After years of staring at the empty, abandoned tree pit in front of our apartment building, I decided to stage a guerilla gardening coup d'etat and take over the public space for myself. I had visions of lilies and dahlias and wild flowers, and was prepared to hold my ground with trowel and shovel in case anyone on Montague Street got lippy.
I imagined confrontations with smug Brooklynites ("Is that fertilizer ORGANIC? Pookie only pees on organic!") until I realized, halfway through the excavation of Brooklyn's vile exoskeleton, that the only thing that really pisses off New Yorkers is when someone upstreams their cab.
"What are you doing?" a woman stopped to ask.
"Planting some stuff," I answered, my hackles rising in defense.
"Oh," she said, considering the crust of lead and asbestos I was steadily forking into the ground. "That's so nice. Can you help me identify something in my backyard? I think it's a cactus."
After convincing her it was most certainly not a cactus, a delivery guy wheeled his bike up to the tree pit, chained it to the iron railing and took out smoke. I ran through a list of things I would say if he flicked his butt into my radioactive tree pit.
"What are you doing?" he asked, in heavily accented English. "Do you live here?"
It turned out the dude was the owner of the sushi joint five floors below me - the restaurant whose backyard I had repeatedly hosed while watering my balcony garden. Shit got hectic one day when I inadvertantly sprayed a table of German tourists and then hid before they could properly ID the perp.
"Erm...yes."
"What floor?"
"Uhh...the fifth?"
"You have the garden! The crazy garden!"
BUSTED. The day of reckoning had come, and I was trapped in the tree pit between a bike and a car, with nowhere to hide. I considered throwing my fifth floor neighbors under the bus by attributing the "crazy garden" to them, since they were stupid enough to call their dog "SO-CRATES" in homage to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."
"Yeah, but I have the watering system under control now, so...that's good," I trailed off.
The restauranteur, who introduced himself as Nathan, was concerned about his backyard.
"I want to make it garden paradise!" he exclaimed. "How do I make flowers everywhere?"
I told him about the farmer's market, what plants he should buy, how he should plant them. Nathan listened carefully, looking nervous.
"Don't worry," I said. "It's going to be great. Give me a shout if you need help."
Two weeks later, I looked down from my balcony and saw Nathan's planters full of flowers. He'd jerry rigged an insane irrigation system which was flooding half of his newly constructed backyard, but the meditative task of deadheading had put him in a trance-like state of obliviousness.
"Lookin' good!" I called down, breaking the spell. Nathan smiled proudly and gave me the thumbs up. Elated, I responded with two thumbs up and an ill-advised fist pump. For a moment we both stood there waving dumbly - two city gardeners in our gardens of crazy.