By D.A.
When I was a young college fellow, I spent four straight summers working for the City of Monroe Landscaping Department. We were located in a one-story building that looked almost like a trailer, and we occupied one half while the Sanitation Department had the other. All of Monroe’s garbage trucks were parked out in the lot, and the smell in the heat of summer was, well … something special (I mention this because olfactory sensitivities come into play later in my tale). Our “office” door was marked with only the letters “LSD,” which turned out to be pretty fitting, because some of the stuff I experienced at this place was like a psychedelic trip.
About once a week, three of us would jump in a truck with a batch of weedeaters and head into the midst of downtown to mow several small lots that were city property. We were only about a block from the center of downtown, so one guy would typically follow along on a riding mower, driving it right down the middle of the street at a whopping 5 miles per hour. On this particular day, it was Earl, Jesse and I on weedeater duty. They were both full-timers, and I was the low-ranking summer help, but we got along really well. These were just salt-of-the-Earth, working-class dudes who went to NASCAR races with a bucket of cold chicken tucked under one arm, and would likely look at you in confusion if you mentioned any brand of beer other than Budweiser.
Anywho, we arrived at our destination, a small parcel of grass located adjacent to the Monroe Courthouse, and started the lawn-maintenance artistry for which we were so famous. I was running my weedeater with speed and precision that day, and the grass was flying everywhere … but let me back up for a moment.
If you’ve ever done any weedeating (not like goats, but with an actual mechanical weedeater), you know that you get covered in grass. That’s why you wear safety goggles. At the end of a given day, the legs of my jeans would literally be completely green from the knee down, and I’d have small pieces of grass and weeds and dirt stuck to my arms and neck and face and … well, everywhere. You get the idea.
So now back to the tale: On this day, as I’ve mentioned, I was in the zone. Grass was flying and bugs were fleeing in terror and all was right in the world. I had just gotten into a really good rhythm when I started to smell something that was … how shall I say it … more horrible than Satan’s unwashed, furry butthole. I looked at the ground and checked the soles of my green shoes for dog poop, but I was in good shape. So I turned to check the immediate area—and I recoiled in sheer horror at what stood before me.
Earl was roughly five feet away, but it was him I was smelling. Or, more to the point, it was what he was completely covered in that I was smelling. That’s right: My good friend, my coworker, my weedeater bro—he’d struck brown gold. Like the blood-spray patterns they analyze on all those forensic shows, an explosive fan of poop had cut a swath from his boots all the way up his body and into his face and crewcut hair. But this was no normal, garden-variety dog or cat poop, folks. Oh no. It was real honest-to-goodness, 24-karat, alcohol-fortified wino shit. And you could tell right away.
The smell was like a cross between some kind of deadly bio-agent and the guts out of a rotten monkey carcass. And I can say without any whit of shame that I was gagging like a sick dog the minute he got within two feet of me. The victim himself was not faring much better. He had a look of puzzlement and rage on his face the likes of which I’ve never encountered again. Above the sound of our weedeaters and my violent, slobbery retching, I heard him shouting something about “goddamn winos” and a “pile of shit.” It was horrible, and I felt true pity for my fallen brother, but I felt an even stronger urge to get him the fuck away from me as quickly as humanly possible. I stumbled back, my hands outstretched in the international gesture of “Dude, you’re covered in wino shit. Get the fuck away from me.”
Now, in the landscaping business, especially when employed by a municipality that takes care of public parks and ballparks and such, the odd encounter with human waste is an accepted occupational hazard. One time, I had to scoop a turd that was roughly the size of a baseball bat out of an actual baseball dugout (How’s that for irony?) with a shovel. It was bad, but it was my duty and I did it with skill and gusto. Why? Because I’m a pro. Because I’m a manly man. Because I was paying for college. But mostly because the dude I was with was my supervisor and he told me to do it. Besides, he’d been drinking the night before and was in no shape to do it himself. Had he tried, I’d probably have ended up cleaning up a baseball bat–sized turd covered in puke. It paints a pretty picture, I know.