I'm a landscape architect by trade and training. It says so on the side of my truck: Roscoe Blim, Gardens of Distinction. People who have exorbitant amounts of cash shovel it into my pockets and I design them a tropical paradise where the only limitation is my imagination. I have a very wealthy imagination.
My most creative work comes from under a blanket of silence. At best, it's only the soft thrum of white noise from the air conditioner, slightly louder than my breath. At worst, it's a flock of songbirds in the nearby trees. The solitude that accompanies this lush, quilted sound is a jewel that I grasp with both hands. For me to see a field of nothing but grass or scrub and transform it into a lake with a waterfall, stands of graceful palms swaying in the breeze, and a bright rainbow of flowers and plants worthy of Dr. Seuss, requires concentration, contemplation, and several drams of Scotch whisky. Losing control of this environment would be the same as Picasso trying to paint while suffering root canal.
I've lived in the country for most of my life, can't stand the cities, and spend as little time as necessary, when I do venture in. I rarely turn on the radio in my pickup truck when I'm driving. The sound of the tires on the macadam, the wind roaring in my ears, and the hum of the engine are better for thinking than some mindless babble or nonstop commercials, interrupted by the occasional song.
My neighborhood fosters that peaceful existence. Cars go by every now and then, but only leaving or returning home, as I live on a cul-de-sac. One neighbor, a couple of houses down the street, has a motorcycle, but only goes out on Saturday morning, long after sunrise. Occasionally, children on bicycles or skateboards circle in front of my house, but with the windows closed, since I spend most of my time in the back, they pass in silence.
The house to my left is only occupied for a few months in the winter by a retired couple from Chicago who gave me a free hand to re-do their property several years ago. The wife, a good ten years older than me, is trying to fix me up with girls young enough to be my daughter. Nice folks, who if I didn't see them getting the mail, I'd never know they were there.
All of it, when stirred together, provides me with a work environment that rivals an isolation tank.
It was then, not only pillage, but a full-frontal assault on my placid lifestyle, a backhand across the face from fate, a crotch-kick from my worst nightmare when the drug dealers moved in next door.
Now, before you get the wrong idea about the drug-dealing Goldfarbs, let me state clearly that the wife-Sylvia-and the eleven-year-old daughter, who had already changed her first name three times, had nothing to do with Harry Goldfarb's side job as a dope dealer. Of course, Sylvia was aware of her husband's extra income. I heard her joke several times about all the extra cash. However, I never saw her take a toke. Moon Kandy, the most recent of the daughter's noms de moment, could have gone either way. They say "kids these days" and I still think of eleven as a baby. Regardless, mother and daughter would leave for several hours on the nights that Harry sold pot, a meager effort at good parenting.
Harry was a personable guy, forty-two, a full ten years younger than me, but with a lot more hair than I had at his age. Joke of it all is that he worked for TSA-Homeland Security-the folks that laugh at your x-ray image in the airport and rejoice when they've slowed the line through security to where little children are peeing in their pants. I don't fly very often, to the islands every now and again, but when Harry revealed his daytime occupation, I decided to fly even less.
Despite the nefarious and illegal aspects of the product, Harry's clientele were considerate enough to restrict their business dealings to reasonable hours. Reasonable for everyone else in the neighborhood except me. During the day, I'm out with a crew, planting, moving boulders, building pergolas, stringing passion vines through them. It's almost mindless work at that point in the project. The design that grew from the fertile regions of my gray matter (fertilized with carefully measured doses of single malt whisky) floats in front of my eyes when I'm at a job site. The creative engine starts chugging when I'm home, sitting in my office and staring at the one-hundred and five orchids hanging right outside my window in a fifty-year-old oak tree.
Unfortunately for my creative needs, my engine of inspiration often seemed to reach full steam within minutes of Harry's patio door slamming to announce his first customer. Now, I'm all for enjoying your evenings with a few friends, but the racket from those four-hour parties wilted my ability to design paradise.
The problem is that my corner office in the back of the house faces the lake on one side and his screened patio on the other. Harry always conducted business on his screened patio because it overlooks the lake, as well. As I learned, music, exceptionally loud music, was required to keep the party going and his customers happy. It really didn't matter to Harry what he played, as long as it could be heard for ten miles in every direction of his house by the end of the night. I wondered if they had to use sign language to complete sales as the parties finally peaked around midnight.
