Green

by Sarah Elliott

The job wears my body clock into the ground and I exist in a constant sleep-drunk fogginess, lobotomized. I learn after the first couple of days of optimistic trying that eight hours of sleep is only efficient if slept at the right time. Though in bed at 9 p.m. with a deep sleep until 4:50 a.m., I am always tired.

My gravity is skewed at dawn. I can’t get my footing right out of bed: I stumble and grab at Carla’s desk, which makes me feel like an old woman.

I wake up before the smog. Waiting for the bus to Toronto’s Oakdale Golf Course at 5 a.m., the air is fresh with the smallest wet slap. This is a morning mist specific to Eastern Canada.

Note: new favourite sunglass lens is “dawn vision”. Everything is soaked in the sweetest pastel and gives those awake at that hour a healthy glow as compensation for their unripe pallor.

On the course, the smog thickens and settles by 7. I’ve been introduced to, and am raking the bunkers with, my new crew. Thursdays are “Fly-Mo” days, named after the mower, and all 8 hours are devoted to the bunkers that cup the fairways and greens. We give them each a thorough preening: trimmed edges, a rake and a “blow job”. The boys trim, we all rake, and then I’m handed a leaf blower to clean out the pits.

Never having gotten my license, I ask the boys to put me in charge of driving the Club Car and I discover that I’m a whole new breed of animal behind the wheel of a 11.5 horse powered utility vehicle. Overtaking the paying members’ golf carts without mercy and cutting turns like a gazelle, I assert myself as “balls-to-the-wall” and my new coworkers take note.

* * *

Rewind to the interview:

“Now, I’m not sure how to say this,” Denis, the main manager, says as his elfish face reddens. “But you’re going to be the only…well, the only female.”

Pause.

“There is one other girl who works with some handicapped guys we get doing divots some afternoons, but you’ll be the only girl at the shop.”

I smile at my new boss. “It’s alright. I’ll be able to handle myself.”

My male counterparts have trouble deciphering what kind of “female” I am. I work hard, talk dirty, date girls and swear. I wear short shorts, can flirt with boys, and read books at lunchtime. When the older men from the Dominican Republic whistle and singsong waves of filthy Spanish jokes in my direction, I tell them to fuck off with a smile. My unwillingness to be consistent with a single stereotype makes my coworkers, supervisors and bosses uneasy. I try to sit with the younger guys from my crew at lunch, but no one really talks to me. That’s never happened before.

After a couple of days of uncomfortable attempts at fraternity, I extend an olive branch while working on weeding a small, isolated section of the golf course: a joint.

Rolled before work and smoked at lunchtime with three of my crew members — Steve, Paul and Orestes — it gains me enough credentials for a spot with them at break and lunch. Getting high at work becomes a necessary, frequent distraction.

* * *

Leo is my supervisor. Early into my first week, it’s just him and me laying sod in an eight by eight foot plot of fairway on the fifth hole. Enjoying the physical strain of the labour, the feeling of moist dirt snug against my fingernails and a warm ache in my muscles, I relax with Leo and we fall into easy conversation quickly. I tell him about Carla, about moving to Toronto from Vancouver for her and the subtle cultural shifts between the West and the East. Subject leads to subject with Leo starting to dip his toes in increasingly intimate water until he plunges into the deep end by telling me that he hasn’t been laid in two weeks, that he went to the stripper and she let him suck her tits (which she doesn’t normally do) and that his wife, a “stuck up white bitch,” hasn’t given him a blow job in days. Leo smiles, winks, when he tells me that he likes to snuggle naked after sex.

Suddenly I’m trying to focus on the sod, on the clean lines in the earth and being efficient. In the beginning, I offer advice, I nod and bark, “Sure, man,” but by the end of it, I’m not saying a word.

In the following weeks, Leo takes me out in the Kushman to secluded areas on the golf course to do random, isolated landscaping jobs. Dig a hole here. Weed there. Let’s talk? Sure, let’s talk. During these jobs, I’m asked what I wear for a bathing suit, what I do with my pubic hair, if I want to see “his hose,” that the elderly man who waved at me wants to fuck me hard, to move “my delicious ass,” if he can see naked pictures of my girlfriend or if there are pictures of us together. I laugh, avoid and try not to throw up. Every time we roll into a small clearing in the thicket and he cuts the engine, I feel as though I’ve swallowed a pound of dry ice.

