I can’t remember what I learned first, how to tie my shoes, or how to talk my way out of trouble. In my later years, I took up a method I like to call “Keep your mouth shut.” Talking my way into trouble had turned into too likely an outcome.
My mother said I came out of the womb talking. There I was, all blonde and bloody, six pounds of matter swinging in her arms. Then came the time to pick my name, my destined name. At the time, they looked to my older brother, Griffey, for an answer. He said, “Andrew,” and it became a coin toss between Andrew and Rupert. I guess I don’t have to tell you what won.
That was how Andrew Kenneth Smith was born. The date was June 6, 1990, the same day as the Normandy landings in 1944, now called D-Day. I don’t mean I’m a believer in destiny or irony or anything like that, but sometimes I am inclined to believe. My grandfather, Buddy Smith, was born just blocks from me and he was supposed to go to Normandy, but his baseball coach made sure he went into the Coast Guard instead. If it were not for that baseball coach, I would not be blessed with the power of life because my grandfather most likely would have been blasted into the darkness of the crimson-stained sand on that day in history.
I was raised in the suburbs of Edmonds, Washington, just a short ferry ride from Seattle. My father, Lenny, was a tenacious Certified Public Accountant with a prominent brow ridge and thin light hair—I am a splitting image of his Norwegian appearance. He always wore suits and would sometimes let me pick out the tie he wore for the day. My favorite was the one that would sing the Washington State University song when you squeezed the bottom:
Fight, fight, fight for Washington State!
Win the victory,
Win the day for Crimson and Gray!
Best in the West
We know you’ll all do your best,
So on, on, on, on!
Fight to the end!
Honor and glory you must win!
So fight, fight, fight for Washington State and Victory!
“All Hail to Washington State”
It took me a while to learn all the words but you can never start too early on recruiting potential students.
My mother, Pearl, was a registered nurse with blonde hair and tanned German skin. Her voice was so soft, so honeyed that it would touch the back of your soul. But she sometimes competed with me to be the family’s most rapid-fire talker. She worked nights, and my dad worked days. Sometimes they even worked at the same time, and for these occasions my brothers and I had a nanny.
We lived on Spruce Street at the top of the hill with all the mailboxes aligned in a row outside our house. Through the kitchen window you could see the long, tall evergreen trees shadowing our house.
I was the youngest of three brothers. Ron, the middle brother with hair as blonde as sand, was always wrestling me in the living room. Griffey was the oldest. The three of us were like peas in a pod, chasing and tripping through the trials of life.
It’s hard to remember back to my first years as a troublemaker, but I do remember the day my mother busted out the front door, down the driveway, and chucked my milk bottle into the garbage truck. I was about four years old and I suppose she concluded that I’d exceeded my allotted bottle period, if there was such a thing.
But she had to wait until the garbage man came. She attempted to throw it away in the evening, but I snuck out and stole it out of the garbage can late that rainy night. That created a dramatic situation in the morning: mom furiously yanking the bottle from my grip upon discovering she’d been defied and outsmarted by her four-year-old, waiting until she heard the garbage truck growl up the hill, running out the front door and down the front steps to the end of the driveway, and flinging the bottle at the back of the garbage truck as I howled in protest.
I had made it to the door just in time to watch the bottle’s last twirl before it landed in the putrid crevice of the waste truck. I ran down to my room. Had she thrown it away when I was younger, I would not have known to care as much. But I sobbed my eyes out that morning.
Eventually I realized that drinking out of a cup was more efficient.
I am not sure if it was the premature exposures I gained from having older brothers, the shrill demons inside me, or my snappish attention span of a gnat, but early on I began to get a bit of a Machiavellian reputation. My brother Griffey, a tall and skinny fellow with fire-red hair, had a rare set of baseball cards organized in a folder. At age five, during my first year in preschool, my frustrated little soul was acting up. I was mad at him for one reason or another, so early one fall morning I crept into his bedroom and snatched his baseball cards. Mint condition rookie cards of Ken Griffey, Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, and others. I was dangerously quiet, and like a slithering snake I managed to escape from his room with the prized cards. Then I snuck out the front door and plopped them into the garbage bin right before the garbage man arrived.
My mother woke up just afterward and started preparing breakfast. She looked at me and caught me with a guilty look. Or maybe it was a satisfied look. She always seemed to know. She interrogated me, but by the time I confessed, the garbage man had taken the cards.
