Freedom [253]
What had happened, as Lalitha soon figured out, was that the local TV footage of Walter’s rant and the ensuing riot had gone viral. It had lately become possible to stream video over the internet, and the Whitmanville clip (CancerOnThePlanet.wmv) had flashed across the radical fringes of the blogosphere, the sites of 9/11-conspiracy-mongers and the tree-sitters and the Fight Club devotees and the PETA-ites, one of whom had then unearthed the link to Free Space on the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s website. And overnight, despite having lost its funding and its musical headliner, Free Space acquired a bona-fide fan base and, in the person of Walter, a hero.
It was a long time since he’d done much giggling, but he was giggling all the time now, and then groaning because his ribs hurt. He went out one afternoon and came home with a used white Econoline van and a can of green spray paint and crudely wrote free space on the van’s flanks and rear end. He wanted to go ahead and spend his own money, from the impending proceeds of the house sale, to fund the group through the summer, to print up literature and pay a pittance to the interns and offer some prize money to the battling bands, but Lalitha foresaw potential divorce-related legal issues and wouldn’t let him. Whereupon Joey, altogether unexpectedly, after learning of his father’s summer plans, wrote Free Space a check for $100,000.
“This is ridiculous, Joey,” Walter said. “I can’t take this.”
“Sure you can,” Joey said. “The rest is going to veterans, but Connie and I think your cause is interesting, too. You took care of me when I was little, right?”
“Yes, because you were my child. That’s what parents do. We don’t expect repayment. You never quite seemed to understand that concept.”
“But isn’t it funny that I can do this? Isn’t it a pretty good joke? This is just Monopoly money. It’s meaningless to me.”
“I have my own savings I could spend if I wanted to.”
“Well, you can save that for when you’re old,” Joey said. “It’s not like I’m going to be giving everything to charity when I start making money in a real way. This is special circumstances.”
Walter was so proud of Joey, so grateful not to be fighting him anymore, and so inclined, therefore, to let him be the big guy, that he didn’t fight him on the check. The one real mistake he made was to mention it to Jessica. She had finally spoken to him when he’d landed in the hospital, but her tone made it clear that she wasn’t ready to be friends yet with Lalitha. She was also unimpressed with what he’d said in Whitmanville. “Even leaving aside the fact that ‘cancer on the planet’ is exactly the kind of phrase we all agreed was counterproductive,” she said, “I don’t think you picked the right enemy. You’re sending a really unhelpful message when you pit the environment against uneducated people who are trying to improve their lives. I mean, I know you don’t like those people. But you have to try to hide that, not lead with it.” In a later phone call, she made an impatient reference to her brother’s Republicanism, and Walter insisted that Joey was a different person since he’d married Connie. In fact, he said, Joey was now a major contributor to Free Space.
“And where did he get the money?” Jessica said immediately.
“Well, it’s not that much,” Walter backpedaled, realizing his mistake. “We’re a tiny group, you know, so everything’s relative. It’s just, symbolically, that he’s giving us anything at all—it says a lot about how he’s changed.”
“Hm.”
“I mean, it’s nothing like your contribution. Yours was huge. Spending that weekend with us, helping us create the concept. That was huge.”
“And now what?” she said. “Are you going to grow