In the Weeds

by Daniel Browne

  “I’ve actually been planning to make a move into politics myself,” Mr. Clark said.

  Ah. I tried to fix an expression of cordial but mild interest on my face. Not sure if I succeeded, but it hardly mattered. Mr. Clark didn’t need much encouragement.

  “I’ve been a member of the Community Free Democrats for a couple of years now. My wife is telling people all the time, ‘Bernard was out at that club of his again last night,’ and they all think I’m partying! Anyway, maybe you and I could meet for coffee at some point, pick each other’s brains. That’s what it’s all about, right? Building that network?”

  I said my own job search was keeping me pretty busy, but the center had my contact information on file now, so he should feel free to get in touch if he needed anything. I told him he would go far in politics, and I meant it. An enthusiastic young man who could command a room and reel off sentences by the yard? He was going to be fine. We both were.

  The Professionals

  It was time to put our team together, caper movie style.

  Of course, it started with a friend of Elliot’s, a landscape architect who’d been involved in designing the most high-profile new park in memory. The High Line was a stretch of elevated freight rail, unused for decades, on the West Side of Manhattan. A neighborhood group led by a magazine writer and a consultant, with backing from the Bloomberg administration and Chelsea bigwigs like Diane von Furstenberg, were in the process of transforming it into one-and-a-half miles of grass, plants, and art installations. The first leg had opened the previous summer, and it was pretty sexy, like a MOMA annex dropped in a meadow—a meadow that just happened to be 30 feet off the ground. It was the beau ideal of Bloomberg’s New York, free to one and all but with a sleek, exclusive feel. It almost pissed me off how much I admired it.

  Needless to say, Elliot’s friend was too busy to donate her services to our little project, but she knew a landscape designer named Seth Greenberg from architecture school and thought he was just what we were looking for. He’d recently started a company called Green ’Burgs—“I know, I know, but my mom likes it” was one of the first things he said to us—devoted to bringing “high-quality design and sustainable practices” to places that typically couldn’t afford them: schools, senior centers, prisons. That was the idea, anyway. I couldn’t tell if he’d had an opportunity to work his magic in any of those places yet. We promised to be just the high-profile client he needed to boost his visibility, which I suppose was why he was so excited to be working with us even though we weren’t in a position to pay him anything close to the going commercial rate.

  The Green ’Burgs offices were in a repurposed factory in Gowanus, an industrial no-man’s land that realtors were strenuously trying to turn into a real place. Gowanus sat right between my neighborhood and Carroll Gardens where Elliot lived, yet I didn’t even know the area had a name till a few months earlier. Why those vested with christening power chose to identify it with the Gowanus Canal—a festering toxic slurry, breeding ground for gonorrhea, last resting place of nautical wreckage (and the rare, improbable houseboat)—was a mystery to me. Maybe they figured it would provide just the right note of squalor to compete with Bushwick, but if so, they were underestimating the canal’s power to offend the senses. On mild days, it was blanketed with an opaque, milky scum. When temperatures rose, it stank. It had even killed a baby minke whale; coined “Sludgie” by the blogs, he got stuck between the canal’s banks and was presumably poisoned by the remnants of coal and petroleum that used to be processed there. Back in 2005, Whole Foods had bought up a huge swath of empty land for its first Brooklyn store, only to find out that the ground was contaminated and required years of heavy-duty environmental clean-up. It was difficult for me to picture a restaurant like Rita’s or a bar like The Customs House moving in and turning the place into a hipster, and eventually yuppie, paradise.

