Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  My mother didn’t even seem to mind that I kept the gun in my bedroom upstairs. As always, she trusted me. On weekends, she sometimes drove me to the mountains so I could shoot at bottles and cans in the woods. She never wanted to shoot, hold, or even touch the gun herself—maybe it was the last bit of Mennonite left in her. And for as much as I loved it myself, I was glad she was uninterested. Otherwise, I thought, she might be tempted to run off and join some guerrilla group somewhere and get herself killed.

  Joel, who was living in the Bay Area, heard about my interest in guns and sent me a used copy of the Shooters Bible for my birthday. Like my mother, he wanted to give me useful skills for the coming violent overthrow of the ruling class. I pored over the hundreds of pages of pictures and the detailed descriptions of guns of all shapes and sizes, from revolvers to rifles to shotguns. Barrel length, caliber, weight, features—all the specs were there. It was like pornography for a prepubescent boy. I kept it by my bedside.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1978, halfway through sixth grade, I woke up late at night to the sounds of a drunk man shouting and pounding on a door downstairs. It was our neighbor Diane’s ex-husband. Diane was screaming through the door that she would call the police if he didn’t go away. He persisted, and started threatening to kill Diane if she didn’t open the door.

  This was not a good moment for a twelve-year-old boy to have a loaded gun in his bedroom. I suppose I wanted to play the hero. I grabbed the Ruger, tiptoed from my bedroom in my underwear, and slowly made my way down the stairs to the first floor. I stopped halfway, sat on a step, and leaned against the wall, my heart pounding. I thought, Okay, I’ll just yell out to him that I have a gun and that he should leave. I told myself that would be enough to get him out; I would never have to use the gun or even point it at him.

  Meanwhile, Diane kept crying and her ex kept pounding, yelling, “You fuckin’ bitch, I’ll kill you if you don’t open this fuckin’ door right now, let me in.”

  I kept wondering if he would really kill her, and what would happen if he broke down the door. Despite my mother’s long-standing hatred of the police, I kept hoping they would come and stop him. I crept down a few more steps, then stopped again, trying to steady the gun in my trembling hands. It felt heavy and unwieldy. The police were nowhere to be seen. But suddenly, just as I was getting up the nerve to confront him, silence descended. A car door slammed, tires squealed, and he was gone.

  Overcome with relief, I sat frozen for a few minutes before quietly crawling back upstairs to my room, hoping no one had seen or heard me. There was no sign of my mother, and I wondered if she had somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing or perhaps wasn’t even at home. But I was so wound up that I could not fall back to sleep. I sat in bed with that black .22 Ruger still in my hand, waving it around, fantasizing that I had bravely come to Diane’s rescue. I took the small bullets out of the clip and rolled them around in my sweaty palm, thinking the empty pistol was now safe to play with. Tossing the gun from hand to hand, I even briefly put the gun to my head, put my finger on the trigger, and almost pulled it.

  It suddenly occurred to me that there might still be a bullet in the magazine. I checked and, sure enough, there it was.

  I never told my mother what had happened that night, but the next day I gave Clyde his gun back, stopped hanging out at the pool hall and the firing range in the basement, and never touched a firearm again.

  VII.

  TEEN YEARS

  I want “the revolution” but I want a secure home and community, too. Future is scary. Poor innocent Peter, dreaming of going to elite college, and having trouble keeping on top of class assignments, and no time to learn ordinary skills like building and mechanics.

  —Carol Andreas, 1980

  Stealing from the Rich

  MY MOTHER WAS arrested on my thirteenth birthday, a year and a day after her previous arrest. She was trying to find a present for me at Cinderella City Mall in Englewood, a Denver suburb. We arrived at the entrance of JC Penney’s. “You wait here,” she instructed. “I’ll be right back with your birthday gift.”

  So I waited, and then waited some more, staring into the store windows and admiring the expensive-looking Seiko and Bulova watches and other items on display. After a half hour or so I went in to look for my mother. There she was, in the boys’ department, near the jeans section, being detained at the counter and then, as I watched, escorted out by mall security guards.

