You're Married to Her? (17 page)

But Helmet hair stepped square in front of me and would not let me pass. His head tilted and his hard expression seemed to thaw. “Brother!” He enveloped me in bear hug and within seconds a mass of men was encircling us, climbing our shoulders, jumping up and down. They only backed off to let one through. It was Golden, who drew me into a naked embrace. He smelled like sawdust and beef stew. “I have come to honor your bravery,” he said. I was a member of the tribe.

The war dance began or more like it a mosh pit in a
schvitz
bath.
Wakan tanan kici un
!
Wakan tanan kici un
! We careened like bumper cars and threw ourselves into each other's arms until Golden took the stage and silenced us for his final benediction. Flabby arms stretched wide, Moses on Mount Sinai, his voice ricocheted off the cinder block walls of the gym. “Alone we are weak. Alone we are condemned to walk the earth in pain. Together, Warriors, we share strength far beyond our number. We are invincible! We are men of POWER!”

The gym doors burst open. “Power! Power! Power! Power!” we shouted, running naked across the frozen soccer field. It was four o'clock in the morning. The porch lights of the surrounding suburban homes clicked on. Clouds of wood smoke billowed above the goal posts where a smoldering bed of lava stones lay ready for the fire walk. Arms linked, we were numb to fear
and welcomed the pain. We had dipped a quill pen in chicken blood and inscribed our e-mail addresses on the sacred mailing list. We had shared our shame. We had committed to meet monthly in small tribal councils for bowling and beer. We were no longer solitary wanderers on the desolate battlefields of the modern world. We were warriors. We were brothers.

 

Jacked up as I'd been after surviving the barefoot run over coals they told us were 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, the whole thing seemed shameful the next day and left me feeling vaguely queasy, like a hangover after a toga party. A workshop claiming to offer the wisdom of a warrior, or even more embarrassing, believing you've received it, is only an ersatz experience, like claiming a knowledge of French culture after visiting the France Pavilion at Epcot.

But the guys I'd met that weekend and at the regular “powwows” since were real. Teachers. Salesmen. Construction workers. Some who were struggling to find work. A lot of ordinary guys as well as a filmmaker, a physicist, a defense attorney, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize: types I'd always imagined had it made. Most had serious personal problems, trouble with their kids, with sex, with addiction. One guy, an award-winning tri-athlete and former professional bike racer, hid his illiteracy. Others were so hopelessly obvious you wondered how they didn't embarrass themselves: a Boston neurosurgeon who talked obsessively about the lap dancer who
really loved him, an heir to a well-known fortune who bemoaned the agony of being born rich. We all had regrets. Every single one of us envied someone else in the group for something he lacked. All of us, to the man, were something shy of what we had imagined ourselves becoming.

But the fact is, I felt perfectly at home. I fit in, just one more sorry-assed loser trying to get by. I wasn't substantially better or worse off than any of the guys I'd met. A surprisingly comforting thought and one that had never occurred to me: failure was normal. How fabulous was that?

The producer was visiting my house. My house! No mere story editor two years out of NYU, she was the executive creative assistant vice president of production for a company whose last film had starred Al Pacino. Al Pacino! She had optioned my novel and hired me to write the screenplay. She liked it and after endless drafts and a year of shopping it around she had found a studio that was interested. Since she was visiting family on Cape Cod I suggested we take a meeting at my house.

The movie business was all about relationships, my agent said. Deals are precarious. You had to think long term. I was out of the Hollywood loop, of course, and fashioned myself an image inspired by a Jim Harrison interview: the screenwriter who chooses not to live in LA, the talent indifferent to the game. Part literary outsider, part gentleman farmer. I put it all together: old jeans and boots, oysters with a vintage Chassagne Montrachet for lunch. An old pick-up truck and a big garden. The
one thing that worried me, however, the flaw I could not allow my producer to see—My producer!—was weeds. I have a thing about weeds.

She was scheduled to arrive on a Saturday afternoon in June. Before leaving for a month-long research trip to France we had planted our entire garden and returned four days in advance of the her visit to a choking biomass of weeds—stitchwort, dog lichen, toadflax, knotgrass, chickweed, mattress straw, speedwell—overflowing the paths, climbing the fences, suffocating the cucumbers and the peas.

