In the Weeds

by Daniel Browne

  “You’re kidding.”

  I looked to Elliot for back-up. He gave me the old hand across the throat sign.

  “So, strategy. How formal a meeting is this? Will he mind us calling him Martin? Or should we go with Mr. …” He trailed off. At least I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know who we were on our way to meet.

  Vivienne sniffed. “Well, considering you’re dressed like a hobo, I’d say that formal isn’t an option. Just follow my lead.”

  Not exactly fair, given that the meeting was sprung on us at the last minute, but even with a month’s notice, Elliot probably would have shown up in the same baggy corduroy pants and half-tucked denim shirt.

  “He must be pretty excited about the project to schedule us so quickly,” I said.

  “He’s going to Israel next Tuesday, and he won’t be back till September. I practically had to beg to get us in. We’re lucky John is able to make it.”

  I was just starting to mentally cross-reference the Israel clue when the mention of John made my brain lock up.

  “Wait. John from Rita’s? He’s coming?”

  “He was so good with Arthur and Barbara. And since we don’t have time to take Martin to Brooklyn, I thought we’d bring Brooklyn to him.”

  Elliot let his fingers root around in the tangle of hair above his collar. “So you two have been in touch?”

  “He asked for my number at the restaurant. And then yesterday he called. He wanted to see if I could help him sort out a problem with the Department of Buildings.”

  I tried to picture when, over the course of that evening, John had the opportunity to hit Vivienne up for her number, but my memory was shrouded in food fuzz.

  “And could you?” Elliot asked, aiming for just-out-of-curiosity. “Help, I mean.”

  “What do you think? It was just some silliness over permits.”

  “Hector Contreras couldn’t handle it?”

  Hector Contreras was the councilman in Rita’s neck of the woods. A real backslapper. Front row center at every presser and rally. Great suits.

  “Hector Contreras doesn’t know anybody at DOB. That’s the problem with these grassroots types. Big talk, but they don’t know how to get anything done.”

  Or maybe he just wasn’t inclined to call in this particular favor (which, for Vivienne’s sake, I hoped wasn’t too dodgy). Hector’s political base wasn’t exactly teeming with guys like John Cardini.

  John was waiting for us when we pulled up to our destination, one of those all-glass Midtown towers you can’t take in from street level. It was unclear from his attire—red checked flannel and chinos, leather work boots—whether he’d attempted to dress up for the occasion. He nodded silently as we joined him.

  “So we hear Vivienne has been pulling strings for you,” I said while we waited for security to print out our visitor badges.

  John’s eyes narrowed slightly. “That’s a different project. We’re building a radio station on the back patio.”

  I bopped my head as if I were already picking up the signal. “Cool. Just let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help.”

  “I think we’ve got it under control for now.” John stepped aside so Vivienne could be first on the elevator. He was right behind her; Elliot and I piled in last.

  Martin turned out to be Martin Gollick, as in the Gollick School of Business, the Gollick Institute for Jewish Culture, and Gollick Media, publisher of several of the city’s community weeklies. One of the original hedge fund whiz kids, he was probably best known as the founder of Next Year in Jerusalem, which promises every assimilated Jewish teen in America a free trip to the Holy Land and inevitably sends them back wearing yarmulkes and hassling their moms about the bacon bits in the salad.

  I vaguely remembered a story about him circulating at the council. A reporter we all knew had scored a rare interview and tour of his Westchester estate. Gollick was keen to show her around his private zoo and insisted she pet his favorite camel. No one consulted the camel, though; it bit straight through her arm. She had to be airlifted to the nearest hospital. More upsetting to Gollick, the camel had to be killed on the spot. Apparently, the only way to tell if it had rabies was to examine its brain.

  So now we knew: this was the guy people like Vivienne and the Schlossers turned to when they needed a little financial aid.