  This was not the first time that my mother had shoplifted, but it was the first time she had been caught.

  My mother hated the mall, a concentrated form of everything she despised about America’s materialist consumer culture. On the rare occasion that she did step inside a mall, she considered it a matter of principle to strike a blow, however tiny, at corporate America. She usually helped herself to small items, typically clothing, which she would slip underneath her coat or into her purse. As she explained it to me, it was only fair to take back from the capitalists who shamelessly robbed and exploited the poor. This was a convenient philosophy, given that otherwise we could rarely afford new clothes. Shoplifting gave us an alternative to the Salvation Army or other thrift stores.

  Except for the stressful anticipation of the court date, I barely questioned my mother’s shoplifting, though I would have been mortified if my friends had known. Neither explanation—that we were so poor that my mother had to steal, or that she was so mad at corporate America that she had to steal—would have helped my social status in junior high. But luckily, though I happily accepted her stolen gifts, I was never tempted to follow in my mother’s footsteps.

  Years earlier, when we lived in Berkeley before moving to South America, I had gone on a candy-stealing spree with my friend Garrett. We came home with an impressive stash of chocolate bars and several packs of bubble gum. It felt as if Halloween had arrived early that year. But as I was sorting through the illicit candy hoard spread out all over my bed, my mother walked in on me. I immediately confessed, and she gave me such a harsh scolding that I never shoplifted again. On her orders, I threw all the candy in the trash, though I did manage to sneak a few bars out of the garbage bin late that night.

  Tempting as it was, I didn’t remind her of her double standard when she explained to me the virtues of her politically correct shoplifting, perhaps because I was a beneficiary of her crimes. Did she see stealing candy as less legitimate than stealing clothing, or had her attitude toward shoplifting simply loosened and evolved from those Berkeley days? One thing I knew was that my mother would have been unhappy if I was the one who had been arrested for shoplifting.

  My mother’s arrest was in early July, but she wouldn’t have to appear in court until October. Unlike with the Coors battle, we were both dreading that date, counting down the days until she would have to face the consequences. But when the day finally arrived, the shoplifting gods had mercy on my mother: we were the only ones who showed up, so the charges were automatically dropped.

  After that, I’d imagined my mother’s shoplifting days were over. But then Christmas came, and we headed to Sears on the weekend. Once again, I found myself waiting outside, staring absently at the fancy watches in the display window. Finally she came out with a long dark green wool scarf tucked away deep in her purse. Every day that winter I wore that scarf as a warm reminder of what my mother was willing to risk for me.

  The Bout

  BEING CALLED A “Yanqui gringo” and teased for my long hair had been a warm-up to more than a few fistfights in South America. I learned to stand up for myself, taking punches and throwing some back. Maybe I’d absorbed some of that Peruvian machismo. I thought my fist-fighting days were behind me when my mother and I moved back to the States, but Joey Gallegos changed that. Joey was a skinny little Chicano kid with a big mouth who seemed to constantly be getting into fights. Maybe it was just my turn when, midway through seventh grade at Baker Junior High, I bumped into him by accident in the hallway. The only two t
hings that Joey and I had in common were the big fat Goody combs sticking out of our back jeans pockets (a necessity for 1978’s perfectly feathered hair) and our crush on Jessica Duran.

  “Fuckin’ honky,” Joey yelled at me as we passed each other in the hall.

  I turned and countered, “Hey, fuck you, too.”

  That was enough to set Joey off. He spun around and strutted toward me. Joey and I went through the ritual of circling each other and shoving and throwing insults, but as a crowd began to form, Mr. Campbell, the gym teacher, arrived to break it up.

  Mr. Campbell didn’t give us the expected lecture about not fighting and threatening to send us to the principal’s office. Instead, he simply instructed us to meet him at the gym right after school. When we got there, he was waiting for us with a smile. He handed us each a pair of boxing gloves, and seemed to enjoy the surprised looks on our faces. “Put these on,” he said. “You want to fight? All right then, here’s your chance. Beat each other’s brains out, but you have to play by my rules. No kicking. No hitting below the waist. One continuous round until one of you drops or gives up. Got it?” And then he added, “Oh, and I already called your parents to get their permission and tell them you’d be home a little late today.”

