“Watch the ditch,” she said when we finally arrived at her white Malibu, and I circled around to the passenger’s side, nearly falling in the ditch.
Once we were in the cramped environs of the car, Gina was mostly business.
“Relax,” she said. Reaching over me, she groped around for the lever, reclining the passenger’s seat. “How’s that?”
“Uh, good,” I said, looking up at her in the dark.
Placing her knee between my legs, she wrestled off her sweater and unbuttoned her blouse and pulled off her panties, and she climbed on top of me before I even had a chance to savor the moment. I’m not saying I wasn’t grateful. To this day, I remain grateful to Gina Costerello and whatever whim, or combination of alcohol and restlessness, prompted her to unbutton my jeans and straddle me in the passenger’s seat of that Malibu. And don’t get the idea that it didn’t feel good, either. It was a revelation, a delirious paroxysm like I’d never known, a welling of rapture from my heels to my temples. The experience literally emptied me.
For ninety seconds after Gina climbed off me, roughly the time it took to get her clothes back on, I felt shucked like an oyster as I gathered my breath.
“Don’t tell Rob about this,” Gina said, buttoning her blouse.
“I won’t. He doesn’t talk to me.”
“And crack that window, so it doesn’t smell like mushrooms in here.”
Cracking the window, I pulled up my pants, still wondering what had just happened to me. I spilled out of the car into the ditch, righting myself as gracefully as possible. I followed Gina dazedly back down the gravel road to the party.
“You’re cute,” she said. “Don’t sulk so much.”
Then she squeezed my hand once and headed directly for the keg before I could interpret whether or not I was supposed to follow her. I got the feeling she didn’t exactly want me to, but then maybe I was sulking again. Anyway, that’s where my romance with Gina Costerello ended as abruptly as it had begun twenty-five minutes earlier.
Gina Costerello was always nice to me after that, up until the time she graduated two months later. There was the time Joe Club stuffed me into my locker, and Gina managed to verbally persuade him not to lock me in there. And there was the time she actually signed my yearbook and told me to “take it easy.”
But it was always painfully obvious to me that there would never be a repeat performance with Gina.
That never really seemed fair. Or maybe I’m just sulking again.
A Place to Land
Not to belabor the point, but I had good reason to be a nervous kid. A few weeks after that picture was taken in front of the fire station, we lost our house on the res when the landlord jacked our rent without warning. We kept what we could carry and left behind the rest of our worldly possessions, which didn’t really amount to much beyond some tired furniture.
For nearly a month, Nate, Mom, and I lived in our 1987 monkey-shit-brown Astro van, eating cold SpaghettiOs out of the can, reading by flashlight through the fog of our own breath, and showering weekly at the state park. I wish I could tell you it was an adventure, at least for the first few days, but it wasn’t. The experience was terrifying from the start.
We parked on the streets most nights, under the sodium glare of a streetlamp if we were lucky, where the shadows played tricks on my uneasy imagination as I lay awake. Other nights, we parked at the end of a dirt road, where I was equally terrorized by the crunch of footsteps over gravel and the clashing of limbs in the wind somewhere in the darkness. Invariably, we awoke damp and chilled to the bone, still wearing our clothes.
Weekends were the worst, because there was no school. School was warm and dry, and a green ticket meant a free hot lunch. Thank God the library was open on Saturday and there was church on Sundays, so we got some relief. Let’s just say I’ve never been much of a camper. Been there, done that.
Eventually, we moved in with my diabetic aunt Genie in South Kingston, a situation that was less than ideal since Aunt Genie lived in a single-wide trailer in a motor court with strict guest regulations. Not to mention that she and my mom never got along.
The first thing Aunt Genie said when we showed up on her doorstep with our damp blankets and dirty laundry was, “This is what you get for marrying a Mexican.”
At the time, I thought she was talking about Nate and me.
The three of us slept in the living room, Mom on the floor, and Nate and I on a fold-out couch. The fact that we were all trying to sleep never kept Aunt Genie from watching television, sometimes all night long. Many nights, I slept dreamlessly to the babble of infomercials and televangelists, only to awake at dawn and find Aunt Genie still sitting there on her bile-colored La-Z-Boy.
