My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm

by Manny Howard

  A job? What a thought. I have not had an honest job in a decade. As an editor near the top of the masthead at Gourmet magazine, the moment my first marriage failed, I got on my boss’s calendar and quit. I sat, knees together in the narrow, yellow chair in the outer office of the editor in chief, juggling the attendant emotions of the circumstances of the past few years. The boss called my name twice from the threshold before I heard her. She ushered me in, offered me the seat across from her at her desk, and before she had a chance to sit down, I informed her that I didn’t think that I was working out. Discourteous in my haste, before she had the opportunity to react, I gave two weeks’ notice. “That seems about right?” I asked rhetorically, then crossed and recrossed my legs.

  I was wearing one of the three new, expensive suits I’d specifically purchased for this profoundly civilized job, gazing out over Times Square while the boss processed my presentation. She asked me not if I would reconsider, but whether I was certain that this was the right time, right time in my life, she clarified, for me to be without a job, a place to go every day. A humane offer, motivated more by compassion than practicality; in truth I had been hopelessly ineffective at work for months. Then, as now, I lived my life out loud, and in the office, as was true most every other place I frequented at the time, the collapse of my marriage was common knowledge. “Yes,” I answered, bright suddenly, animated even, “I am certain this is the right time.”

  “Maybe we can work out an arrangement?” she offered generously. “Maybe we can … we can put together a contributing-editor slot for you? You could write for the magazine, rather than edit?”

  “Thank you. Let’s … Can we sleep on it?” was my halting, distracted response.

  “Fine, then,” said the boss, grown weary of her compassion and generosity going unacknowledged. She began sifting through a pile of pink phone-message slips.

  “Thank you,” I announced, suddenly focused, strangely resolute, standing up and smoothing my still new suit.

  “I do hope this works out, Manny,” she offered, looking up from the notes without pausing their shuffle.

  A yearlong contract was negotiated with the magazine; I wrote about food and travel, but always for the competition, never once for Gourmet. My contract was not renewed. This might not have been the case if I had once shown an ounce of interest, never mind gratitude, but I was so busy rebuilding myself I’m sure I never gave my behavior a thought. I had as much hostility for the image of myself as a senior editor at Gourmet magazine as I did for myself as a cuckolded husband, the job as much a symptom of my whingeing collapse of courage and my deluded determination to hold tight to the husk of a hobbled marriage.

  For the years that followed, my travel assignments were diverse—random, more like: one week hunting for bear with petty mobsters in the new Russia and the next week at a four-star resort on Kauai, attending cooking classes taught by Roger Vergé.

  I wrangled an assignment in Ukraine. My friend Evan was simultaneously directing a movie he had written in Russian and being held captive by the studio (in reality, an Eastern European gang who could not shoot straight, petty mafiosi who, he would come to believe, were using him as their “American filmmaker” in order to defraud investors in their business). At my request, Evan organized a bear hunt in the foothills of eastern Ukraine. It was hosted by his associates in the budding world of Russian film. The hunting party included the “don,” recently released from captivity in a windowless basement by a rival “studio” with his head shaved and twenty pounds lighter than when I had last seen him at a restaurant in New York (where I’d arranged a dinner for him and Evan and their associates from Brighton Beach). Also in the hunting party was an Afghan war vet we nicknamed Ajax. A muscular blond, he appeared to be a killing machine and developed a reasonably intense, if boyish, crush on me. Ajax continually challenged me to wrestling matches and various daredevilry. Most all of the challenges involved us both being naked.

  In Haiti, after Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s election, I reported on a United Nations mission to coax a legitimate police force from the Tonton Macoutes, a band of soulless, blood-soaked thugs who stepped on the public neck while despotic lunatic Baby Doc Duvalier raped his country.

