“Those trees aren’t looking too good,” he said. “Let’s replace them with something that’ll give a little more shade, some visual appeal. Elms, maybe, or willows.” He snapped his fingers. “How about a couple of fruit trees, say a cherry and a pear? I’m sure if Parks donated the trees, Will and his team would be more than happy to donate the labor.”
Something in me broke at that moment. These were the same sad, ugly trees that four months ago Jack had declared sacred, untouchable. If he’d let us replace them, then we never would have ventured into the handball court of the damned in the first place.
“I think we’ve covered all the issues we came here to discuss,” Jack said, readying a fresh victory cigarette. “Thank you all for making this such a productive meeting. Will, is there anything you’d like to add?”
I let my gaze wander from face to face: Contreras was strutting around now like all had gone according to plan, the three ballers slapping him on the back. Suzette was huddled with the chairman and the bodybuilder, sketching an edifice in the air, no doubt a stage for the poetry slams and griot circles to come. Sasha and Xander were standing behind them, nodding, trying to look like part of the solution. I imagined having to sit at a table with these people for the next two years, hashing out the devilish details of the grand revitalization, feeling the pressure to deliver on Jack’s promises. Would balls hit from the handball court into the dog run be fair game for the dogs? Would it be feasible to use a rainwater collection system for the shower spray? How about a shower spray for the dog run?
Was this my penance for refusing to meet with CB1? I thought about Elliot at the Pavement concert, Sadie on his shoulders, singing along to “Shady Lane”: “Freeze, don’t move/You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation/of the sequel to your life.”
“I made a mistake,” I said quietly.
Jack’s forehead took on an extra crease. “Will?”
“I made a mistake,” I said again, louder this time. “I thought I could do this for myself and help other people, too. But I was picturing people in general, not, you know, you people.”
Suzette’s mouth sprung open, but I held up my hand before she could protest.
“I didn’t mean it like that. Actually, I don’t know what I mean. I’m sorry.”
Contreras stepped forward and threw his arm around my neck. “It’s okay, man. The past is the past. We’re putting it behind us. Everybody wins, right?”
In my numb state I didn’t immediately recognize that this was our “cue music” moment. Jack, however, had no such trouble: time to get the hell off the stage. The meeting was adjourned. I stood where I was while the crowd broke into its constituent groups. Kat unlocked the farm gate for Henry so he could retrieve his basil plant before Jack’s goons came to tear it out of the ground. Nelson and Dante went deep in the parking lot to receive an imaginary pass from Felix; they hadn’t given up their football dream. I figured I’d better pay my respects to Jack, but when I looked around, I couldn’t find him. Having made the Triangle safe for democracy, he’d slipped away without a word, not even leaving a cigarette butt in his wake.
Before I could do the same, the Post reporter descended on me, his tape recorder set to stun. “That was quite a meeting.”
I peered at the recorder then back at his speckled face. “You said it.”
“One more thing: this whole area’s called Peter’s Place, right? Who is Peter, anyway?”
No room for loose ends at the Post. “The steering committee will be taking suggestions for a new name,” I said.
“That’s an official announcement?”
I told him if he reached out to Parks they’d be happy to give him all the details. Then I said it was time for me to be heading home.
Astride the Hump
When I got off the subway in Park Slope, it was around eight-thirty. Fifth Avenue was full of people. True to the stereotype, there were yuppie couples with strollers and one more on the way, waiting in front of the gelateria and the crêpe place. But there were also knots of young, good-looking gadabouts smoking outside the many bars—the gay bar, the lesbian bar, the gastropub, the Irish dive, the wine bar, the craft beer emporium, the old timey cocktail club, the outpost of the cheesy Manhattan tourist destination where you could get a manicure with your Cosmo. On the other end of the spectrum were the graying couples in high-waisted jeans (not the stylish Williamsburg kind) and elaborate nylon sandals, retired school teachers and bookkeepers who’d bought their brownstones back when all of Brooklyn was still considered the dark continent. They were out reaping the return on their foresight, walking all manner of complacent dogs—from state-of-the-art doodles and poos to ineffable shagadelic mutts to fetish breeds like the gallant Spinone. No doubt many of these very dogs had submitted to Tricia’s needle, understanding that even the cushiest life has its trials.
