Lawnboy (29 page)

With the remainder of my money, I rented a room at the Hotel Lumiere for the week. It was no-frills simple, with single bed, TV, combination bureau/desk, and salt-pitted, dorm-sized refrigerator. And it had that scent, that inimitable fusion of cigarette smoke, mildew, cat pee, and chlorine bleach. I thought of the people for whom this place had initially been built—working-class Jews from Brooklyn or the Grand Concourse who’d anticipated their stay here for months, who’d envisioned their vacation on the beach as a little taste of Heaven. It cost a near mint now, more than I could afford, but I didn’t care. I spent most of my days lying in bed, thinking, ordering pizza or Chinese food, listening to the many languages of the people on the street: German, French, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish. One night there was a loud crash, like a stack of falling plates, and I walked to the window to see a party revving up in the apartment across the street. A samba spun louder, and a good twenty or thirty people stumbled out onto the balcony, some in a conga line, some with cocktails in hand, before waving over to me, and I back at them.

A girl with large, soulful brown eyes cupped her hands around her mouth.

“
¡Anda ca!
” she cried.

“Come over,” someone else yelled.

“Join the party,” said a third.

Across the bay, a faint popping of fireworks.

“I can’t,” I answered.

***

I waited until the following morning to leave the room. I walked up Collins Avenue out of the trendy, gentrified zone into the run-down section of South Beach that hadn’t caught on yet, where the tourists weren’t glamorous, but looked ashen, pockmocked, and haunted, dressed in their tight shiny fabrics, gold chains, and wide collars. It could have been twenty years ago, the Miami Beach of the late seventies, and I both loved it and was depressed by it. I walked into a T-shirt shop, checked out the gag gifts and souvenirs: oversized dice, Statue of Liberty pens, furred little beagles with nodding heads—stuff I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. I thought about how much Jane would have gone nuts over these things, how she would have borrowed money from me, chattering excitedly, leaving the store with a full shopping bag and then some. Where was Jane? I missed her so much. It was time I made an effort to get in touch with her.

I couldn’t have been in the store more than three minutes when I spotted a man in the aisle ahead of me. I didn’t see his face, but I saw the back of his neck, a long thin neck, swan-like, though on the verge of gawky, atop which balanced a sweet head with ears that stuck out. He looked nearly perfect to me. I watched him picking up the very same things I’d picked up—snow globes, netted bags of bubble gum resembling lemons, tangerines, grapefruits, and limes—cupping them in his palm, eyes shining. I couldn’t stop looking at that neck. The neck had always been the most telltale part of a man’s body for me. Nothing could excite me more, not even muscles or big feet or big dick or large nose or dark hair or well-developed Adam’s apple.

I followed him. He walked north on Collins, past the Sunoco and the Shelborne, before turning left on 16th. He strode down the street, looking straight ahead, taking long, athletic, supremely confident strides. My eyes watered. The wind crackled, purred inside my ears. He turned south on Meridian, glancing at a particularly beautiful cherry palm outside an apartment house—good sign—then started toward Lincoln Road. His walk seemed to have no destination or plan. Was he cruising? Lost? I decided he was lost. I decided I could bump into him, step down on the back of his shoe, ask if he needed directions, and he’d recognize something in me, something in my eyes, a shared spirit, a sense of humor, and we’d get to chatting, and soon enough we’d be drinking coffee together, talking about what we were doing tonight.

I kept following him. I kept looking at that sweet and luscious and vulnerable neck, and I wasn’t about to let him go. I thought of his chest—firm, muscular, lightly matted with hair—and I imagined holding a melting ice cube over it and watching him shudder as I worked my tongue upwards from his belly button. The heat beat in my face. Outside the Night ‘n’ Gale he turned a bit to the side, not fully facing me, but just enough to see me out of the corner of his eye, and he knew who it was, and he knew I was after him, and I knew that he liked it. I pictured him smiling. My dick rustled, plumping the front of my jockey shorts. And then, just as I stepped closer to him, narrowing the distance between us, he crossed 14th, mere feet before a cargo truck, and the traffic light went red, and everything stalled. Horns. Curses. Heat. Gridlock. I tried to pass around the truck. I tried to sidestep to the left, to the right, but the seconds were ticking. The noon sun hammered my brow, blurring my vision. I banged my fist on the side of the truck twice, three times, before it moved forward. My fingers throbbed like a boxer’s. The traffic loosened, I walked ahead.