  Rather than become known, as I had fantasized, as the go-to for global political mayhem, I followed that assignment with a dreary snigger about a doomed son of Upper East Side privilege with a deadly monkey on his back. I continued to drift from my early ambitions. Staring at glass office buildings bobbing above a dense canopy of trees from the window of my room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston, Texas, I imagined I knew what the jungle of the city of Freetown must look like. But, try though I might, I wasn’t covering fratricide in Sierra Leone; rather, I was holed-up with a plastic surgeon named Gerald Johnson, the self-described “originator and inventor of the belly-button breast augmentation procedure.” Grown weary of sitting-in while Johnson fitted a torrent of unconscious, spring-breaking nubiles with a new set each, I was waiting at the hotel for the adult star Traci Topps to fly in for her downsizing—the bottom had just dropped out of the big-bust erotic entertainment market and I was Johnny-on-the-spot, breaking the news. I wrote inexcusably giddy profiles about supermodels (remember them?) and movie stars, and countless ditties about the good works of socialites (this before the advent of celebutantes). A dubious honor, I wrote the first of what would be a brief but intense avalanche of profiles about Colin Farrell. During the interview, held over breakfast at an ersatz Irish pub near the location of his second feature, American Outlaws, the indiscriminately affectionate enfant-terrible-in-the-making and I got so loaded on Guinness that I missed the day’s last flight back home. There was some spiritual food, for sure: I proudly covered the cataclysmic flood in Grand Forks, North Dakota, staying on to volunteer for the Red Cross long after I’d gotten the assigned story. I scoured the south of France for truffles and learned the art of the perfect omelet with bold-name chefs at the dawn of that phylum of celebrity.

  After years of searching, I tracked down a Chinese-American who agreed to make a traditional dog casserole and exposed David Bouley’s profiting during the chaotic days that followed the September 11 attacks. One story at a time, my professional profile became that of the Grim Reaper of celebrity chefs, one of the few food writers who bothered to gather court records and call angry creditors, and who reported his stories even if it meant fewer gratis three-star dinners on the town. One day in 2005 I abruptly threw over magazine writing to work on a documentary about the war in Afghanistan. Finally a real adventure, I thought back then. A framed photograph of myself standing on the grand marble stairs at the Gandamak Lodge (once the Kabul home of one of Osama bin Laden’s six wives), gripping a German-made StG 44 assault rifle, still hangs on the wall of my office.

  My sudden desire for a proper job haunts me. I examine it warily, treat it like a symptom of something much more complicated, possibly an early warning of some terminal ailment. I ferry the children the five miles across Brooklyn to school without speaking or hearing a word. After returning to Howard Hall, I take up my station at my computer, relocated from the documentary production company’s office suite on Park Avenue South to a temporary desk made of sawhorses next to the dining-room table, unambitiously downloading mediocre pornography—force of habit, more than the result of any specific animal urges. The home phone rings. I don’t pick it up. Then, moments after the final ring dumps the call into voice mail, the same number registers on the caller ID of my mobile phone.

  I answer it. Faye introduces herself, says she has, just this moment, come out of an editorial meeting at New York magazine and has a story assignment she wants me to consider. Faye explains that as soon as she presented the idea, the instant consensus in the conference room was that I was the very first choice as the writer for the piece. No runner-up was discussed, she assures me. “This one,” Faye declares, without describing the assignment, “is the ultimate Manny Howard story.”

  Few compliments are gre
ater—given you like the assignment—than being told that a roomful of editors agree that you are the best writer for their story. It suggests that your past writing has made a generally positive impression on some people in your field, and that the work is memorable, and, maybe most important, that you have a style that is identifiable, at least recognizable. Though feeling complimented and therefore beholden, I am practicing restraint, still trying to hold on to the notion that magazine writing is something I used to do.

  Faye begins an excited description of the assignment. I understand little of what she first says. I catch familiar words and phrases: locavore, food miles, greenmarkets, and the global food industry.

  Faye asks if Lisa and I have a backyard. Faye asks because she wants me to write about the backyard. Faye asks because she wants me to write about using my backyard to grow food and then, eventually, eat only that food to sustain myself for at least one month.