  His office was like a modest wing in a venerable museum of antiquities. Relics were scattered around on pedestals and book shelves: bronze urns, shards of pottery imprinted with what I took to be cuneiform. The floor-to-ceiling windows were shaded, the overhead lighting diffuse. Gollick himself was seated behind a glass oval desk, his paunch visibly pressing against the underside as he tucked into a vast chopped salad. With his buck teeth, round specs, and capacious crescent of mustache, his pink suspenders unhitched, he looked like a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Jackie Mason. He waved us over to the leather sofa opposite him.

  “Vivvy, you don’t call, you don’t write. Must be all these young men you’re spending time with.” His breathing was labored, his voice a rumble that sounded painful to produce.

  Vivienne made a little moue. “Maybe if you got out more, we’d run into each other.”

  Listening to them flirt like teenagers somehow made me feel like a toddler. I crossed my legs, wishing I’d hit the bathroom before we sat down.

  “I’m worried if I get out they’ll never let me back in.” A phlegmy crackle followed, Gollick appreciating his own joke. We each chipped in with our own not-quite laugh, except for John, of course, who may have lifted one corner of his mouth a fraction of an inch.

  Gollick crumpled his napkin and dropped it into the remains of his salad. “We better get down to it. I don’t want to have to cut you off in the middle.”

  We got down to it. Vivienne talked up the enthusiasm of the Schlossers. Elliot rhapsodized about being a model for schools across the country. I chipped in my bullet points on obesity and bodegas. It was hard to tell how much he was taking in. His milky eyes wandered to the ceiling and, from time to time, closed altogether for what felt like long intervals. We wrapped up with the Year One budget. In the car, Vivienne had insisted that, when dealing with a man like Martin, you had to bring hard numbers to the table. All we had was the back-of-the-napkin guesstimate we’d come up with that first night at Rita’s: two hundred thousand.

  “Three hundred fifty thousand to get us up and running,” Vivienne said with finality.

  A flicker crossed Gollick’s face, a mere tremor of an eyelid, which I imagined was amusement at the paltry sum on which our fates depended. Just one of his ancient potsherds would have been more than enough to bankroll our rich and fulfilling new lives.

  “I don’t care about Year One,” he croaked. “What’s your sustainability plan?”

  I looked at Elliot who looked at Vivienne. She squared her shoulders. “We were hoping to get your advice on that very thing.”

  Another amused tremor. “You want my advice? Figure out how to make money selling veggies in the ghetto. Because I’m not bankrolling you in perpetuity. In fact, I’m not bankrolling you at all till you show me how this thing starts to pay for itself.”

  There followed a pause filled only by the sound of Gollick’s breathing. It’s not that we were unfamiliar with the concept of a sustainability plan. But events had been moving so quickly, there’d been no time to come up with one.

  “I can field this.” It was John, speaking for the first time since he’d introduced himself.

  Gollick sized him up, throwing his whole head into it. “You’re the pizza man.”

  John didn’t flinch. “I’m a businessman. And I can tell you, businessman to businessman, we don’t expect the farm to pay for itself.”

  “You don’t?”

  I uncrossed my legs again, knocking knees with Elliot, who stared at the tasseled scimitar in a case on the wall. Wondering, I figured, whether he’d need to use it on John. Vivienne’s face was frozen in a grin as if anticipating the
punchline of a joke.

  “We don’t expect it to pay for itself. We expect it to turn a profit.”

  Gollick coughed, as if John’s answer had gone down the wrong tube, like a wayward crouton. “You’ll have to excuse an old man. I thought we were talking about a not-for-profit.”

  “We are,” I said.

  “My partners,” John lifted his chin in our direction. “They’re do-gooders. Nothing wrong with that. Me, I’m a capitalist. I’ve got a need at my restaurant. Customers want to see the words ‘locally grown’ on the menu, and they want it to mean ‘grown in New York City,’ not the Hudson Valley or Connecticut. And I figure, if this is a need at my restaurant, it’s a need at other restaurants, too. I want to be the one to fill that need. I know there’s money, lots of money, to be made filling that need, if we do it right. And if we can do some good for kids in the community while we’re making money, all the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

  We braced ourselves while Gollick mulled John’s speech—or took another micro-nap, hard to say. When he finally spoke, the words seemed to come from a deeper, more serene place inside him.

