So the following day, Tino, Ramiro, Tomás, and I were lunching up at the top of Magnuson’s driveway on Hall’s Hill, when suddenly the three of them fell silent and went to skulking behind their tamales as Lacy pulled up in his white Econoline.
“Muñoz,” he said, climbing out. “I specifically told you to pick up the shit on McClures’ deck, did I not?”
“We talked about this from the beginning, Lacy. The dog shit was their responsibility. I was hired to mow the lawn and beat back the blackberries. I’m sick of people changing the rules on me. Promising me one thing, then giving me another. Maybe they think they’re too good to pick up their dog shit, but that’s their problem, not mine. You can hire a new dog-shit picker-upper, I’m out of here.”
“Nice try, but you’re fired,” said Lacy. “Pack up your gear and get out of here. I can’t believe you even showed up today.”
Tino and the guys were all averting their eyes as I slammed my tailgate shut. Tino gave me a little nod, and when Lacy wasn’t looking, he gave me a clap on the back as I climbed into the cab.
“Shit, ese, what you thinking, man?” he whispered.
“I’m a landscaper, not a shit picker-upper, that’s what I’m thinking.”
He shook his head, looking genuinely disappointed.
“You got to watch your temper, vato. Is only dog shit, right?”
“That’s plenty.”
“I keep my ears open for you, amigo. Maybe my cousin Sergio knows somebody. You cook?”
“Not really.”
“Construction?”
“Not so much.”
“Too bad. You gotta learn some other skills, homie. Don’t get me wrong, you good with a lawn mower, best I know. And you prune really good, too, Miguel, but—”
“Don’t call me Miguel.”
“What about cars? You fix cars?”
“No.”
“What about bikes?”
“Not really. I mean, maybe. Fuck, I don’t know.”
He shook his head solemnly. “I keep my eyes open, Miguel.”
As I pulled away, I flew Lacy a bird out the window.
Maybe I’m my own worst enemy. Maybe I made my own miserable bed.
But I can’t tell you how goddamn sick of the indignities I was, how fucking tired of Lacy’s petty, patronizing ways. The way he kept me in my place, the way he seemed to relish my humiliation. Nothing would have pleased Lacy more than to watch old Mike Muñoz pick up dog shit in the rain. And don’t get me started on some of the clients. Like the old lady in the wheelchair who treats me like her personal servant: always tasking me with fetching her an umbrella or moving boxes around in her three-car garage or dragging her garbage cans a half mile up the driveway. I don’t mind helping somebody with special needs—hell, I’ve been doing it my whole life. It’s the way the old lady expected it of me that made me want to wheel her off a cliff. The way she spoke to me, like I was beneath her. The way she never asked me how I was or even greeted me with a hello. Fuck the old lady and anybody like her. If I had my own outfit, I’d find clients that respected my work, people who appreciated my professionalism and my mad topiary skills and my immaculate edges. So, who knows, maybe getting fired was me turning a corner. Maybe this was Mike Muñoz finally sticking up for himself and asking for more.
At once dazed and energized, I watched my old life recede in the rearview mirror. Something had to happen now, right? Something had to give, my life had to begin. Didn’t it?
Drinking the Kool-Aid
I was in third grade when my mom took the job as the milk lady at our elementary school. Nate, who should’ve been in the sixth, repeated fifth grade, where he spent his days in the moldering portable out by the soccer field. I envied him, actually. He got to watch videos and screw around with finger paints and construction paper and eat paste all day long. Meanwhile, little Mike Muñoz, still wearing the same dirty coat with the fake-fur collar, stuck to the far end of the cafeteria at lunch, not drinking milk, clutching his free meal ticket tight as he inched his way through the line, pretending not to notice his mom waving at him from across the room.
Yeah, I know, it was a dick move, ignoring my mom. What can I say? I wasn’t exactly flush with social currency in third grade. Beyond Nick, I didn’t really have anyone I could call a friend. I was a scrubby, undersized half Mexican, whose brother was a freak of nature. My high water pants and my green lunch ticket were indignity enough. I couldn’t have my mom waving at me in the cafeteria.