  Faye wants me to live off my backyard. She wants me, she announces, suddenly breathless again, to engage the groundswell of enthusiasm for urban agriculture. She wants me to confront the self-satisfied, well-to-do locavores cruising the city’s greenmarkets. It is one thing to live in New York City and know the farmer who sells you milk or meat or whatever, she says. It is quite another to live in the city and be the farmer.

  There is no stunned silence. Not at all certain why, in my heart I have already accepted this strange, mammoth assignment. Rather than say so, my reflex—honed after years of negotiating equally harebrained assignments from editors with unrealistic expectations—is to parlay for exceptions, specifically salt, pepper, and coffee beans.

  I stop after three because, for reasons I do not yet fully understand, I agree with Faye’s assertion that if I want milk, it will have to be produced behind the house. This meeting of the minds permits me to introduce the topic of livestock. During our first phone conversation we discuss the risks and rewards associated with keeping a milking goat.

  Faye never uses the word farm, but before I hang up the phone, the editor’s proposed arch, maybe cynical, critique of urban agriculture and the fetish of sustainability has become a fully operational farm in my mind.

  Berserk assignments negotiated during twenty-minute phone calls are nothing new. More of the same, I have been flown out to Trancoso, Brazil, to follow a celebrity chef and tease out a story—any story—finally settling on the earthy (if poisonous) joys of cooking with trans fat–laden palm oil. I have been paid to ghostwrite for an editor’s own magazine a tale about his infidelities. I’ve been pulled off an assignment after arriving at a four-star resort halfway around the world because the editor did not realize that the publication’s parent company underwrote the subject of the story. This assignment is refreshing by comparison: New York magazine has offered me a job that, contrary to most every other magazine assignment I’ve landed over twenty years, is a straightforward tale of intense physical labor yet to be completed. The most appealing aspect of this assignment is the promise of the backbreaking work it will require. Better still, taking this gig will certainly preclude hustling any other magazine work, which, though it has been the core activity of my career for ten years, is, of late, beyond imagining. Equally appealing is the advance understanding that the job will take eight months at a minimum to complete.

  Faye and I negotiate the schedule, and eventually I secure unlimited reimbursement for expenses and what I consider fair compensation for the work and the writing—never mind that it is not nearly half a year’s salary. All that is left before I officially accept the assignment is to check in with Lisa. After last year’s trip to Afghanistan, I am anticipating little resistance. I might even be expecting a bit of grateful relief that I’ll be staying so close to home.

  * * *

  Just two years after we first met, Lisa returned to her suite at the Fairmont, New Orleans, during a break from a working session at the appropriately luxe annual retreat her division made. I was holed up in the suite, working on a profile about chef Gabriel Kreuther, then the executive chef at the city’s newly reopened Ritz-Carlton. Lisa opted not to return to the working session, and instead we broke the furniture until sometime after the dinner she was mandated to attend had begun.

  I held her hand as we dashed across Canal Street, then hailed a cab to Commander’s Palace in the Garden District, where her engagement was well under way. Opening the cab door for her, I gripped her firmly in my arms and kissed her quickly, before she stepped into the cab. I watched her cab pull into traffic, crossed the street to the Ritz, and visited briefly with Chef Kreuther in his kitchen as the dinner rush waned. Then I ducked back into the Quarter and took a stool at the counter of an oyster bar I favor just around the corner from police headquarters.

  Not exactly how I’d imagined I would spend the evening that my future wife and I conceived our first child.

  I arrived home before Lisa and was reading when she tumbled in the door, then undressed before me. Since we’d boarded the plane in New York, Lisa had been regaling me with stories of unsanctioned lost weekends and road trips to New Orleans that she’d taken with her teammates on the swim team. Half-dressed and entirely animated, now she proposed that, first thing in the morning, we visit Jackson, Mississippi. I protested mildly, pointing out that we would never make the four-hundred-mile round-trip in time for our afternoon flight. Lisa, smiling at the man, silly goose, in bed below her, was so eager to show me her childhood haunts, she insisted that as a teen on a booze safari, she and her friends could make the journey in less than two hours. “Really?” I asked sleepily, unable to convincingly calculate the necessary ninety-eight-mile-an-hour average land speed that such a trip would require while watching as she peeled herself out of her business rig and primped for bed.

