The Garden

 

You say tomato...

 

     Inside its plastic sheath writhes fifty pounds of shit.  The plastic warps as my fingers burrow for grip, threatening to tear and spill its contents prematurely.  I grunt and strain and heave the bag of manure on top of two more just like it.

     “Stuff smells like shit!”  I look at Andrea and smile as I wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans.

     “So do you!”  She smiles back from on her knees in the loose soil.

      I run to her and grab her by the hips and rub my face into the crook of her neck.  She laughs and pushes me away, and I laugh and tousle her hair.

     “Eeew!”

     “Shush!  You better get used to bein’ dirty, sweetheart!”  I shoot her a grin.

     “You’re dirty enough for the both of us!”

     “That may be, that may be, but we both gotta spread this shit around.”  I pick up the top bag again, set it on end, and tear a hole in the plastic along the bag’s top seam.  ”Look out!”  With the bag under my right arm, I start sifting forth its contents onto the churned soil.  ”You did good baby,” I say, “this looks well broken up.”

     “It should, I clawed the crap out of it!”  She holds up her hand rake, tines towards me, “Rawwrr,” she says, clawing the air like a jungle cat.

     “Rawwr.” I grin, dumping a fine layer of manure over her handiwork.

     “Should I start spreading it out?”

     “Sure, just don’t spread it too thin.”

     “Make sure you dump enough out for me then.”

     I empty the first bag, and open the second.  Andrea grabs the larger rake and follows behind me, sweeping my scattered leavings into a consistent layer.

     “Seeds?”

     “Seeds!”  Andrea runs into the house and emerges with the seed packets.  She fans them out in front of me.  ”What you want boo?  I got tomato, I got corn, I got lettuce, I got eggplants, what you want?”

     I grab the pack of heirloom tomato seeds.  ”Tomatoes first.”  I tear the top off the paper packet.  I empty half the contents into my left hand, and the other half into Andrea’s.  I kneel in the ripe top soil.  With my index finger, in the corner of the yard closest to the house, where the shade of the eaves will fall near midday, I make a small divot in the layer of manure, in the firmer tilled soil underneath.  I wiggle my finger in a small circle, widening my hole slightly.  I drop the first tomato seed in the divot.

     “How big do you think they’ll get?” Andrea asks.

     “How big?”

     “Yeah, how big?”

     “I dunno, softball size?  If we’re lucky…”

     “That seems a little big.”

     “Maybe baseball size?”

     “I’d be happy with that.”

     “I’m happy now.”

     “You know what I meant.”

     “I know.”  I put my arm around her waist, and pull her close.  She lays her head against my chest and I kiss the crown of her head.  ”Let’s plant these seeds baby, it’s gonna get dark soon.”

     She lifts her head from my chest and looks at me.  ”I love you,” she says.

     “I love you too.”

 

January 27, 2009

The Walk to Work

 

I'll take my Chevrolegs.

     I take my pack of cigarettes from my right pants-pocket, remove one from the pack and place it between my lips.  I close the paper flip-top lid and stuff the crumpling pack back in my right pants-pocket.  I take a red plastic lighter from my left pants-pocket and use it to light the cigarette between my lips.  I take my phone from my right sweater-pocket and check the time.  I have fifteen minutes to make it to work.  I usually give myself half-an-hour to make this walk.  I wonder if I can catch a cab closer to downtown.  Shit.  No money.  I walk faster.

     I drag on my cigarette and my stomach churns and gurgles echoes of a receding flu.  I reach the bridge into the financial district and flick my cigarette into the street.  It’s run over by a small gray Toyota, northbound.  The pressure of my backpack against my sweater against my t-shirt against my dermis heats the latter above its sweat threshold, and moisture gathers in the small of my back, in the hallows between my clavicles and deltoids under the straps of the backpack.  I stop on the bridge and take off my backpack.  I put it on the ground at the base of the suicide-fence and take off my sweater.  I open my backpack and put my sweater inside.  I zip the backpack closed.