After school, three nights a week, Mom went to her second job, waitressing at Campana’s in Poulsbo, which left me to take care of Nate. Since the library was about the easiest place to keep him occupied, we’d spend two or three hours a day there, Nate flipping through piles and piles of board books, sucking and twisting his shirt collar until it was heavy with spittle and hopelessly stretched out. He’d spend hours rapping his knuckles on the side of the aquarium so that the startled clown fish darted about crazily. Always nearby, I read White Fang or Treasure Island or Gulliver’s Travels, books with vivid settings far from my world and far from Nate.
Mom started taking us to a little Methodist church. The church was good to us. I’m not sure how much Mom believed in the gospel, or whether she prayed for our sins or knew the words to the hymns, but she believed in the church—as a resource, anyway. So on most Sundays she dressed us in our cleanest clothes, combed our hair, and we went to church, smelling of stale cigarette smoke. Mom stayed after the service and served coffee in the banquet room, and the married men chatted her up as Nate and I ate lemon bars and stale cookies and filled our pockets with sugar packets and creamers.
Thursday evenings, Nate and I went to the youth-group meeting at the church and played wholesome games designed to engender trust and communication and unwavering faith in God. We sang songs about building our houses on rocks and about how Jesus loved the little children. There were always snacks, of which we partook greedily: graham crackers and little paper cups full of grapes. I drank the Kool-Aid, but I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean. It’s not that I had anything against Jesus or God, I was just underwhelmed by the evidence.
I think those nights when we were at youth group were about the only break my mom ever got from us, an hour and a half a week on Thursday evenings. And you know where she spent it? At the Laundromat. These days, it may look like my mom’s not trying very hard, but then I consider how far she’s come and all the bullshit she’s had to endure, and I figure she’s doing all right.
As dull as the Bible study and singing were, I looked forward to Thursday nights. For one, I didn’t have to manage Nate. There was a teacher for that. It gave me a break for a while. All told, there were eight or nine other kids, including my hero, Doug Goble, long before he became the hottest real-estate agent in Kitsap County. It’s not that Doug Goble was particularly winsome or athletic or anything like that. He had a fetal cast to him, actually, like he wasn’t fully cooked when he came out of the oven. I’m not saying he was all curled up or anything, but his head had a lightbulb aspect to it, and his nose was flat and undersized. I think the appeal for me was that Doug Goble had confidence, charisma even, though he was poor like me and, like me, lived on the res in a manufactured home with dirty siding and a cluttered carport. Doug Goble could talk to girls and adults. He was decisive and self-assured, which made him persuasive. He possessed that quality I most associated with winners: certainty.
“You see this church?” he’d say. “Someday, I’m gonna live in a house twice as big as this dump. And the roof won’t leak. And it’ll be right in town, where everybody can see it. I’m gonna have a huge laundry room with a maid. And she’ll have big jugs, too.”
And I believed it, every word of it. I guess I needed to believe it. I would have done just about anything to impress Doug Goble. I laughed at his jokes, listened raptly to his plans of world domination, hoping that at the very least he’d let me ride on his coattails.
“It’s all just a
big game of Monopoly. Dummies and nice guys always lose.”
God, how I wanted to be a winner. How I longed for that certainty, when everything in my life was so uncertain. Goble tolerated me for the most part, as long as I kept laughing and listening. Until one day, he just abandoned me with no explanation. I always reasoned it was because I was a loser or maybe just a sucker. Anyway, our lives took different trajectories after that. Goble grew into himself and became one of the popular kids who sat at the same table in the cafeteria with the other popular kids who, in retrospect, weren’t actually popular, just feared and admired, and mostly wealthy. Goble was forced to bluff on the wealthy part or to compensate with confidence and guile.