  The next morning, a Sunday, we woke just after sunrise because that’s when, as Lisa had passed the front desk on the way upstairs a few hours before, she had arranged to have breakfast delivered.

  Between sips of coffee and pieces of fruit Lisa again made her case for the road trip. The moment I nodded agreement, she picked up the house phone and confirmed the reservation for the car she had made with the concierge before ordering breakfast. “I got us the most loaded Cadillac available,” she trumpeted. The only kind of car Charlie and Mama, her beloved paternal grandparents, had ever owned, she explained, excited. Then, catching herself when she clocked my furtive glance at my wallet on the dresser, she announced she was putting the car on her frequent-flier miles and wouldn’t hear of me contributing. “This is my treat, my adventure,” she said, bounding out of bed.

  Once our ride was secured, Lisa announced that, rather than taking the most direct route, west out of town, then due north on I-55, running between lakes Maurepas and Pont-chartrain, we should—“while we are down here”—visit Pass Christian, where she summered on the Gulf with her family as a child. “It’s so beautiful there. You are going to love it,” she all but sang. “It is so Manny Howard—very rustic, not Biloxi, the opposite. You’ll love it. I swear you will.” She smiled broadly while, all at once, fussing with the bodice of a bright yellow sundress and stepping into high sandals.

  Choosing the route to Pass Christian was also important, she explained. There is a right way and a wrong way. If we were going to visit one of the most magical places of her childhood, we couldn’t possibly take the state road northeast out of town toward Slidell. The causeway over the lake—Lake Pontchartrain—to Mandeville was the only proper route. “It’s so pretty,” she said. “You really will love it. I just know you will.” I was so completely content watching while she made her third full wardrobe change that it didn’t occur to me to say that I was, in fact, familiar with the drive, and the route she described constituted, even by the most optimistic, if feeble, math, a round-trip of over 450 miles, so that even if the traffic gods smiled and we did not get out of the car once in Jackson, the trip would take at least nine hours.

  “Should we ask the hotel to pack us a box lunch, do you think?�
� Lisa asked, forgetting the question the moment she picked up her PDA to make sure she had no unfinished business from the retreat. “I can’t believe I was late to dinner!” she exclaimed suddenly. “I got so much shit.” She tossed her head, delighted, hair cascading down her back, arms straightening to the floor, PDA still gripped in both hands and disappearing between her strong thighs into the folds of her white skirt. I remarked that we should skip ordering lunch, probably just get a move on, if we were going to make our flight out.

  * * *

  Lisa was right, Pass Christian was “so Manny Howard.” We visited in Jackson for all of twenty minutes, getting out of the car to gallop through the quiet country club where she and her brother and sister had learned to swim. I purchased some commemorative merch, a baseball cap, country club of jackson, est. 1914, a perverse disguise which I still enjoy wearing on crowded subways. We slowed the Cadillac in front of her grandparents’ home and Lisa misted up, lamenting that we could not stop one more time. I got an enormous speeding ticket for tear-assing south down I-55 from Jackson.

  I was only recently divorced (the legal nicety being completed three years after that first marriage had, in fact, died). Sure, I fell in love with Lisa on our first date. There was no question that I wanted to be with her. I did not want to have a baby and get married at all, though.

  At least, I definitely didn’t want to be a father. I probably was not as inelastic about getting married, but since my first marriage had begun to wobble on the wedding night, I did require that marriage be “fun” for a while before the unknowable preconditions of parenthood fastened themselves to us.

  Lisa would not entertain the notion of terminating the pregnancy. Told me matter-of-factly that she was prepared to have the baby by herself, if I was not interested. I was aware of her formidable negotiating skills (then probably more acutely than now) and, because I was so impressed with Lisa’s business acumen, truly considered this an opening offer, of sorts. But we had a difficult time “moving the conversation forward.” Neither of us really had the words that could get us to what Lisa frequently described as the best outcome of any negotiation: a win/win.