There were kids, too, of course, the younger ones tooling around on their silver razor scooters, the teens roaming in packs, looking for trouble, but not looking too hard. In a few years, one more would join their ranks, assuming we hadn’t been priced out by then.
The majority of faces were white, but the ratio wasn’t as lopsided as the Slope’s reputation would suggest. I passed Latin American families, black couples, a South Asian bachelorette party, all out enjoying the evening. And what an evening. The sun was leaving a pinkish afterglow as it melted away. The heat had taken a hard-earned break. Unseen birds were making dulcet small talk in the trees. The trees! A phalanx of lush elms lined the sidewalk.
I was passing by the local playground and the Old Stone House. The Old Stone House was exactly that, an unimposing replica of an eighteenth century farmhouse where General William Alexander and the Maryland 400 had staged their last stand against the Redcoats and the Hessians in the Battle of Brooklyn. Later it became the clubhouse for the Brooklyn Superbas, the earliest, mysteriously named incarnation of the Dodgers. The rebuilt Stone House had been there, slumped at the far end of the modest playground, as long as I’d been around. But in the last couple of years, a group of concerned citizens had decided it was time for a renovation, and in true Park Slope fashion, they made it a blowout. The Friends of the Old Stone House raised millions, and seeing the opportunity for a showcase, the Parks Department and the local pols flung themselves onto the bandwagon: $3 million from the council; half a million from the borough president; a quarter million from Bloomberg; another hundred large in state grants, courtesy of the local assemblywoman. Everyone donned tricorn hats for the ribbon-cutting.
The result was a lavish park-playground-museum complex. The farmhouse was turned into an educational and cultural center, its original retaining wall recreated using locally quarried granite. The playground was revamped with a battery of new equipment, the cutting edge (figuratively speaking, of course) in slides, swings, and jungle gyms with a special gated area for toddlers, adorned with cutouts of farm animals. I’d never noticed before, but the water features really were impressive: spray cannons on turrets, an old-fashioned water pump, even a channel of running water meant to suggest a colonial-era mill stream. The sleepy park surrounding the playground and the farmhouse was reimagined as a souped-up recreation complex: a skate park, a soccer pitch, two basketball courts, a dog run, café seating with chessboard tabletops, and—count ’em—eight handball courts, enough for Dante to feel up a different girl in a different court every night of the week and twice on Sunday.
What really caught my eye this particular evening, though, was the garden. It was slightly smaller than ours (at least for another day or two; I’d just agreed to give up a big chunk of real estate), but compared to the mountains of gravel and the projectile sofa I’d grown used to, it was a dream. The design was simpler than what Seth had come up with, but it was executed to perfection—no welcome circle, no woven bamboo, just beds of mulch divided by paved walkways. Crop yield obviously wasn’t a driving factor here. Towering sunflowers and redolent lavender were just as abundant as tomatoes and
cucumbers. At the center was a stately open-air greenhouse composed of wooden beams; as I walked by, a little girl was wandering through, awed to be inside and outside at the same time. Best of all, the garden was a good twenty yards away from the handball courts. Standing in one, you might not even know the other was there. I wondered who was in charge of taking care of the plants; I bet they enjoyed their work.
Before the renovation, the playground had been perfectly adequate, far nicer, in fact—cleaner, safer, better equipped—than Peter’s Place. But the minute Park Slope’s ruling class decided it was time for an upgrade, the city’s political players lined up to sweeten the pot. Meanwhile, it had taken me and Elliot blundering in with our wheelbarrows for anyone with pull to even notice the Triangle. And let’s face it: Jack’s assurances were no guarantee that the decades of neglect were over.