  I wondered how my mother could have possibly approved. Didn’t she distrust authority figures in schools? And wasn’t boxing an example of the “macho male culture” she always complained about? But maybe, like when she’d approved of my short-lived gun obsession, my mother thought this would be a good experience to harden me up for the coming revolution. Either way, I knew my father would have disapproved. He didn’t like sports, and I imagined he would dislike a violent sport like boxing most of all.

  Mr. Campbell led us to the middle of the empty gym. He sat on a folding chair and leaned back to watch the entertainment. Joey and I stood there awkwardly, not sure exactly what to do. “Here, let me help you with those,” Mr. Campbell said amiably, reaching out to tie the laces on our gloves. The padded gloves seemed comfy, but I knew from watching boxers on TV that they could do serious damage.

  I looked at Joey. I was a lot taller, and had longer arms, but he was quicker. I wondered if he had ever done any real boxing before. Probably not, I thought. Hopefully not. “Go on, what are you waiting for?” Mr. Campbell egged us on.

  Joey and I began to circle each other, figuring we ought to do something, just as we had in the busy hallway. This time, there were no insults exchanged, or friends to cheer us on or to intervene if things got too out of hand. There was only silence, and Mr. Campbell watching gleefully from his chair. “Come on,” he said impatiently, “I want to see some good boxing.”

  And so we boxed, lunging at each other clumsily, arms flailing, trying to put on a show for our audience of one. We stopped at one point and looked at each other. Joey’s jet-black hair was wet with sweat. I looked at his equally black eyes, trying to read his mind. Was he frightened? Tired? I couldn’t tell. But this whole boxing thing was not much fun, and as we grew tired, we threw fewer and fewer punches. I didn’t care so much about beating Joey, but I definitely didn’t want to be the first to give up. What would Jessica Duran think?

  Finally, Mr. Campbell intervened when neither of us would fold. He stepped between us and said, “That’s enough, boys. Let’s get those gloves off and shake hands.”

  Fifteen minutes had passed, maybe longer. Maybe Mr. Campbell was in a hurry to get home, maybe he thought he had taught us enough of a lesson, maybe he simply got bored. I was relieved that it was over. No one had “won” the match, and there were no knockdowns or knockouts, but neither of us minded. That was the last time I got into a fistfight. Joey and I kept a respectful distance in the hallways, and from then on we always gave each other a knowing smile.

  When I got home that afternoon, my mother was clipping articles as usual. She looked over at me and saw my fat lip.

  “Mmm. Someone from school called earlier, said something about boxing. You all right?” She didn’t ask if I had won or lost. I didn’t expect her to.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, just a swollen lip and a sore jaw, no big deal.”

  “Did you use any of the karate moves Raul taught you?” This was the first time my mother had brought up his name in a while.

  “No, Mom, it’s boxing, not karate—no kicking allowed.”

  “Ah, that’s probably good,” she said, and reached up to clip a new article.

  Surfacing

  I’M NOT SURE when I started to call my father “Carl,” the way my brothers did, but it must have been around the first time I contacted him after almost three years in hiding. Now barely a teenager, I was eager to be treated like a grown-up and to demonstrate my independence. I was determined that there would never be another tug-of-war battle over the “Peter problem.” I was living with my mother, Denver was my home, I would stay there, and that was that.

  But even so, I wanted to see my father. It just didn’t feel right to continue living in hiding and be so completely cut off. In early December, my mother finally, reluctantly agreed that I could contact my father and Rosalind, just in time for Christmas.

  We came up with a plan: for a few days over the holidays, I would visit my father and Rosalind in Michigan, with Joel flying in from California, and we would keep secret where I lived. Joel and I would connect through Chicago to Detroit so that they would not figure out my point of origin.

