photo by adamfarnsworth/Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license
My landlord bought the rowhouse I rent in the early Nineties, for eighty-some thousand dollars. He’s since retired to Africa and in his mind, Shaw – the neighborhood where I live – is still a crack-war Baghdad where people eat dinner lying down for fear of stray assault rifle fire, and the gutters run with blood.
I mail my rent to a post office box, where my checks go uncashed sometimes for months at a time, and although fixing things is entirely my responsibility (when my shower wall caved inwards, I merely duct-taped a trashbag over it and continued taking showers as usual, now accompanied by the eerie sound of the plastic ‘breathing’ in and out from the draft blowing in through the exposed bricks), he hasn’t raised the rent in several years. Sometimes I think he forgets the house even exists.
So it was a surprise to me when he called from his overseas compound and told me that I was going to be evicted. Apparently the city had been citing the house for months, the citations, like my rent checks, piling up in his stateside PO Box, the fines accruing interest, the violations growing more and more serious. The fines had gone into five figures. Finally, the city had placed a lien on the house.
Violations for what? I asked. Though the house was crumbling inside, the exterior looked perfectly acceptable.
The yard! He said. They say it’s a health violation! Rats! Roaches! Disease!
I looked out the window; admittedly I wasn’t much for landscaping, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that bad. And it wasn’t. Sure, it was overgrown, with knee-high grass and unpruned trees and flowering bushes, but I’d seen much worse. And it certainly wasn’t a “health violation.” I mean, on my very block were houses with backyards filled with piles of moldering trash bags, cars on blocks, rusted-out appliances. Clearly, there was something else going on here.
Look, I said to my landlord. I’ll handle it. Just hold off on the eviction for a few weeks, I’ll get to the bottom of it.
Fine, he said. In the background I could hear the chime of female laughter. He’d told me about his overseas compound, the live-in chef, the drivers, the guards, all of whom cost him less than a hundred dollars a month. He also had several young girlfriends. Even though I’m seventy, he’d told me, I still ‘do it’ every day.
Just solve this, he said. If there’s another complaint, I’ll have to fly over to take care of it, and then you’re definitely out.
***
A few days later I received a FedEx envelope full of photocopied citation reports, accompanied by blurry photos of my unmowed yard. I called the Department of Public Works and was transferred to the compliance officer who’d issued the citations.
I just don’t understand, I said. It’s just weeds. There’s no health violation.
Rats, she said.
But rats live underground, where it’s dark and damp. In piles of garbage, or sewers, I said. Mice might live in the yard, but they’re harmless.
Roaches, she said.
Roaches don’t live in weeds either, I said, trying to keep my voice even. You ever see a meadow overrun with roaches? They live in filth, and there’s no filth in my yard.
Vermin, she said. Disease.
Now she was just saying words. Throughout this conversation, she’d spoken in a tone that I couldn’t quite identify, but that I suddenly recognized; it was the tone of a weary bureaucrat who, deep down, agreed with me, but was obligated to recite the company boilerplate.
Listen, she said. If someone calls in a complaint, we have to come out, and we have to enforce the code. If I were you, I would talk to your neighbors about this.
Ah. The house to the left of me had been flipped twice in three years and was already on the market again. The house on the right was owned by a Howard University Hospital nurse who’d moved to the county, done the cheapest possible remodel (when the contractor came to my house to look for the source of a basement leak next door and I asked him how the renovation was coming along, he just shrugged and said “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.”), and was now trying to rent it at exorbitant rates to gullible law students and interns.
No one answered the door on the left; as far as I could tell, the latest owners of the house only used the parking in back, and didn’t actually live there. At the other house, the timid new tenants gave me the landlady’s number, and when I called she agreed to come out to the house the next afternoon.
It looks bad, she said as we stood on my deck overlooking our adjacent yards the next afternoon, as she waved an arm at my overgrown yard. It’s an eyesore.
Your yard is just a huge concrete slab, I said. That looks far worse than a bunch of grass and bushes.
It’s neat, she said. Clean. I’m trying to rent my top unit out and the last tenants that came by looked down at your yard and just shook their heads.
Okay, I said. So what’s my cut then?
She looked at me sideways. Your cut?
If I have to cut my yard so you can rent your stupid condos, I said, then what’s my cut of the proceeds? How about five percent?
She didn’t find this funny, which was fine, as I didn’t really mean it as a joke.
Take care of the yard by Monday, she said, walking down the stairs. Or I’ll keep calling the city every week.
***
So this is what it’s come to, I thought the next day as I emerged into the sweltering June afternoon clad in pants, long-sleeved shirt (mosquitoes!), work gloves, and heavy boots.
I was soaked in sweat before I even unsheathed my machete. From the perspective of the ground as opposed to the second floor window, I saw that many of the bushes were in fact small trees and that many of the small trees were in fact just trees. It was going to be a long day.
Still, it was a shame; up close the yard was as lush and diverse as an arboretum. As I set about hacking and uprooting, trampling the wild strawberries and breaking off the stalks seeping sap, I felt more and more like a murderer. And it didn’t comfort me, any more than I imagine it comforted so many other reluctant perpetrators of atrocity, that I was just following orders.