I think of weeds as thugs, the violent underclass of the garden. I think of weeds as gangbangers using their size and numbers to intimidate innocent vegetables. Left to thrive, allowed to spread, to plunder the nutrients of the slow-to-mature tomato, to ravage the fragile hot pepper, the spindly eggplant staggering under its heavy load, these malicious deadbeats leave only destruction and blight in the wake of their hateful creep. Not on my watch!

I began the attack at dawn on the morning after we returned, armed with a stirrup hoe and a hori-hori knife, unearthing pernicious green carpets of chickweed. Midway through the day, however, it began to rain and kept at it for the better part of the week and every square foot I cleared gave birth to more weeds like replacement troops pushing each other to the front, a new one sprouting as soon as I turned my back. After three more days of hacking weeds and hauling them to the dump I
broke out the propane-fueled vapor torch and burned my way down every path till dark.

To my mind there is no escaping it. Your garden reveals who you are. If you're a lazy slacker who likes fresh tomatoes but can't even be bothered to mow the lawn, you force a few tomato plants in a pot on your porch. If you're an obsessive compulsive you dig uniform paths between each row, measured to the inch. If you're a geek you lay a grid work of soaker hoses as intricate as a subway map all connected to a digital timer. Likewise people afraid of wildlife protect their garden with a battery of horse rattles, whirligigs, reflector ribbons, tethered beach balls and at least one Styrofoam owl decoy. The worst of the lot are people like me, narcissistic control freaks for whom the garden is an ever-humbling reminder of our inability to impose our will and direction on the world. Yet every St. Patrick's Day, be it above freezing or below, be there sun or rain or a coating of snow which I dutifully shovel off—or ice, which I attack with a pick axe—I plant the peas. Why do I put myself through it?

For years I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a small city home to a large number of famous writers. Nearby there lived a world famous novelist who I would see walking his dog every day. But rather than walking the animal, he seemed to be trailing it aimlessly down to
the Charles and up to Harvard Square, his eyes to the ground, barely holding the slack leather leash. The more I encountered him, the more interested I became in his books and over time I read most of them. In the way you do after becoming involved in a writer's work, and therefore in his sensibility if not the facts of his life, you begin to think you know things about him. You know he likes cooking, for instance, because there are recipes in every book. You know that he comes from the working class; and that he sympathizes with feminists. Because many of his sensibilities were my own I was determined to make his acquaintance. I was furthermore not going to approach him like a crass fan, “Hi, I love your work,” but as a colleague, and one day I stopped squarely in front of him and said, “Hi, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Yes, I actually do,” he said, not breaking step. “I'm working.”

It took me some time to understand the encounter as a lesson rather than a brush-off. A writer's work entails a great deal of doing nothing at all obvious, or at least nothing to do with making words appear on paper. A writer has to allow the mind itself to wander aimlessly. Some do it tottering behind a dog. Some do it in the bathtub. I learned a long time ago that most of what I forced myself to write was junk and that I needed to stop forcing myself, to allow ideas to arrive or not, like dreams in sleep. For me those ideas come when I'm behind a roto-tiller, or stringing beanpoles, or moving
clumps of day lilies. When the ideas don't come, which is most of the time, fuck it all, at least the day lilies get moved.

I think I'm overweight (and you probably think you are, too). Therefore seven months out of the year I torment myself for about an hour every day on exercise machines. Over the years I have tried treadmills, stair masters, bicycles, ellipticals, universal gyms, free weights, stability balls, resistance tubing, and have settled on the Nordic-Trak cross-county ski machine because it is the most painful. I also own a state-of-the-art Concept2 rowing machine but I don't use it as a rule because I enjoy it and therefore don't believe it could possibly be doing me as much good. Working out on these machines bothers me, however, because it seems a total waste of energy, like a furnace pumping hot air through a vacant house.

I once had a high school science teacher who made his children power their television set with a stationary bicycle attached to a generator. However parsimonious this seemed at the time, it does strike me as a reasonable way to make use of a worthless expenditure of foot-pounds. I might have shopped for such a generator except that there's too much equipment in my bedroom already. Half the time just making her way to the bed for sex my wife bashes her shins on the rowing machine (it is nine feet long) and we've found it is not erotic to wait
for swelling to go down. Nor do I like what working out does to my mind. Because it is boring to exercise in my bedroom, I have devised any number of ways to enliven the experience. MP3s on my Droid phone work well. NFL football games are very good. Until it was cancelled the all-time best was the Fox series
24
, which made my heart race and my blood bubble but messed with my politics and turned me into a sweat-soaked overweight vigilante in spandex shorts chasing terrorists on a stationary ski machine while shouting, “Down that alley, Jack! Get him! GET HIM!”

