Work

 

                                                                                    

Work, Gardening, and the Art of Zen

     The teenage kid looked like Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, though the movie hadn’t been made, yet. My boss told me to use him like an assistant. It was 1973. While taking college classes at night, I worked full-time as a grounds’ keeper at a local high school, 7:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., each day, cold in winter, hot in summer, beautiful in spring, and a lot alone time.

     Each morning, I'd walk up to grassy knoll just above the Administration Office, early, before most of the faculty and staff had arrived. I'd look out over the Pacific, the beach barely four blocks to the west. Not a bad job, healthcare, vacation time, and a pension plan, though I had eyes on something bigger. What? I didn’t’ know. For now, this met my needs.

     My boss took me aside, one day, and told me this kid had been getting into trouble. Detention didn’t seem to make a difference, so the principal asked if we could find something for the kid to do for fourth period, just before his lunch break. The physical labor might do him some good.

     I reached out to shake the kid's hand. “Hey, I’m Danny,” I said. He looked down at my hand, slowly took it, and shook. “Joey,” he responded, without any emotion, his eyes on me.

     In the early 70’s, everything was upside down. A lot of guys attended college to dodge the draft. Peace and love were in the air. Big pay checks, fancy clothes, houses, and cars meant nothing. In fact, ownership meant being trapped in the system. As students, everybody was studying literature, the social sciences, and art, not so many science or engineering majors. The outdoors was king. It was like everybody was hitting the road in vans, pickup trucks with campers, and old school buses painted like kaleidoscopes. Educated kids, rebelling against their parents, didn’t want to settle down or work in offices, avoiding the dreaded eight-to-five grind, and the growing corporate culture. They wanted the outdoors, freedom and independence. 

     Hell, a lot of them didn’t even want to work at all, and many didn’t. They were the first kings and queens of Welfare, hippies collecting monthly checks and cashing in food stamps, the social stigma not yet invented, until the media began focusing on black single mothers and Chicanos who started asking for help. As elections neared, Congress cried “foul.” Truth be told, most Mexicans I knew worked. It was drilled into us from an early age. "You want to eat, mi'jo. Go work!"

     I’m not sure why my boss brought the kid to me, maybe because I was the youngest guy on the crew, only three or four years older than the high school seniors. That I’d been in army and gone to Vietnam didn’t matter. Like a lot of vets, I kept quiet about it, not wanting others to think of me as a "baby killer." Still, even though I was married and had a kid, I was immature, thinking about weekends of partying with friends and ingesting whatever new substance they came up with. I was more a kid than adult. 

     The older guys on the crew, one Irishman in his sixties, and an Indian in his late thirties, considered me cool, kind of like a hippy-gardener because I wore a funky straw campesino’s hat I found at Olvera Street in downtown L.A. I donned flared Levis’, a light blue work shirt, and a faded Levi’ jacket with colorful flowers and butterflies stitched into it, a homemade job.

     “Have him do whatever you need,” were my boss’ last instructions before leaving me with the kid.

     I took him into the work shed and showed him around, pointing out all the different tools, electric, motor, and manual. I showed him the lunch area, coffee always percolating, a vase of flowers in the center of the table, homey, in case teachers wanted to escape the backstabbers in the faculty lounge. So, they'd come down here and slum it, free to talk about whatever subjects they had to avoid in the faculty lounge. Don’t laugh. Word traveled fast. Sometimes there’d be so many teachers crowded around our lunch table, there was no place for us.

     The kid didn’t seem impressed. I introduced him to Mike Zender, a tall, handsome college graduate from back east who said he refused to “work in an office and sit on my ass for the rest of my life.” Mike loved nature, camping, hiking. and gardening, especially the “weed” he grew and sold, “to make ends meet,” was his rationale. His big dream was to move to Oregon and start a worm farm and lose himself in the woods. Mike would bring in books to share with me He introduced me to writers, like the eccentric Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, the Indian mystic Krishnamurti, the hip, fashionable philosopher-alcoholic Allan Watts, and German novelists Goethe and Herman Hesse.