When my brother woke up he noticed their absence and came running up the stairs. My mother explained to him what I had done, and he was furious. Furious and devastated. That was the first time I remember feeling misery, anger, and disappointment in myself. But I was still somehow unaware of the harm I had caused. I lost the trust of my oldest brother at age of five. And my parents’ hearts were shattering for me.
Losing trust and then slowly climbing back up the ladder to an equilibrium of trust would become all too familiar to me. The top of the ladder was always followed by another mistake, more trouble, and another fall. Soon, the trouble began to come in waves.
After a year of preschool I resisted kindergarten. I refused to go, dug my heels straight into the ground. My mother said I just wanted to be with her, to go shopping with her, that I enjoyed being attached to her at the hip. So I attended another year of preschool.
I stole for the first time before my sixth birthday. I am not sure of the normality of that—young kids stealing—but even now I feel a twinge of remorse. My mother, again, took note of the guilt in my posture one winter day during my second year of preschool. She asked me what was wrong, and I caved. I had taken some Legos from the Lego bin at school, I said. Naturally she got mad at me. The trust was lowering again and I returned the Legos the next day and apologized to my teacher. Thankfully, kids don’t get suspended in preschool.
Later that the spring our family cat Charlotte mated with our cousins’ cat Bandit and had a litter of kittens. They were beautiful baby kittens, jovial balls of fluff playing around the house.
Unfortunately I had recently heard that cats always land on their feet.
One day my cousins and I were on the second-floor deck of my house. My middle brother Ron was watching me like a hawk from inside. Ron’s light hair matched my father’s, and we called him Bam Bam because he was the destroyer of toys. On the deck, I bent down and picked up one of the newborn kittens and hurled the small fluff ball off the deck and watched it soar through the air. I guess I was testing the newly-discovered hypothesis. Sure it was a cruel thing to do, but I really didn’t know any better.
After I watched the first kitten twirl down to the ground and stick the landing, I chased after the second kitten. Its mother, Charlotte, came running after me as I grabbed her newborn. The second kitten flew airborne across the railing and I peaked over the railing with my chin, watching with eyes bigger than saucers. Charlotte caught up to me and leaped off of the deck after her newborns while my mother and brother came running after me. All three cats landed safely. I was smiling until my mother arrived and put me on restriction. Bam Bam was angry with me for almost killing the family cats.
I never really thought things through until the damage was done. I guess my gnat-like attention span blocked any consideration or fear of consequences. Complete thoughts were rare accomplishments fighting for ground in my hyper-distracted brain.
Then there was the whole sucking the thumb fiasco. I sucked my thumb, secretly in my leisure time, until I was ten. One moment is forever ingrained, hung on a wall in my downstairs hallway. It’s a picture drawn by an artist, one of each of my brothers and me. I would not take it out of my mouth so he drew my palm clinched with my thumb pointing in between my lips, being sucked like a vacuum, with my two brothers at my side, smiling with their buck teeth.
I thought this was a sign, a sign from some spirit, smashing the meaning of my accidental witty, stubborn, attachment towards life. Sucking my thumb was a metaphor for my life. I clamp on to the people I meet and embrace the saps from my heart.
After my second preschool year ended, my mother made it clear that I had to go to kindergarten. As a six-year-old going on seven, I would be the oldest kid in class. There are always the old ones and the young ones in class, and I think being at either end of the age spectrum affects a person’s overall experience in school. Being on the older end of the spectrum placed me in a leadership position. I was also taller than all of my classmates, which gave me a sense of dominance and power each year of school, until I stopped growing.
My parents were doing well enough in their careers to allow my brothers and me to attend private school. All three of us were placed in a school called Holy Rosary. When I got there I had to wear a uniform: blue corduroys, white shirt, and a blue V-neck sweater. We all looked identical in formation as we traveled the halls. The girls wore similar blue vests, but instead of pants they wore plaid red and blue skirts. I never liked those uniforms. I wanted to be different, and my gentle eccentricities were constantly trying to bust out of the confines of those damn sweaters.
My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Essex, and me.
Mrs. Essex was my kindergarten teacher—a short older lady with black hair that was beginning to tinge with gray. She was kind and always had the greatest Show and Tell expos in her class. Kindergarten was probably the only year of school that I behaved well. There were exceptions though, and they always seemed to have to do with my propensity for strong displays of sexuality.