April -1994

Javier Montes, who would come to be our gardener for 11 years, came and introduced himself to Wendy while she was still unboxing her stuff and getting my crap out of the hallways and wherever else I had dropped it before going back for more at my apartment. Javier, like many Angelenos, came to this city after growing up somewhere else. In his case it was the region of Mexico named Zacatecas. When he showed up at the door, Wendy was in grubby jeans and t-shirt, after having sweated through moving the bed from one side of the room to another, seeing which way looked best. Javier, on the other hand, was dressed impeccably in a shirt and tie, black hair and mustache slicked back, which we came to know as his Realtor Look. Kind of a roll reversal, I might add. Javier also sells real estate, or tries to, to the mostly Spanish speaking population of nearby Silverlake, Echo Park, and Eagle Rock. From what I gather he’s not incredibly successful, but he does enough to have an office number at a local realty agency and the chutzpah to ask once every 3 months if we are interested in selling our house.

But on the day he came by he was inquiring whether or not we’d be keeping him as the gardener. We’d never questioned it. He’d kept the garden for years and he obviously knew how to keep it, it seemed insane to let him go and try to decipher what the hell was going on out in the front yard ourselves. Our plumbing was already backed up and the bedroom was the color of green we came to call “vomit”, so we already had our work cut out for us.

Wendy and he shook on it, and there we had it, for $80 a month we would have someone to take one more chore off our hands. It seemed a bargain.

Well, it would have been a bargain if Javier took care of the whole garden from top to bottom. But he didn’t. To be honest, unless someone was actually living in a hut in our front yard and working in the soil while the sun was shining, we could never even dream of having this chore off our hands. We quickly learned that Javier is the standard “mow, blow, and go” gardener that homeowners know all-too-well. 80 bucks for four visits, I don’t know quite what we were expecting for $20 a week. But we got the standard watering, mowing, ear-splitting gas blower, a lot of raking, and a hearty Hi-O, Silver. It seemed like enough until we realized many of the plants were dying or in various stages of dying. An investigation of the drip irrigation system, poorly placed all across the walking paths revealed why: none of the damn system worked.

Drip irrigation systems (which were developed in the deserts of the Middle East) are a series of large tubes leading to smaller tubes leading to tiny emitters which spray onto the roots of specific plants, thus delivering water where it’s needed, but not the surrounding weeds. It sounds like a brilliant idea, and it is. But you have to keep in mind that this was probably one of the first non-commercial versions of this system and, like the first version of almost anything, it needed a lot of TLC. Okay, that’s being kind. This system sucked. It also revealed that Paul, the landscape architect who laid this oasis out, decided that his drip system should call the shots with plant’s watering needs instead of common sense. If he could deliver precise amounts of water to cacti and thirsty rose bushes (because he placed them on two different systems), why not stick them right by each other? Brilliant! Yes, brilliant indeed. You wouldn’t do such a thing, clueless, because you could end up selling the house and my girlfriend could go on a rampage against your decrepit Israeli-made piece of crap system and rip out all the hoses before we made any sense of them.

I’m not sure whether we were more screwed before or after the hoses were piled into the driveway roasting in the midday heat, ready to be chucked in the dumpster. But the fact was, we were pretty well screwed.