In the Weeds

by Daniel Browne

  in the weeds

  Garrett County Press

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition 2018

  ISBN: 9781939430205

  Designed by Kevin Stone

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Garrett County Press books are distributed to the trade by National Book Network, 800-462-6420.

  www.gcpress.com

  in the weeds

  Daniel Browne

  Garrett County Press

  Beforehand (this had begun with his childhood and kept growing until he was completely adult) when he had tried to do something for the good of everyone, for mankind, for Russia, for the whole village, he would notice that thinking about it was agreeable, but that the activity itself was always incoherent...

  – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  Hello, Brooklyn, how you doing? Where you going? And can I come too?

  – Jay-Z, “Hello Brooklyn 2.0”

  Contents

  Under the Lunch Bus

  Savory Brooklyn

  Save the Chickens

  First Fruit

  A Farm Without Grit

  Building That Network

  The Professionals

  Till the Revolution Comes

  Shovel Ready

  Vegetable Unity

  Kids Are People

  No Peas

  Lone Ranger

  Power to You People

  Astride the Hump

  The Next Evolution

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Under the Lunch Bus

  The chairman was slung low in his seat, his long legs crossed at the ankles, pink, manicured fingers folded over a soft knoll of belly. “We’re not paying them off,” he said. “Not happening.”

  I hadn’t even gotten the words “financial compensation” out of my mouth. The meeting was off to a bad start, but what else was new?

  We’d come to that colorless conference room to discuss the construction of the Second Avenue subway, a hundred-year boondoggle recently revived. Vivienne had been getting complaints from her constituents on the Upper East Side. Blast excavation was sending up plumes of smoke and debris right on their doorsteps. Drilling was shaking their foundations; scaffolding obscured their signs. Business was down by half, the end nowhere in sight. It was my job to come up with recommendations to ease their plight. Ever watch a public hearing on TV and notice a youngish person in a wrinkled suit discreetly passing notes to the official on the dais? That rumpled note-passer was me.

  This was my last chance to do something useful for the people before Vivienne left the city council. A well-known Park Avenue socialite, she’d been fundraising for liberal causes and candidates, serving on boards and blue ribbon commissions, for thirty years. Her friends—Ralph as in Lauren, Bill as in Clinton—were always needling her about running for office, and after her older husband, a legendary white-shoe lawyer, died on the tennis court, she finally felt bored enough to do it. Turns out, though, she didn’t like the job much, found it sordid, throwing elbows at the same people she rubbed shoulders with at the Century Club, grubbing for headlines in papers that referred to her only as “Viv” or “Vanderbilt confidante.” When Bloomberg made his controversial push to change the law so he could run for a third term, she was quick to announce that, as a matter of principle, she would bow out at the end of her second.

  By the time we got on the MTA chairman’s calendar, we were deep in running-out-the-clock mode. Vivienne’s lunch meetings were getting longer, the invitees more likely to be gossip columnists and tennis pros than PR consultants and pollsters. Daily briefings were increasingly held at the hair salon. Still, I had my talking points committed to memory and a folder full of supporting documents at hand. I’d already passed out copies of some letters of complaint we’d received from Second Avenue business owners. Now I mentioned that in Portland the city had backed loans to small businesses affected by an extension of the municipal light rail system.

  The chairman gave his flunky—a moonfaced lunk with Addams Family hair plastered to his forehead—a quick eye-roll. I’d heard he was halfway out the door himself, looking to break into the international consulting racket, and clearly he felt no need to keep up appearances.

  “This ain’t Portland,” he said.

  Vivienne held out her hand as if to stop my next suggestion before it reached the chairman’s ear. “No one’s saying we’re Portland. Anyway, we have ideas that don’t involve money. Right, Will?”

  I shuffled my stack of papers. “There are ways of mitigating the loss of business. We did a scan of best practices.”

  “Well, isn’t that enterprising,” the chairman said. He flapped his fingers in a bring-it-on gesture. “What’ve you got?”

  My eye fell to the top of my stack. “Seattle has a lunch bus program.”

  “What’s a lunch bus? Is that like a food truck?”

  “What’s a food truck?” Vivienne asked.

  “No food trucks on Park Avenue yet, Viv? You should talk to your pal Danny about doing one up there. The kids are crazy for them.”

  I could hear the hinge of my jaw pop as I tried to cut in. “Once a week,” I said, “the city of Seattle provides a shuttle to its employees so they can visit an area affected by construction and have lunch at the restaurants there.”

  The chairman glanced over at the lunk and then at Vivienne as if he expected one of them to reveal the hidden camera, let him in on the prank.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  The lunk suppressed a grin.

  “It’s considered a successful program,” I said.

  “How many employees do we have?” the chairman asked.

  “Forty-eight thousand,” the lunk said, without looking up. He was now lost in his screen, probably texting his fellow transit drones, letting them know they were missing amateur hour.

  “In how many locations?”

  “Dozens.”

  The chairman turned his palms up, voila. “And I’m supposed to get them all up to Vinny’s Pizza in rush hour traffic, spend who knows how much on logistics so they can shell out a buck-fifty on a slice?”

