Lawn Boy(16)

I arrived home in the middle of the afternoon as Mom was ironing her slacks for work and smoking a cigarette. Nate was watching Megamind with the volume up too loud, oblivious to the world as he shoveled Cheetos into his mouth. Freddy plucked his bass on the sofa, smoking a joint. You could see one of his nuts poking out the leg of his jeans shorts, along with the inside pocket liner.

There are times when a man needs a garage. A shed. A goddamn tree fort. A little piece of real estate. The place can be riddled with oil cans and rat turds, it doesn’t matter. There can be a lawn mower and a gang of broken flashlights and a busted jar of drywall screws. Half a croquet set, a rusting putter, and a ruptured air mattress. The point is, a man needs somewhere he can go to decompress, shake off all the shit life throws at him, dust off his bong, and feel like the king of his moldering little domain for an hour or two. A place to listen to Mozart or Rush, drink a couple tallboys, regather his wayward optimism, and convince himself the whole endeavor is worth the effort—and by endeavor, I mean breathing. But sometimes there’s a guy living in his shed. Sometimes there’s no optimism left to be gathered. Sometimes there’s just enough room under the canopy to stow his lawn mower.

This was one of those times.

“You all sweaty,” observed Freddy, from his place on the sofa.

“How’d the job go, honey?” said Mom. “I didn’t hear you pull in.”

“It didn’t,” I said. “My truck bit the dust on 305.”

“Oh, Mike.”

“Bound to happen with an old truck like that,” said Freddy, Cheetos dusting his gray stubble. “Boy, you twenty-two years old. Time to jump-start your life.”

“Is that right, Freddy? And how do you propose I do that?”

“You gotta start by finding gainful employment.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then you gotta find yourself a woman.”

“Mm-hm. Go on,” I said, wresting the Cheetos from him.

“And, boy, you got to get your own place. Look around you. Ain’t no woman gonna come around here.”

“You don’t think?”

“Hell, no! Ain’t no woman gonna sleep in no bunk bed. And you got to get yourself into a new truck while you’re at it.”

“And how do you propose I do that?”

“By findin’ some gainful employment. Ain’t you been listenin’ to me?”

“Thanks, Freddy. Good talk.”

“Anytime, man. Old Freddy seen a few things. When you’re black in America, you anywhere from invisible to a bright red. Gives a man a number of different perspectives on the world. You pay attention, Mike Mu?oz, and maybe you can learn somethin’.”





Coinstar Blues




The days of unemployment ran into weeks. I didn’t even know what day of the week it was when I bused over to Safeway on the island for my monthly visit to the Coinstar. Allowing for my fare and the 10 percent Coinstar charge, I still figured to clear about thirty bucks by my estimate. And thirty bucks buys a lot of frozen burritos. On the ride to Safeway, I resumed reading the book that crooked-toothed Andrew recommended, The Jungle, by the dead guy, Sinclair. The writing was a little clunky at times but serviceable. It’s about a dude named Jurgis, from somewhere in eastern Europe, who comes to America, like everybody else, looking for a better life. The whole thing starts out with a wedding feast, and by page 50 you just know this Jurgis fella is wishing he would’ve rationed all that food instead of springing for the feast, because things start getting thin really fast. It didn’t help that his wife and his whole family were counting on old Jurgis to bring home the bacon. Poor Jurgis couldn’t get a break. It was one indignity after another, and they were all more or less familiar. Poverty. Injustice. The Man. Hell, take away all the funny names and it could’ve been my life. And yeah, that pisses me off. I can’t tell you how the book ends yet, but I can tell you this much already: I won’t be eating a hot dog anytime soon.

There’s this Indian kid from the res who is a fixture at the Bainbridge Safeway. He’s usually staged out front by the shopping carts with his guitar, bungling through a stilted version of “Seven Nation Army,” utilizing only his E string. He never takes his eyes off the fret board. His finger work is pretty jerky. But I admire him all the same for his nerve. He’s pretty haggard, this kid. Nineteen going on fifty-one. He has a broken front tooth, and he always wears a leather vest, hand stitched with a cross-eyed eagle. You can actually see the dirt caked around his extremities, like a human bath ring.

Yeah, he sucks at guitar, I get that. But you see how it is? Some rich kid with a college education can go fuck around and pretend to be whatever he feels like. He can go save the world doing missionary work in Ethiopia, or pretend to be a poet in Brooklyn, or join a band, or be a political activist on weekends, or get an internship on Wall Street. I see them on the island in the summer, back from their East Coast colleges and prep schools, sitting around to no practical purpose, talking about XR and Vampire Weekend. But the minute some broken-toothed Indian kid exercises a little initiative in front of a grocery store, he’s automatically a bum.

For this reason, I usually stand around and watch him suck for a couple of minutes before dropping a couple singles into his battered guitar case. But this particular day, he wasn’t out front by the carts. Instead, I found him standing in front of the Coinstar machine, looking even shaggier than usual with a couple of sad weeks’ growth for a beard. From the looks of it, somebody had recently used his vest to beat out a campfire because it was sooty and singed around the edges.