  Shows what I know. The reason Seth decided to base Green ’Burgs in Gowanus—aside from the cheap rent and the fact that it was exactly the kind of urban wasteland he hoped to revive—was that the factory (the landlords were calling it an “entrepreneurial incubator”) was steps away from a new condo development that claimed to be “the most energy efficient and environmentally sustainable residential project in Brooklyn.” More meaningful to space-starved sophisticates, the apartments were duplexes with private entrances and backyards—an impossibly precious luxury in the neighborhoods on either side of the canal. In Gowanus, the asking price was a comparatively reasonable $1 million. Who cared if those floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on a channel of iridescent muck, if July barbecues were pervaded by a foul effluvium? In New York, real estate is a force more inexorable than nature. The developers were heavily invested in the premise that Gowanus would be cleansed and their building would be the anchor of a thriving waterfront community. They were promising to throw Seth some work down the line.

  As it was, there was something vaguely exciting about rambling through Gowanus in search of Green ’Burgs HQ. For years, I’d lived within walking distance, yet I’d always assumed the area was pretty much abandoned. Tricia worked with a shelter that was trying to get a handle on the feral cat population, but that was about all I knew. In the course of our wanderings, though, Elliot and I came across an art-gallery-cum-performance-space (full, at the time, of dense, apocalyptic line drawings); a bakery with tin ceilings, plank floors, and a crew of hot-yet-hospitable bakers (and hence our new regular meeting spot); a shop that sold only terrariums (the sign said, “imagine your world and let us create it for you”); a Zen meditation center. It was a self-contained little society of enterprising pioneers, Brooklyn’s own Deadwood.

  To the extent that Gowanus had a center, the incubator was it. Green ’Burgs’ next-door neighbor was a respected indie hiphop label. Upstairs was a start-up devoted to cutting-edge sneaker design (they published a slick zine for sneaker freaks out of the same space). Nobody was entirely sure what was going on the top floor, but Seth insinuated it was porn-related. Maybe one day, when we were managing a network of rooftop farms across the borough, Elliot and I would have our headquarters in this hive of industrious cool.

  With Seth around, at least we wouldn’t be the only bourgeois white boys. Earnest and enthusiastic, he was the kind of slightly doughy Jewish guy whose idea of being his own boss is wearing a Patrick Ewing jersey (over a T-shirt, of course) to the office. But that was fine by me. As far as I was concerned, the Rita’s gang was giving us more street cred than we knew what to do with. Seth was just what we needed, an agreeable achiever out to do well by doing good (his words), a team player with the jersey to prove it. He was eager to take the brief we’d given him—to design a teaching farm as picture-perfect and state-of-the-art as the Living Classroom at a tenth of the cost—and run with it. In our first meeting, he was already sketching us pictures of bird feeders, a woven bamboo fence with pea shoots, a hoop house that could function as a winter classroom.

  The first step was to make sure the Begin to Win roof was structurally sound and could handle the weight of the farm and all those half-pint farmers. That’s where Twitchy came in. A Mormon recently relocated from Salt Lake, Twitchy was a structural engineer but for some reason looked like a collage of ’50s style: rockabilly pompadour, Buddy Holly hornrims, black skinny jeans, cowboy boots. Seth found him on some engineering message board. We called him Twitchy because he seemed to be in a constant, low-pitched struggle to master his nerves. The steel toe of his boot was always tapping, his head always darting as if he’d just caught sight of something shiny out of the corner of his eye. In combination with the pompadour, it gave him a birdlike quality.

  He’d come from Utah to work for one of the big architecture firms, where for six months he’d done nothing but check blueprints for measurement errors. Suffice to say, he didn’t need to be convinced to donate his services pro bono. He even took a sick day to meet us and check out the roof.

  He’d asked us to bring the blueprints so he could come
up with a game plan. If they were sufficiently detailed they might be enough to satisfy the insurance company. I was embarrassed the issue of insurance hadn’t crossed my mind until then, doubly embarrassed there was a problem with the blueprints. Edgar the maintenance chief hadn’t been able to track them down.

  “They weren’t in the drawer where they’re supposed to be,” he told us when we called for an update. I thought about the stacks of paper forming a kind of bureaucratic Stonehenge on and around Principal Jenner’s desk—what were the chances of finding them there? Elliot enlisted a drinking buddy at the Department of Buildings to see if he could locate the copy on file with the city, but said buddy didn’t sound optimistic.

