his cupped hands unconsciously reaching for the screen as if to succor the hen.
He ate no bite of stewed chicken that night, for he saw in the bones that stretched the blanched skin no meal, but a friend. The next night he would not touch his ground beef. The night after that he picked at the veggies in Dad’s famous beef stew, but would not touch the meat until the anguish in his mom’s voice moved him to do so. He took a spoonful into his mouth; the meat had the tang of death to him now, and he disgorged it back into the bowl on a vile stomach acid tsunami.
“Dead animals,” he murmured with a sorrowful gaze as his mom wiped his mouth.

“Dead animals,” he reported with sincere helpfulness in The Chefs Club, an
after-school class for kids behind in their graduation requirements. “Meat’s just a nice word for murder.”
Mercy, who bodyguarded her eleventh grade brother from a discreet distance as if he were the president’s son, glided to the cooking table and positioned herself between Lawrence and a meat-loving, thick-necked boy named Mark who was unaccustomed to being contradicted.
“You’re calling me a murderer?”
“No,” said Mercy with a disarming smile. “He’s just trying to help.”
Mark grinned down at Mercy through narrowed eyes. “Hey, I like brainy girls.”
“I’ve got glasses, so I’m brainy?”
Mark shook his head and smiled, turned to the counter and pressed a glob of raw ground beef with the heels of his hands, then rolled hunks of the beef into balls with occasional lascivious grins at Mercy. She stayed in position between Mark and Lawrence the rest of the day and the rest of the year, and rebuffed Mark’s frequent advances with subtle wit and grace.
In twelfth grade Lawrence was back in the Chefs Club, as was Mark, as was Boyce, as were two dozen kids who needed one more credit to graduate. “So you want to be a cook when you grow up, Lawrence boy?”
“Oh yeah,” Lawrence said dreamily. “It makes me happy to serve people food.”
Mark snickered ostentatiously at that, and Boyce, who had dropped out of sports and grown a jawline beard to go with his red-rimmed, lunchtime beer drinker’s eyes, snickered too. “I bet decorating cupcakes makes you happy too,” Mark said.
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Lawrence. “I love sprinkles the most.”
“Sprinkles,” Mark snickered. “Lawrence Man, where’s your sister?”
Lawrence rolled his tongue around the corner of his mouth in reflexive synch with his rolling of the pizza dough, much as a dog kicks when his paddle point is petted. As with all repetitive manual tasks, he rolled dough expertly. “She was accepted at Cal,” he said with
a strained effort to talk while rolling. “But she wanted to live at home, with me.”
“Who wouldn’t want to live at home, with you?” sniggered Boyce.
“Tell her hi from me,” said Mark with an anaconda arm around Lawrence’s shoulder.
They left him alone for the day and the week.
“Did you tell your sister hi from me?” Mark asked.
Lawrence was intent on shaping the tail of a croissant, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Mark backhanded him hard on the arm. “Did you?”
“Huh?” asked Lawrence. “Yeah. I said hi.”
“And?” The demand in Mark’s stare would have been understood by most guys but was wasted on Lawrence. “What’d she say?”
“She said not to get too close to that guy. But I don’t think the cooking table’s too crowded.”
Snickers erupted from Boyce and from Boyce’s pal Hank, who always wore a down-grin of mocking disdain. Mark raised his voice to tamp down theirs. “Is your sister a lezzie or what, Lawrence Man? I mean come on, that short hair.”
Lawrence smiled, visibly at a loss.
“He means,” said Boyce, leaning in on Lawrence’s face, “does she like boys?”
“Oh, sure,” Lawrence brightened. “She goes out with Draco.” Then, as if explaining: “He doesn’t eat meat.”
“Which is what matters,” Mark snorted.
Lawrence earnestly nodded.
Mark, Boyce, and Hank dubbed themselves The Three Musketeers and settled in for the rest of the school year. Lawrence, who had been raised to give, bought a frozen Three Musketeers bar for each. They caucused privately and invited him to be the Fourth Musketeer. He proudly accepted. His status as Fourth Musketeer involved fixing the subpar results of their lackadaisical cooking efforts, wearing Mouseketeer ears for their amusement, and keeping his mouth shut when they chatted. They chatted about things he did not understand–hos and drugs and Grand Theft Auto and bad ass pits and how crappy school was–and they spoke with regret in coded terms of things they hadn’t done in high school, and how they had better do them while they could.