     I touch the back of my right hand against my shirt, just above my hips.  I feel the sweat come through the once-worn white t-shirt.  I lift my left arm and see a small yellow oval against a field of white cotton, bound for growth.  I look through the green mesh of the suicide-fence at the freeway below, at the cars rushing across it.  Ceaseless.  I think about how I might survive the fall:

A panicked but alert motorist applies the brakes forcefully and leans hard on the wheel.  The car veers into the next lane and collides with another, and another, and another, piling up and flipping and crushing and tumbling and rear-ending into an automotive hurricane with me as the eye.  A nonplussed island in a sea of mangled metal.

     I shoulder my load and feel the cooled sweat set on my skin.   I start walking again.

     At First and Broadway, an old black man in a security guard’s uniform and cataract sunglasses is arguing with a crackhead in front of the Wendy’s.  They’re yelling, but I’m not close enough to hear what they’re saying.  The light changes and I cross Broadway towards them.

     “Fuck you!” the crackhead is yelling.  ”Fuckin’ sunabitch dirty mother fucker I should…”

     “I told you calm down nigger,” growls the old black man in the security guard’s uniform as I step onto the sidewalk and turn up Broadway.  He lifts his hand in a fist and puts it in the crackhead’s face.  It looks like he threw a punch that fell a foot short.  The crackhead stares at the fist, at the small metal can it holds.  The old man with the cataract sunglasses presses down on the top of the small metal can.  A spray like a squirt gun, or a sad seltzer bottle, streams silently into the crackhead’s face.  He stares defiantly at the old man, his eyes already blood shot.  I look at the old man’s cataract glasses and I look at the crackhead’s eyes, drifting, blind now.  He stumbles towards the corner, into a bank of newspaper machines.

     “Gawn now,” says the old man after him, retaking his post in front of the Wendy’s.

     My eyes start to itch and water so I move on up Broadway, towards Fourth, on my walk to work.

 

January 19, 2009

I’m Training People

     “Sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to leave the pup outside.”

     “No I won’t.”

     “Excuse me?”

     “He’s a service animal.  I’m training him.”

     “Oh, I’m sorry.  Of course, he’s fine then.  I’m sorry.”

     “You’re supposed to ask, ‘Is that a service animal.’”

     “I’m sorry…”

     “He’s going to help people with epilepsy.  Here, do you want to see his service tag?”

     “No, no, I believe you.  I’ll take your word that he’s a service dog.”

     “Look, here.”  She shows me the round brass tag on the dog’s collar.

     “I believe you, really.  He’s fine, we welcome service animals.”

     “Is that a service animal.  Remember that.”

    ”Of course, of course.  What can I get for you today?”

     “Hmm.”  She looks at the motorized wheelchair with a raft of black plastic trash bags lashed behind and around it, parked in front of the sorbeto case.  ”It looks like someone forgot their things…”

     “She’s just in the bathroom.”

    ”Hmm.”  She looks intently into the gelato case.  ”What does the non-fat one taste like?”

     “It’s pretty good actually, here, I’ll let you try it.”  I take a small translucent corn-plastic spatula and scrape a thumbnail’s worth of non-fat, low-sugar chocolate gelato onto it.  I hand her the spoon.  ”Here you go.”

    She takes the spoon and turns her head away from me as she puts it into her mouth.  She swallows.  ”It’s not bad.”

    ”Right?”

     “I’ll have a small one of those.”

    ”You bet.”  I scoop the gelato into a small green corn-plastic cup, into a neat mound, one inch higher than the rim of the cup.  I take another little translucent corn-plastic spatula, scrape the rim of the cup clean, and stick the spatula into the mound of gelato.  I set the cup on the counter, by the register.  ”Three seventy-five.” I say, as I enter the sale into the register.

     She hands me a five.  ”We have problems with homeless at my work too.” she confesses.

     “Yeah, she’s a pretty good customer, actually,” I say, “she comes in every day, and she always has money.”

     “That’s not good for business though,” she says nodding at the wheelchair, “I work on 7th and C, and it’s a real problem there.  That’s the worst part of downtown.”

     “Yeah, there’s some hard cases down there for sure.”

     “I’ve almost been attacked several times.”  She takes a tighter hold of the service animal’s leash.

     “Yikes.”  I hand her a dollar bill and a quarter.  ”I’m surprised to hear that.  The homeless here are usually so tame compared to like San Francisco or New York.”

