In the Weeds

by Daniel Browne

  “How about getting kids in there somehow?” Elliot said. “Children’s Harvest?”

  “Kind of sounds like we’re harvesting children for their organs.”

  Marnie pressed her palm into her forehead, like she was trying to force what she was hearing back out of her brain. “You don’t want people to think you’re copying your bigger, better-funded competitor, okay? What’s your edge? What sets you apart?”

  “We’re cheaper,” Elliot said.

  “No. When you’re talking about schools, cheaper isn’t better. Where have you been?”

  The conversation stalled. I felt like I had to break the silence. “Ours is on the roof.”

  Marnie looked up from her phone. “That’s actually good. Kids on a roof. It’s visual.”

  Elliot was tearing pieces off his napkin and working them into pellets between his fingers, like he was stockpiling for a literal spitball session. “Roof Runts?”

  Marnie turned to me. “Is he serious?”

  “We need to get the idea of the farm in there,” I said. “Green, organic, sustainable, leafy, earthy…

  “I’ve got it!” Marnie clapped her hands. The girl behind the counter shot us a dirty look, thinking it was another attempt to summon her. I tried to apologize with my eyes.

  “Raise the Roof,” Marnie said. It sounded like she wanted to add a “period” to the end.

  She sat back and waited for the gush of appreciation. Elliot rooted through the scruff under his collar, his go-to stalling tactic. I let my head list from side to side, swaying between opposing thoughts.

  Marnie crossed her arms. “What?”

  “It’s good,” I started. “It’s just kind of…”

  “Patronizing?” Elliot finished the thought. “If we were starting a reading program, would you call it Word to Your Mother?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Marnie said. “‘Raise the Roof’ is fun. ‘Raise’ is an inspiring word. It’s got that Up with People vibe. And it works on two levels because you’re raising vegetables.”

  “‘Raise vegetables’ doesn’t sound right,” I said. “You must be thinking of cattle.”

  “Will, I assure you I am not thinking of cattle.”

  Elliot wanted to keep fighting, but when Marnie demanded alternatives, we couldn’t think of any. Raise the Roof was already growing on me anyway. We moved on to the tagline, Marnie now fully in charge.

  “There’s two ways to do this. There’s the six-word description, this is who we are and what we do. Something like, ‘Rooftop farms for kids and communities.’ Kind of dull, but it gets the point across.”

  We nodded. Not bad.

  “Then there’s the ‘Eat. Pray. Love.’ approach, three words only. You could do nouns—Kids. Crops. Classes. But I prefer verbs—Plant. Teach. Grow.”

  She traced the words in the air, making a dot between each for the silent period.

  Elliot shook his head. “No ‘Eat. Pray. Love.’ or I’m going to gag, puke…Will, what’s one word for ‘lose all self-respect’? ‘Die inside’ with a hyphen?”

  “I think the descriptive approach works better for us,” I said. “It’s kind of a complicated idea to get into three words.”

  Marnie lowered her glasses, the better to look down her nose. “Yeah, real complicated. Why don’t you call it The Will and Elliot Early Retirement Plan, backed by Viv?”

  Elliot gave her the finger. “You should talk. You’ve probably already sold her endorsement in the next election. Or maybe she can be the first female spokesman for boner pills…”

  “Actually, if you must know, I’m getting a chair at Baruch named after her. How’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Is it a nice chair? Does it recline?”

  “An endowed chair in public policy and urban affairs. Anyway, what’ve you got? A pile of dirt on a roof in a place nobody’s heard of? Maybe you can call it Viv’s Pile.”

  “Tommy Brutti’s probably going to want us to put his name on it,” I said. “Or Martin Gollick, since he’s giving the most.”

  Marnie’s face froze. “You didn’t tell me you got Tommy Brutti and Martin Gollick on board.”

  “We have trouble keeping track of all our donors,” Elliot said. “You know how it is.”

  If she was chastened, she didn’t show it. As always, Marnie was all forward momentum.

