Romano’s Landscaping

Yazmin was working at the landscaping company for six months before I asked her about it. She’s my oldest friend from high school, and on weekends, we drink at the bar. Sometimes Yazmin finds a boyfriend and disappears for months at a time, but like the stray cat who won’t roam far from the lady who leaves a plate of Meow Mix on the curb at 74th and Broadway, Yazmin always comes back to me, more bedraggled and heartbroken than the last time I saw her. I was listening to Yazmin complain about some guy when I finally interrupted and asked if she’d hire me.

“I need a gig,” I said, and Yazmin frowned.

“But you have a job, stupid.”

“A second gig. The clinic pays pennies. All my co-workers have second jobs on the weekends, even the doctors.”

Yazmin was suspicious. She thought my job as an office manager at the underfunded public health clinic was fancier than it really was.

“But you studied nonprofit administration,” she protested.

“I want to be a landscaper. Can’t you put me on the schedule part time?”

“But why?”

“I told you. I need the money.”

“I guess a lot of the guys don’t work on Sundays. Have you ever used a leaf blower?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Yazmin laughed, but I didn’t care. Yazmin thought landscaping was a man’s job, but that’s only because she believed in traditional gender roles. To me, having the option to be a single old lady without some man to take care of was what the 21st century was all about. But Yazmin was terrified of becoming a spinster, and even in high school, Yazmin thought I was crazy for not wanting to be a mom. 

“They’re gonna chew you to pieces, Meli,” Yazmin said. “Eddie’s gonna take one look at all 96 pounds of you and tell you to get lost.” 

“I weigh 120 pounds. And I’ve been doing pull ups.”

Yazmin laughed and laughed, until she started choking on one of the giant green olives that came with her drink. She thought vodka martinis made her look fashionable, but when she had three of them in a row like she always did, it made her look like an alcoholic with a briny sense of taste. I patted her back until she spat the shriveled garnish out. For a few moments, she heaved and drank water. Then she promised she’d get me an interview, and I knew I was as good as hired.

It was warm in September as I walked three miles to Romano’s Landscaping in Flushing. As the sun came up over the Empire State Building, I paused for a moment to look at the silhouetted needle in the sky, so big and imposing I could see it from Jackson Heights, Queens. Proximity to a world wonder like that is as good as any legacy or family heirloom. My parents know it, too, which is why they always brag about the constellation of graveyard plots they purchased years ago in the cemetery nearby. My parents aren’t doing too well financially now, but I’m glad they’ve figured out where the family’s gonna die, because I never think of death at all. It’s not that I don’t like to; I’m just too busy at work for it to cross my mind.

Romano’s Landscaping was a two-room office on the first floor of a multifamily building across from the Home Depot Garden Center. Eddie Romano and I had an easy conversation. I talked about my childhood shadowing my mechanic dad, how I’d been treated like a son ever since I was conceived, and even how I was supposed to be named Jason.

“I like your attitude,” he finally said. “But the uniform comes outta your paycheck, and you gotta keep it clean. Don’t look like a freakin’ bum, you hear me? I don’t want you running around like the rest of these momos, looking like a slob.” 

He looked me up and down, and I realized that I must have had sweat marks under my arms from walking to the office.

“You got it?” he said.

“Yes,” I said automatically. I knew how hard it was to get a job these days, and staying neat didn’t seem too big an ask. People were sacrificing more than that to be employed, like my boy Billy who used to be a receptionist at the clinic. Billy started driving for Uber and now the leather interior of his new Jeep Grand Cherokee is ruined. He said that when he started screaming on the phone, the Uber representative screamed back as if it was their own wallet they were protecting. Now Billy swore off the apps and says he’ll never work for a boss he can’t find in person to sock clean in the face.