I had a funny feeling that change was less likely to come from Jack installing a water feature than from John Cardini opening the floodgates. Sooner or later, a Rita’s imitator would stake its own claim, followed by a single origin coffee shop, an artfully curated consignment store or a pop-up gallery. The buzz and cheap rent would attract more Sashas and Xanders, who would eventually get married and have babies (not necessarily in that order). Xander would realize that doing graphic design for a commercial firm wasn’t so bad after all; Sasha would get her master’s in education, start taking teaching seriously as a career. They’d still make art when they could find the time. Their friends who’d gone into law and finance would come to visit and see that something was happening in the Triangle; there were actually some interesting places to eat and hang out. They could afford to buy, maybe even one of those sweet little row houses with a front yard. And hey, look there’s already a charter school in the neighborhood! A few years would pass, and this new wave would no longer think of itself as new. Once they’d taken advantage of the full range of fertility treatments and maximized their earning potential, the campaign to bring café seating and a wicked half-pipe to Peter’s Place would begin in earnest. Maybe they’d even get someone to pick up the trash.
All that might happen or it might not. If it did, odds were that Contreras, Suzette, and the rest would be protesting rising rents and the displacement of local businesses, and who could blame them? Hell, if I truly cared about the Triangle, not just as the backdrop for a Savory Brooklyn photo shoot, but as a real place where people lived and fought and played, I’d be right there alongside them, manning the barricades.
I wanted to care that much. I knew I should care that much. But knowing it wasn’t the same as feeling it. What I did feel keenly was that it would be wrong to fake it. The people I’d met were impossible, but they deserved better than that.
As hard as it was to admit to myself, it was even harder breaking the news to Tricia. The rhino-dung-enriched soil I’d tracked on the rug, the arguments over how much she spent on moisturizer—all for nothing. She listened patiently as I stumbled through an account of the meeting and strained to explain my decision. She grimaced once or twice during my tale; I hoped it was just prenatal heartburn and not an involuntary reaction to my failure. The only words that really mattered were the last ones: “I can’t do this anymore.”
The first thing she said when I’d finished was, “What about Elliot? You’re not just going to leave him hanging, are you?”
Truth be told, I hadn’t thought much about Elliot since the meeting. When I found out John had offered him a job at Crop Top, my first thought had been that I couldn’t possibly run Raise the Roof without him. Would he feel the same way? Was I, in effect, making a decision for both of us, the result of which would be the end of the farm? And what if I was? Was that reason enough to tough it out?
“I won’t leave him hanging,” I said. “I’ll do whatever he needs for as long as I can. I just don’t want to be responsible for it anymore.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You sure about that?”
Tricia laid her hand on my arm and gave it a pinch. “Refusing to admit defeat is for losers.”
I wished I could believe her. For the time being, it was enough to hear her say it.
She got up. I figured she was making her twentieth trip to the bathroom for the day, but then I heard the air conditioner in the bedroom kicking on.
“So,” she called over the rumble, “what are you going to do now?”
This was the part I was dreading most, but I had a family to think about, and there was no putting it off. I swallowed hard.
“I’m going to talk to Viv.”
* * *
Elliot showed up at Peter’s Place on Monday bearing a gift: a Pavement T-shirt. Mercifully, it had rained all weekend, so neither of us had to come out to water. I had called him, though, to report back on the meeting.
“You did good,” he said. “I’d say we’re definitely over the hump now. Or, you know, atop the hump. Astride the hump?”
Jack had followed through on the first of his many promises. The moving crew from Parks was there to greet us when we arrived at sun-up. We pleaded with them to go easy on the plants, but it was clear their mandate was speed not finesse. Within a couple of hours, the farm we’d built in the handball court was gone. The section of the parking lot that had been fenced off for our use with wooden posts and chicken wire was about half the size. The guys loaded the gravel we no longer needed onto a truck, no doubt to be repurposed for another of Jack’s schemes. I pointed out to the foreman that he was making off with at least a hundred bucks worth of gravel; he shrugged and said that just one of the trees he was delivering was worth triple that.