He was nowhere in sight.

Something occurred to me: I didn’t want to die.

Three weeks passed at the Hotel Lumiere. I lay in bed, staring up at the rotating paddles of the ceiling fan. Checkout was 11:00 a.m., and I’d timed it so that I could pick up my results from the clinic upon my departure. I stood, shoved my possessions—jeans, T-shirt, contact-lens solution—into my backpack. My mouth was dry. My hand looked old. I kept staring down at the skin of my hand, asking myself how on earth could the hand of a twenty-year-old get to looking so old.

But who was I kidding? Already I felt it: that slight white heat, simmering inside the engine of my body, making me older before my time. Correct? Didn’t anyone who’d ever lived through this recognize early on what had already possessed him, inhabiting his corpuscles on the deepest, most urgent level? It was as if one had never been anything but sick, that loneliest place, and it seemed astonishing that there were actually people in the world who’d never felt this: to have something burning inside you as intimate as a lover.

And yet I wondered whether I was cutting myself off from surprise. What if, to my good fortune, I was deemed negative? What if I was told that my days weren’t immediately pressured, that I most likely had decades ahead of me? Would I feel different? Negative: funny, awful word. What did it mean to call oneself negative, anyway? I was only negative until the next time I had sex with someone. Wasn’t staying negative always the most demanding of efforts, and not a state of grace, not a protected, privileged zone?

Something became evident. This whole matter was about being handed two choices.

I stared at my reflection in the window glass. I looked fine, I felt fine.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe that there were only two choices.

I walked to the window, not knowing whether I was copping out or not. I felt relieved and shaken all at once. I looked out toward the ocean and saw a cruise ship passing into the warm aqua of the gulf stream. It looked so small from here, the size of a toy. I imagined a couple—straight, young, still in their twenties—lounging on the deck of that boat, the sun shining on their faces. How would they have reacted if they’d been informed in hushed tones that a terrorist bomb had been planted aboard one of the ship’s lavatories, that sometime within the next few minutes or the next few days they’d come to violent death? Would that have made them generous, wise, more responsible to one another, or would it have diminished and destabilized them, making them feel they were under the fist of something so much greater than themselves?

But even that wasn’t the same. An instantaneous death—even a death that permitted a few days of preparation—seemed merciful compared to a death that lingered for years and years, where one got sick, better, then sick again. Where a simple sore throat could signal the onset of ruin. Where one’s family and lover and friends were ever tempted to bail out. Where one had to push past the inevitable burdens of blame and shame—all the meannesses that people happened to attach to them.

Where one had to forgive.
Forgive.

I glanced down at the appointment card in my hand and tore it in two. I watched its pieces flutter down onto the people of the street.

It seemed that I’d already made my decision weeks ago.

Was I a coward? Was I selfish, irresponsible? It seemed that even now, I was suspended between the two worlds—the world of the living and the world of the dead. I would go on in the only way I knew. I picked up my backpack, walked down to the lobby, and handed over my money to the desk clerk. The lighting was milky. Outside, the people seemed beautiful, pale, their ghosts following close behind, already guiding them someplace.

***

Three hundred dollars: enough to get me through the next two weeks, but barely. It wouldn’t last the month, unless I was willing to subsist on rice and beans. I tried not to fret too much. I had the uncanny sense I was revisiting my days when I’d first moved out of William’s house. I thought briefly about the nature of time, how it’s always tricking us into thinking it’s taking us forward, when, in fact, it’s always coiling around like a spring, bringing everything we’ve known back to us.

I spent the days looking for work. I bought the
Herald
and checked out the various restaurants, clothing stores, gas stations. Everyone I talked to seemed wary of my lack of experience. It was all right; I would have screwed up those jobs, anyway. I was about to start lying, fabricating a history for myself—name: Vico Bakaitis, age: 24, place of birth: Seal Beach, California—when on one of my wayward afternoon walks I literally found myself within the fencing of a nursery. It was on a forgotten back road, west of the city. It bordered a canal filled with stagnant, olive-green water. Florida’s turnpike rushed in the distance like a waterfall. Though the place was overgrown and past its prime and sadly disheveled, it yielded the most offbeat plants, the likes of which were impossible to find at bland, commercial nurseries: blood banana, surinam cherry, weeping fig. Immediately I felt possessed of a good feeling, as if I’d been here in another life. I needed a task if I was going to make it through. I wanted nothing more than to reinvent the place, to reclaim just a bit of its former glory.

