Community Garden

This story is true and was told to me by a customer. The names, dates and location have been radically altered to protect the original storyteller's identity and family. 

Todd lived in a housing complex in Florida in the mid-early aughts. He had taken on the job of maintenance man and general person to settle disputes as a way to help augment his salary as a TA while completing his masters in engineering. The complex was pleasant but not at all luxurious: pipes often burst for no readily apparent reason; the painted stucco flaked and peeled; there were broken roof tiles and enough windows were hung with bed sheets and broken blinds to make the place feel slightly seedy. But the crumbling walls were a warm shade of butter and the grounds were kept neat. As long as Todd was in town, and not visiting his girlfriend in Massachusetts, all urgent issues were dealt with immediately: exterior hall lights were all lit, there were no busted locks, no broken door jambs. Adding to the general sense of well-being was a shared garden.

A few years back when a young couple with "vision" had moved in, the complex had come together "as a community" and planted the garden in a lozenge shaped plot of earth next to the pool. The wife was a botanist and landscape artist for wealthy clients in Boca Raton and had lent her expertise to the project. Most of the people in the complex had helped to plant and weed. Notable among these was a cantakerous old bible-thumper named Hank. Nobody liked Hank, but he had a green thumb and when the young couple left to have a baby and a "real" home no one doubted that the bulk of the responsibility for the garden would fall to him.

 Hank spent a good deal of time harrasing the two young Guatemalan women, Anna and Tina, who lived on the first floor and worked for a commercial cleaning service. According to him, their clothes were skimpy, they were noisy, they had too many men over to their apartment, they were Catholic, they needed to learn to "speaka tha English", and they left roots behind as they lazily chatted and weeded on their days off. Hank harassed them often enough that they eventually left the complex and moved to a nearby trailerpark so Hank found himself with twice as much work tending the garden. But he wasn't sorry to see them go. It was his fervent wish that they would be deported back to "Meh-hee-co" and he had often threatened to call the INS when their after work beers with friends got too rowdy for his taste.

To be fair, Hank didn't like anyone in the complex. He had particularly hated Anna and Tina, but he also hated Todd. Hank had been the complex's caretaker before Todd - who as an engineer with years of carpentry in his dad's business behind him was more than equal to the task. Hank- who was responsible for both a pallette's worth of the shitty exterior paint that couldn't stand up to the humidity of south Florida, and the copious amounts of duct tape Todd found when he opened up a wall to fix yet another leak- thought Todd was a stuck up pin-head weasel; a snotty college brat spending thousands of dollars to learn how to do what any man should be born knowing. Hank would knock on Todd's door at all hours of the weekend while Todd was studying and preparing lesson plans.

 "Hi, Hank. What's the problem?" Todd would answer the door wearily but always pleasantly. "Oh, nothing, Todd. I was just wondering when you were planning on fixing Mrs. Lundquvist's air conditioning?" "That's funny, I just saw her this morning... she didn't say anything was wrong..." "Well she probably doesn't even notice the problem. Why would she? It's not her window that's getting covered in filthy water splatters. MINE is. My window is covered in a film of grime from her disgusting air conditioner, and I want to know what you plan to do about it!" And so on. In spite of all this, Hank was not the most despised person in the complex. Larry was.

 Larry lived by himself and if any apartment could be pointed to as being the one to bring down all the others it was his. All the apartments had two windows that faced the inner courtyard and two that faced the parking lot on the outside, like a motel. Larry's was on the end, so he got three more windows: 2 large ones and one tiny one in his bathroom that allowed unfortunate passersby to hear whatever was transpiring between Larry and his toilet.

 Larry looked like a no-goodnick. He was quiet, and kept to himself but not in the way that makes you curious to know him or that invites sympathy or even pity. He was quiet in a seething, hate-filled, way. In a land of fat people, he was grotesque. He sweated a foul mix of raw onion, potato chips and coffee breath. His thick glasses were usually perched at the end of his nose so that he could always look down its pimply expanse. He was sickly pale, but covered in black hair from just above the ears to his toes: his crown was bald and scaling. He kept an overly long, filthy mustache and the rest of his jowls were usually covered in a layer of 10-o-clock shadow. He was a mouth breather. He burped loudly. He referred to women in general as "pieces" and rated their looks on scales of 1-10. Racist, sexist, xenophobic, vaguely libertarian in the least responsible sense of the word, and a slob. Todd dreaded getting called into Larry's apartment: one whole wall was covered in pages torn from porn magazines and if Todd so much as glanced at the wall, Larry would quietly leer at him. Kleenexs littered the floor as did piles of fast food trash. The recycling bin in the corner was overflowing with Red Bull (full sugar) and Arizona Ice Tea (diet) cans. It smelled. It was dark and depressing. Larry worked two nights a week at a movie theater as ticket taker and he supplemented his income with social security because his obesity was considered a disability.