Ah, yes, the trees. The second of Jack’s promises come to fruition, so to speak. While the Parks crew reassembled the farm and rinsed the film of dirt off the handball court (they’d brought their own high-powered hose, complete with water tank), Elliot and I were put to work digging up the swale bordering the playground to make way for the new trees (one pear, one hawthorn, one Japanese dogwood). As manual labor went, it was actually fairly diverting. The swale was studded with buried junk: tin soldiers, pottery shards, a spoon. It was like history’s least important archaeological dig. The work went quickly. Knowing I wouldn’t be doing this much longer made me swing my shovel with a little more oomph.
By the time the guys were finished, most of Seth’s precious seedlings were kaput. In their place, they’d planted a funky grab bag, the dregs, no doubt, of some godforsaken Parks Department stash house. There were bell peppers and…well, mostly bell peppers with the occasional misshapen cabbage and listing bean pole thrown in. The foreman, however, stood back with his chin propped on his knuckles, like the Picasso of landscapers, waiting for us to express our appreciation. The source of his pride wasn’t the vegetables but rather the battery of decorative bushes arrayed in pots around the inner perimeter of the fence. The effect was weird, like the garden—I couldn’t bring myself to call this version a farm—was a tiny country club we were trying to protect from view. Whatever. There was room for the new chili plant I’d brought, so I could live with the rest of it.
There was one more promise left to be fulfilled that morning. Before they clocked off, the crew backed their truck up to the entrance of the parking lot and rolled an enormous boulder down a ramp, blocking the open space. I assumed it had to be a prop, hollow inside, but a quick inspection confirmed it was a genuine hunk of rock. The guys deposited another boulder in front of the second entrance on the other side of Peter’s Place. Now the only way in and out was a small gate adjacent to the school building. The parking lot had been reclaimed.
Elliot and I were taking an inventory of the new garden when I told him I was out. He took it calmly, like he’d been expecting it. The lack of protest just encouraged me to babble on about water features, trees, and loyalty. I promised I had no intention of leaving him in the lurch.
“You still need me to water, I’ll be here. Until I get a job, I mean. Obviously.”
“You talk to
Viv?”
“She sent me a few names. There’s an old crank at the Century Club looking for someone to ghost-write letters to the editor.”
“Wow. That sounds, um…”
“It’s temporary. I hope. Between you and me, I want to try to find the next thing on my own. Anyway, I mean it. You need me, just say the word.”
“Cool. I appreciate it.”
“And that five thousand from Gollick?” I went on. “Now that we don’t have to pay Kat for the rest of the summer, you should pay yourself.”
“Actually, I think I’m going to use it to hire Dante.”
“Babyface?”
“He’s been angling for a job all summer. Should be good for community relations.”
Even now, after my Jack-brokered truce with the community, it would never have crossed my mind to entrust one of the ballers with plant care. That was the difference between Elliot and me. If he could replace Kat with Dante, he’d probably have Contreras taking over for me before the week was out. Maybe he’d have been better off with a different co-director from the start.
“I hope I didn’t fuck this up for you,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. Once school starts, we’ll be golden.”
“No, I mean from the beginning. If you had a different partner, someone with a better attitude, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out like this.”
“Dude, if I had a different partner, Raise the Roof wouldn’t have America’s Next Top Logic Model.”
“That’s me, the logic master.”
“Not always. You’re the one who said, ‘no more meetings, let’s build the fucking thing already.’ That wasn’t logical. In fact, it was pretty goddamn perverse. But if you hadn’t said it, we’d still be running between community boards, trying to make everyone happy. You, kemosabe, brought this whole clusterfuck to a head.”
In the Weeds Page 20