I got the job, and then I got a phone call from Eddie Romano telling me where I’d get my uniform tailored. The tailor was in Corona, and she made me wait on a hard, plastic chair for half an hour. It took ten seconds to measure me, and when I returned five days later, there was an army green suit waiting for me. On the left side of the chest, just over the heart, was looping gold cursive that said, “Romano’s Landscaping.” The uniform was a little tight at the boobs and butt, but other than that, I found it sort of beautiful. My dad wore something similar, except his was navy blue, whenever he worked on the cars at his shop.

On Sunday, four of us landscapers met outside the office, and then we rode in the company truck to a neighborhood called Malba, just south of the Throgs Neck Bridge on the northernmost tip of Queens facing the water. In our green uniforms, we looked like we were going to war, all the more so when we assumed our positions. At an enormous house with glimmering, peach-colored bricks, Manny went to the southeast, Oscar went to the southwest, Felipe went to the northeast, and I did the northwest. Using a leaf blower was uncomplicated, but the machine was heavy, and I was sweating profusely. By the end of the day, my legs were smeared in grass stains, and my uniform looked like it’d been assaulted by a tree.

“Como te fue?” Oscar asked in the truck. It was the first time I’d been addressed all day.

“Sweaty,” I said, answering in Spanish, and they all laughed.

“It’s not so bad,” Felipe said. “We never have to pay to join a gym.” 

“No,” I said. “Only to get the uniforms washed.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Oscar said, and I knew he was talking about the boss. “My wife will wash it for you. She’ll give you a fair deal, cheaper than that Chinese tailor he’s in love with.”

At this, the men laughed and stomped their feet until the truck shook from side to side. Sitting next to all those guys, I suddenly felt a sense of camaraderie for the first time in my life. I smiled, laughed alongside them, thinking how different it was from the clinic where the employees were dead-eyed, protected on municipal grant money, waiting for the day when they could cash in on a pension. But in that truck armed with my leaf blower like a proletariat weapon, I felt capable and brave. Embodied. Alive. Alive enough to consider my death, which felt impossible now that my muscles were pulsing from an exhaustion that was certain to make me stronger every day. That evening I walked the three miles from the office in Flushing to my apartment in Jackson Heights, pushing my body even further, feeling like I could join Che Guevara’s army. I was outfitted in the green combat gear already; all I needed was a matching beret.

Yazmin told me Eddie Romano hired me because he thought I’d boost morale as a woman. It was Saturday, and we were at an opulent family barbeque for Yazmin’s one-year-old niece. A few years ago, Yazmin’s aunt moved from our neighborhood to Bayside and now she spends her time watching the local news. She tells us horror stories about muggings and rapes in our part of Queens, saying how sorry she feels for us girls who still live along the 7 line. When I was a teenager, I used to roll my eyes in her face, but now if I do that, Yazmin gets offended.

“You know they never hired a woman before,” Yazmin said, sucking on an ice cube and holding a red cup filled with Bacardi. 

“They hired you before me, stupid,” I answered, looking at the heaps of food scattered across fold-out tables, platters of beef empanadas alongside trays of lasagna. So much food—it was like catering for a wedding. After Yazmin’s family’s parties, I always wake up at night with indigestion.

“You know what I mean, Melissa. They never hired a woman to work with the guys.”

“Oh,” I said, feigning surprise.

“So how is it,” she asked. “Do you cheer them on like Eddie hoped? Do you shake your leaf blower in the air and say GOOOOOOOOOO team!” She imitated the sound of a leaf blower motor. She did it several times until people glanced over with puzzled looks, and then she started to tell them that I was a landscaper. Tia, did you know Meli fixes lawns with the guys? Papito, Meli works at my company now, except not with a salary in the office like me!

“Do you need to tell everyone?” I finally said.

“Why not? I thought you liked your job!”

“I do, but that’s not why you’re telling people.”

“Why am I telling people?” she said. She spat out the tiny piece of ice she’d been sucking so that it landed on the grass at my feet. “Really, Meli,” she goaded. “I don’t know. Tell me.”