 Whenever someone pissed Larry off, he would threaten to call the cops on them. It was, perhaps his favorite thing to say to some stunned neighbor "I could get the cops here right away. My father was a cop, you know. They'd come. You'll see." But he never called. It was understood that Larry's father, if the man were still alive, was not interested in helping his son with his connections. It struck everyone that the father probably didn't want anything to do with his asshole son.

******

 2008 was an election year and this being Florida, everyone in the complex was pretty fired up. Everyone talked about Barak Obama and hope. Would this black golden boy be able to usurp the decrepit white veteran? Would the man who spoke of change with a folksy, unplaceable accent, overwhelm the attractive - but undeniably stupid - maverick and her noble father figure (who seemed to be getting a little senile in his lusty power grab)? Blue and red stickers bloomed all over the complex. Anna and Tina - before they left - wore "Si Se Puede" buttons on their uniforms. Hank grumbled about "colored" people in the White House and bringing Jesus back to the Constitution. Todd rejoiced and signed all kinds of MoveOn.org petitions, but mainly he just studied. Mrs. Lundquvist had a picture of Sarah Palin taped to her front door... Right next to a picture of Rosanne Barr. Larry, though, stuck posters for the local sherrif in his window. He said couldn't abide a Muslim in the White House, but other than that he didn't give a rat's ass who won. He was interested in the county sherrif race. Larry's father, it turned out, had provided one connection to his flatulent son and now that connection was running for public office.

 This sherrif-to-be, Lance Steady, was no doubt the son Larry's dad might have wished for. If Larry was the portrait in the attic, Lance was Dorian Gray. Tall, handsome, well-spoken, if not all that smart, and he looked great in his police uniform. Even though he was 37 and had only left the county to go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1998, he had the hard, but kindly, look of a man who has seen the uderbelly of the cruel world and perservered anyway. It made people believe him when he denied allegations of a coke-fueled rampage that left his girlfriend in a coma and a prostitute dead. When a drug dealer was dredged from the swamp near Lance's parents place 50 miles north of the county line with a police bullet in the back of his head, no one even mentioned Lance's name... the murder was a mystery. When the investigation was dropped, Larry seemed to walk around with a swaggering smirk on his face and he adopted a new habit of making a gun with his thumb and forefinger and shooting it at whoever he passed. Lance and Larry went to strip clubs together as they had done since high school. Lance would get the girls to come over, and Larry would provide dollar bills from his social security- they joked that at least the government was good for something...never mind that Lance worked for the government and was now more overtly seeking public office. When Larry said "my buddy" everyone knew he meant Lance. The elections came.

Lance, with his easy jokes and his ability to throw and catch a football, won the seat handily. He celebrated with a tasteful barbeque at a country club that struck the right tone of "dude-ness" so that he could project a "working man" persona but not come off as a redneck. When he was grilled by a nosy reporter about the allegations of battery and possible homicide, Lance put on his most manly expression and said "I arrest wife-beaters. I sincerely hope that whatever happened to Annabella never happens to anyone's daughter. Now, let me be clear: I bear Annabella no ill will for her false allegations against me, but as an upholder of the law I do take responsibility for not getting her the help she needed sooner. And this is my burden to bear as I support her in her efforts to overcome addiction. Of course, if- no, when- we find the bast-, the fiend who so brutally beat her, lets just say, I'll have a few choice words for him. That's all I have to say about that." And the people gathered cheered. The reporter felt a chill in the damp air and left. Larry wasn't invited to the celebration, but he heard about it later. He smirked and called Lance a "sly dog."