    ”They’re not all tame.”  She takes a bite of the gelato and turns to leave.  As she’s crossing the threshold, she stops and turns around.  ”Remember: ‘Is that a service animal.’  I’m training people to ask that first.”  She walks out leaving her used sample spatula on the counter.

     “Have a good one!” I yell after her.

 

January 13, 2009

Gaza City Rollers

     “This is what I wanted.  This is where I want to be.  I am not afraid.

This is what I wanted.  This is where I want to be.  I am not afraid.”

     I repeat it, again and again as I march.  The metal treads of the tank next to me clatter and clang so I can hardly hear my mantra.  My pack feels lighter than it did in training, my rifle heavier.  I wish it weren’t winter.  Why couldn’t we have done this last spring?  ”Then I wouldn’t be here,” I think.  The wind howls down the street, channeled by columns of empty buildings.

     I don’t know how far we have to walk, or where we’ll be when we stop.  I know I have to stay next to the tank.  I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  The tank is American, built like a, well…   When shooting starts, I will be safest by the tank.

     I think there is a pebble in my right boot.  I shook my boots out and ran my hand all along the inside lining before we left.  They’re tied so tightly, almost halfway up my calves, how could it have fallen in since?  I must have missed it this morning.  I was so sleepy, and it was still so dark, I’m lucky I remembered my rifle.  My rifle.  I look down at it, away from the rooftops of the empty buildings, for just a moment.  It is beautiful, the precision of its machining, the ruggedness of the dusty aluminum receiver, the smooth modernity of its plastic stock, the straight, perfectly-round steel barrel…  I wish my washing-machine at home was this well-made.

     The washing machine leaks.  I haven’t done laundry since I got married, but Rachel says it leaks and that she hates that machine, so I have to fix it, so I hate that machine.  I don’t know how it leaks, where it comes from.  I’ve replaced every gasket, reclamped and checked every hose, it makes no sense.  After every load of laundry, there’s a puddle underneath the machine.  Rachel forgets and steps in the puddle, and then she yells at me to fix the washing machine.

     I exhale and see her in the wisp of steam escaping.  Then I hear the sound of the earth opening and the tank is gone and I am prone in a pile of dust and rock and it is raining pieces of the empty buildings and I am deaf.  I feel the earth shake again behind me and I turn and see the tank, rocking forward with the recoil of its soot blacked cannon.  Another building comes raining down.  Now people, running.  I see screaming, but I don’t hear anything.  Men with guns are taking positions in the rubble opposite, among the girls and kids running away.  Positions.  Shit.  Little bursts of orange fire  from the barrels of the men’s guns.

     I scramble to my feet, concrete and sand and blood shifting under me as I do, and run ducking to the tank, to shelter.  My commanding officer is waiting behind the tank already.  He’s yelling at me, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.  I point at my right ear and shrug.  He understands and tells me in slashing hand-signals to take the alley on our right and flank the next street.  I nod.

     Leaning my back against the back of the tank, I slide to my left, keeping my head low.  I reach the tank’s right tread, squat and turn around.  I peak one eye around the tread.  They’re gone.  Where’d they all go?  Shit.  My CO looks at me and I shrug.  ”Nothing.” I say.  I can feel myself talking, feel the vibrations in the bones of my skull, but I don’t hear it.  He repeats his slashing hand gestures and shoves me from behind the tank.

     I run crouching to the alley.  Once there, I move slowly, but purposefully, the sight of my rifle at my right eye, that plastic stock buried in my right shoulder.  I sweep the perfectly-round barrel from side to side as my eyes trace the same pattern.  I aim at the sky as I look up to check the rooftops.  I lower the barrel, my eye still on the sight.  I near the end of the alley and press my back up against the far wall.  I creep left along the wall like this.  At the corner I stop.  I lean my head ever so slightly past the safety of the wall.  My left eye strains at its peripheral extreme.  Another empty street.

     I swing the barrel of my gun around the corner.  My head follows, attached at the rifle’s sight.  My chest and shoulders and right hip come around the corner, exposed.  I look up into a face, centered in the sight.  A boy’s: wet with tears, muddy in this dust, but not crying now.  In the reticule, I see the tiny muscles of his face tighten, his delicate jaw clench.  I see his lips move and I hear his voice and he says, “I am not afraid.”