The kicker for me, having grown up in Florida, is that unless the temperature is well over ninety and the humidity is keeping pace, I leave the windows open while I work. Harry and his home business were making that impossible.
Much of it can be blamed on his "clients," as he called them. (He told me "customers" expect a credit card machine, "clients" bring cash.) Early in the evening, before the music kicked in, their words were as clear as if I were standing there. With the first toke, I would normally hear, "Oh wow, man!" where "wow" scared birds out of the trees.
On the second toke, they always got much louder, "Oh, wow!" and a bit of coughing. Alligators on the opposite shore scurried into the water. And on the last toke, I'd cover my ears, because now the client's found religion, "Oh, God!" they'd shout in a valiant effort to be heard over music that's suddenly loud enough to cause ripples on the lake. Harry, who brought the volume up to earth-shaking levels, would slip the remote into his shirt pocket and grin.
I could see his face go Cheshire as he stood there nodding and rubbing his hands together. I doubt he saw me, even when I pointed my t-square at him and pulled the imaginary trigger. In the beginning, I'd go out on my patio and glare at him, refusing to risk an encounter with someone who I was sure had a pistol close at hand; after all, he was a drug dealer. Several times, I walked down to the edge of the lake and threw a couple of stones toward his piece of shoreline. Nothing caught his attention, nothing to leave a hint that he should drop the volume, that it was causing me grief. Finally, accepting defeat, I'd march back into my office and slam my office windows closed. A useless gesture, but the protest felt good to release.
As invisible as I must have been to Harry, his clients seemed to view me as part of the landscape. Lumpy and Hummer were Monday night regulars. Hummer's massive black Humvee (hence the moniker I assigned him) shook the windows in the front of my house with a combination of raw motor and deep bass from a sound system to rival any arena. He made a point of blocking part of my driveway with the truck. Obnoxious, even though I rarely went out once home.
Lumpy, who tried so hard to keep his gut from rolling over the top of his shorts, always announced his arrival by turning toward my house and shouting, "Donuts!" as he dropped a box of them on Harry's glass table. It was my cue to close the windows and put on the air.
Stosh, who may or may not have been from Eastern Europe, but did have some kind of weird accent, came every other Thursday and insisted on hearing the double, live Peter Frampton album, over and over, whether he was there for a quick, twenty-minute puff and run, or staying for appetizers, entrée, and dessert. I liked that album, until the third or fourth time he came to Harry's house.
In six month's time, I named over twenty of Harry's customers. A foul-mouthed guy with dirty blond hair, who resembled a Viking, became Vulgar the Vulcan, owing to his inability to say a dozen words without throwing in some profanity. Gale Storm, who bore no resemblance to the late actress, blew threw the space between our houses as if there was a Category 5 hurricane chasing her. She forced Harry to listen to Cher, singing and dancing as she got stoned. Harry hated the music, I could see that in the pained expression on his face, but his eyes followed Gale and her bouncing chest around the patio as though they were tied to her t-shirt.
Now don't take any of this to mean I'm against the casual use of marijuana. Listen, for my buck-twenty, let 'em legalize every drug known to man. Hell, stop growing tobacco and replace it with cannabis. Drunks fall down and keep trying to get back up again. Dopers fall down and go to sleep. Think about it, did you ever see a surly stoner? Understand, I grew up in the 60s, but somehow managed to avoid anything not measured in proof.
Glenlivet and I became good friends in my early teens. The thought of screwing up my college chances, when no one really gave a damn about drinking, was enough to keep me and the potheads at bay. Even now, some thirty years later and as someone who's never tried a cigarette, I have no desire to smoke dope. But to my side of the coconut, if that was Goldfarb's thing, let it be. Just do it quietly.
Near the end of the summer, the wife and daughter went with his in-laws to Disney and he threw a party that he paid me to decorate-a temporary fountain on the patio, a bunch of palm trees in pots, and Tiki torches around his property, so his guests wouldn't get stoned and fall into the lake. It was the first time in months that I'd gone over there.
I was washing my hands in his kitchen sink when Harry walked in and stood next to me.