  I sent my father and Rosalind a short letter via Joel, the first contact since we had returned to the United States.

  Dear Carl and Rosalind,

  I am planning on coming to visit you for Christmas with Joel!! I will be arriving on the same flight as Joel. I haven’t seen you in three years so I thought it would be a good enough time to now! I would like a letter from you though that says that you will not try to keep me there or try to get me back in any way whatsoever. I want to make it clear to you that I don’t want you to know where I live. I am very happy that I am going to see you at Christmas!

  Love,

  Peter Andreas

  PS: You can send your response to Joel

  Reading that letter again now, I realize how badly those lines must have hurt. They may have assumed that my mother composed it for me, but I wrote it by myself.

  All I cared about at the time was being able to reconnect with my father and Rosalind without risk, and to finally enjoy a real Christmas again. After moving to Denver from Peru, we even avoided visiting Grandpa Rich in nearby Kansas, though he knew we were back in the country. North Newton was too small a town, and word would have spread rapidly. So we stayed put, hiding out in Denver, with no Christmas tree with presents underneath, no feast, no family gathering. Nothing at all. My mother treated it like any other day, except most things were closed and there was no school. She always got me something for Christmas, but it was frequently shoplifted, never wrapped, and she often gave it to me early. My mother, if asked about her religion, liked to tell people she was a pagan and worshipped the Andean earth goddess Pachamama; to her, Christmas was an unfortunate name for the winter solstice and had been taken over by consumer capitalism.

  As it turned out, my father actually knew we were back in the country; he just wasn’t entirely sure where we lived. He had caught a glimpse of my mother on an August 7, 1978, ABC evening news story on the antinuclear protests outside the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California. He immediately contacted the sheriff of San Luis Obispo County, informing him that there had been a warrant for my mother’s arrest. It was indeed my mother he saw on the news that evening yelling and carrying a protest sign, but she just happened to be visiting friends in California that week.

  My father also had other clues that we were no longer out of the country. Grandma Andreas had sent me a $10 check, via Joel, for my thirteenth birthday that July. When Grandma received the copy of her deposited check back—stamped deposited at First National Bank in Denver, and signed “Andrea Gabriel”—she immediately notified my father. But he had no idea who
Andrea Gabriel was. With my brother Joel as intermediary, I sent a thank-you note to Grandma for the birthday check and tried to give her the impression that we were still somewhere in rural Peru by writing, “Our corn is growing ears now.” We weren’t even living near any cornfields.

  Despite his earlier persistence, though, my father didn’t balk at my insistence that they not try to get me back. Maybe he understood that I was too old now to be his little boy, no matter what right he had legally. Back when I was ten, my father could have won me over—and had started to do just that—but by now that battle had been lost. My father and Rosalind wrote to Joel that they would welcome a visit from us, and that they had no intention of trying to keep me there.

  And so my brother and I met at Chicago’s O’Hare airport to catch a connecting flight together to Detroit. My flight from Denver arrived first, so I waited for Joel’s plane to come in from San Francisco. I was glad I’d have my brother with me for this first visit to Michigan, and so was my mother. He’d make sure there would be no talk of me staying there and no trash-talking about my mother.

  “Hey, Peter,” Joel greeted me with a wave and a smile when he got off the plane. Joel had cleaned up—he now wore shoes, and no longer wore colorful tie-dyed shirts—but his sandy-brown hair was still nearly down to his shoulders, and his political views were more radical than ever. As we waited for our Eastern Airlines flight to Detroit, Joel asked me, “So, Peter, are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’ll be okay. Just glad you’ll be there.”

  When we stepped off the plane, I saw my father and Rosalind waving at us from the gate. My father had clearly aged; though he still had a full head of hair, it was grayer than before. Rosalind looked exactly the same. We walked up to them. “Well, hello, Peter,” my father said, sticking out his right hand awkwardly, then leaning forward to give me a stiff one-armed hug with his left arm. My father was never much into hugs or public displays of affection, though I could tell by his watery eyes that he was happy to see me. And I was certainly happy to see him.