I was filled with a rage that I had felt a million times before with Yazmin. Yazmin, who had an aunt who lived in a nice house in Bayside and a dad who just bought a second home in Ecuador, had the bad tendency to think she was better than me. I was glad that her grandparents, who had emigrated from Quito, had done better than my grandparents, who had emigrated at a similar time in the 60s, by buying and flipping a bunch of multi-family homes in Brooklyn for cheap. But what drove me crazy was when she mistook her grandparents’ accomplishments for her own. Yazmin, who was given a car just for graduating high school, had no right to criticize all of us who’ve ever worked multiple jobs to help our parents survive old age.

“Just say what you mean!” I shouted. “Meli’s mowing lawns with the immigrants! Meli, the same girl who graduated Hunter with honors! Carrying that leaf blower and looking like a lesbian! Isn’t that what you want to say?”

Yazmin cleared her throat. She was done playing stupid. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. I am sorry.”

But I didn’t feel like forgiving her. So many years had gone by since high school, and she still had the impulse to make me the butt of her vicious jokes. 

“Want to go to the outlets tomorrow?” Yazmin asked.

“No, I have better things to do.”

Yazmin laughed. “Oh right, you’ll be working.”

I looked at my phone. It was already 6:00 p.m. I’d have to be at Romano’s in less than twelve hours. I grasped my stomach, feeling it churn. I was going to be sick, and the lasagna wasn’t helping. Get over it, I said to myself. I thought of my uniform, ironed and laid out on the dining room chair, and I was glad I had a life outside of Yazmin, outside of her trashy, judgmental, new-rich family.

Every Sunday morning that autumn, my comrades and I blew leaves in Malba. Sometimes we went to surrounding neighborhoods, but we could always see the Throgs Neck bridge stretching over shimmering water from Queens all the way to the Bronx. The Bronx was the only borough in the city connected to mainland America, and when I saw it from Malba, I could sense the limitless land that beckoned westward all the way to California. The guys said that Malba was the only neighborhood in Queens with private beaches, which always made me wonder. I never saw those beaches, never knew where they were, but sometimes I tried to look past the shining Audis, past the four-story houses, past those fake Roman columns installed on the porches, and then I’d see it, the real Malba behind the fake Malba, just a couple fudged letters and the real image appeared: Malibu in the distance. Private beaches and palm trees. Real wealth and luxury, and not this imitation junk.

Our services on the job were prepaid and hands off, like contact-less delivery. We arrived, we blew leaves, and we never spoke to the homeowners. If they had any issues, they were supposed to call the office and talk to Yazmin, who’d be bouncing in her chair, playing with a fidget spinner, thinking she was hot shit because nobody ever knew the difference if she was high at work. Not me—I’d never do it. The last thing I wanted on top of all the noise and panting was the congested, head-cold feeling that weed always gave me. So I was always sober for all that hard labor, feeling and seeing everything. Sometimes, when my ears rang at night, I worried that the sound of the leaf blowers was making me deaf, but nobody wore earplugs, so I didn’t either.

An element of fantasy fueled my interest in the job, ever since that first day when I imagined myself as part of Che’s army. But as the months wore on and leaf blowing turned into mowing and mowing turned into planting and fertilizing, I realized that my body had stopped getting stronger. Exhaustion set into my bones, leaving me irritable and weak. I was always rushing somewhere: to my job at the clinic or to my job at Romano’s or to appointments or to my parents or to help my parents get to their constant appointments.

Still, I ironed my uniform every Saturday morning, laying it out on my dining room chair. And sometimes, when I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror, I remembered that I didn’t need to be named Jason to help my dad. When I started giving him 150 dollars a week to help him pay his increased rent, he grew suspicious, but I assured him that I had gotten a raise at the clinic. He’s always felt like a failure for accepting money from his only child, a daughter. I know that’s a stupid way of thinking, but there are some things you can’t change about an old man, so I don’t waste time trying.