The Restroom Is for Customers Only

     On the radio, Cat Stevens sings “I’m being followed by a moon shadow.”  I hear a clang and look up.  I know it’s her as I do.   With one of the double doors closed, the entrance to the shop is too narrow for her conveyance.  I’m supposed to keep the left door closed when it’s cold.  She and her motorized wheelchair would fit if not for the raft of over-full plastic trash bags lashed behind and around it.  She takes hold of the closed door in her right hand, reaches across her lap to the joystick that controls the wheels with her left hand, and, holding onto the door with her right hand, backs the chair up.  The door cracks opens and she uses her left hand and the joystick to maneuver the chair and its attending sacs of miscellany into the opening.  She flings the door fully open, switches her now free right hand to the joystick and scoots across the threshold.  The door rebounds at the extreme of its hinges’ range and swings shut as rapidly as it was flung open, thudding to a stop against her chair’s trash-bag rear fender, dragging shut as she enters the shop.

     Inside, she parks her rig, stands up and examines the display case.

“Oh, they all look so fluffy, like colored whip cream,” she says to me.

“Yeah, I like the way they look too.” I say.

“Can I try a couple?”

“Sure.”

“How’s that pineapple?  When I lived in Hawaii, they  always had pineapple ice cream.”

“Oh.  I bet it was good, Hawaii, and pineapples and everything…”

She stares intently at the case.

“Do you have a coconut one?”

“Yeah, right here, in the back.”  I put my finger against the freezer case’s sliding plastic doors, pointing at the frozen white waves on the surface of a pan of coconut sorbeto.

“You could make like a-uh pina colada.”

“Yep.”

“Do you like those?  I mean the drinks.”

“Not really, too sweet for me.”

“Me too.  I never really liked alcohol.  Beer I guess, but I never liked alcohol.”

She stares into the case.  I stare into the case.

“Which one do you want to try?” I ask.

“Just give me the four-seventy-five cup, with the pineapple and the tropical.”

“A medium with pineapple and tropical?”  I take a pink cup, made from biodegradable corn plastic, from the top of a two-foot tall stack of inverted pink cups that sits between a one-foot tall stack of smaller green cups and a three-foot tall stack of larger blue cups.  With my left hand, I grab the top pink cup and flip it top-side up.  With my right hand, I open the plastic sliding doors of the smaller of the shop’s two freezer cases, the one that holds the sorbeto, the one she stares into so intently.  I look at the metal pan, with a small plastic lean-to placard in front of it that reads “Pineapple” on both sides,  a quarter full of pineapple sorbet.  I look at the tropical, nearly full.

     With my right hand, I pull the red handled spade from the pineapple sorbeto, like sword from stone.  I scoop the pineapple first because it is older, and I know it will be harder, less malleable, than the fresh, airy tropical.  If I reverse the order, the serving will not find its form: a cupcake-like half-dome, an inch over the pink corn-plastic rim, forming a sticky equator between hemispheres of pastel orange and yellow.  Without the constraint of the week-old pineapple in place, the tropical will not hold its shape.  It will flow over the edges of the cup and stick to my hands.  I’ll have to give her the cup and the sugary soup will stick to her hands too.

      She’ll touch her money with her sticky hands, and it will become sticky, and I’ll have to touch the sticky money.  She’ll touch the chair she sits in, because she does not sit in her wheelchair while she is in the shop, and the chair will become sticky, and I’ll have to clean the chair.  She’ll put her hands on the bathroom door before she leaves, and I’ll have to clean the bathroom door, after she’s used the bathroom.

     I slice through the frozen mixture of pineapple, water, sugar, syrup, dextrose and air with the edge of the equally frozen spade.  A jaundiced iceberg breaks away from a pineapple glacier.  The atoms of the iceberg are cold and slow and so adhere to the cold slow atoms of the spade’s metal concave.  I scrape the chunk of pineapple sorbeto into the pink cup against its plastic rim.  It slips into the dish and lies on the bottom.  I pick it up with the spade the way one picks up a sleeping drunk, and lean it against the wall of the cup, mashing it in a bit with the back of the metal scoop, so it knows to stay up.  I replace the spade, convex down, handle resting on the clean back edge of pineapple’s metal pan.  I reach for the spade resting on the clean back edge of the metal pan with a small plastic lean-to placard in front of it that reads “Tropical” on both sides.  When she sees I’ve got the flavors right she begins pulling crumpled bills from the folds of her clothing, and half-heartedly straightening the bills.

