So dawn is cracking and I’m headed east toward the Pima Reservation — which is a LONG way from the Funny Farm — to attend the weekly bidness networking meeting.
God, God, GOD how I hate driving through the awful traffic this damn city has sprouted. Time of day no longer matters: rush hour or not, it is ALWAYS a bitch to drive around the city streets.
Is it just me getting old?
Well. No.
Over Labor Day, everybody in the city but me left town. Or parked themselves in front of some televised sporting event, presumably. That afternoon I happened to jump in my car to run a couple of errands. And thought good grief! What’s wrong here? The streets are not full of crazies; no morons are getting in front of me and doing stupid things like turning left out of the right-turn lane or yakking on the phone through the green light or whatEVER they can dream up. Whaaa? I was actually having a good time driving my tank down the road.
And the thought came to mind: This is what driving in Phoenix used to be like: once it was actually fun to drive your car. When I was a young thang, I often would while away a moment of boredom by getting in my car and just driving around. Because, yes, it was fun to drive in those days. And that Labor Day afternoon, with the streets half-empty, it was — for a few precious moments — fun again.
Most of the time, though, it’s a species of Hell, every time you get on the road.
So I’m cruising east on Gangbanger’s Way thinking how much I hate cruising east on Gangbanger’s, or cruising north or south or east or west on any other street in Phoenix, when a Thought (!!) crosses my mind:
I wonder if there’s any way I could move back to a ranch up around Yarnell.
Can I get back to Yarnell?
Well, no. Of course not.
In the first place, what WOULD I do there? Sit around and sniff the clean air?
I’m too old to run a ranch. I’m really too old to ride a horse: if Babe threw me in the riverbottom today the way she did once when I was a young pup, it would bust every bone in my body. I’d have to hire someone to do not some but all of the work. That would mean I’d have to turn a profit in the cattle biz. Not that it’s impossible to do so: we owned the Gold Bar as a tax dodge, intending to lose money on the thing. We failed: the damn thing ran in the black every year. But ranching is a lot of work. You need an honest foreman to handle just about everything…and honest foremen are few and far between.
Live in town? Really? Seriously? What would I do? Write? Edit copy? Spend half my lifetime driving into Prescott or down into Wickenburg and west Phoenix to keep a freezer provisioned? Hm.
Maybe not so much.
About then yet another revelation came to mind: I’d left my credit cards back at the ranch house.
Shee-ut! This meant I couldn’t do the shopping errands planned for the return trip from the Pima Rez.
Besides the company of our band of merry bandits, the weekly eastward junket has just one other blandishment: a Home Depot within walking distance of the restaurant, and on the way home an Albertson’s, a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe, a Penzey’s, a Fry’s… Just about every routine household purchase — and then some — can be had along that route.
No credit card? No errands done. Two hours’ worth of driving through hair-tearing traffic for an hour’s worth of socializing.
Did I really want to do that?
Well, no.
I turned around and headed home, thinking I’d grab the cards and shoot out to Scottsdale, arriving only about a quarter-hour late. And along the way thought why do I want to do that?
The morning was gorgeous, painterly clouds decorating the dawn sky, a virga dropping its veil over the southeast.
Why do I want to do that?
I don’t. I want to walk the dogs.
Which is what I did.
Speaking of honest foremen, it appears that Gerardo has given up the ghost. Haven’t seen nor heard from him and his cousins in over two months now.
The yard is a mess: needs blowering, raking, and trimming in a big way. Cost almost $300 to get a zanjero out here to repair the irrigation system, something Gerardo was keeping shored up, within reason.
So I’d decided that the next time I saw some guys working on a neighbor’s yard, I’d ask if they’d like to pick up another job.
Over in Richistan, the crew that works on THE most gorgeous shack in the entire neighborhood, bar none, rolls up to the jobsite, about an acre of irrigated lawn with vast, lighted towering trees, a gazebo, a burbling fountain, and on and on and on. I know better than to ask: any outfit that calls itself “Paradise Ponds and Gardens” and does what they do at that place is, by definition, out of my price range.
The hounds and I continue up the neighborhood street, where we find another crew’s truck & trailer, with a couple of workers mowing an emerald ryegrass lawn. And holy mackerel: they’re not lawn men: they’re women!
And ay caramba, they’re not just women, they’re Latinas!
Two women, nicely dressed women decked out as though they were at the yoga studio or at the gym instead of pushing a mower around a half-acre of lawn. They look smart — not just in a stylish way. They are, to coin an old Texas saying, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I ask if they’d like to take on another job. The younger woman says, “Sure. Write down your address.” I have to take the dogs back to the house and retrieve a bidness card for the purpose — which I do forthwith.
On the way back, I see the neighbor’s lawn guy is also on the job. He’s a gringo — a down-at-the-heels sort of guy dressed like he slept in the alley last night. Upwardly mobile? Sooo not!
Fleetingly I consider asking for a bid anyway…until I’m reminded of why I would not hire a gringo yard guy for love nor money. Call me bigoted — you’ll be right. But my one-on-one experience with White landscape workers has been uniformly negative — well, except for one ex-convict who trimmed palm trees. Unfortunately he went back to jail and so has not been around recently. They steal any tools that are not red-hot or nailed down. They cheat you. They try to injure or poison your dog so they can come back and burgle your house.
I’ve yet to meet a Latino yard worker who proved to be, overtly, a thief.
How am I reminded? Because a few minutes after I get back, I find the jerk dragging debris from the neighbor’s house — across the road — hauling it up the alley and dumping it into our garbage bin!
The guy does this all the time, because he’s too effin’ lazy to open the neighbor’s back gate and drag the front-yard debris through the backyard into HIS alley and dump it in his trash can.
Today it didn’t matter, because today is trash pickup day and the garbage truck (running late…) hadn’t yet come by. But he doesn’t always show up on trash day. Nor do the garbage trucks always run late. And when he fills that garbage can all the way to the lid, the four households who are assigned to use it can’t put a thing in there. We have to walk all the way down the alley to the trash bin assigned to the next set of four neighbors.
Not that it’s a big deal. But it’s the kind of petty dishonesty, petty laziness that speaks to the man’s character. And what it says in speaking is “don’t hire this one!”
Godlmighty.
Yarnell. But only if you can find an honest foreman…