As early as sixth grade, Goble started distinguishing himself as an entrepreneur, trading in lunch tickets and selling his mom’s cigarettes to high-school freshmen, who lined up behind the bleachers before school. Sophomore year of high school, he somehow finagled the school into paying him five cents per tray for collecting lunch trays from the cafeteria and commons, then outsourced the job to Vic Burzycki for a penny per tray.
Goble always had a plan, always knew what he wanted, never lacked ambition or nerve. He was a worthy hero for little Mike Muñoz, while he lasted.
The Usual Bullshit
Okay, I blew it. What do you want me to say? I probably shouldn’t have kicked the bag of shit. I probably should have driven down to Jiffy Mart and asked for a plastic bag, even if I had to buy something. Then I probably should’ve gone back and cleaned up the mess and called it a day.
But I didn’t.
Dazed and numb with apprehension, I had neither the inclination nor the courage to go home with the bad news. So I took comfort where I usually took comfort: the library.
As kids, Nate and I spent untold hours in the library while my mom was at work. We ate bruised apples and crumbling saltines, napping on the quilted sofas. The library was the most stable thing in our lives, the only thing in the whole damn society that said to little Mike Muñoz: “Here you go, kid, it’s all yours for the asking.” No matter that your ears were dirty and your hair was greasy. No matter that your mentally challenged big brother didn’t have much of an indoor voice or that he tended to throw books and pee on the bathroom floor and scare the clown fish shitless. At the library, a little ferret of a kid like me had a chance. The only currency he needed was a library card.
For two hours, waiting for Nick to get off work at Les Schwab, I scanned the fiction section for distraction. What I wanted was a book written by a guy who worked as a landscaper or a cannery grunt or a guy who installed heating vents. Something about modern class struggle in the trenches. Something plainspoken, without all the shiver-thin coverlets of snow and all the rest of that luminous prose. Something that didn’t have a pretentious quote at the beginning from some old geezer poet that gave away the whole point of the book. Something that didn’t employ the “fishbowl lens” or a “prismatic narrative structure” or any of that crap they teach rich kids out in the cornfields.
I wanted a book that grabbed me by the collar and implored me to conquer my fears and embrace the unknown. I wanted a novel that acted as a clarion call for the disenfranchised of the world. Not 250 pages of navel-gazing about the nuances of saddle making, topped off with some hokey epiphany. I wanted realism. Grit. I wanted my transcendence with grease under the fingernails and unpaid bills piling up on the countertop. Where were the books about me?
Maybe I should write the goddamn Great American Landscaping Novel. Why shouldn’t I have a voice? Just because I never went to college? Because I haven’t traveled the world or lived in New York City or fought in Iraq or done anything else of distinction? I suppose you could make a strong argument for any one of those. But I believe the world could use the Great American Landscaping Novel.
After all, most of us are mowing someone else’s lawn, one way or another, and most of us can’t afford to travel the world or live in New York City. Most of us feel like the world is giving us a big fat middle finger when it’s not kicking us in the face with a steel-toed boot. And most of us feel powerless. Motivated but powerless. Entertained but powerless. Informed but powerless. Fleetingly content, most of the time broke, sometimes hopeful, but ultimately powerless.
And angry. Don’t forget angry.
The problem, I soon came to realize, was that landscapers, especially unemployed ones, and cannery grunts and heating-duct installers didn’t have time to while away their days writing novels. They had bills to pay. Cars to fix. Disabled siblings to care for.
I finally picked up a handful of titles off the new arrivals’ rack, though none of them really appealed to me. One was a dystopian novel about a global pandemic with metaphorical implications. So was another. The last was by a woman named Hannah, who’d won a prize I’d never heard of and was billed as “a stunning meditation on race, gender inequity, and sexual identity.”
“MFA fiction,” said a voice.
I looked up to discover the same broad-shouldered librarian with the mop of dark, curly hair and the prominent Adam’s apple, who had recommended The Octopus to me. He was pushing one of those tan wheelie-carts loaded with recently returned books. Not your usual librarian, this guy, nothing like those formidable librarians of my youth, with their translucent nylon stockings. He was wearing a puke-colored sweater and a T-shirt that said BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT.