  “We’re not talking about every transit employee in the city. Think of it as more of a goodwill gesture.”

  The chairman cocked a sandy eyebrow. “With all due respect, we’re moving more than five million passengers a day. We don’t do gestures.”

  Vivienne snickered. “You have to admit, Will, it sounds pretty silly.”

  For a moment, there was silence. Blood rushed to my ears; my throat went dry. Even the chairman seemed stunned by how quickly she’d thrown me under the bus.

  Strong-arming done for the day, his tone shifted. “Look, we’re really not the ones you want to talk to. My job is to get this damn tunnel built before another hundred years goes by. That’s the mayor’s priority. We’ve got Small Business Services to help out mom and pop.”

  Vivienne nodded, apparently missing the condescension in this little civics lesson.

  “But I understand you’ve got to go back to your people with something, so how about this: On Monday, we’re going to launch a website for the businesses in the corridor, let people know they’re still open, do regular updates on any promotions or special offers they’re running, maybe spotlight a different business every week. Have I got that right?”

  “It’s more of a webpage than a website,” the lunk said.

  “Site, page, what do I know? The point is, we’re dedicating MTA staff time and resources to addressing
this issue.”

  “How is anyone going to know this webpage exists?” I asked.

  “We’ll do the usual song and dance, press release, e-blast…press conference?”

  The lunk shook his head, a mortician who’s been asked about the possibility of an open casket.

  “OK, no press conference. Unless, of course, you want to do one, take a little credit. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like you want us to do your PR for you.”

  “Really? Because I think we’re going above and beyond here.”

  A year or two ago, I might have just moved on to the next paper in my folder, kept throwing out proposals—sales tax holiday? off-street parking for construction vehicles?—till the chairman was so sick of me he’d promise something, if only a follow-up meeting. That, I figured, was what they meant by “incremental progress.” Now I was just burning to get outside. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d spent the better part of my young adulthood in government conference rooms and government conference rooms never had windows.

  The chairman turned to Vivienne. She stood and offered him her pallid, ring-studded hand. “You’ve been more than generous.”

  I glared at her. I couldn’t help it.

  “With your time,” she added quickly.

  The chairman unfolded himself like a mantis and engulfed her hand in his florid executive pincer. I was forced to press flesh with the lunk, who was, inevitably, clammy as a dog’s nose.

  Meeting over. And so, I decided at that moment, was my career in politics.

  The chairman held the door for Vivienne. “This wasn’t your last official business, was it?”

  “You know, I’m not sure. We’ve got a few days left till the winter break, but after that it’s my successor’s problem. No one can believe I’m walking away, but I had to take a stand.”

  “Will I be seeing you in St. Barts?”

  She made a curlicue in the air with her hand. “I’m trying to carve out some time to myself, but there’s been a flood of offers.” Sigh for emphasis. “Whatever will be will be.”

  The chairman mimicked the flutter of her hand, giving it a little extra zazz. “Always leave ’em wanting more, right?”

  * * *

  Back in the Viv-mobile—black SUV, plusher than the mayor’s, to hear her tell it—I was brooding over what the chairman had said about a Park Avenue food truck. Could that be my next move? After the meeting we’d just left, the notion of dishing out Waldorf salads from a to-go window had its appeal. I could call it the Ladies Who Lunch Truck. Maybe I was just hungry. Other than a damp tuna sandwich before the meeting, I hadn’t eaten all day. Tricia was doing her monthly evening shift, so I texted Elliot to see if he was free for dinner.

  Vivienne, meanwhile, was buoyant. “Feels good to be going out on a high note.”

  My face must have given me away.

  “Come on,” she said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. We got the website.”

  “Webpage.”

  “Do you think the guy who owns Vinny’s Pizza knows the difference?”

  “I don’t think there is a Vinny’s Pizza. That was a rhetorical flourish.”

  Vivienne swatted away my gloom. “We did what we could.”

  “We could have threatened to go to the press, tell them the Second Avenue subway is killing small businesses and the MTA won’t do anything to help.”

  “Will, you know the press won’t pay attention if you’re not running for something. That’s what I get for taking a stand, right?”

  “Right.” For everyone’s safety, I aimed my death-stare out the window.

  In the reflection, I watched her fish a compact from her purse and take a gander. “You have to admit, the bus thing is pretty goofy. I mean, New York imitating Portland? Can you imagine?”

  Savory Brooklyn

  As soon as I set foot in Rita’s, I was hit with its distinctive smell, a mix of fresh basil and bathroom sex. The place was packed as always, never mind it was a Tuesday night. The regulars were yowling along to AC/DC. I was the only one dressed like I’d come from the office.

  Vivienne was wrong, part wrong anyway. Manhattan, with its glass and steel towers, its greenery largely confined to Central Park, could never be Portland, a modestly proportioned town surrounded by forest, a kind of nature preserve for the young and the restless, tattoo artists and furniture makers, freelance video game designers and adventure sports enthusiasts. Brooklyn, on the other hand, was looking more like Portland—more organic, more handcrafted, hairier—every day.