     I pull the spade from the tropical with a slurping suck.  The softer stuff is the fresher stuff, the right stuff, possessing the texture it’s meant to have.  It  scoops less like an iceberg than beach mud, bits of blended seed and pulp for the grit of sand grains.  With the pineapple retaining wall in place, the tropical mudslide fills into the neat mound I mean for it.  I use the nose of the metal scoop to scrape the pink-plastic edge of the tropical hemisphere.

“Could you put one of those cones on there sweety?” she asks.

“Sure.”

     I press an inverted sugar cone into the surface of the mounded cupful of sorbeto.  I’m supposed to put it on the counter by the register.  She’s supposed to walk over and give me five dollars.  I’m supposed to put it on the counter by the register because it’s bigger, so the cup is less likely to be knocked over onto the floor, which would make a mess I would have to clean up.  Also, my tip cup is by the register.  I don’t get tipped as often if people don’t see the tip cup while I’m taking their money and giving them their change.  I take the cup of sorbeto to the bit of counter that she’s leaning on, in between the two freezer cases, and set it down.  She gives me five crumpled singles.  I take them to the register.  I press a button on the register with the number “2″ on it in bold black lettering.  Then I press a key marked “PLU”.  Then “6″, then “1″, then “PLU” again.  Then a button marked “CA”.  The drawer of the cash register springs opens with a thud.  I put the five crumpled bills on top of a crisper stack of the same denomination.

     She ambles to a table in the middle of the dining room, cup in hand.

“Do you drink alcohol?” she asks me.

“Sometimes,” I answer, “Not hardly at all lately.”   I take a spray bottle of kitchen cleaner and a rag from under the counter, beneath the register, and start cleaning the espresso machine.

“My daddy owned a bar, in New Jersey, that’s where I’m from.  So I grew up seeing people drinking and everything.  But I think sometimes the beer actually makes people go crazier than the other stuff even.”

“People drink so much of it.” I say, staring in to the already shiny chrome of the espresso machine, searching for water spots, for any dried flecks of steamed milk.

“There was one guy, he came in all the time.  I would come home from school, and he’d be there in my dad’s bar, and I’d have to go move his car from the middle of the street.”

     I turn my head to look at her and she shakes her head and laughs.  ”He got drunk and left it there?” I ask.

She stares into her cup, “I was seven I think…  when you’ve served drinks most of your life, which is what I did, you see the way that people are when they drink alcohol, you know?

“Yeah.”

     I put the spray bottle and the rag back under the counter.  I sit at the table, under the pass-through window to the production room, where the gelato and sorbeto are made, where I have my computer set-up.  I sit and start typing:  

     “On the radio, Cat Stevens sings “I’m being followed by a moon shadow.”  I hear a clang and look up.  I know it’s her as I do.   With one of the double doors closed, the entrance to the shop is too narrow for her conveyance.  I’m supposed to keep the left door closed when it’s cold.  My boss says it’s to keep some heat in, but still let people know we’re open. She and her motorized wheelchair would fit if not for the raft of over-full plastic trash bags lashed behind and around it.  She takes hold of the closed door in her right hand, reaches across her lap to the joystick that controls the wheels with her left hand, and, holding onto the door, backs the chair up.  The door opens and she uses her left hand and the joystick to maneuver the chair and its attending sacs of miscellany into the opening.  She flings the door fully open, switches the joystick to her now free right hand and scoots across the threshold.  The door rebounds at the extreme of its hinges’ range and swings shut as rapidly as it was flung open, thudding to a stop against her chair’s trash-bag rear fender, dragging shut as she enters the shop.”

     I hear her clear her throat and look up.  She’s standing by the small freezer case again.

“You want another one?” I ask.

“Mango and wildberries.” she says.  ”Here’s the money.”  She lays more crumpled bills on top of the freezer case.  ”And can you scoop it, but leave it in the case for me while I use the restroom?”

I close my computer and stand up.  I wipe my hands on my apron.  ”Sure.”