“I’d like a job,” I said to the owner.

He squinted down at the marl beside my shoes. His face was weathered, puffy. Above his shirt pocket: a blue patch that said Hickory Bob’s. In the calmest, kindest voice, he said: “I never said I was hiring.”

“I’m not asking for much money. All I want to do is help out. Get this place back into shape.”

He squinted, only mildly threatened. “You’re young. What would you know about plants?”

“A lot.”

He walked me up and down the rows, expecting me to identify each variety he pointed to. Without pause, I said: loquat, maya palm, aurelia. I even named the dreaded pitch apple, a variety that had routinely stumped even the most knowledgeable of his clients. “What else? What else?”

He shook his head back and forth. He didn’t know what to say.

“You think I’m a weirdo, don’t you?” I said after a while.

“No.” His face was clearly dazed. “We better sit down,” he said ruefully.

I followed him down the path to a bullet-shaped trailer. Cattle egret scampered about the yard, in and out through the windbreak of Australian pines that bordered the Everglades. A pink sky rumbled over our heads. It turned out that Bob had been wanting to sell after his wife, Dorothy, had died, but had taken it off the market after receiving but two meager, demeaning offers. Things only worsened after Hurricane Andrew. Though managing to cut a swath a mere three miles north of the property, leaving the nursery virtually unscathed, it hurled the entire region into a real estate depression.

He fell silent for a full six minutes. He quoted a salary that was a full three dollars an hour more than I’d expected. He also offered me a place to stay in a second trailer out back. I’d tried to conceal my astonishment and disbelief.

“Do you think that’s enough to live on?” he said.

I looked at the wall clock, a cuckoo clock in a shellacked box on which drawings of various minerals had been pasted. I hated to think that I’d be taking advantage of anyone in dire circumstances, but he was offering it to me.

“I guess we could give this a try.”

I nodded avidly.

“Why not,” he said as if convincing himself. “Let’s give it a try.”

“Done.” My handshake was damp, feeble. “Done deal.”

In only a few days I threw myself completely into the nursery. I told myself that my work was all that mattered, that contentment and peace were not to be found in the world of people, but in the world of vegetation. I dealt with my customers with patience, caution, and care, never raising my voice or condescending to them. The dirt blackened my fingernails. I walked to my little trailer every evening, welcoming the ache of my lower back, concentrating on the sting of cuts on my hands, if only because they told me in no uncertain terms that I was still alive.

One morning, I walked up and down the rows of plants, garden hose in hand, watering. I loved the plash of water on the leaves, loved the tuneless flat splat it made on the mulch. I walked to the cluster of shrimp plants, which Bob had virtually left for dead after a brief drought last year. Their leaves were healthy now, shiny and loose, with pretty saffron heads (ladies’ swim caps!), and for the first time since my arrival (or “takeover,” as Bob called it), I realized that my simple gestures were doing some good in the world. I squirted a squat wooden fence and glanced around at my little domain. I shivered inside. Soon I’d get to moving the cacti closer to the front, then cleaning out the old koi pond, stocking it with marbled, thick fish. Then more varieties of plants; weirder, stranger specimens, plants I’d never seen, names I’d never heard. I wanted them all. I wanted to stay surprised.
This is happiness,
I thought.
This is where I want to be.

***

And love?

What else is there to say on the subject? I wasn’t quite bitter about it, but I wasn’t hopeful either. I was in some vague, vaporous place that blended both of those worlds. If anything, I’d come to decide that relationships were best for other people, that my own longing and need had in the past gotten the best of me, and it was time to let that go. There was no reason to assume that I couldn’t be comfortable by myself. All I really needed was a few close friends, a love for my work, and some occasional sex. I felt wary admitting to this, as if I were only deluding myself, trying to justify my failure, my giving up. But was I giving up, or growing up? Was I in some deep depression and afraid to deal with its causes? My answers wavered depending upon my state of mind.