I make plans to talk to Denis about the situation, but when I suggest it to Justin on the way home, he tells me that he heard Denis calling me a fucking dyke with the rest of the guys in the shop at lunchtime on Friday. After that, I just shut up and take it.

Justin, it turns out, lives a couple blocks away from my girlfriend’s house.  I listen to Justin lament the number of “Wops” and “Porkchops” in our neighbourhood before asking if I can start getting rides from him. For the two months that I work there, he gives me a ride in the morning and, when he’s not golfing, a ride home.

At 22, my age, he’s the youngest supervisor at Oakdale and a recent golf-course management school dropout. While we’re at the job he doesn’t talk to me, but while we’re in his car he treats me as a friend, an equal. He’s got a girlfriend who he brought home with him from Mexico and they live in his mom’s basement under subsistent conditions; he invites me over one day to smoke a doobie and complain about work. Justin lies to his girlfriend about driving me home because she’ll think that he’s cheating on her. When I ask Justin what he would do if she was cheating on him, he smiles and looks right at me. “Oh, I’d be goin’ to jail.”

“What do you mean?”

Still smiling: “Unless I found a good place to hide her body.”

“Oh.”

Subject change.

* * *

One lunch hour, I smoke too much weed. I smoke a finger-thick cannon with Paul before we head back to the shop to eat and I am Flying High, heart pumping, cold sweat, can-feel-my-hair-growing blitzed. Unable to sit and eat with everyone, Paul avoiding my glazed eyes, I leave the shop and take a walk to the parking lot where I find someone from another crew, Donovan, a soft-spoken Jamaican whom I’ve never talked to.

I come up beside him and sit down next to him on the ground.

“Hey.”

“Hey girl, what’s up with you?”

I lower my sunglasses so he can see my squinting eyes, fleshy and pink.

“Ah, right. Too much weed?”

I’m watching my hands wringing each other sore.

“Yah, freaking right out, man, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m talking to you about it. I’m sorry, dude, I just needed to tell someone, talk to someone, to remind myself that I have the ability to do those things? I don’t know?” My words are slung in a rush.

“Girl, s’okay, s’okay. Just breathe and you’ll be okay.”

“Right.”

We sit in silence; I slow my breathing and feel my head clear.

“Um. Please don’t tell anyone?” I get up to head back to the shop, wiping the dirt off the back of my jeans, embarrassed.

Donovan winks at me, “Girl, I hear deaf and see blind.”

* * *

After two weeks, finally, a friend.

Paul spits gallons. He punctuates his sentences with a solid trajectory of saliva that lands on cement with a splash and in sand with a thud. When Paul smokes he doesn’t inhale, so when I bum cigarettes off him I inhale for both of us and let my world tilt and spin on an entirely new axis during the powerful nicotine buzz. He gives me the upwards of three cigarettes a day, but I’m guaranteed at least one while we wait for our daily tasks to be written on the whiteboard at six in the morning. As a routine, Paul and I stand close beside drums of gasoline lighting our cigarettes, scuffing our steel-toed boots into the dirt while talking about girls and snorting hard drugs. Sometimes I lie, but I’m sure he does too.

Paul is a university student who fucks his girlfriend every day but calls it making love, and that’s the only compassionate human quality he has. In fact, he is the most human person at my work. After two months at Oakdale, I can relate to Paul on multiple levels and only looking back now can be appropriately disgusted at my swift depletion of moral standards.

When Paul tells me about the “nigger fight” he saw yesterday across the street from where we work, I bob my head and let my mouth widen into an idiot grin: I act like I also enjoy “nigger fights.”

I’m reading And the Band Played On during lunch hours and breaks and everyone razzes me for it. It’s a thick book, an intimidating book, and when Paul asks me what it’s about I tell him, “AIDS, man.”

“Why the fuck are you reading about AIDS?” He laughs. “Shit, that’s from niggers fucking monkeys, right?”

Lips together, corners up, smile hard.

The one day that Paul and I get our hands on the Kushman, we spend most of the afternoon collecting crab apples and driving around the back forest of the golf course throwing them in front of the cart, trying to run them over. Paul pulls out his keys and uses one to dig out a face into one of the apples, exaggerating the width of the eyes. “This one is a Chink, make sure you get it.” He watches me as he throws it. I turn my mouth into a smile and swerve with gusto, overshooting the apple by half a foot.

