Where's My Gardener?

I lost my gardener for three weeks. He has no phone and I couldn’t find him. He is one of these small wiry Trinidadian Indians, very passionate and vocal. At sixty he does triathlons and sometimes gets into trouble, usually with jealous husbands by his own coy admission.

So, after three weeks of no show, I’m thinking he’s gotten into some trouble, and started calling around. This morning he shows up finally, and sure enough, my gardener says to me;

“I go me ass lock up las week.”

Guess what? A jealous husband, an ex-marine, no less. Some very tall white guy married to a Polish woman who “loves her gardener.”

Now, this gardener always brings roses, maybe local fruit or some small gift to his clients. If there are children, he brings something for them too. If there is a husband, he is not excluded. This is a traditional West Indian custom, bringing some kind of gift.

This Polish woman and her tall ex-marine have known this man for some years, but ex-marine has been eating at his gut about the inevitable roses for some time and has decided that this gardener is fondling his Polish wife. Ex-marine also likes to drink a lot.

So anyway, some time last week, my gardener is invited in for a drink at the end of a long hard and hot day by the Polish wife. I always invite my gardener in for a cold beer or whatever he wants to drink after a tortuous day of work, sometimes a loooong ten-hour stint out there that I sure won’t do. Ex-marine joins them, gets a little drunk and moves in…

“You f*****g my wife?”

My gardener emphatically denies this in his heavily accented Trini dialect which becomes incomprehensible when he is nervous; desperate to preserve his friendship with the Polish wife, and his job.

“Menooowhaman?Nonono!”

He is invited back by the Polish wife a second and a third time after this afternoon of accusation, in spite of the suspicions of ex-marine husband, and the gifts of roses continue.

On the third visit, as the three of them are enjoying some cool rum on ice during a setting sun, ex-marine proceeds to get so drunk, mixing the alcohol in the gut already eaten by the thorns of roses, he suddenly jumps up, tears off all his clothes and runs out of the house. He runs down the street naked, through the middle-class neighborhood inhabited by “proper” middle-class people who are about to experience some excitement in their proper middle-class lives.

The neighbors come alive. Numerous 911 calls are placed, including one by the Polish wife. My poor gardener is beside himself and goes after ex-marine who then turns on him and starts swinging. After a series of failed attempts to persuade and cajole ex-marine into submission, my wiry little gardener gets tired of dodging fists, so grabs ex-marine by the balls and squeezes as hard as he can. Two wailing police cars arrive as ex-marine is writhing naked and moaning in agony on the ground. As my gardener tries to frantically explain in his over-heated Trini gibberish, he is promptly arrested and whisked away leaving the screaming ex-marine to the paramedics who arrive shortly after.

Polish wife, who remained cowering in the house, does not know her gardener has been arrested.

They let our gardener go after two days behind bars.

He pays a visit to the Polish wife who tells him that her ex-marine is in the hospital recovering from the ball squeeze, and we can assume as well, the effects of the flavored ethanol that had been excessively consumed, so our gardener pays a visit to ex-marine. They kiss and make-up.

And I got my gardener back.

I don’t know if there is a moral to this story, but if there is, perhaps it would be something like:

Tall drunken ex-marines with Polish wives, who wish to be fondled by their gardener, should not interfere when the gardener is a five foot, four inch, sixty-year-old Trini Indian who does triathlons.
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Hey, Dad!

There were many rats down there. You could hear them bustling about and squeaking, sometimes fighting and shrieking. Rats down there along with the mice, piles of wood, piles of papers and red pencils, large heavy books, the microscopes, little rectangular pieces of glass with mysteries splattered on them. Bottles of guts and worms and giant bugs and fetuses and many other pickled dead things that looked impossibly large, magnified by the formaldehyde they were preserved in. Sawdust, the giant lathe, tools, big saws, paper and more paper, and my father doing something with all of these, including a partially constructed dollhouse that had little tiny doors and windows with little tiny hinges that you could open and close.

The rats were multi-colored, pretty, not too big, and had long pink hairless tails and the white ones had red eyeballs. I want to feed the rats. Not the mice, because they were always sick and some had metal things stuck in them. When I asked my father why the mice were always sick he said because he makes them that way.

“Can I feed the rats?” I asked.

“Yes, you may feed the rats,” he said.

I’d watched him feed the rats, twenty cages of them. Big cages, maybe five to fifteen in each, some with mommies and their cute little rat babies. You have to lift the wire tops to get to their special little rat food dishes. The water tubes you can do from the outside. I already did those. I wanted to get inside, stick my hands down into the rats and feed them for real.

My brother watches from the door, leaning up against the door jam with that slightly amused contemptuous look he always reserves for me. Creep! I ignore him. To the fifty-gallon drum, lift the lid, fill the basket with the nice smelling, precisely formed little compacted pellets; the only food these fat rats have ever known and will ever know until they serve their allotted purpose, designed by my father their God. Where’s the little scoop? Oh there. Basket of neat little pellets and the scoop. He’s still standing there watching and smirking, I hate him!

To the first cage, untwist the wires, lift the lid slightly, push it back, reach in for the dish . . . Oh! Sharp little rat toenails dig into my hand and run up my arm, how many, seven or eight? Scrambling out, using my arm as a highway to freedom, while my senses and body revolt. I started shrieking, just like them. I hear diabolical laughter from the doorway. Stupid idiot! I flail, throwing rats into the air, flinging them off my body and then running though the sawdust, stumbling over piles of wood, trying to catch them as they scurry away, grabbing these no longer pretty, suddenly slimy little monsters, throwing them back into the cage, trying to keep them in as they keep running out. Impossible, I am really in trouble, I thought, as that worthless horrible mean brother doubles over in laughter, still at the doorway. Okay, they’re all back in . . . SLAM THE LID DOWN NOW, I think and I did. And the shrieking went on and on…Oh that’s not me, that’s one of them, Oh NO! No, no! I lift the lid. A rat nose melded to the lid, parted from a rat face, a face covered with rat blood. The rat with no nose drops to the floor of the cage and is instantly concealed by a pile of squirming brothers and sisters. I can’t SEE!! NO!! They are EATING it! Tearing at its belly, disemboweling the evidence of my incompetence . . .

I watch with fascinated horror, knowing what I am seeing, but still not believing it. My brother walks over, lifts the lid, reaches in and pulls out the rat, the one with no nose and not much else by now. As he lifts it and pushes back the lid, an impossibly long pink wormy thing dangles from its belly. He pulls and pulls at it, pulls it out and throws the body into the trash can. He holds the loooonnggg wormy thing up in my face, turns around and runs up the stairs, with it bouncing and trailing behind him, and me not far behind, screaming in anger at him and in terror of my father.

“HEY DAD!” he yells, “She fed the rats!” and he hands him the slimy wormy thing.

“Oh,” says daddy, “So she did,” as he removes the thing from dung-head’s hand and lays it gently on the dining table where he was grading papers. He spreads it out carefully.

I’m nauseous with guilt, waiting to be “struck down.”

He makes me sit down and look.

And thus followed my first lesson on the anatomy of the lower intestine.

And Beginning Again

This is my first blog and my first blog post. Now that I consider that I have Been and Done (or Done and Been as I was forced to use as my blog name), I am venturing down a new avenue, mainly with the intent to tell a story. Other friends of mine have done so, so why not?