Matthew Medendorp

Portrait of the Landscaper as a Blue-Collar Man

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2022: VOL. 37.

I. Rob’s Route

Rob is an equal opportunity racist. When he rolls up his sleeves, you can see a faded bulldog ripping through a Confederate flag. The tattoo is so faded that at first, I thought it wasn’t a Confederate flag and just an x-shaped banner, but the stars and the bars are the only clear ink still visible. Rob probably calls the Confederate flag the Stars and Bars. Rob works hard to get no work done. Rob says he knows how to work the clock. The clock works Rob too. Rob’s ex-wife married his cousin, his full-blooded cousin, as he puts it. They met through Rob. Because of that, Rob doesn’t get to see his two boys much, but every night before he goes to sleep, he texts them goodnight. He shows me the texts as proof. One morning while taking his customary pre-work delay, Rob tells me he got a text from a woman that he knows a bit, who says that she’s actually his half-sister. She says Rob’s dad might not be Rob’s dad. It rocked his world. Rob tells me this while he smokes a cigarette. Rob smokes a lot of cigarettes and Rob only smokes Camel Wides, thicker than the run-of- the-mill kind. More tobacco for the effort and a longer smoke break. Rob lives a branded life: at lunch he eats Oberto Beef Jerky Hot and drinks Mountain Dew in various and virulent shades. That day, Rob tells me over a lunch of Mountain Dew and Camel Wides that he always had his doubts about his parents a little bit, but doesn’t everybody? Rob thinks he’s cleverer than the world around him. Rob never stops talking, and now when Rob talks, he talks about his maybe parents and maybe sister in a generational smoker’s voice. Rob repeats that he knew his perhaps biological father, that he partied with him, that they were friends, kind of. “Kind of friends,” Rob says, and he didn’t even go to his funeral, he didn’t go to his funeral and he’s dead now. Rob says his maybe half-sister might give him some ashes. He says if she does, he’ll keep them in his truck, hang them from his mirror. No more looking back.

II. Rob’s Integrity

One time, Rob split a 40-dollar tip he could have kept for himself. He could of, but he didn’t. He said an old Chinese lady gave it to him and says the word “old” and the word “Chinese” in a very particular kind of way, the kind of way that hurls someone’s age and heritage back at them as if it’s an insult. When Rob says things that are racist, I try to say something actively not racist back. I don’t always succeed. Sometimes I wait too long or say nothing, and Rob turns the ignition on his Exmark Zero Turn Riding Mower and the smell of diesel fumes and Camel Wides cover up the smell of dried grass clippings and I look down at my chlorophyll stained boots, ashamed, not sure if it’s shock or if I’m a coward or if it’s both and, like water, I just want to find the path of least resistance. Rob cheats the time cards and makes me complicit by telling me not to tell the boss. Rob makes me complicit in a lot of things. Rob stares at women like a jackal. Rob knows now that I won’t leer with him, or catcall, and I try hard to get him not to stare. But I’ve never said to Rob, “Hey asshole don’t stare.” Instead, I say, “Rob, do you think this edger blade needs to be replaced?” We’ve replaced a lot of edger blades. I don’t tell Rob a single personal detail about myself, but he knows my wife is pregnant. I was gone for an OB appointment when he got the tip, and he’s in-charge, kind of, so he had to know. When he finds out, Rob tells me that the best days of his life were when his sons were born. Sometimes now I’m afraid that in the delivery room I’ll hold my son or daughter and, unbidden, I’ll think about Rob. But maybe that won’t happen, because Rob also said the best time of his life was going to a Rat Rod show. I didn’t know what a Rat Rod was before I met Rob, and for two weeks I pretended I knew because I didn’t want to encourage more conversation. It turns out a Rat Rod is a mutt of a vehicle. It’s several cars Frankensteined together to create something strange, an old body on a new chasse. Rob has a potbelly and very tan forearms. He’s somewhere between 45 and 55, his hair is all dust gray and his goatee is all cigarette smoke. Every day after work, Rob buys a few 16-ounce beers and cracks them open, one at a time, for his drive home, taking gravel-lined country roads. “It’s okay because of the backroads,” he says. “But don’t tell anyone,” he likes to add conspiratorially. Some days I wonder if I should call the police. Now, every time I see a pickup on a backroad I wonder if it’s Rob drinking a beer and driving home. It never has been Rob, but someday it might be.

III. Rob’s Mantra

Rob tells me one morning, “I’m 45, never been to jail, never had a DUI, never had no sexual harassment.” He pauses for a bit then says, “I guess I been to prison once, but that doesn’t count.” Rob has no sense of irony. When we pull up to lawns that look the same as the week before, Rob says that this is just insane. Rob says that they’ve haven’t growed none. I suspect Rob and I have a different definition of the word insane, like we might have a different definition of sexual harassment and of what being in jail means. He tells me that he thinks there’s a grass conspiracy, that there’s something going on with the grass, a kind of plot. I laugh a bit, but I’m not sure he gets the joke. Rob doesn’t want to work; he wants to smoke cigarettes and bullshit and collect unemployment when it rains so much that each Midwestern lawn resembles a reedy lake. Still, Rob thinks he’s a hard worker, or at least Rob thinks that every other worker is a lazy worker. I don’t know if he takes much time for self-reflection, but he likes to mutter as he watches other crews encroach on our territory. And Rob hopes for more rain. Rob doesn’t work when it rains, so neither do I, and every weekend I look up at the sky. When he’s feeling desperate, Rob likes to say he shouldn’t have to work in a drought either. He says that a lot lately. One day, Rob has some bad sunburn, and in the late afternoon heat he rubs his peeling back up against the door of the bright red company F-350 SuperDuty, a grizzled bear against a particularly garish tree. He lifts his shirt to show me the damage and with that motion I learn that Rob has nipple rings, hoops the size of half dollars.

IV. Rob’s Mirror

For two weeks, I work with Rick, who trims hedges while I kneel in flowerbeds, weeding. Rick likes to stand back to contemplate the evenness of freshly shorn foliage and ask my opinion. Then, Rick says, “Better is better!” In two weeks, Rick says, “Better is better” a lot, and he teaches me about plants, which ones are weeds, which ones are worth keeping. He puts on gloves and a mask before he sprays Roundup on patio tiles and won’t let me touch the stuff. Once, when he thinks I might quit, he calls me on the weekend and says, “Why don’t you stick with me this summer.” Rick works when it rains, since it makes the weeds easier to pull, and Rick likes to take bathroom breaks in gas stations instead of in customer’s prize begonias. He builds decks for grandmothers in his spare time, or not to generalize, he builds one deck for his grandmother, but still. Each morning I drive my hour commute to work with Rick, I stop in the middle of the road for a sandhill crane with a bum knee, guarding his growing family as they cross the pavement from pond to pond in the early Michigan dawn. Each morning I work with Rick, I still pass the same house, ten minutes into my drive, with a front porch that flies a flag of apparent contradiction: left half Union, right half Confederacy. The day I do quit, Rob sends me a Facebook friend request, texts me a few times in his guttural way. I don’t hear from Rick.