* * *

Understand: the racism is everywhere. The racism is used by and towards every shade of human towards every other shade of human. At Oakdale, there are Jamaicans, Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Caucasians, one Asian, and one half-breed, me. Words like “nigger nap” (a nap taken in the afternoon after a large meal) and “nigger juice” are commonplace. Spic, Chug, Chink, Wop, Porkchop, Wetback, Packi and Sand Nigger, are all used without hesitation or fear of social censure. At first I comment, but in the end there isn’t much point.

High school finishes at the end of June and a couple of new kids are added to our crew. The youngest, Chris, is sixteen and struggling to fit in the group for the first couple days, but eventually becomes a court jester of sorts. Raking bunkers one morning, shooting the shit, Chris finds out that I’m half-Indian. He asks which half.

From the driver’s seat of the EZ-GO, I tell him. “My mom, she’s from Singapore.”

I watch Chris dart his tongue over his lips and look at the other crewmembers. “So what, is she like, shit brown?”

I see red and put the car in gear, barely hearing his egging me on become a scream for me to back up the car. I pull the keys out of the EZ-GO, throw them to Paul, and leave Chris pinned at the knees.

* * *

Though the Club Car is the fastest of the work cars that we’re given, the EZ-GO cars don’t catch on the axle when they’re going too fast and can outrun the Club Car when racing down a hill. Driving back to the shop to pick up two more shovels and a rake, I pick a fight with inertia and tip the car down hill at full speed, refusing to touch the brakes. Realizing everything Too Late, I turn Too Hard for a corner at Too High a speed and am thrown six feet from the car onto pavement up ahead.

I cannot breathe. I try to get up, but my elbows give like oiled hinges and I submit, splayed on the ground like a fucking loser, convinced that my lungs have collapsed and resemble two shriveled birthday balloons the morning after.

It is a slow-moving five minutes before I notice the only thing that stopped the buggy from flipping over was a sapling, now bent in half with the EZ-GO leaning on it like a drunk uncle. My hands shake as I focus on learning how to breathe again, praying that a supervisor doesn’t turn the corner on the hill to find me sitting cross-legged six feet away from the tipsy, sorry, tipping EZ-GO, with my head in my hands.

Not looking to lose my driving privileges, I don’t tell anyone about the crash. Already, Justin and members on my team have made comments about my driving abilities – likening them to our lone Asian coworker. What I’d hoped was a respect for my reckless driving is revealed as thinly veiled mockery.

With my hands shaking like twin leaves, struggling to dial the phone, I call Carla about the crash right after it happens. She tells me to be careful; there isn’t much else to say. Everyday I come home with new stories from work and there are fewer and fewer words to offer in support. I sleep whenever I get home, so the plans we make never pan out and for a huge chunk of the time that I’m employed at Oakdale, we don’t go out at all. The strain becomes more and more apparent.

Why do I stay? Because I have found a truly lush natural haven in a concrete jungle, I tell her. Despite the heat, despite the hate and the creepy looks and the dirty words, every morning I work in the only plot of green in what I know of Toronto. It was bought for and is preserved as an escapist garden. Every morning as I turn onto the course to start, I’m descending into a creationist’s mural. It’s what I tell her and what I tell myself for some time.

I’m done work at 3 and get home an hour later, depending on traffic. By 5, when Carla’s on her way, I’ve usually fallen asleep or have had too many beers to eat dinner with her and her family. After the beers, sometimes I get angry about the way things are going at work, but whenever Carla suggests I quit, I find reasons not to. When she points out my moodiness, my lack of motivation, a sneaking depression, I just tell her I’m tired, Jesus, I’m just fucking tired, you know.

On her birthday, I tell her that I didn’t have time to get her a present and promise her that I’ll get her one that weekend. I sleep for a while and, when she shakes me up for her birthday dinner, I’m a bundle of pinched nerves at the table with her family. By the end of the night, I’ve made her cry by saying something I didn’t mean.

* * *

Things at Oakdale get better because I let things at home get worse. I’m eating lunch regularly with the boys on my crew, getting rides with Justin more often than not and opting out of Leo’s “special jobs” as much as possible. Leo, we all can tell, doesn’t appreciate it but I don’t care because I’ve exchanged phone numbers with a couple guys on my crew and we’ve all made plans to do things after. Unfortunately, none of these outings ever come to head as we all fall asleep as soon as we get home, usually. Word has spread that some people on Leo’s team are smoking weed at work, but I don’t stop rolling and smoking and rolling and smoking at work. With these boys, it seems like I’m finally getting credit where credit is due.