  The lack of blueprints had set Twitchy off on a foot-tapping, head-jerking jag. “Right. Okay. Let me think. We’ll have to do a stress test.”

  We said that sounded good to us and asked him what was involved.

  “Well, normally you’d just use a bunch of weights, pile them up gradually so you can measure the stress on the beams. But we’re not going to be able to get the weights all the way up here without a crane. Darn it!”

  It was hard to figure how a guy could get so worked up without any caffeine in his system. Maybe it was characteristic of the trade. Makes sense that roof tester wouldn’t be the mellowest of professions.

  Twitchy went still for a moment. “I got it. We’ll do a pool test. You get a bunch of kiddie pools and a hose, fill them up one by one. It’s the same as the weights but without the transport problem.”

  Elliot was having a little trouble taking him seriously. “I get it. You just keep filling up pools till the roof collapses.”

  The mere suggestion seemed to horrify him. “Of course not.”

  He muttered something about putting tension sensors on the load-bearing beams in order to gauge the strain. I wanted to suggest we put a tension sensor on him but decided to let it go. Instead I asked whether he’d done a pool test before.

  “I saw some kids do it in school. Didn’t look too hard.”

  I gave the others a chance to say something, but if they had any misgivings, they were keeping them to themselves.

  “I’m fine with waiting for the blueprints,” Twitchy said. “I can analyze blueprints in my sleep.”

  I didn’t doubt it. It actually sounded like he might be more comfortable waiting for the blueprints, but John, who had insisted on joining us, was shaking his head.

  “No. We’ve got to move. I’m renegotiating with my suppliers based on this. I’ve got other restaurants that are interested in joining up. We can’t miss the growing season.”

  That’s how we ended up back on the roof the following day with a half dozen kiddie pools from a nearby Home Depot, Twitchy manning the hose while Edgar looked on, scratching behind his ear like he was witnessing an act of such bewildering stupidity he had no frame of reference for it. Seth was taking pictures with his phone; he maintained a slide show of his projects on the Green ’Burgs website. Elliot had rolled up his pants and was sitting with his feet in one of the pools, a beer at his side. John was surveying the scene with his hands on his hips, looking for all the world like he was supervising the rest of us. As for me, I was determined to take an interest in every aspect of the project, so I mostly just hovered over Twitchy’s shoulder, asking questions about what was, in fact, a stupendously tedious procedure.

  After a while, Edgar said, “I’ve got work to do,” leaving the “unlike some people” implied, and took off. That prompted John to check his watch and say he had to get back to the restaurant. As soon as he was gone, Seth pulled me aside.

  “Is he serious about renegotiating with his suppliers and all that?”

  I said he was, though the question must have been rhetorical. Anyone who’d spent any time at all with John had to know he was always serious.

  “You guys realize this farm is never going to yield enough to supply a restaurant, right?”

  I couldn’t speak for Elliot, but I realized no such thing. I stared dully at Seth and waited for him to fill in the blanks.

  “With this amount of square footage, even if you completely rocked the growing season, which never happens your first year, it just doesn’t add up. I mean, maybe if you covered every inch in lettuce seed, you’d end up with enough for it to pay off. But we’re envisioning more diversity, right? And then there’s all the space you’re giving up for the hoop house, the welcome circle—all the features that make it a great space for the kids. I mean, the kids are the priority, right?”

  An image appeared before my eyes: elementary school children shuffling among tightly packed rows with baskets hanging from their spindly necks, picking lettuce for the boss man. I pinched the bridge of my nose to make it go away.

  “This is all for the kids,” I told him. “Don’t worry about John. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  It felt good to say. I tried not to think about the fact that John had put the kiddie pools—and all of Seth’s up-front expenses—on his credit card.

  * * *

  Elliot didn’t seem especially concerned about Seth’s assessment when I recapped it for him at Flake, our bakery in Gowanus, the next day.