He had two Ziploc bags and let me smell them both before pulling what appeared to be a very expensive glass and gold pipe from his shirt pocket, which he placed next to the sink. Taking one of the bags, he opened it and inhaled as though sucking on an oxygen mask. I thought he was going to swoon.
"You smoke from this one if it's God you want to speak to." Harry closed the first bag and laid it on the counter. There was a long pause, as though his brain had fallen out of gear, but then, as if he was moving in slow motion, he lifted the second bag with the reverence a priest holds a bible. I could see his gold molars when he smiled. His eyes were mere slits. "But you smoke from this one, if the line is busy." He gave a little snort and then laughed, harder and harder until he was coughing-a good, rattling, blow-out-the-mucus kind of cough.
I took a step back from this shaman and his herbs, just as he blew a dime-sized glob into the sink, and folded my arms across my chest. "You know, I've been meaning to..."
Harry held a finger up to his lips. "Hold that thought, Roscoe. I gotta pee." He turned and ran for the bathroom. I dried my hands and left.
When the weather cooled and requests for my talent multiplied, as they did every year after hurricane season, it became harder to work with Harry's booming trade. His regular clients brought their winter guests, and they in turn brought friends. Sylvia and Moon Kandy vanished the day after Thanksgiving; I wondered if they'd both had had enough of what was becoming an almost nightly madness.
I certainly did.
In my early days, before the name Roscoe Blim was synonymous with tropical landscaping, I took on every job I could get. Gas stations, cookie-cutter houses in the gated communities, a church; anything to get a foothold in the trade. One of my friends from college became a deputy sheriff and I re-did his house at my cost. The next dozen of his sheriff buddies also got a break and it wasn't long before a pair of lieutenants and half the traffic unit were on my list of references.
So the thought of dropping a dime on my neighbor was always floating just off shore. I had the sheriff's number on speed-dial, having used it more than once to get out of a traffic problem. But in all good conscience, I couldn't make the call, not with my personal stand on pot and all that. My work was backing up. Designing at one o'clock in the morning, it's easy to draw a palm growing in the middle of a pond. I spent hours going back to correct mistakes made due to exhaustion.
Harry the dope dealer had turned paradise into purgatory and it was about to go all to hell in a bong.
I was never much a ladies man. Dated a few girls on and off in my college days, but found most of them to be anathema to creative thinking. After college, with fourteen-hour days the standard, I rarely had time for a dinner date and movie, much less for a full-time relationship. There was a span of almost ten years where I spent a lot of time with an older woman, the widow of a client, who saw me more as a tool than a treasure. But she provided access to many of my current, wealthy clients and as long as we offered each other mutual satisfaction, there were no hidden agendas.
Recently, I started spending time with one of the barmaids from Callaghan's, a nice Irish girl named Leana, who worked in the only bar in the area with top-shelf Scotch whisky. Admittedly, there wasn't as much bedroom time as there was drinking on our dates, nonetheless I needed both hands to count all the successful nights we'd spent together.
Catching a lucky night off in the middle of the week, she called and offered to cook dinner at my house. "Not a problem," I told her, "just give me a few hours to figure out which room is the kitchen and where to store all my pizza boxes."
Tossing my cellphone onto the seat of the truck, I turned and waved to the foreman. "Pack it up, Saludo. I'll see you tomorrow." Any woman who suggests "me" for the last course must either be able to cook with the expertise of a five-star chef or she can't even boil water and hopes I won't care. Regardless, there's always pizza delivery.
In the seven times Leana had been a guest at my house, it had always been after the drug store next door closed for the night. Working nights in a bar, she rarely got off before midnight. The lights went out in the Goldfarb house at least an hour before we got to mine. Tonight, as fate would have it, Leana turned onto my street just as Hummer's hummer stalled, completely blocking my driveway.
I had slipped into a pair of flip-flops and a bathing suit as soon as I got home from work and showered. My hair was still wet, but I managed to put on a t-shirt, inside out. Regardless, I was determined to greet Leana as soon as she parked, so I was standing in the driveway when the four-ton SUV farted to a stop.
"You need to move it back, you're blocking me in." I shouted to Hummer.
The burly pothead climbed down from the driver's side and ran past me. "I'll only be a minute, man. Be right back." Hummer disappeared around the corner of Harry's house, the screen door banging moments later.