My frustrations are leeching into my interactions with my superiors in ways that I don’t even notice until people point them out to me. Paul lets me know that the bosses haven’t been impressed with my attitude; they’ve been suspecting me as the “pot smoker”. Whenever he tells me this, I shrug it off. “If any of these assholes fired me, I’d have their asses handed with a discrimination lawsuit faster than shit.”

This is the way I talk close to the end.

The night that things pivot, it’s the one night that my work intersects with my personal life. The night I realize that green earth and masochistic, immersive anthropology is not worth sacrificing a summer out East, it’s at that crossroad. There’s an annual street festival by Carla’s place in the West End, Salsa on St. Clair, and I know that she’s wanted to go for weeks. As it turns out, Orestes from my crew and a bunch of Dominican guys from work are going as well so we all make plans to meet up. Up till then, when Orestes tried to poke holes in my relationship by offering his sexual services it was always funny and only slight annoying. But, by the way that he looks at his friends when we show up, I realize that they’ve been prompted. We’ve become a challenge.

And Carla rises to it. The festival closes soon after we arrive, pushing us in the direction of bars with the rest of the crowd. Orestes’ friends daisy chain from club to club till we find one that everyone agrees on. The whole time Carla is putting out like she’s game as hell, giggling and flirting hard. I’m trying to keep my cool, but my jealousy is a choking me by the time Carla agrees to have a dance with Orestes. He pushes between us as a song comes on and grabs her hand, turning to me and winking before he leads her through the crowd onto the dance floor. Watching them twirl together underneath low lights, the Latin music pulsing through the hall with the high notes bouncing off the mirrors and the hardwood, I stand in the corner feeling his friend’s hot breath on my ear and burn.

That night, in an uncharacteristically restrained way, I’m not volatile, but I’m angrier than I’ve ever been.

I’m supposed to be working the next day at six in the morning and we don’t shake off Orestes and his friends till two. After the dance with Orestes, I’m marking my territory; I hold her hand or sling my arm over her shoulder and pull her to me or make us walk a few steps away from the boys. I don’t let my anger show until we wave goodbye to pack and turn down the street towards her house. Then I shake Carla off, speeding up as she tries to keep holding onto my hand.

“Baby?” Her voice is small because she knows.

“Anyone but them, Carla. Jesus.” I don’t slow down.

All the work I’ve put into building myself up is put in jeopardy because she wants to make me jealous and all she can say is that she’s sorry, that she’s stupid. It’s not even about Carla, it’s that it will get back to Them. My credibility is completely erased. I walk a half a block ahead of her the whole way home.

* * *

“Sorry, Denis. St. Clair was closed for cleaning so I had to walk to Bloor Street, which took twenty minutes and then I missed my Jane Street bus.” I let this out in a breath to Denis when I run in at 7 o’clock the next day, forty minutes late.

He stares at his shoes. “Well, better grab your things. I don’t have any work here for you.”

My stomach thrusts itself into my throat. “I left my house at 4, Denis,” I manage to say. “It’s an honest mistake.”

But by the time I’m done talking, Denis has shifted his attention to Paul who is asking him something about one of the mowers, one of the mowers that I remember not being able to operate because it was too big. Paul moves in front of Denis, turning his back to me.

I clean my things out of my locker quickly. As I’m leaving the shop, a man that works as a gardener and a landscaper watches me. I’ve noticed him looking at me before, but this time his watery blues eyes trained on my ass and tits make me furious. I turn towards him and flip him the bird as I move onto the path that will take me up and off the golf course. He laughs and blows me a kiss.

On the way home from getting fired, listening to Wolf Like Me on repeat, I can’t help but think I could have done things differently, could’ve walked away with more dignity. I get back to Carla’s after 7 and don’t bother to lie to her dad when he asks me why I’m home, not at work. He says that he’s sorry. Though I don’t doubt his sympathy, I know that I’ve cemented my position as “a bit of a fuck up.” Later that day, Carla’s mum will give me the same tightlipped smile that Carla uses when she’s embarrassed for me. But before that, before I get drunk at 3 in the afternoon for the entire following week, I crawl onto the mattress on the floor with Carla.

“What are you doing back?” Her words are as thick as the smog forming outside and muffled by her pillow.

“I fucking got fired. Those fuckers fucking fired me.” I can hear my voice shaking and see my hands shaking. I’m wearing my shorts and a stained white t-shirt underneath the covers and she slides naked towards me, fits in me, practiced. Her warm breath on my collarbone, I learn how to breathe again.

“Good.” She nuzzles my neck.

I slept like I haven’t in days.