For two years I was known as "The Boy."
Or "Boy."
Two summers at the nursery, the Dutch owners called me that.
I was 15 & 16.
I was the water boy. The weeder. I carried trees and shrubs and lifted them into cars. Toted fertilizer and peat moss and manure. I swept the parking lot. Carried flats of flowers, unloaded trucks. Anytime someone needed help, they called for The Boy.
"Where is 'The Boy'?" Thelma used to ask. Robert called me "Boy." "Okay, Boy," he'd say, and he'd lead me out to the beds and show me something new, how to prune junipers, how to mulch, how aerate the root stock, how to tag shade trees.
I was the gopher, the errand boy, the bell-hop.
No one really knew my name. I was the skinny nameless kid in cut-offs and wet shoes.
Strange how for over thirty years I have forgotten that. I was an imp, a curmudgeon, a cur, a ragamuffin at the beck-and-call of everyone in the nursery: Get a hose. Get a wheelbarrow. Load this. Unload this truck. Go get that.
During the busy season, I was a blur of activity, 4 hours a day after school, twelve hours a day on Saturdays. In summer I'd work 60-70 hours a week. Near mother's Day and Memorial Day I exhausted myself. We were all running on adrenaline, on vapors, literally running all day. Then later, as the days lengthened and business slowed to a crawl, I spent hours in boring stasis watering, weeding, sweeping, unloading semis. I guzzled bottles of Mountain Dew and cheap grape soda all day, my skin scalding crab red. My feet wrinkled like prunes and stank. I disappeared among empty greenhouses and the lost beds of leftover nursery stock. It was wretched, watering the same baskets of dirt and plants every day in silence, listening to the hot wind waffle the visqueen skin of the hoop houses...I was tormented by a routine in which no one saw me or was aware of what i was doing, but when they needed me they didn't even know my name, ad I felt rescued by the faint praise of that lame recognition. "Boy, there's a truck of fertilizer that needs unloading." "Boy, can you carry this stone deer?" "Boy, go get a rfope and tied this down."
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