“I mean, the writing’s good,” he said. “Lyrical and all that. If it’s sentences you’re after. But so much of it just feels like affectation and craft to me.”
“Got any recs?”
“What are you looking for?”
“Something angry,” I said. “I like the last one you gave me—The Octopus. It made me want to put a brick through a window.”
“Ah, follow me, then,” he said.
He led me back to the fiction section and began running his fingers gingerly over the book spines. He picked out something called The Jungle by a guy named Sinclair.
“Is this guy dead?”
“Yes. You might’ve read it in high school,” he said.
“Not if it was assigned.”
“Then you should definitely check it out. Classic muckraking.”
“Cool. Thanks, man.”
“I’m Andrew,” he said, extending a hand.
“Mike,” I said.
He smiled, exposing a big pileup of crooked teeth that looked like a miniature Stonehenge. It was sort of a heartbreaking smile, but it didn’t seem to bother him.
“You should go ahead and check out the new fiction, too,” he said. “By all means. Don’t take my word for it. See what you think. Maybe you’ll like the acoustics.”
Once again, the library had my back. I left feeling a lot less desperate and scared than when I’d arrived. I clung to that security as I walked down the hill to town, clutching my five books.
Around five fifteen, I arrived in the murky environs of Tequila’s, where Nick awaited me in back. Before I could even tell him about getting fired, he started in on his usual bullshit.
“You see where they’re puttin’ a Mexican market across the street?”
“So?”
“Who do you think’s gonna shop at it?”
“Uh . . . Mexicans? People who like Mexican food?”
“Bingo.”
“So, why do you give a shit?”
“Because this place is starting to look like Tijuana.”
“You ever been to Tijuana?”
“Fuck no. Why would I go to Tijuana? Hey, look at that fag over by the jukebox,” he said.
“That’s Ron Strobeck’s little brother. He’s a youth pastor.”
“He’s a total homo.”
“Nick, do you have any idea what a dumbshit you sound like? I mean like ninety percent of the time?”
“Hey, you’re the one mowing lawns, chowder hound. I stopped mowing lawns for money when I was twelve. I made thirty-one grand last year at Les Schwab. So who’s the dumbshit?”
�
��But c’mon, don’t you want more?”
“Yeah, more pussy.”
“I’m being serious, Nick.”
“So am I. I’d like to be getting considerably more pussy than I’m currently getting.”
“What about a steady girlfriend, then?”
“Fuck that noise. Then I’d never get laid.”
“See? You sound like a total misogynist when you say stuff like that.”
“Fuck you, I don’t see you getting laid.”
“This isn’t about getting laid, Nick. This is about your life.”
“What are you, my guidance counselor now?”
“Where do you see yourself in ten years? Seriously, Les Schwab?”
“What is it with you tonight?”
“Just answer the question.”
“I don’t see myself in ten years. Why would I want to do that? I’ll probably be fat. And my hair will be gone. You’re really starting to piss me off with this superiority complex of yours, Michael. You work with a crew of illegals mowing old ladies’ lawns. I just don’t see where you get off judging anybody, I really don’t.”
Maybe Nick was right, maybe it wasn’t my place to judge. But his ignorance seemed willful. Or maybe it was just lazy, which was also willful. Whatever the case, I was running out of patience for it, growing weary of the exercise—mostly fruitless—that comprised coaxing out Nick’s good side. Such was my fatigue that over the course of the next two beers, I didn’t even bother telling him I’d quit my job or how I’d struck out with Remy. Already besieged by doubt and insecurity, I couldn’t see how telling Nick anything would make me feel better.
The Pavement
The next morning, I slumped at the kitchen table with a splitting headache, combing through the Kitsap Herald classifieds—all two columns of it. Nate was at the table with me, plowing mechanically through his third bowl of Rice Chex.
Lawn Boy Page 4