After nearly two months of this, my mom picked up a second job, at the elementary school. By that time, Aunt Genie was so anxious to get rid of us that she lent my mom half the money for a new rental on the res. And no, in case you’re wondering, you don’t have to be an Indian to live on the res. Apparently, all you need is a bunch of broken shit in your yard.
We managed to stay afloat for a year at that place until the landlord jacked the price, and my mom was forced to rent a one-bedroom apartment, or we might have been back at Aunt Genie’s again. That didn’t last, either. It was simply too hard for my mom to support us, even with two jobs. That’s probably where stepdads 1 and 2 came in, at least in theory.
Stepdad 1 was Chuck, who was about five two and carried a comb in his pocket, right where his wallet should have been.
Stepdad 2 was Ronnie, a guy who liked to pump a little iron and go crabbing, until he married my mom, that is, after which point he simply enjoyed being a fat fuck and sitting in a chair.
Both Chuck and Ronnie suffered very audibly from chronic back pain, migraine headaches, and a general, debilitating condition called “the fucking system.” Both stepdads, in the Victor Muñoz mold, were work averse, and both played a little guitar. In the case of both Chuck and Ronnie, the honeymoon ended abruptly, with neither marriage lasting two years.
I’m not making excuses here, but I’ve come to believe that to a large degree we are products of our environment. So I suppose it’s no small wonder that expectations for Mike Muñoz have always been low. But mark my words: somehow, some way, I’m gonna change all that. Old Mike Muñoz fully intends on going out and getting his one of these days.
Getting My Mow On
Just in case I seem like another disgruntled wage slave, don’t get the idea that I don’t actually like landscaping. Maybe it doesn’t pay a fortune, but I’m outside in the fresh air eight hours a day, seeing the immediate results of my labor. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that. Think about it: why else would all those old fogeys who retire do nothing but work in their gardens all day long? I’d way rather mow your lawn or deadhead your rhodies or even mulch your flower beds than do your taxes or make your sandwich. At least with grass, you get the last word. Not like a sandwich, where somebody eats it. And what’s more beautiful than a great green field of new-mown grass? What’s more pleasing than a tidy edge or the clean lines of scrupulously pruned boxwood? I’m not gonna get all nuanced about the art of landscaping or start in with any of that navel-gazing philosophical crap like they do in books—it’s not a metaphor for the human condition, it’s a fucking yard. Just know that I’m a guy who really enjoys maintaining them, generally speaking. And yeah, maybe someday I’ll write the Great American Landscaping Novel, but in the meantime, Tuesdays are a bitch.
All our Tuesday accounts are located across the Agate Passage on Bainbridge. We call the bridge the service entrance because virtually nobody on the island, as far as I can tell, mows their own lawn or maintains their own pool or cleans their own gutters. Nobody drives a broke-dick truck, either, unless it’s from 1957. Even the high-school kids —with names like Asher and Towner—drive new cars. They seem happy and healthy, if not a little bored. They all appear harmless enough on the surface, except that most of them don’t seem to reali
ze how good they’ve got it or how people less fortunate than themselves have helped account for their good fortune, have even suffered, so that they can enjoy their wealth and security.
But like I said, one day I’m gonna get mine. It probably won’t be a Tuesday, though. Tuesdays start with a half day at Truman’s, a huge residence over on the east side of the island, with two hundred feet of high-bank waterfront on the sound, facing Ballard, all of it hemmed in by neat boxwood borders. There’s an acre of manicured lawn, which Truman makes us mow with an old rotary mower that he must’ve inherited from Fred Flintstone. No leaf blowers allowed at Truman’s, either. No radios, and especially no salsa music, which is fine by me. I guess when you’re a big rich, important person, sitting around on your ass, meditating on your big important, rich-guy thoughts, moving your money around in the “free market,” the one built on the backs of slaves and children, you can’t be bothered with noisy lawn mowers.