     I pulled a leaf rake down from a rack and handed it to the kid, thinking I’d start easy. We walked to a solid wall of tall eucalyptus trees, at least forty-foot-high. They grew along the baseball field’s first-base line, to keep foul balls from zipping onto the freeway. The kid's face fell when he saw the grass covered in leaves. I told him not to worry about it if he didn't finish, to just rake the leaves into piles, and, later, we'd come by and pick them up in an electric cart.

     It was about an hour’s job, enough work to keep him busy for the class period. I headed back to the shed, but then, I turned around towards the kid, I guess, just checking to make sure he knew what to do. I noticed he had the rake in his hands and was turning it over, slowly, like a baton. At first, I thought he was messing around, but then I realized he had no idea how to hold it. Who didn’t know how to use a rake? My dad had me raking leaves when I was barely five years old, by six I was turning over dirt with a hoe and pulling weeds, and by ten I was cutting the lawn with a power mower. Work, man. Everybody worked.

     The kid, eventually, grasped the rake handle with both hands, like he was holding a baseball bat, ass backwards. He stabbed at the leaves with the rake head, awkwardly pushing the leaves around, ignoring the laws of physics, the leaves escaping in all directions. I watched for a while and decided I had to do something, but I didn't want to embarrass him.

     I walked back to the shed and came out with another rake. I took up a place a few yards from him and started raking leaves. I wanted him to see the right way to hold a rake and use it. He watched me, studied my hands, and he switched his around like mine. He saw how I stretched my arms and upper torso, moving rhythmically, like an athlete broad jumping, pitching, throwing a football, or hitting a tennis ball. If we had music, it would have looked like I was moving to the sounds, in time to the beat, my arms reaching, my legs perfectly spaced, capturing leaves in the teeth of the rake, and pulling them towards me, over and over again, not too fast, not too slow, steady, letting the tool and gravity do the work.

     Slowly, he began to imitate me, much slower, though, and awkward, but starting to get it. “I’ve been doing this a long time.” I told him, “Since I was a kid. You learn, you know, like playing an electric guitar or drums. It's all about the rhythm. You don’t work as hard that way. It's all about timing.”

     By the end of the semester, he had it down, not great but much better, and not just raking but using a hoe to pull weeds, a shovel to dig holes, a trowel to plant flowers, and shears to trim a hedge. Sure, he still had a way to go, but I know he took pride in his improvement, even showing off when other students passed by. 

     Throughout the semester, we talked. He was a curious kid. He confided in me, too, you know, like the things bothering most teenagers. I listened. I've always been a good listener, so it gave him confidence that he had something important to say. The kid wanted to know about the army and about Vietnam. I told him what I could, what I thought he might be able to understand. Sure, everybody wants to know about killing and dead bodies, but they don’t know whether to ask or not, mainly because many of us, veterans, don’t know how to respond.

     Oh, he had no intention of ever joining the military, and I didn't glamorize my experiences. When he asked why I joined, I told him we were from different sides of the tracks. None of my friends talked about going to college or living in dorms. After high school, they all got jobs and waited to be drafted. For some of us, the miliary was a way to leave home and explore the world. It was our college.

     His parents had money and lived up in the Santa Monica highlands, a big new housing development above the Palisades. I told him he had opportunities none of my friends, nor I, ever had, or I was too ignorant to understand. Like him, I didn't listen to my parents, either. They talked about me going to college but had no idea how to get in. Even though I went to a Catholic school, the teachers knew who was bound for college and who wasn’t. 

     The kid and I talked and talked. By the end of the semester, we were on a first-name basis. He was Joey and I was Danny. Then, the semester finished, and he was gone, off to a new adventure. We’d see each other on the school ground from time to time. No matter how many friends surrounded him, he'd always come up to me, shake my hand, and say "hi." I’m not a hundred percent sure, but he seemed to have a smile he didn’t have when we first met. It was also, then, that I gave serious consideration to becoming a teacher, thanks to a kid I once mentored.