NakedCity Wichita

revenge on the lawn

Posted on 01. May, 2010 by Carrie in op-ed

words > BART WILCOX

I suffer this disturbing sort of muscle memory. Mostly it’s the memory of having once had muscles, but sometimes it’s something else. They are the deeply hardwired impulses that run my life. Until last year I had been paying a college student to mow. So, what do-it-yourself eco-spasm induced me to start mowing my own lawn again? Issues. That’s what. Unresolved childhood landscape-based issues. For one thing, I have it stuck in my head that a guy should mow his own lawn. But I’m determined to get well.

In my day, mowing the lawn was a young boy’s rite of passage. It was his introduction to adult-sized anger: the frustration and rage that is every American’s right. Long before a man learned to hurl obscenities at politicians or other drivers, he had learned to swear at the family mower. I am of course talking about the mowers of my own youth, not those of today with their bourgeois suburbanite luxuries like electric starts and self-propelled drives.

Here’s where the diabolical mental muscle memory comes in. I can’t let go of the safety bar that cuts off the engine every time you want to do something besides mow, like scratch with both hands or sing “YMCA.” I just can’t get my fingers to let go, that’s how ingrained the memory is. It’s 102-degree heat and I’m wrapping the pull cord around the rotor (that whole self-rewinding pull-cord business belonged to a future full of flying cars and wristband TVs), pulling, yanking, ripping, one-handed, two-handed, behind the back, between the legs, tickling, pleading, kicking, cursing, or, that is, trying to curse with a limited vocabulary of profanity, calling up Billy Campbell in mid-fit to ask him, “What was that word you used that got you the ass-beating?” Finally, I completely dismantle the mower down to its piston rings and reassemble it. Still nothing.

And then, without reason, sometimes without even pulling the cord, the engine would catch and cough and wheeze to life. With the heartbeat of the mower semi-regular, I would give it the gas and close my eyes and mow. I mowed and prayed and didn’t stop. I didn’t even swerve, lest the mower interpret it as weakness. I just mowed right over my grandmother’s gladiolas. I didn’t even care if I got the two bucks. She could keep it, the old bag! My sweet, white-haired Nana, standing at the screen door with lemonade, was a malevolent creature. What was she looking at? Oh! You want me to stop? For a COOKIE? I CAN’T stop! I can’t even BREATHE! I couldn’t swallow a cookie right now if you crammed it down my throat!

And would I stop the motor to empty the bag? You would have been considered absolutely nuts by any boy of that era if you suggested such a thing. No, I just took my chances. By the time we were twelve, half of my school friends were missing at least one digit. Our fathers and uncles had war injuries; they would pull up a trouser leg, point to a long white scar, and say, “Guadalcanal” or “Inchon.” My friends and I would hold up a ring finger that stopped at the first knuckle and say, “Toro” or “Lawn Boy.”

Most mowers didn’t even have brand names. They were all painted dark Soviet Green, manufactured in some Balkan backwater by slave labor boys like us, smuggled into the country, and only sold on the curb. If they’d had brand names then they would have been something like Mangler or Ever-Yank or Blood-on-the-Lawn Boy.

A lot of kids didn’t have to pick up the grass with a bag like I did. I thought the bagless way was the ultimate in common sense. Why would you so lovingly grow something and harvest it just to throw it away? To my dad, something wrong with those people, like they went to the wrong church or something. Why couldn’t I have been born to a bagless family? I didn’t want much as a kid, just that. I didn’t want a fancy bike or a real concrete swimming pool or my own chimpanzee, I just wanted another half an hour or so a week that I could have devoted to— well, I really had no idea—but probably to writing a novel and becoming famous and living next door to Hemingway and going fishing for marlin on Saturday afternoons while the gardeners gratefully mowed the vast estate and distributed the clippings to poor people who didn’t have lawns. I would probably also wear an eye patch.

Now, the crowning irony to all of this is that my dad owned a business called Farm & Lawn Supply. I was, in the lawn-and-garden sense, the preacher’s son. Our lawn was impeccable: greened up with enough fertilizer to keep the groundwater toxic for a couple of centuries. If there were a slight discoloration in one patch, it would be triaged and stabilized and prepped for an intense, chemically-aided rehab. We were all about chemicals in those days—the more and deadlier the better. We were eyeball-to-eyeball with nuclear global communism in Eastern Europe, and at home we needed a nuclear option for crabgrass. Bermuda was the grass of choice, because it was sturdy, easily spread, and unstoppable, like folk music. Dandelions were looked upon as a social disease.

As a part of our Farm & Lawn Supply service, we actually painted lawns green. I’m serious. In the winter, we would go to some rich person’s house—or sometimes, grave—where there was a perfectly good, dead, beautifully yellow grass and spray it with gallons of green paint. To me, doing so was just a brazen defiance of whichever benevolent deity had mercifully killed the lawn in the first place. We might as well have kicked over the garden gnome and erected a golden calf.

But, forgive me while I dye grass. (To you, it’s a bad pun, but to me, it’s an inspiration.) The mower died again. The grass is still a toasty brown. Lowe’s has a paint sprayer on sale. And I have this great idea . . .

Tags: bart wilcox, childhood memories, lawn boy, lawn mower, lawn mowing, nakedcity magazine, toro