  “This changes things. With names like that, you’re going to want to do an announcement and some kind of event, a party, a ribbon-cutting ceremony…”

  “Is there even time?” I said. “We’ve got to be up and running by May.”

  “You’re going to need to start sending out invitations within the next week or two if you expect anybody with any juice to show up.”

  Elliot scowled, a rare look for him. “You’re cordially invited to our pile of dirt in a place nobody’s heard of?”

  “Just let me handle it,” Marnie said, already working her phone with both thumbs.

  “So you can invite everyone on your hit list of potential clients?”

  “My hit list is all the people you want talking about Raise the Roof. Come on, you know Viv is going to agree with me.”

  There was no doubt about that. In Vivienne’s world, there was no good deed that didn’t warrant a party. And the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea of a formal kick-off to announce our presence in the Triangle and on the urban farming scene. To salvage Elliot’s pride, I insisted on a sober tagline: “School-based agriculture for urban communities.” Marnie sketched out a logo concept on a napkin, a grid pattern with interspersed blocks of green representing a network of rooftop farms. I had to admit, it was good. She later turned it over to the graphic designer on her team who preserved the rough quality of the sketch, giving the finished logo the rustic look of a woodblock print.

  Marnie was exultant on the phone when she sent us the mockup of our stationary and website banner.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “You’re a brand.”

  Till the Revolution Comes

  We had a name, a tagline, and a logo. We had an anchor donor with bottomless pockets, a matching grant from a famous name, and a planning grant from the city’s most powerful foundation. We would soon have a logic model, a curriculum, and a website.

  The logic model was proving to be a major undertaking. Brad at Prometheus had sent me the “toolkit” he mentioned in our meeting, but it turned out to be just a piece of software on the Prometheus website that allowed you to arrange a series of color-coded bubbles under the headings “Inputs,” “Outputs,” and “Outcomes” and draw arrows between them: “advice from curriculum development experts” (input) leads to “standards-based science and art lessons” (output) leads to “increased test scores” (outcome). Tricia called it wonk Sudoku.

  After a couple of days, my dreams were haunted by bubbles and arrows. I decided I needed a few examples of A+ logic models I could crib from. Brad said it wasn’t the foundation’s place to “prescribe the process” and suggested I hit up our “peers in the field” directly. Our peers in the field weren’t much help, though. Living Classroom was as unresponsive to my calls as ever; Duncan at In It Together was solicitous and unexpectedly guarded at the same time. “Dude, I’ve been there. Fucking logic model, right? I sweated blood over ours. That’s the thing. You put in all that time and effort, and you start to get proprietary about it. Not that I ever even look at the fucking thing, but you don’t want anyone else looking at it either. Kind of like the Colonel’s secret recipe.” Wasn’t this the guy who told us, “You help the people who need your help”?

  Elliot, meanwhile, was busy hammering out Raise the Roof’s curriculum, our bid for innovator status. He cc’d me on epic email threads with his former academic advisors and their colleagues, who seemed more than willing to lend their expertise, especially once they heard that Prometheus and Martin Gollick were involved. I tried to keep up with the discussion, like I was auditing a particularly abstruse seminar, but most of the details whizzed
over my head. Before long I was just skimming, content in the knowledge that we had our very own brain trust, and it was deep in cogitation, hashing out the appropriate “dosage” of farm time for each age group (one hour three times a week or three hours once a week?); shuffling the sequence of activities so they would “facilitate project-based learning”; debating which benefits to aim for, “intrinsic” (fresh air, exposure to the wonderful world of salad fixings) or “instrumental” (an up-close lesson in photosynthesis). I was confident we’d have the most pedagogically sophisticated vegetable patch around.