Then one day, almost exactly a year after I was hired, we arrived at this hideous Mediterranean Revival mansion. A twenty-something raven-haired girl with a big nose burst through the door and told us to go away. She was the daughter of a cop, I was sure, given that everyone in that neighborhood drove around with NYPD license plates on civilian vehicles. My co-workers shrugged and went back to the truck, but I stood on the pathway, inexplicably furious. It’s really loud, she whined, and I thought of yelling back, the revolution isn’t quiet, bitch! 

And in that moment I realized I was nuts. That we were not revolutionaries; we were leaf blowers. We were called by the names of our machines. My knees were killing me, and I’d never have the stamina to stage a working-class coup against the capitalists living in Malba or Malibu or anywhere else. Romano’s landscaping service wasn’t even Italian-owned. According to Yazmin, Eddie was Albanian, and Romano wasn’t his last name. He only said he was Italian so that all the cops who owned mansions in this part of Queens would trust him as one of their own. As for the rest of us, we were South and Central Americans, and I wasn’t even a guy. Nobody gave a shit if my uniform was dirty, only maybe that it still fit tightly at the waist, so from that moment forward, I never spent another penny washing it. 

A few weeks later, when I happened to catch Eddie Ramaj at the office as I finished my shift, I broke the news to him that I was moving on. By that time, I had gotten my small raise at the clinic.

“Single again,” Yazmin said.

As we sat at our favorite bar in Astoria, Yazmin told me that the break-up was mutual, and I could tell by her complete lack of anger that she was telling the truth. She gazed dreamily at the avenue, watching people pass. I knew she wasn’t seeing the neighborhood in front of her, or else she’d be complaining about how hipster and hippie it had gotten. Astoria was now home to shops that sold bone tallow and organic laundry detergent, but we remembered it as the place where we’d spend our teenage allowances on pocketless stretch jeans. Or rather, where I’d watch Yazmin buy pocketless jeans, giving her a thumbs up or thumbs down as she stepped past the oversized Colombian flag hanging from a curtain rod that separated the corner from the rest of the store, a makeshift fitting room.

“Did Eddie tell you I quit?” I asked. “Sunday’s my last shift.”

Yazmin pinched the stem of her vodka martini.

“Thank God!” she said. “I’ve missed my plus one. Nobody ever wants to do anything with me.” 

It was the nicest thing I could imagine her saying. I felt tears come to my eyes, but I didn’t want her to see them, so I brought the giant rim of my michelada to my face. 

“It won’t reflect badly on you, will it?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “You did Eddie a favor. He’s an equal opportunity employer now. Sometimes he says to me, in his fake-Guido accent, you know what? I think employment of women is good business!”

I laughed. “It wasn’t bad. I’m just so tired all the time.”

“Of course, you are. Working two jobs is insane! I don’t know how you did it, I never could!”

I held my tongue. After she’d been so nice to me, I didn’t want to pay her back with cruelty.

“And anyway,” she said. “You get to keep that nasty uniform you paid for, so whenever you get the urge to relive your landscaping days, you can go right back to it, okay? But my advice for you would be to take it easy for a while. Too much work and no play makes Meli a dull…” She smiled, chewing on the olive garnish. “Girl.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised—for as long as I’ve known her, Yazmin has never been able to say one nice thing without following it up with an absolute ball buster. Maybe Yazmin will never understand, and I was the fool for being her friend all those years, hoping one day that she’d see my perspective. But if I could go back in time and tell her what I meant, I’d say that under the sound of the leaf blower, there’s a human underneath who doesn’t have an off button. Like my boy Billy who drove with Uber, or my aunt Elmira who bathed elders as a home caretaker, or my dad who at 60 never missed a day of work. I know their energies, and I know the power of all our energies put together. And it sort of makes me afraid, but the truth is I think it’s finally breaking through, and people are taking notice because everyone in the world is feeling it. When it happens, I already know where I’ll be. I’ll be somewhere important. I’ll even wash my uniform for it. I won’t be at the outlets with Yazmin.