  “You handled Seth the right way,” he said, reading my unease as self-doubt. “He doesn’t need to worry about John, and neither do we.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “John’s a big boy. If we don’t produce enough to supply the restaurant, he won’t be any worse off than he was before. And we’ll still have a kick-ass program for Prometheus to bankroll.”

  I searched for flaws in Elliot’s logic, couldn’t find any, and took that as permission to let it go. I’d done my due diligence, and now there was other business to attend to. We were meeting Marnie to go over the marketing plan.

  Marnie was Vivienne’s director of communications back at the council. We tried telling Vivienne we didn’t need Marnie’s help, but she insisted. “Image is everything, boys. Leave it to a professional.” Marnie must have been subjected to a similar arm-twisting session; she was the first person we’d roped into this project who didn’t seem especially thrilled to give of her time. She stepped warily into Flake in her punishing red-and-black heels like she was stepping over a body.

  “So this is how you do business these days? It’s like the set of a zombie movie out there.”

  She slung her red leather tote bag over the back of her chair but left her sunglasses on, so making eye contact with the girl behind the counter was a challenge. I had to restrain myself from yanking her arm down when she raised two French-manicured fingers in a beckoning gesture. We’d only just begun to establish ourselves as regulars at Flake, and I didn’t want to jeopardize our standing with the staff.

  “You order up at the counter,” Elliot said.

  Somehow I could tell Marnie was rolling her eyes behind her shades. “Of course you do.”

  As soon as she settled in with a latte and a granola parfait, she started checking messages on her phone. “Sorry. Running your own shop is 24-7. But you must know that.”

  Marnie had started her career as a spin doctor for the pharmaceutical industry: Sure, there have been isolated reports of change in eye color and suicidal ideation, but what we know for sure is that Humilify has provided relief to millions of Americans suffering from the pain and stigma of restless spleen syndrome. That kind of thing. She’d always hoped Vivienne would run for mayor, giving her a wider stage for her sledgehammer rhetoric (“Look, it’s not rocket science. Every child deserves a school with a working water fountain. Period.”). That ship had sailed, of course, so now she was busy launching her own consulting firm called Marnie. That’s “Marnie.” with a period at the end of it.

  Her plan, we suspected, was to lure potential clients by dangling the prospect of Vivienne as an endorser or spokeswoman. Which is why Vivienne could still force her to schlep from Tribeca to Gowanus to talk to us pro bono, the last thing she would ever do of her own free will.

  “So t
ell me why anyone should care about your little garden,” she said, mixing her parfait with a disturbing intensity.

  “It’s a farm,” Elliot and I answered as one.

  “What’s the difference?”

  I still wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure of the answer, but I’d at least learned to anticipate the question. “A garden’s for enjoyment, a farm’s for work.”

  Marnie smirked. “Then how did you guys end up with one?”

  We gave her the whole song and dance: model curriculum, cost-efficient design, supply chain, sustainability. She looked bored, and having delivered this litany at least half a dozen times now, I was beginning to share the sentiment. Maybe we needed her help after all.

  “Frankly, I don’t see a there there,” she said, dipping into her bottomless bag of professional cant. “Maybe if you were rolling this out in twenty schools. Or you had the mayor standing with you. Whatever. You’ve certainly got Viv all hot and bothered.”

  “I don’t know what she told you,” Elliot said, “but we’re not looking for a big marketing campaign.”

  “That’s good because I’ve got real paying clients to deal with. What’re you calling this thing?”

  “You mean the farm?”

  “That, too, but I’m talking about your company, nonprofit, whatever it is. You may not need a campaign, but you still need basic branding: a name, a tagline, a logo. Or are you planning to submit reports to funders with your names in the upper right-hand corner like you’re in kindergarten?”

  She had us there. Up till now, nobody had asked us for a name, so we hadn’t given it any thought.

  “We’ve been kicking some ideas around,” I said. “We need something that puts us in the same conversation as Living Classroom—like the Planted Playground or Nature’s Laboratory.”