Kudzu Queen
I needed something to do one summer, so I decided I’d demolish the hulking garage, which loomed like a rotting, redneck Leaning Tower of Pisa in my backyard. Smashing things with a sledgehammer is enormously satisfying and much cheaper than psychotherapy.
Each day, I’d don my demolition outfit (cut-offs, sports bra, steel-toed boots, carpenter’s belt) and spend several gratifying hours smashing and splintering. I got to know others in my community. There was the couple who came by every few days to tell me about Jesus. At first I didn’t mind listening, as long as they helped me pull nails and pile demolition debris. But after awhile, their proselytizing began to wear on my nerves. They were just a little too fervent.
“Do you guys get a commission?” I asked. “Bonus points for hardcore heathens, maybe? Tell the truth.”
“We always tell the truth,” one of them intoned, humorlessly. “Lying is an abomination to God.”
This couple also significantly retarded the job progress, because you can’t really do effective construction/demolition work without cussing a lot. I was loathe to curse in front of churchy people, lest my Baptist grandmother come spinning up out of her grave and beat my ass into next year, so my work slowed to a crawl.
They finally stole one of my ladders. Since that kept them away, I didn’t pursue recovering the ladder. I’d stolen it from somebody else to begin with, anyway.
A nice old man used to come park his truck on the edge of my backyard every noon during his lunch hour. He said he enjoyed watching me work while he ate his lunch. I thought this was mildly weird, but harmless. He never got out of his truck. From time to time he’d call out helpful comments to me, like “Honey, you dropped a nail in the grass. Better bend over and find it,” or “You know, if you wore a bikini, you wouldn’t get so hot. I bet those little shorts are mighty hot.”
Sometimes he would get red-faced, and shudder. I didn’t understand this, but he was easily 300 years old, and maybe that’s what ancient dudes just do, sometimes. I didn’t tip to what was really going on until I ran into my across-the-alley neighbor at the grocery store and she said, “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“What?”
“That nasty old freak jerking-off in his truck every day.”
After that, it DID give me the creeps, so I told him to go find something else to do at lunchtime, unless he wanted me to apply my sledgehammer to his windshield.
One day an authority figure came by, identified himself as the housing inspector or construction Grand Poobah, or something of that ilk, and demanded to see my permit.
“Excuse me?”
“You need a permit to tear down this garage.”
The man was obviously addle-brained. Did he think I had just picked some random person’s decrepit garage to demolish?
“It’s OK,” I said, speaking slowly so he could understand. “This is MY garage, and I give myself permission to tear it down. Capiche?”
Then HE began speaking slowly, presumably so I could understand: “Lady, you can’t just tear buildings down. You got to have a permit.”
“But it’s MY building. It’s totally OK with myself for me to tear it down.”
“You still need a permit.”
“What if I don’t get one?” I asked. My acts of civil disobedience tend to be equal parts enthusiasm and stupidity. I’ll be damned if I’m going to ask somebody else for permission to tear up my own stuff, I decided. I’ll sit in jail, first. If I have to ask this butthead’s permission, he can make the damn payments on the property. I began to bristle up, which is generally an indicator that my inner hillbilly is coming out and I’m about to get in trouble for something really dumb.
“Get a permit, or I’ll have to write you a ticket,” he explained.
“How much is the ticket?”
It was an amount exorbitant enough (meaning, it was over $100) that I immediately changed tactics. I affected a helpless feminine pose, best as I could in steel-toed boots and a dingy carpenter’s belt, and said, “Gosh, Sir, I had no idea. Thank you so much for telling me about this. I sure do appreciate your good advice. I’ll get right on the permit thing.”
This satisfied him for the moment. As soon as he left, I redoubled my efforts to complete the demolition. My plan was to have the whole mess finished and illegally dumped somewhere by the next time he came back, when I planned to say, “What garage? I don’t see any garage. I think you have the wrong address. You haven’t been drinking on the job, have you?”
I was thinking of all this today while I was watching Goo the iguana clamber about on the jungle gym of logs and branches in his beautiful outdoor lizard palace. Bob and I built it, and it was a highly cost- and labor-intensive project. Our relationship survived the palace’s construction, so I guess we are really in love. Bob was the brains and brawn of the project. I was the designated cusser. And since you can’t really have a bona fide construction project without somebody on the crew being high, Bob’s relative Slack obligingly came over and slouched in a lawn chair, stoned to the very core of his being. We needed Slack because Bob and I don’t do drugs anymore.
I used lessons I’d learned from the garage demolition to make the iguana project run smoothly.
“If any evangelists come by, GUARD THE EQUIPMENT,” I instructed my crew. “If any ancient old men park in the sideyard, we’re all going to run inside and put on more clothes. Lots of clothes. And don’t feed the iguana. We want him cranky.”
“Why?” asked Slack.
“If a housing inspector metastasizes in the yard and starts yammering about a lizard house permit, we turn the iguana loose and let the two of them work it out between themselves.”
Contact Tamara Ducote at TDDucote6@aol.com.
Archives
Kudzu Queen