  “Do you know what fraise de bois are?” he asked.

  I spoke up when it was clear no one else was going to. “Isn’t fraise French for strawberry?”

  He gave his mustache a pensive stroke. “It is. But the French strawberry is a completely different experience from the tasteless junk you find in supermarkets here. When I was living in Paris in my twenties, one of the old women in the market let me try one. I couldn’t believe it. That intense flavor. Like going from black-and-white to Technicolor. My first thought was that if I could grow strawberries like that back home, I could make a fortune.

  “So that’s what I did. I sweet-talked the old woman into introducing me to her supplier, and I convinced him to sell me a cutting from one of his bushes. I smuggled the plant back to the States in my coat and brought it to my summer house upstate, where I’d have space to cultivate on a commercial scale. I consulted horticulture experts from Cornell to figure out exactly the right conditions: temperature, soil, exposure to sunlight. When the first fruiting came, I was so nervous, more than when I started my company. The flavor was there, maybe not quite as vibrant as the original, but miles beyond anything you could get anywhere else in North America at the time. I was certain of that.

  “So Jeannie—that’s my late wife—and I loaded our crop into the bed of an old pickup truck I’d restored, and we drove it down to the city bright and early. We went to all our favorite restaurants, we insisted on speaking to the head chef, and we wouldn’t leave until they tried our fraise de bois. Every last one of them had the same reaction I had in Paris. They couldn’t believe what they were tasting. This was when nouvelle cuisine was starting to take over New York. Strawberries weren’t just for dessert anymore. We could name our price.

  “The problem was the demand was insatiable. We were waking up at four in the morning every morning to haul another batch of those damned berries to the city. At a certain point, it wasn’t practical anymore. I had my business to run. Jeannie had the kids. I suppose we could’ve hired people to handle it for us, but I didn’t see the point. From the beginning, this was a labor of love.

  “I realized the only solution was to grow them in the city, so we could cut out the back and forth. I found an old warehouse and converted it into a greenhouse. I brought in the Cornell people again, poured close to a million dollars into the thing. It was an obsession. No matter what I did, though, I couldn’t get the same flavor here as I did upstate. The berries were just as bland as the imposters from the supermarket. The restaurants lost interest, and I had to give the whole thing up.”

  Gollick paused to let his story sink in or maybe just catch his breath. We sat in silence, mesmerized. The epilogue was aimed straight at John.

  “So, my fellow businessman, my question for you is this: are you confident that what you grow on a rooftop in Brooklyn will be good enough to serve in a four-star Manhattan restaurant?”

  John met his wavering gaze and held it. “No doubt.”

  “He can even grow your fraise de bois for you if you want,” I heard myself say.

  John’s back stiffened, but he kept his eyes on Gollick. I spotted a faint movement beneath the old man’s mustache, but I couldn’t tell if he was smirking skeptically or smacking his lips at the memory.

  “In that case, you’ve got my support. Because if you can do that, you’re going to be sitting on a gold mine.”

  It took Gollick struggling to dislodge himself from his desk for me to comprehend that the meeting was over and we were leaving with a commitment. Even when we were back on the street, divested of our visitor badges, it was unclear what exactly he had committed to. A donation? An investment? Did he expect to see a return?

  “Was all that true?” I asked John. “We’re going to make a profit on this?”

  John watched the traffic like it was a mighty river in which he alone could discern the elusive nature of truth. “It depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “The margin on fucking fraise de bois.”

  I gave him a cold smile. “Maybe we’re a nonprofit after all.”

  Elliot eased himself between us. “We are whatever we want to be, right, guys?”

  “Until we file the paperwork,” I said.

  “Forget the paperwork,” Vivienne chimed in as she rummaged through her purse. “Martin wants to see you do something. That’s what men like him respect. So that’s what we’re going to do. Damn it, where did I put my phone?”

  “You gave both your phones to Kat.”

  “Who?”

