Without warning or notice, Andy was not quite ready the first time he met my parents. He was picking me up from their house, and I didn’t think much of it when they came to the door to meet him, which, looking back, seems entirely at odds with my usual hyper-vigilant self, but for whatever reason it just felt right and easy and completely casual, so there it was, and there it was over, and his only concern was that he’d been wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with some alcohol-sponsored message of ‘GET WICKED TONIGHT!’ on it.
In all fairness, a silly message T-shirt was not entirely foreign to Andy, who had a whole collection of them when we met. My favorite was a simple black one, entirely blank but for one tiny square in the middle of the chest that you had to lean in and look very closely at to discern the words, “You are so fucking nosy.” It was one of the cute quirks that first attracted me to Andy, and he retains that mischievous sense of humor to this day.
In these old photos he recently unearthed, you see a bit of that T-shirt collection with something that was clearly from his thirtysomething days. Accompanied by gin – loads and loads of gin.