One of the things was making a film–a cooking show, they told Lawrence one day–and it would star him, the best cook in the class. Mark held the camera and Boyce held the mike as Lawrence proudly laid out the cooking table with tools and ingredients for his favorite recipe, his father’s beef stew, subbing soy meat for beef.
“You like wearing that apron, don’t you, Lawrence?”
Lawrence smiled at the camera’s friendly eye. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “It makes me feel like a real chef.”
“So remember the chef’s hat.” Hank presented the puffy white chef’s hat to Lawrence on a tray. Lawrence placed the hat on and flushed with pride.
Mark peered through the camera as if through the sight of a sniper’s rifle.
Smiling angelically down upon his domain, Lawrence diced carrots, celery, and onions; sauted the veggies and built up a sauce; tossed pearl onions, potatoes, mushrooms, peas, and soy meat into the pot; seasoned the simmering pot with herbs; inhaled the intoxicating aroma; stirred the pot lovingly, gently, sweetly. Occasionally he looked up shyly at the camera, as for years he’d looked up at loving parents and sister when taking on a new challenge. When the stew was ready, Mark led a giddy Lawrence by the arm to a seat of honor at a well-set table to receive the first bowl. Boyce behind them slid a mob of red, fatty beef chunks into the pot and filled Lawrence’s bowl, taking care to load it with extra meat which he submerged with care.
“Time for the chef to take the first bite,” said Boyce with the hushed anticipation of a golf announcer on the eighteenth hole. “Take a big bite, L.”
Mark took dead aim at the Lawrence’s face with the camcorder as he raised a spoonful of stew thick with beef chunks, potato chunks, carrot, and peas, all brown from the sauce. Through the viewfinder Mark observed Lawrence placing the spoon in his mouth and closing his eyes with sensuous joy as he chewed the stew well, as his parents had taught him; then he suddenly stopped, like one realizing he’s unwittingly entered a dangerous room. “Something’s wrong,” Lawrence hushed, pulling a half-chewed chunk of stringy meat from his mouth in tweezering fingers. He recognized the chunk as meat and his face swelled with horror and then the dam burst, the contents of his mouth and gut spewing wildly into and all over the table, slime and chunks and steam everywhere. With a sickly voice he told the camera, as if telling a friend: “There’s meat in there” as slime dripped from his mouth.
“There’s meat in there” was the tag on the clip on YouTube the next day, and it was also the caption beneath a close-up of Lawrence with bulging cheeks and imploding eyes a moment before the surge burst through his lips. The clip garnered two dozen views the first day, three hundred-plus the next, and well over a thousand by the afternoon of the third day when Lawrence learned of it and showed it to Mercy.
“Oh, my baby,” she murmured, draping her arm across his shoulders, leaning her head against his, kissing the hair atop his head as she’d done when he was beaten up in ninth grade. He did not turn to her, but stared ahead and clicked play again. “You don’t have to do this to yourself,” Mercy hushed. He forwarded to the part when Mark led him to the table. “I’m gonna get that monster thrown out of school,” she said with a tear in her voice. “First I’m gonna get YouTube to take that trash down, then I’m gonna see the principal tomorrow and get all those guys thrown right out of school!” The clip was at the moment when Lawrence realized he was a cannibal eating a fellow creature; now the spewing, now the aftermath–the clammy skin, the viscous drool, the horror that Lawrence summed up like so: “There’s meat in there.” “I should have been there with you somehow. I’m so sorry, baby.” Lawrence was hunched forward in a world of his own; her words couldn’t reach him. “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Again he played the regurgitation ... the close-up of the vomit all over the table ... the close up of the sickened boy with shiny, slimy lips. The boy turned to his sister:
“They’ll never eat meat again, Mercy. One-thousand three-hundred and fifty-five people. They won’t.”
She relaxed now, choked out a quivering laugh of relief and kissed her brother on the nose. An impulse led her to place on his head the king’s crown she’d bought for him many years before. She leapt to her feet and curtsied to the king and swept out the door to make plans to move in with her friends.

- end -