 At the complex, Hank fumed continuously about the new president and his family. Mrs. Lundquvist seemed to forget the picture of Sarah Palin on her front door as it warped and bleached in the sun. Todd watched the innauguration with tears in his eyes while studying for finals. Every couple of days an article featuring something the new sherriff had done would be taped to Larry's front door: a drug bust, finding an 8 year old girl (dead) who'd been missing for months, the bust up of a prostitution ring, and the closing of one night club after another for sale of illegal drugs. Amazingly, Lance and Larry's favorite strip joint escaped this crack down, though not a single stripper could recall seeing Lance there since his election.

 ******

 In the days leading up to his finals, Todd spent more and more time at the library letting problems at the complex slide. He would come home to find half a dozen notes slipped under his door: requests for repairs, complaints about noises from neighbors, questions about security deposit deductions. He threw them on the kitchen counter and stumbled to bed. One night, there was a pounding on the door, and he could hear Hank muttering and cussing. Todd looked at his bedside clock: it was 2 am. He pulled a pillow over his head, and let Hank pound. "Todd!" Hank shouted. "Wake up! I know you're in there! Get up you pussy! We've got a problem!" Todd ignored him and managed to fall back asleep. At some later point, he didn't know when, he thought he heard something like an endless cascade of spoons falling. Falling and falling. But he didn't even open his eyes and just willed himself back to sleep while the spoons kept clashing and tinkling. At six, Todd's coffee pot alarm went off. He poured himself a cup and stumbled out to his car. He vaguely noted something amiss, but didn't stop to consider what it was. He even ignored the white van with a logo advertising chain link fences that was parked next to his car in an illegal spot. As he pulled out of the lot, he realized two things: 1) he had left his cell phone on the counter and 2) he could see Hank in his rearview mirror, arms thrown up in the air in an expression of angry supplication.

 ********

When the young couple had first planted the garden, it had been in a spirit of community-building: a way to bring the disparate neighbors together in wholesome endeavor. It might have been that in the beginning, but over the years, first one person, then another took on primary custodial responsibility. First it had been the couple, then, for a short time, a tall young man majoring in environmental science, then Anna and Tina, then Hank. Larry, however, had never expressed any interest in the garden at all. He hadn't noticed the roping trumpet flowers, the birds of paradise shooting up behind frothing alstomemeria and seeming to look longingly at the thicket of short palms as though wishing to alight at the base of their leathery leaves. Larry wasn't a man who noticed the world outside the dark, enclosed places he inhabited: his apartment, the local dive bar, the strip clubs.

********

 When Todd returned home that evening, his door was covered with angrily scrawled notes that weren't Hank's hadwriting. His phone, on the counter where he'd left it, was buzzing with messages. He opened the first note, and his eyes went wide. He looked out the window that faced the pool and the garden, and he saw what the note described: Larry had annexed most of the garden by erecting a chain link fence that extended from his door to one whole end of the lozenge and back around. It was as wide as his apartment and blocked part of the walkway that went around the back of the building. Todd noted that no effort had been made to integrate the fence with it's surroundings... he shook his head sharply: had he expected there would be? Did he expect the kind of person who would build a fence in the middle of the night to claim part of a communal garden he had no part in building or maintaining to worry about the esthetics of the thing? Absurd. Todd went storming out to the courtyard.

"Ah! So now you're pissed huh?" Hank, intercepted him. "Where were you last night, when I was pounding on your door, when you could have done something to stop him? Huh? Where were you then, pin head?" Hank spat. Todd pushed past Hank and ran around the far end of the fence to Larry's bathroom window.

"Larry! Larry! What the shit?" Todd heard the toilet flush and winced. "LARRY! What the fuck did you do?"

"Hold on a sec," was the calm, muffled reply. Todd heard water running as Larry washed his hands. He heard the heavy man move through his apartment. Todd ran around to the door, which was blocked by the fence. The door opened and Larry stood there, expressionless, looking down his nose through his grimed glasses. "What's the problem, Todd?" Larry's lower lip hung, forgotten, from his gums. 

Todd leveled a stern look at Larry, and threw his arms wide, to encompass the whole fence.

"I got nothing to say about that, Todd." Larry started to close the door.

"Are you crazy?! You can't build a fence in the middle of the property!" Todd shouted.

"Says who?" Larry replied.

"Says the lease agreement! Says county regulations! Says all your fellow tennants! Says any normal human being!"

"Doesn't say anything about fences in my lease agreement. Does it say anything in yours, Hank?" Hank started hollering and didn't stop for some time.