"Wonderful", I spat the word in Hummer's direction and kicked the nearest tire.
The pain of kicking a twenty-one inch tire with a mostly bare foot isn't as bad as the aforementioned root canal. However, with root canal, they mute most of the pain. I've dropped large rocks on my foot; that hurts. I've stubbed my toe getting out of a pool; that hurts. This was something worse than "hurts". My breath left me on the exhale and my brain, suddenly receiving the news of my stupidity, forgot to tell my lungs to start another one. I didn't see stars, whole galaxies perhaps, and there may have been a super-nova.
Leana missed the actual moment of calamity as she got out of her car, parked on the opposite side of the street, but she must have seen Hummer running away. From the sight of me on the grass at the edge of my driveway, screaming and writhing in pain, she immediately assumed I was shot by whoever was driving the black Humvee. Of course, this being Florida, she popped open her purse and pulled out a nine-millimeter automatic. The sound of the slide ratcheting back was a clear warning of loaded death.
I may have said something as she sprinted past me, the nickel-plated gun held in front of her combat-style. Honestly, I can't remember anything besides the horrible feeling that I'd split my large toe open and I was too scared to look.
The gunshot froze the pain.
I hobbled, stumbled, and jumped; anything that could move me toward Harry's patio. In what normally would have taken me twenty, maybe twenty-five steps, I fell three times, crawled for a foot or two before standing again, and collided with an overhanging limb from a tree in my garden.
Rounding the corner, I had prepared myself to see a body lying in a pool of blood, but I wasn't sure who it would be. There wasn't really enough time to think this into further detail, as I had enough with dealing with what felt like a roofing nail in my large toe.
The porch lights were on, as well as dozens of strands of multi-colored Christmas lights. Harry had flattened himself into a deep corner below a wall-mounted television. At first glance, no blood was visible on his shirt. Leana was standing just inside the open screen door, holding the gun with both hands, steady as an old tree in a storm.
Hummer was holding the only injury.
Leana might have had a steady hand, but her aim turned out to be a bit off to the left. Hummer, in a perfect impression of a bearded, long-haired scarecrow, was holding Harry's glass and gold pipe in his right hand and a one-gallon Ziploc bag with a huge hole through the center of it in his left. The former contents of the bag had become a green spray across the patio behind him.
As the only sober member of this little troupe who wasn't holding a weapon, I put my hand on Leana's arm and slowly lowered it and the gun toward the floor. "Put the safety on now, Leana." The words were more of an order than a suggestion. "You," I turned and hissed at Hummer, "Put that pipe on the table, take your shit, and get your truck out of here." I pulled my cellphone from my pocket. "I'm dialing 9-1-1 right now. If you're not off my street in thirty seconds, I'm going to hit Send and bring every sheriff's deputy for twenty miles to this house."
Hummer yanked off his t-shirt and wrapped the bag in it as he ran. The sound of his engine revving to a scream and the screech of his tires was one of the sweetest tunes I could ask for. I mean, the guy probably could have kicked my ass if he'd thought about it for a few seconds.
I hobbled over to Harry, the pain in my foot somewhat held at bay by the rush of adrenalin, and reached out my hand to pull him from the corner. "It's over."
Leana started to raise the gun, but I grabbed her wrist and took it from her. "Sorry lady, you only get one shot this evening." I tried to stuff the automatic into my bathing suit pocket, one that's just large enough for my keys, but it fell and clattered out the patio door, onto the grass. "Leave it there for a moment, it's safer out there than in here," I told her.
Pulling a chair around, I sat down in front of Harry the drug dealer, and leaned forward so that our eyes were pinned to each other. "This crazy bitch is my best friend in the whole goddamn world. Do you understand that, Harry?"
Leana never cooked dinner that night, although she made the best Spanish omelet I've ever eaten the following morning. I'd like to tell you that she's done a lot of cooking for me since that day, but the whole episode really spooked her and the last I heard, she was working on a cruise ship out of Port Miami. Harry Goldfarb packed up and left the house before the end of the month. Never came over to say goodbye. A single guy in his early twenties, an artist with bad teeth and a blind cat, moved into the place a few days later. If I didn't see him drinking wine on his patio every now and then, I'd think the house was vacant. |
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