  The website was Marnie’s doing, or more likely a flunky at “Marnie.”’s doing. Either way, it was pretty slick. There was a flash animation version of our logo on the welcome page, the green blocks on the grid filling in one by one. There was a meet the team section with bios of me, Elliot, Seth, even Kat, who was identified as Raise the Roof’s “administrative director and chief gardener.” I had no idea where that came from. The news section already had one post, a “sneak peek” of Seth’s design for the site. The blog so far consisted only of photos of Rita’s and Begin to Win. It was up to me and Elliot to keep it fresh.

  “Just be conversational,” Marnie said. “‘Great meeting with Tommy Brutti today...Heirloom tomatoes or green beans: tell us what you think...So psyched for spring!’ That kind of shit. Lots of pictures.” I swore I’d try to take it seriously.

  Everything was going so swimmingly, I was almost excited when I found we had a problem to solve.

  “Arthur and Barbara don’t want it on the roof anymore.”

  Vivienne was calling from Palm Beach; an esteemed designer of ladies’ evening wear was weekending there with his children, and they needed a fourth for tennis.

  “What?”

  “They say the community won’t get anything out of it if it’s on the roof.”

  “Just tell them that’s what the green market is for.”

  “Don’t try to be reasonable. What they really want is for it to be at eye level so anyone passing by can see what a wonderful thing they’re doing for the children.”

  “No one ever passes by.”

  “Well, that’s not what they think. And it’s their roof.”

  “We did tests. The architect has been planning for that space.”

  “If he’s any kind of architect he knows that plans change. Changing plans is more or less his job.”

  “We’re called Raise the Roof.” The hinge of my jaw was starting to throb. “We have a website. We ordered business cards.”

  I could hear the thwack of racket on ball. Was she playing while she was talking?

  “That’s a good name. You should keep it.”

  “It won’t make sense.”

  “Coca-Cola doesn’t have cocaine in it anymore, but they kept the name because it’s catchy. Speaking of, would you be a dear and fetch me a Coke on ice?”

  That last part couldn’t be addressed to me, but it sure sounded like it was. I could feel the zest for problem-solving dribble out of me. I tried to will it back.

  “All right, fine. No roof. Do they have any suggestions of where else we can put a half-acre farm?”

  “Actually, they do. They want you to put it in Peter’s Place.”

  “Who’s Peter?”

  “How should I know? Peter’s Place is what they call that dreary little playground with the handball court. Hello? Still there?”

  I’d gone silent because I was genuinely befuddled by the suggestion. “I don’t get it. They want us to uproot the playground? That’s supposed to make the community happy?”

  “You don’t need to uproot anything. They say there’s a ring of grass around the blacktop. You can plant your vegetables in that.”

  “Viv, the school used to be a drug factory. The ground is probably full of chemicals.”

  “Even better.” Thwack! “Nothing brings a community together like a nice environmental cleanup.”

  I was starting to wonder if the thwacking sound was coming from inside my own head. “Arthur and Barbara know the playground doesn’t belong to them, right? It’s Parks Department property.”

  But nothing was going to throw Vivienne off her game. I realized she wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Well, that’s not an issue,” she said. “We’ll just talk to Jack.”

  * * *

  That’s how the whole team—me, Elliot, John, Seth, Twitchy, and Kat—wound up in Peter’s Place with Jack, a Parks lifer Vivienne knew from her days with the Central Park Conservancy. Jack was the city’s bureaucracy made flesh, not that there was much flesh to him, mostly just yellowing skin and rickety bone. He looked like a civics teacher circa 1962: flattop, short-sleeve button down—with a pocket protector no less!—orthopedic shoes. He seemed content to contemplate the smoke from his cigarette while the rest of us sized up our predicament.

  John’s temper was as close to the surface as I’d ever seen it. “No. Not enough space, not enough control. It’s got to be the roof.”

  Twitchy picked up a square plastic wrapper, then quickly threw it away, wiping his hand on his pants. “If you’re looking for my recommendation, I say do it here. From a child safety perspective, it’s the best bet.”

  I was getting the impression he wasn’t a hundred percent confident in his jerry-rigged stress test.