 "Yeah, well," said Larry. "It doesn't mention fences in my lease, so ah, if you'll excuse me." "I'll tear it down myself, Larry," said Todd. Larry stopped short and looked angry for the first time.

"Don't you touch a damn thing on that fence or I'll break your shitty little fingers!" He snarled. "It's my fence! I spent money on it! And it's my private property. I'm part owner in this place, you know, and I'm entitled to my bit of private property!"

 Todd punched the chain link - which hurt him badly - in frustration and then turned and went to the utility shed. He found the chainsaw and rushed out with the blade already whining. He ran to the end of the garden. Larry lumbered as fast as his elephant limbs would let him to where Todd, with sparks flying, was attacking a post.

"I'll get the sherrif down here, you twerp!" Larry thundered.

"Good!" Todd screamed back. Larry exhaled through his nostrils like a bull getting ready for another charge.

"I said, I'll get the sheriff down here! My buddy, Sheriff Lance Steady! Here! He'll come here!" Larry stared down at Todd's reedy frame bracing the chainsaw. Todd looked at Larry, his lips pressed tight. He shut the saw down. He dropped his arms and leaned back, cantilevering himself against the weight of the machine. He had been so absorbed in the presidential race and finals that he'd utterly forgotten the county sheriff's race.

"Lance won the election?" he asked, though he knew the answer.

 Larry scowled. "Of course he did, jerkoff! Of course he won!"

Todd looked up at the sky and thought about his paper that was due the following day and the pile of tests he still had to grade. For the first time, Larry's threats about calling the cops held some weight.


Todd had once seen Lance and his girlfriend leaving Larry's apartment and he'd been struck by how tiny and frail the girl looked. She was too young, maybe 19 if he was being generous, with unfortunately huge breasts. She looked like a bird you'd handle gently or risk popping. He couldn't imagine Lance's huge hand crushing her windpipe, punching her delicate face to fracture her jaw, breaking that twig of a collar bone as he'd been accused. The broken girl had dropped the assault charges, but there was a restraining order against the sherrif, and after the media frenzy had died down, the she had disappeared. The killer of the prostitute and the drug dealer was still at large, and no one thought it was worth it to spend any more of the county's money to find the murderer.

Larry snorted in victory. "Don't touch my fence, douche bag."

Todd looked at the birds of paradise that had been trampled by the workmen. Their purple and orange heads were mashed into the dirt. Half of a carolina coralbead had been torn from it's twisty, skinny trunk. An unused bag of concrete lay like a dead body among the periwinkle informing Todd that the fence was built to stay put.

 Hank stared at Todd, and for the first time in Todd's memory, looked at a loss. Mrs. Lundquvist had come out to stand on the balcony to see what the noise was about. A few of the other tennants were staring at Todd and Larry facing off through the absurd fence. The bigger man was so clearly a loser in everything except this one battle. The lithe, competent figure: smarter, stronger, kinder - the better man in every way - beaten. In spite of his many resources as a person, he was totally without recourse. Who could he call? Was the law truly on his side, as he assumed? When was the last time he'd read the lease agreement? Did it explicitly say anything about fences? And after all, the garden had merely been the idea of people who weren't even there anymore. They had left, gone on to larger, better housing complexes, places where the ideas of "community" had already taken root and where ideals like theirs would be understood and encouraged. This complex, just one step up from a Katrina trailer park - full of students, immigrants , old people shunted from their families and waiting for time to pass - was an impermanent place. The only thing that remained unchanged about the building was Larry. No one, not even Hank, could remember a time before Larry. His blinds had always hung haphazardly. His wall had always been covered in porn. He had always claimed connections to important people, seizing on his noble father's reputation for power. A man without human connection and therefore without morals. There was no appealing to reason. Todd would be graduating in a couple of months and taking a job in California. Did he really want to wind up in a swamp with a police bullet in the back of his head for defending the integrity of a housing complex in south Florida? He did not. He turned back to the tool shed and the tennants booed, as though they were watching a tv show. Hank, now having a clear target for his anger shouted "you college boys are always cowards when push comes to shove!"

Todd didn't bother to respond, He put the saw back in it's appointed place. When he came back out, Larry was still standing by the slightly mangled post. He cocked his thumb and his forefinger and fired.