Truman is an uptight little bearded guy about five foot three, who’s always home on Tuesdays. I have no idea what he did to become so rich, but my guess is next to nothing. Whatever the case, he sure doesn’t know how to enjoy it. Every time you look up, the guy is watching you out a window, and he wants you to know it. You had best be raking or pruning when he looks out the window, or you might end up like Eduardo and Che, both of whom got fired due to Truman’s watchdogging. That’s why I usually hide behind the boxwood for a few hours, pruning.
With boxwood, it’s all about crisp edges and clearly defined boundaries, which are two things my life could use more of. So the work is pretty gratifying that way. It would be a hell of a lot more gratifying if I could make of that boxwood anything I chose. Not to brag, but I’m kind of a savant when it comes to topiary. Though I’m never called upon to do so professionally, I can coax zoo animals, naked chicks, or just your basic geometric shapes out of your garden-variety shrubs. Sometimes when I’m walking around, I’ll see a shapeless clutch of holly and imagine an obelisk or a spiral. Or I’ll see a line of yews and picture a Greek colonnade.
I do most of my creative work in our backyard, where nobody will complain about it. A cluster of mushrooms in the myrtle. A pair of pom-poms in the privet. In the barberry, a gnome eating a hot dog. But my masterpiece, liberated from the shapeless clusterfuck of Japanese holly behind the shed, was originally supposed to be a mermaid, in homage to the Little Mermaid. But ultimately, the shrub refused to submit to my artistic vision. One pesky limb in particular thwarted my efforts—one very proud and protruding limb. It was a teachable moment, really. I learned that sometimes it’s better to give in to the thing itself than to fight it. Which is to say, my masterpiece ended up being a merman with an erection. I guess you could say that the erection was already there, and I just freed it.
Working beside Tino is one of the bright spots on Tuesdays. I’ve learned a lot from Tino, but don’t tell him as much. I’m not saying I like the guy. He calls me puto five times a day, and his laughter grates on me. But he’s efficient and detail oriented, and he takes pride in his work. He’s got a good eye for the big picture: the lay of the yard, the importance of definition and balance, the subtle transitions in terrain that create flow. And he’s holy hell with a pole pruner.
But this Tuesday, Tino was out of sorts. One of his uncles had a birthday party the previous night. A gran fiesta, as he put it. Multiple barbecues, four cases of Tecate, three fifths of tequila, and 2:00 a.m. soccer in a parking lot. Bottom line, Tino didn’t look so good Tuesday morning: bleary eyed and kind of pale for a Mexican. You could smell the tequila coming out of his pores. Within a half hour of arriving at Truman’s, he chipped in the hostas, then blew chunks again on the flagstone walkway, not three feet from where I was working.
Well, guess who must have been peering out the window and soon came marching down the walkway?
“What exactly am I looking at?” Truman said, indicating the pile of chum.
Sheepishly, Tino began to ramble some kind of explanation in Spanish.
“No hablo español,” said Truman. “Did you do this? Is this yours?”
Tino looked at his feet.
“That was me,” I said. “I was just about to clean it up.”
Truman subjected me to a doubtful once-over.
“I ate some funky Indian last night,” I said. “Pretty sure it was the masala. But it sure looks like the paneer, doesn’t it?”
I’m not sure whether Truman bought it or not, but I’m pretty sure about this: the guy is a prick. If I were running this show, Truman wouldn’t even be a client. I’d have standards: no creeps, no ingrates, no busybodies, no racists. No clueless rich fucks. I’d also pay my crew more than twelve bucks an hour, but don’t get me started.
“Well, kindly take care of it,” Truman said.
Kindly, my ass.
And things only got worse from there. An hour later, my fat boss, Lacy, showed up on the work site. Not that I ever really liked him, but he’s changed in the past year. For starters, he never works alongside us anymore. He just delegates, usually by yelling on the phone. Back in the day, he used to always have good medicinal weed for his bad back. Black Rhino, Blueberry Kush, you name it. These days, safety meetings are strictly forbidden. In fact, if Lacy smells weed on you, he’ll send you home. But the worst part about Lacy is that he’s a social climber, and not a very good one. Basically, he’s just a brownnoser.