  “Not if the ground’s contaminated with Pfizer’s backwash,” Elliot said.

  Jack spoke in a papery rasp without looking any of us in the eye. “We tested the soil years ago when the playground was first built. Came back clean, believe it or not.”

  I asked Seth what he thought.

  “Less space, no way around it. Funky shape, too. We’d have to completely rework the design. But this is supposed to be about serving the community, right?”

  John took a step closer to him, carefully parceling out his aggression. “You know the community’s not paying you, right?”

  Before I knew it, I had wedged myself between the two of them. “It’s the Schlossers’ school, remember? And they want it here.”

  John eyed me like he was thinking about removing me from his path. “I’ll talk to them. We made a connection.”

  “No way. We’ve got to speak with one voice.”

  Kat had drifted over to the gate to talk to a woman in an army surplus coat walking a bedraggled black lab. She made her way back to the group, unaware of the pissing contest she was interrupting.

  “She wanted to know what we were doing. She said it sounded like a good idea, but only if there’s a dog run. This is where everyone brings their dogs to poop.”

  Twitchy winced. “I noticed.”

  Jack’s cigarette had disappeared between his thumb and index finger, but he seemed reluctant to dispose of the butt. “Look, gentlemen,”—either Kat was exempt from what he had to say or he’d granted her honorary gentleman status—“I think I can make this easier for you. We’re not going to be able to let you use the swale.”

  My head snapped back. “When we talked on the phone, you said it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I didn’t think it would be. But I hadn’t been out this way since—I’m ballparking here—the late ’80s. I’d never seen those.”

  At first, I couldn’t figure out what he was pointing at. “You mean the trees?”

  There were three of them, scraggly pines with sallow bark. One of them was barely taller than Twitchy. A second was drooping morbidly, nearly bent double.

  “Not much to look at, I know,” Jack said. “But the mayor’s got his million tree initiative. The Million Tree March, I like to call it.”

  He waited, without much hope, it seemed, for the laugh he desired.

  “Every tree in this city is counted toward that goal, gentlemen, and Parks is under strict orders not to remove a single one of them.”

  The whole group was momentarily united in its stupefaction.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “You realize they actually make the neighborhood more d
epressing,” Elliot said.

  “I can put in something a hundred times nicer,” Seth said.

  “Fucking government,” John said.

  Jack placed the cigarette butt in his pocket protector. Far be it from him to litter in the presence of three of Bloomberg’s million trees.

  “I should have said from the beginning, Parks would like to see this happen,” he said. “And if it’s going to happen, we’d like it to be as accessible to the community as possible.”

  I made a point of not looking at John.

  “To be completely honest, we forgot that Peter’s Place existed,” Jack said. “Don’t even ask me who Peter is because I have no idea. I feel a personal responsibility to spruce things up a little here.”

  “But the trees...” Twitchy said.

  Jack held up a hand, appealing for patience. “If I may, I have an alternative suggestion.”

  He looked off into the distance, and we waited, until we realized we were supposed to follow his gaze, that his suggestion lay on the other side of the chain link fence, behind the swale.

  I ventured a guess since no one else was volunteering. “The handball court?”

  “You’ve been out here how many times?” Jack asked. “A dozen?”

  That was a bit of an overestimate, but we nodded anyway.

  “And have you seen a single person playing handball in this court?”

  I was under the impression you needed more than a single person to play, but I grasped his point. I couldn’t claim to have paid any attention to the court specifically, but I couldn’t recall anyone using it either.

  “And do you know why that is?” Jack was enjoying himself now. “Because there’s another handball court six blocks away from here. A much better one. No cracks, no graffiti, no condom wrappers lying around. Gentlemen, it is the official judgment of the Parks Department that this court is abandoned and in need of revitalization. We’d like Raise the Roof farms—cute name, by the way—to take responsibility for that.”

  With that, he drew a fresh cigarette from his pocket protector and lit up with a disposable Bic. It was clear that he would just silently savor his smoke until we came up with a response.