  In 2009, Brooklyn was about two-thirds of the way through its evolution into Brooklyn™. The Hasids, the Poles, the Puerto Ricans, the Dominicans, the old-school Italians—they were all still around. Traders had been bunking down in Brooklyn Heights for a while, taking the R train two stops to “the street.” The artists, already zoned out of the warehouses in Williamsburg, were taking their perpetual 1978 to the Queens border. Some of them were old enough to have seen this movie play out across the bridge in Soho and Tribeca.

  Then there were the ones like me—white people with inessential degrees, no church or temple but maybe a yoga practice, some posters nice enough to frame. Fifteen years ago, we wouldn’t even have considered living in Brooklyn. Now, it was just what you did. The financial collapse was supposed to drag down rents in Manhattan, but if that happened, I missed it. In any case, I’d already landed in Brooklyn by then. It didn’t take me long to realize it was more than just a place to crash after a day’s work in “the city.” Once people left behind the high-rises and the tourist hordes, it seemed to open up the possibility of a whole new lifestyle. I knew that lifestyle existed because I saw it in the pages of Savory Brooklyn.

  Savory Brooklyn was a free magazine stocked in the gourmet stores and wine shops that dotted my neighborhood of Park Slope, its cover graced with luminous photos of crusty loaves and tattooed artisans in flour-dusted aprons. The text inside adhered to a set of tropes I came to recognize after a few issues: Subject X had been toiling away in [finance/academia/PR/fashion] but felt unfulfilled. On a trip to [Asia/the deep South/a clandestine supper club], he/she was moved by the humble yet sophisticated foodstuffs on offer, steeped in history and meaning, so different from the anonymous fare we’ve been conditioned to expect from our rootless, industrial monoculture. He/she began making his/her own [pickled watermelon rind/quinoa dosa/foraged elderflower-infused gin] as a hobby and giving it away to friends at [dinner parties/the holidays]. The first time one of those friends said, “This is amazing. You need to bottle this stuff and go into business!” he/she laughed it off as hyperbole, but eventually the revelation set in: This is what brings me happiness, not [making even more money for the one percent/elucidating some abstruse point of theory/perpetuating the tyranny of body image]. Why keep at it when I could be working with my hands, giving a little piece of myself to others, bringing a smile to their faces, turning them on to the simple power of a good thing crafted with love?

  Fortunately, he/she had set a little money aside. Even better, one of his/her loyal “customers” turned out to be a venture capitalist with an itch to give back. Fate was speaking loud and clear: time to go professional. It was tough finding a suitable production space (shout-out to the transgender art collective that was looking to get out of its lease), and moving from a home kitchen to an industrial one wasn’t without its headaches—he/she’s become a regular MacGyver when it comes to repairs!—but by far the biggest challenge has been keeping up with demand. In fact, the only way to source enough raw ingredients of the quality and provenance the famously discerning Brooklyn clientele has come to expect is to cultivate his/her own sustainable [greenhouse/apiary/chicken run], a whole new adventure, more than that, an opportunity to learn about one’s place in the eternal circle of life—and leave Brooklyn a little greener than he/she found it. And to think, none of it would ever have come to pass if he/she hadn’t taken that first plucky step into the unknown!

  I r
ead this story in all its many manifestations dozens of times that year; I couldn’t get enough. Flipping through the pages of Savory Brooklyn—not glossy but of a weighty, sumptuous stock—gave me a whisper of the feeling I used to get from watching The West Wing as a crusading student council president.

  But no tale of reinvention made a stronger impression on me than the legend of Rita’s.

  People who knew things said that John Cardini, Rita’s principal owner, had been an international security contractor who’d earned his nut supervising ransom drop-offs, training dictators’ bodyguards, that kind of thing. When he returned, he had money but no particular plan. On a whim, he bought an abandoned factory on a grim industrial block in Bushwick and used it as a clubhouse for his friends: bikers, metalheads, stoners, a wide assortment of ne’er-do-wells and extreme bohemians. One late night, John’s boys were complaining about the long walk to the nearest taco stand, and someone mentioned that what he could really go for was his grandfather’s pizza. His Nonno Arturo had a restaurant in Sicily, and you just couldn’t find anything like his pies in the States, not even at di Fara’s or Lombardi’s. Something about the brick oven, a whole fading way of life baked into its cracks. The shame of it was Nonno Arturo was retiring; soon you wouldn’t be able to get his mind-altering pizza in Sicily either.

  John’s vision came to him then and there. Just hours later he was shouting at Nonno Arturo, the connection patchy, making a godfather offer for his mystical oven. It took months of back and forth, protracted consultations with the shipping company and customs, but eventually the ancient heap arrived more or less intact on the doorstep of his clubhouse, which from that moment forward was a pizzeria. He did all the necessary renovations without permits, taking electrical shocks from frayed wires and giving out bribes to city inspectors with equal stoicism. He didn’t decorate, just left the space raw, cinderblock walls, chicken wire over the front window. He and the guys hewed the long plank tables and benches in the backyard. For the bar, they salvaged metal and wood from the scrap yard around the corner. He never told anyone who Rita was.