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| Good Gardening |
Junior quit high school in the eleventh grade, started his own gardening business, and played a “tasty” blues guitar in a band on weekends. Back then, about 1966, he still lived at home and drove his old Chevy truck wherever he went, even to his band’s gigs. In the early 70s, he met a rhythm guitar player from Brentwood, Mike Zinc, who lived up in the hills with his parents. The two hit it off real good.
They started hanging out, writing songs, and trading licks on the guitar. Mike's dad was a big wig in Hollywood, a director or something. He took a liking to Junior, thought him too smart for gardening, and offered him a job, learning to edit film. In the 70s, this meant literally cutting film and splicing it together, which took skilled fingers, organization, but not a lot of brain power. That was cool with Junior because he always had music going through his head, anyway.
Film editing was a clean job, paid good money, and was prestigious, for a Mexican kid out of Venice who didn’t finish high school.
Junior was a quick study, learned fast, and was in demand, except that, unfortunately, the movies started changing. Film editors began turning to computers. The job needed guys who could understand some math, read schematics, and compose memos, areas in which Junior was deficient, even though he had no problem memorizing the pentatonic guitar scales and could play right along with B.B. and Freddie King records.
Within a year, the Lincoln, the apartment, the nice clothes, and most of the girls were gone. Lucky Junior never sold his Chevy truck or gardening tools, so, by the 1980, he was back to cutting lawns and pruning hedges, while in the evenings performing in clubs throughout Los Angeles, hoping to make it big with a blues band, his one, his real love.
Junior never got depressed over the change, disappointed, for sure, but never long-faced sad, at least that any of us could see. He’d go with the flow, and he was always quick with a laugh, like when he said, out of nowhere, one day, “You know, we had three Juniors in the family, me and two cousins. My grandmother used to take care of us. She'd call out to us,” he laughed, “Junior! One of us would take off running. We always knew which one of us she wanted,” again he laughed, “by her tone. That's how we knew. Junior!”
One day, he asked if I wanted to hang out with him while he did his gardening route. He said it would be a short day because he wanted me to go with him and see the big contest, winner $100. I asked, “One-hundred bucks, for what?” He waved me off and said I had to see it for myself.
After we finished up his last house, rolled up the hoses, and loaded up the equipment. off we went in his, now, aging ’65 Chevy truck. He had a cassette player and wanted me to hear who he considered the best blues guitarists around, Jeff Beck, Peter Green, and Little Luther.
Usually, Junior cruised. He didn't like pushing the Chevy too hard. This day he was rushing, taking the turns along Sunset Boulevard really fast, even Dead Man's Curve, where singer Jan Berry nearly killed himself in his corvette, even after he recorded the song with the same name.
Whenever I asked Junior about the contest or the money, he told me I had to wait, like it wouldn’t be the same if he told me. He just said, “Come on, man, you gotta see it for yourself. It’s really cool, though,” then he’d guffaw, releasing a burst of laughter.
Once we were back in the lowlands, among working-class folk, south of Olympic Boulevard, he got onto Centinela Avenue, like heading towards the projects, the border of Culver City and Venice. He zipped past Washington Place and Washington Boulevard, taking the bumps hard, his tools clanking in the back of the old truck. “You’ll dig this, man.”
We reached the Sporting Goods store at the corner of Short Avenue. There was already a line in front of Mago’s, home of the avocado and bacon burger. I saw a bigger group, mostly men, around the corner at the gardening shop’s, George’s, where all the gardeners from this side of town bought their tools.
“George’s,” I said, “really?”
There were gardening trucks, way more than usual, parked up and down the streets. Junior found a spot near Culver Boulevard, behind Betty’s Music, where all the neighborhood kids bought their first instruments. “Come, on, brother, let’s go,” and he was out the door.
I followed him past the submarine sandwich shop, and we crossed the street to the alley behind the gardening shop, where a crowd of at least a hundred or more guys had already gathered. I mean, it was an alley with a lot of gardeners crowded in. It could have been the Rose Bowl and 90,000 wild fans, the way it felt.
I was from another part of town, a few miles to the north, so I didn’t know anybody, but Junior knew most of the guys, mostly Chicanos, Japanese, Mexicans, and a few white guys, hippie-gardeners.
This was before the Mexican immigrants monopolized the trade.
Junior greeted everybody as he pushed his way through the crowd. I heard someone say, “Everybody ready?” Junior leaned over and told me, “Dude, this is the championship. They’re down to the last two guys.” I followed him. “What’s it about?” I asked.
“You’ll see. You’ll see,” he said, chuckling.
At 5:00 sharp, everybody crowded into the alley, packed solid. They formed a long line, two or three deep, to watch. At one end, two guys stood, one guy looked Chicano, wore an L.A. Dodger cap, and other, a Mexican, who wore a straw campesino’s hat. Each brought their own cheering section, a bunch of drunk gardeners.
The two stood a few feet apart, each with a water hose, at least hundred feet long, stretched out before them. The men crowded closed in. I could hear guys making bets, “Pedro, quince bolas.” Then from another part of the crowd, “Twenty bucks on Hank,” and on it went. The biggest bet I heard was more than the prize money.
Junior grabbed me by the arm and moved me closer. “Hank Armenta is a three-time winner. Come on, man, you stand too far away, you’ll miss it.”
"Winner at what?"
As the noise decreased, I tension increased. Some guys were passing around a fifth of Seagram. They roared when the judge announced the contestants' names.
Someone stepped up and squatted, making sure the ends of the hoses were even. He nodded, like okay. I heard a gunshot, like a starting gun at a track meet. In a blur, each man reached down and took hold of a hose, and started pulling and rolling, dropping the hose into a neat circle close to his feet.
They rolled the hoses the same way we did when we finished washing down a house, except these guys moved lightning fast, all hands, arms, and legs, like 3-D. For a second, it was neck and neck, or hose and hose. They moved like dancers, their bodies swaying in unison, pulling and rolling, guiding the strange rubber snake into a neat circle, and within thirty-seconds, it was done, the finish too quick for my eyes to see.
The judge, George Yamamoto, who owned the gardening store, sponsored the contest, and put up the prize money, walked up to each hose. He looked at a stopwatch. Then, he took a tape measure to see whose hose formed a more perfect circle. George called out, “And still champ, Hank Armenta.”
We had to admit, though fast, Pedro’s hose wasn't quite as tightly wound as Hank’s. The crowd roared, like for the winner at Wimbledon. Some in the crowd cheers and some groaned. Money changed hands. Someone turned on a boombox and a ranchera echoed down the alley. Beers began appearing, even though drinking in public was forbidden in Los Angles. Hank Armenta walked around with a winner’s medal hanging from his neck.
“You believe that shit?” Junior said, laughing, as we walked back to his truck. He kept marveling, “Man, where else you ever going to see something like that?”
I wasn’t sure if he was serious or just pulling my leg. Then I saw it, that gleam in his eye, the one he gets whenever he's on stage and hits the right note on his guitar, stretching the string taut, the sound blending perfectly with the other musicians in his band. I knew then that he was dead serious.