  I took a deep breath and thought, so this is what an adventure feels like. I was starting to have fun.

  A Farm Without Grit

  It turned out to be harder to get an audience with the principal of Begin to Win than with the mighty Martin Gollick. Finally, after nearly a week of noodging, we were in. He was a man straight out of ’80s teen movie central casting: colorless hair cut close to the scalp, wire-rimmed glasses, khakis. He seemed edgy, distracted, and not all that enthused about the prospect of a vegetable farm on his roof. He reeled off a fuzzy spiel about the school’s new focus on “literacy and numeracy,” but once we conveyed how excited about the project the Schlossers were, all the fight went out of him. He introduced us to Edgar, the weather-beaten head of maintenance. Call ahead anytime we needed access to the roof, the principal told us, and Edgar would take care of it. Meanwhile, he would round up some teachers to work with Elliot on the curriculum. Basically, he arranged matters so he wouldn’t have to talk to us again. Elliot made a bland comment about coordinating with the District 75 school. That set off a round of sputtering about “efficient allocation of resources” and “respecting autonomy.” We let it go and left him rearranging stacks of papers in his office.

  Our meeting with Tommy Brutti was set for the following day. Vivienne was sitting this one out. She’d graced Begin to Win with her presence one time—the grand opening twenty years ago—and said that was enough for her. Her understanding of our powwow with Gollick was that he had tacitly agreed to cover our entire first-year budget, and while there was no harm in adding to the kitty, she’d essentially done the heavy lifting for us.

  So the welcome committee consisted of John, Elliot, and me, along with Edgar, the maintenance guy, who inspected the blacktop roof with a proprietary eye.

  “So you guys really putting a garden up here?” he asked.

  “A farm,” I said, using my hand as a visor, the very picture of a man with a vision.

  The view from the roof was less than majestic. I could make out a sliver of the BQE in the near distance. Behind us loomed the hulk of Woodhull Hospital. The scenery at ground-level wasn’t much of an improvement. Most of the acre or so outside the doors of Begin to Win was taken up by a car lot; among the teachers’ dingy compacts were a couple of beaters, apparently abandoned, and a carpet cleaning van, probably
taking advantage of the free parking.

  Alongside the lot was a scruffy playground with a faded jungle gym and merry-go-round—not the kind with ponies and music, the kind that’s just a metal disc on a spindle with a few bars to hang onto—pale, anemic pines poking out of the perimeter swale. Adjacent to the playground was a handball court, its concrete spiderwebbed with cracks. The scene was desolate, despite the neat brick row houses lining the street opposite the playground (formerly Pfizer worker housing) and the projects whose outer edge faced the handball court on the other side of the block. Suffice to say, the space wasn’t a neighborhood hub.

  Not exactly inspiring, but taking it all in, I felt like I was getting somewhere. Just a few days ago, I’d been trapped in a windowless conference room, yearning for the outdoors. Now here I was. One small step for Will, but I’d take it.

  “A farm,” Edgar said. “So, like with chickens?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Eventually. But for now just vegetables.”

  “In boxes?”

  John answered, his back to the rest of us. “No boxes. Just a layer of gravel and a layer of soil. Better yield that way.”

  Edgar crouched down as if the roof, his roof, wanted to tell him something. “That’s a lot of weight.”

  I said, “We’re going to hire a structural engineer to make sure it’s safe.” I’d been looking into it. “That reminds me, do you have access to the building plans?”

  He squinted as if my question were a beam of light. “Access? Yeah, but I got to remember where they are. What vegetables you going to grow, anyway?”

  We turned to John. “Tomatoes, lettuce, herbs, zucchini…”

  “Fraise de bois,” I said.

  John may have grunted, or he may not have reacted at all.

  Edgar shook his head. “You got to grow chilies, tomatillo, calabaza. That’s what people eat around here.”

  “You garden, Edgar?” Elliot asked.

  “Oh, sure. I’ve got a garden for the kids around back.”

  I’d been gazing at the crummy view, but now my head snapped in his direction. “Wait, this school already has a garden?”