“What the fuck, Muñoz? I just got a call from Truman. Are you drunk?”
“No, I’m sick. Should I go home?”
“It’s too late now. You already puked.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Fuck you. Look, I got a call from McClure,” he said. “You need to start picking up the dog shit on the back deck. Like now.”
“But you said—”
“It doesn’t matter what I said. We can’t afford to lose an account over some dog shit.”
“Why don’t they hire a—”
“A dog-shit picker-upper? I looked in the yellow pages, and guess what? I couldn’t find one. So that leaves you, Mike. Is this gonna be a problem? Because I know Tino’s cousin is looking for work.”
“But, Lacy, you said—”
“Look, every crew needs one, and it turns out you’re my dog-shit guy. Get the hell over there and clean the deck.”
I hate working at the McClures’ to begin with, but for different reasons than I hate working at Truman’s. If I were in charge, we’d dump the McClure account, too. They don’t want any pruning or bed maintenance, and the lawn is only about fifty square feet, hemmed in by shaggy cedars on all sides and riddled with roots everywhere. It’s awkward as hell to maintain. You can’t push the mower more than three lengths in any given direction before you’ve got to swing it around again, careful to keep the front wheels off the ground, or the mower will clip a root and stall. It’s perpetually shady as fuck, so the grass is wet in July—and it grows two inches every time you turn your back.
That’s not the real problem, though. The real problem is Duke, the McClures’ two-hundred-pound St. Bernard, who takes elephant-sized dumps everywhere. And I mean everywhere: on the gravel footpath and in the beds lining the walkway. And yes, on the deck. And guess who the McClures expect to pick up all those turds? I’ll give you a hint: not Hillary Clinton.
It was dumping rain by the time I got there. As usual, there were lawn cigars everywhere. The fucking dog had managed to shit in a pot of nasturtiums three feet off the ground. I couldn’t even get my brain around it. As always, the McClures were thoughtful enough to set out a little fireplace shovel on the deck for me, and let me tell you, the instrument is sorely deficient for the task.
First, I tried the spatula method, but no matter how firm they looked, the turds were too soft in the middle, like one of those lava cakes. To make matters worse, the only bag I had was paper. And meanwhile, the rain was running a rivulet down the crack of my ass, and the stink of Duke’s ass goblins was damn near unbearable. After about six waterlogged
turds, the paper bag ruptured, in spite of my desperate attempt to stop the breach with my bare hands. The whole mess hit my boots like a rotten pumpkin. Seething, I glared up at the pitiless gray sky for a second before I lost it completely.
“Goddamn-fucking-cunt-fuck-shit-ass-fucker!” I yelled.
I flailed and stomped my boot in disgust as a dollop of shit hit the sliding glass door like refried beans. In a blind rage, I kicked the ruptured bag of shit across the deck, then marched down the steps to the lawn, where I began dragging my boot and wiping my hands in the wet grass.
“Shit-fucking-mother-of-fuck!”
I must have gotten old Duke’s attention, because he’d lumbered to his feet and was standing there behind the glass, gazing out impassively, both eyes milky with cataracts.
“Fuck you,” I said.
But Duke didn’t bat an eye. He just lay back down with his big square head on his paws, let out a sigh, and closed his eyes.
This was the final indignity. The McClures’ fucking dog had a better life than me. Sure, he was bored. But he was warm, dry, well fed, and he could shit anywhere he pleased, and some poor schlep like me would clean up after him. And here I was, disconsolate in the rain, with shit on my hands. Again, I’m not blaming Duke. But what the fuck is wrong with this picture?
I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, I spent a half hour trying to clean up the mess, and you can damn well bet I wasn’t happy about it. But without another bag, there was only so much I could do.
So I left.
Boldly, into the Future
Look, I’m not stupid. There was really no use in going to work the next day. I knew damn well I was a goner. But I wanted to see Lacy one more time and let him have it, let him know he could clean up his own dog shit if it was so important to him. I guess I needed to prove to myself that I did the right thing.
Lawn Boy Page 3