joshua rose: musings, memories and other stuff

This morning a man knocked on the door and offered to cut down a dead tree in the front yard. It was an old tree already quite big when I moved into this house more than a decade ago. Covered with leathery eye shaped leaves that used to spring enthusiastically from hundreds of straight vertical suckers, themselves supported by a half dozen hefty trunks. It reminded me of a mangrove tree though it really had little resemblance. The desert sometimes creates the need for water in my imagination and so water bound trees seem a natural extension. That’s just a guess though.

In spring it exploded with thousands of hand sized umbels transforming it into an undulating terraced landscape of white. They stank to my fine tuned New York schnoze, but others liked their perfume. Of course I’m right and they’re wrong. They stank pure and simple! After a week or so these stinky little flowers became zillions of berries the size of BB’s the color of dried blood.

Anyway the below zero freeze this past February killed it off, or rather ninety five percent of it. It also killed off most of the foliage around here as well as most of the cactus and palms. For awhile the city was brown which divided people into those who yanked everything up immediately and replanted from those who took a patient wait and see attitude. I was a wait and seer and after I saw that the tree wasn’t coming back took a waiting for Godot attitude. He’d fix it if anyone could!

And so there it stood, brown and ugly, a constant reminder that I’d rather be living in a studio loft somewhere in a grungy eastern city torturing  jade trees, airplane plants and wandering Jews than have to mow a lawn and think about the management of real trees. Ok I exaggerate but grass and trees of this sort are so antithetical to living in the desert and I would have never planted them, but they came with the house. Some friends have xeriscaped their digs but that is even more of that kind of work than mowing, at least up front. Now that I think of it perhaps I should think a little deeper about it, but that is for another time.

Jaime, he introduced himself, was driving around looking for pickup work. In fact he was looking for dead trees to cut down if I am to buy into his complete rap. Listening to the pitch requires a funny kind of guy negotiation whereby there are pauses between statements that represent thinking, not real thinking mind you, but the kind of thinking that a cartoonist would have a primordial ooze in the background and two cave men achieving fundamental consciousness in front of a dead tree that evolution has finally recast as a problem. One says to the other “ya know there’s a dead tree in front of your cave and I’ll chop it down for you with this freshly made stone ax for twenty clams…” silence and posturing for a few minutes…”you sure it’s dead?, hmmm maybe…don’t know if it’s worth twenty clams though…well I guess so” etc..

Agreement can’t come too quickly or someone is going to feel taken advantage of even if the ask and the agreed price are the same and entirely fair. There has to be a dance first. The thing of it is that I have learned this facade, at least the guyness of it, from the movies. I’d be a terrible negotiator if things were on some kind of equal footing but I was indifferent to this dead tree and Jaime was in real need of work.

He was in his mid forties is my guess and strong, solid, pot bellied and not all that much shorter than I am, perhaps five six or so.  His hands were callused and firm when we shook on price which was the first amount he mentioned, but agreed to after some guy thoughts and silences. Then he told me about his chainsaw needing a new chain to which I was silent, though for real this time and he quickly indicated that I need not think about it. I asked when could he start and after another guy silence as if he was mentally shuffling around a dozen commitments in a manner advantageous to me, he said “right now”.

And he did. He fired up his clunky chainsaw and commenced while I came into the house to work on images. I realized that part of my agreeing to have him cut sown the tree was also agreeing to stay around in case he needed anything. So I worked on some photos and listened to some online lectures while half aware of the speeding and slowing puttering of the chainsaw. About a half hour in he informed me that the chainsaw had broken and he had to go get something for it, he’d return in an hour and a half. Sweet sweet silence….

When he returned he had in tow a boy, his son I think and an old man who was missing a few front teeth. The old man, his friend of many years he said, greeted me with an awkward smile and a outstretched hand telling me his name that I didn’t catch. Between his diction and my poor hearing, I never would catch it so instead of doing an endless series of “whats?” with an imagined crooked sheep’s horn plugged into my poor ear, I just smiled and told him mine, shook his hand and said something like “pleased to meet ya”.

Then I had an Ugly American moment seen in lots of western films where the well-to-do wonder-bread white family with fresh looking freckled kid,  steeped in packaged and plastic consumer oriented materialism, has the invisible Mexican gardener named Juan and house keeper named Maria with a distance between them was so dense that it might as well be a stone wall and so high that one could traverse it only through special doors guarded by homeland security goons.

Luckily, I am neither wonder-bread, all that materialistic, plastic or otherwise, nor well to do and the wall while real enough was easily climbable by comparison. Still Jaime and I would probably never meet in the same bar after work. It lasted only a moment and we both went back to our respective tasks.

His fourteen inch chainsaw was a wonder. It recalled stories I’ve read about fifties Chevy’s being kept running in embargoed Cuba. Drivers there had (have) come up with all manners of repairs to make them drivable. This saw was something like that. He showed me different parts to convince me how close it was to breaking but I didn’t recognize any of them and I have owned a few chainsaws. This prompted me to go digging in the piles of crap in our storeroom to see if I still owned one. If that was the case, I would have given it to him in addition to the agreed upon cash. I know that mine wouldn’t have been any great shakes but would have been cherry compared to the thing he showed me. Unfortunately I didn’t find one though it may still be at the bottom of one of the heaps.

It took Jaime, the old man and the young boy about five hours to cut it into fire wood, stack it and load the scrap into a trailer bound for the dump. They did it in a hundred degree oven with frequent frustrations and a lot of water. In the end I gave him significantly more than he asked for and it still seemed cheap to me, especially since I have it on fairly good authority that Godot stays out of the desert if he can. We shook hands after a guy-type inspection that was pure theater on my part and we all went our way feeling good about the day’s work.