And maybe it was the heat exhaustion, but as I worked, I became more and more convinced that I was victim of a vast conspiracy of wrong-minded absurdity. After all, why should I be responsible for buttressing my neighbor’s property values? Like most varieties of social contract, neighborliness seemed to be all downside, no upside. I suppose this is why homeowners hate renters, but then it’s also why renters hate homeowners. Their smug entitlement to profit, their transmutation of the roof over their head into an “investment,” their assumption that you should share their petty concerns. I mean, don the yoke of homeownership, spend your leisure time cleaning gutters and staining your deck, that’s fine – but for God’s sake, leave me out of it.
And really, there isn’t any good reason to have a manicured yard; it’s simply an arbitrary aesthetic preference, like a hairstyle. Not to get all “big government is evil” on you, but is that really something that the government should be enforcing? I mean, where’s the agency I can call to have a compliance officer go out and pry the stupid crusty flip-flops off people’s feet? Because I’m sick to death of looking at that shit. Where’s the toll-free hotline for me to call when I see yet another pack of douchebros in cargo shorts?
***
Really though, I was up against more than a local government agency. I was up against centuries of Western tradition. The lawn as a cultural phenomenon originated in 17th century England, where large expanses of aristocrat-owned meadow were kept naturally trimmed by grazing livestock. When these green swards became fashionable, they came to be maintained by hand and scythe, which required a huge amount of labor (and money to pay said labor). It wasn’t until shortly after the Civil War, when the first lawn mower was patented, that the lawn craze crossed the Atlantic into the U.S.
Even so, lawns were just patches of trimmed (and usually native) grass, until the 40s and 50s saw the spread of sprinkler technology and chemical herbicides and pesticides. Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” detailing how the overuse of these chemicals threatened to drive several species of bird to extinction, was a mere speed bump, in the rise of lawn culture. In post-war America, a lawn became a required emblem of middle-class respectability, a value further institutionalized by the rise of country clubs and golf clubs. These were large tracts of highly-manicured green land for the use of the elite – or, more accurately, for the non-use of the elite. The philosopher/social critic Thorstein Veblen observed that practical use of these lands – for, say, grazing animals or growing food – was strictly taboo. Their symbolic worth lay in their very superfluity, the vulgar display of surplus. Has there ever been a more effective symbol of decadence?
But there are real consequences to this pettiness. In a time when droughts are becoming longer and more frequent, up to 70% of all residential water is used to water lawns, most of it in naturally desertlike areas in the Southwest. On top of that, the EPA estimates that over 70 million pounds of herbicides are used on lawns every year. The Chesapeake Bay (and many other waterways around the country) are in large part being ruined by the runoff of these hundreds of tons of herbicides and dyes (yes, people dye their lawns green).
And this runoff is made even worse when people (like my neighbors) pave over their yards, creating a hard impermeable surface that accelerates the process. The accumulation of these chemicals have caused a massive permanent dead zone of oxygen-deprived in the Bay, as well as a huge population of malformed, hermaphroditic fish, their biological processes garbled by pollutants. Families who for generations flourished fishing in the Bay now can’t even bring in a livable wage, and a recent survey of drinking water in the region found it was among the most contaminated.
On the other hand, your lawn sure is purty!
***
But as I chopped away, into my third and fourth hours, I grew more and more embittered. Because on a fundamental level, it was bigger than just real estate values or mediocre aesthetics.
There’s a reason that any hipster bohemian (guilty as charged) worth his or her salt is unkempt and longhaired and unshaven, wearing threadbare thrift-store clothing. The most detestable ur-principle of mainstream American bourgeois society, its defining and fatal flaw, is the Puritanical obsession with “cleanliness,” which manifests itself in all the worst characteristics of uptight, square culture. The association of newness with virtue (old things are “dirty”) is what informs the relentless materialism and consumerism (that in turn necessitates the white-collar income), as well as the ADD-like insistence on novelty. It’s also behind “reg’lar folks” aversion to anything with a whiff of the organic, of the flesh; their ostensible obsession with but fundamental aversion to sex (ever watched “Dancing with the Stars”? It’s essentially burlesque for people who hate sex), the obsession with youth and the concomitant revulsion towards aging. It even informs the preference for escapist entertainments, with their predictable narratives and “neat” endings, to anything more sophisticated (the American streak of anti-intellectualism?), much less the messy ambiguity of reality.
And, finally, it all made sense. I pictured a housewife spraying Febreeze (scented water) on her furniture lest any unsavory organic odors manifest themselves, keeping the lights out during sex, combating the anomie of mortality by shopping for shoes, and then one day looking out her window at my house and feeling an inexplicable horror at the chaos of the yard, the unrestrained explosion of life. No, this will not do, something must be done, she thinks, as she picks up the phone.
***
I called my landlord later that night to notify him that the work had been done, and sent him along some pictures of the defoliated property. When we talked a few days later he said that although I’d done a bang up job, and that he’d reconsidered my eviction, he was sending someone by to pave over the front yard, just in case.
And what about the back, I asked. Maybe we can get someone to come by every few weeks and soak it down with Agent Orange.
That’s good, he said. Let’s do that.
A few days later, a hired handyman came to the house and paved over the entire front yard. The final triumph of the philistines. And why not? It was their world, that was clear.
The landlady next door, the one who’d complained every week for months and months, was out front a few days later as I was leaving the house, and I waved an arm at the yard. Happy now? I said.
She surveyed the cement patio and nodded vaguely. Much better, she said. Now how about repainting the place? It’s looking kind of faded.
If I’d had a gun on me, I would’ve murdered her on the spot.