In the spring of every year, however, we use the machines to hang our clothes on and get our exercise in the garden where the term “workout” actually involves work, as well as being outside. The garden tones different muscles than the machines—shoveling pumps up my shoulders, for instance, while bending and twisting seem to trim the waist—although my abs will always resemble a keg as opposed to a six-pack. There is no doubt that seeing the fruits of one's labor actually turn into fruit makes the work, as the Marxists like to say, less alienating. The only thing I've ever grown while working out indoors on the ski machine is a fungus so bad I had to use Cruex to stop the jock itch.

Cut down a tree in your backyard that's too close to the
marsh and you're in the cross hairs of the conservation commission. Shoot an intruder in your home and it's you who are in trouble with the law. Just try to turn your garage into an extra bedroom without a building permit. But who gives a damn what you do in the garden? Bulldoze your roses and booby trap your hillside with yucca. Buzz cut your lawn till it looks like a billiard table. You like cement buddhas? A twelve-foot tall statue of the goddess Minerva made of welded oil drums? Every Halloween where I live a woman populates her lawn with an army of life-size ghouls, six-foot figurines holding rubber daggers, blood-soaked corpses and marching zombies, stopping traffic for miles. A ridiculous garden is one of the only things you can do on your own property that is not against the law. Feel free to express your bad taste. People will snicker but secretly love you. It makes them feel superior. It gives entire families a destination, someplace to drive past and ridicule instead of each other on long holiday weekends.

Back in the last decade of the twentieth century people thought writers made a lot of money. They thought that because they had seen a good review of a book in the
New York Times
, and a stack of them in the bookstore window, people were actually buying those books. I remember counting a writer friend's money when a book of hers landed on the
New York Times
bestseller list. I
remember doing a kind of hallucinatory calculus, pulling a royalty rate out of nowhere, like, say, 10% of the catalog retail price, and multiplying it by a phantasmagorical number of copies, like, say, 300,000, and figuring that my friend had suddenly received a check for a million dollars. These days it's well documented that only a small number of titles get bought by a large number of people and that most writers don't make much money at all. It's a drag but at least our friends no longer make up fantasies about us. Never mind. We have vegetables.

In June we have enough lettuce to confidently stock every salad bar south of Boston, Massachusetts. This crop is immediately followed by long glossy rows of spinach plants with leaves as large as the ears of green elephants. It takes approximately half a station wagon full of fresh spinach to make one pound frozen, six hundred gallons of water to wash every pound and four hours of labor per. As we dedicate at least a week of our lives to freezing spinach we figure each pound to be worth about $85. Now that climate change has bumped us up to Zone 7 we have broccoli at the same time but after two weeks of eating it every day for lunch and dinner and in breakfast omelets with cheese, there are still so many heads going to flower that we put up vast tubs of broccoli soup. I forgot to mention the snow peas. And zucchini, which are famously prolific: even novice gardeners have getting-rid-of-zucchini stories. Personally I keep a database of people who do not have gardens—working mothers with young children, people confined to wheel chairs, anyone who owns
a boat—which is what makes carrots so nice and leeks, which likewise can stay in the ground for months, like friends who don't demand attention but are there when you need them. The tomatoes are painfully slow to arrive. Most of the college freshmen in the United States have already hauled their TVs, DVD players, laptops, refrigerators, crock-pots, and microwave ovens into their dorm rooms before we get our first tomato. The early ones are round red miracles anticipated like the first grandchild. The rest descend like quintuplets. We freeze them, puree them, can them, dry them, squeeze them into juice. We make chutney, hot sauce, spaghetti sauce, ketchup, soup. We barter them for lobsters, quahogs, little necks, blue fish, striped bass, oysters and the promise of chainsaw work come hurricane season. We FedEx tomatoes to my wife's literary agent, who gives me the run of her swank Upper East Side apartment when I need to stay in New York City. But mostly we give them away by the bushel. In August we are the MacArthur Foundation of vegetables, bestowing grants, as the Foundation itself advertises, “on talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” i.e., our friends. This is as close as we come to knowing what it's like to be rich.