Moe Folk

Greenhouse Gas by Moe Folk

Phlox, Beauty Mix (Phlox drummondii)

At Zeke’s Greenhouses, transplanting seedlings is a war of attrition that must conquer 100,000 flats, 10,000 baskets, and endless pots before Memorial Day. The campaign starts in winter, the time when Dale hires every single warm body who applies (provided it is white and not wearing a pentagram).

In February, I become part of a crew of twelve transplanters, and before Memorial Day rolls around, fifty people filter through our ranks in order to maintain numbers. Some step out for a smoke and never come back. Some grab the first paycheck and head for their cars. Others just steal away, leaving behind rancid lunches in the fridge and moldering paychecks next to the time clock.

On the first day, us new hires mill around a picnic table in a garage choked with a fine layer of soil and dust. This is where we eat lunch. It’s also the break room, clock room, and staging area for plant tags, as well as the rest home for dilapidated equipment. The other workers are buzzing about how much they love plants and how great it will be to learn more about them. I feel the same, but I’m more worried about the next student loan payment and not being seen by people from high school.

The boss sweeps in from his sheetrock-apartment living quarters attached to the garage. He is tall, with bushy, feathered hair and a moustache reminiscent of Magnum, P.I., an image that his too-tight Levi’s and faded rugby shirt don’t do enough to dispel. He motions for us to follow him, and we do, mesmerized by his long, hairy arms swaying like those of the Bigfoot in the Patterson film until he stops in front of some battered wooden tables.

Our first task is to transplant 10,000 geraniums in four-inch pots. We gather round and Dale demonstrates the correct transplanting technique: “Pop the plug tray gently, then pull out the geranium and place into the pot. Repeat 9,999 times.” I look around and people are nodding. Then he points to a squat, rough-looking man and says, “You’re on dirt duty,” and motions to a table where soil bags and empty pots await. The rest of us grab plants as Dale plugs in a radio, tunes it to the local Christian station, and leaves.

It takes a full five minutes for the first radio fight to erupt. We are an odd mix: rich, old housewives who don’t need to work and assume they will be lending botany expertise; a woman who keeps a dog named Arthur in her car and spends breaks cleaning the soiled backseat; a squad of young people in tie-dyes who say things like “I wish I could turn into a geranium,” and “Squid are the most amazing creatures”; big-haired women dressed in black Poison and White Lion shirts; tattooed biker chicks, one of whom brags that she hitchhiked to kindergarten; and disillusioned recent college graduates like me and the guy who majored in Marine Biology and is incredulous he can’t find a job in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. We all want different stations.

The biker chicks and metalheads yell the loudest, so we transplant to a station that plays Motley Crue and Ratt. The rich housewives immediately mutter to each other, and after a few minutes, the other college guy keeps shaking his head and shouting “Boot-scootin’ boogie!” every time a guitar solo starts. After an hour of discord and the realization that we will never, ever get done with these geraniums, Dale checks on us and makes us stop. We made a solid block of flats when we laid down the completed transplants, neglecting to leave aisles for waterers and order pickers, so he leads us in rearranging a couple hundred flats. As soon as he leaves, our lanes stagger and eventually pinch together again.

People then start fighting about how to keep straight lines, and one of the hippies shrugs his shoulders and switches the station to jazz. The radio wars immediately escalate when one of the metalheads hears Dave Brubeck cut through an Iron Maiden song; she hurls a geranium into the plastic wall of the greenhouse and says, “I’m fucking telling Dale.” I watch her stomp away through a labyrinth of greenhouses.

Except for the hippies, who are now dancing as they transplant, we silently await Dale. A few minutes later, I look up to see the boss marching toward us, his eyes serpentine, veins pulsing in his forehead. Dale bashes off the radio and says, “The radio is a privilege, not a right. I can take it away from you.” We stare at our shoes like chastised kindergarteners. He continues: “Since you can’t agree, I’m picking the station and if it ever gets changed, no more radio.” This time he selects the local station that has the bright idea of trying to please everybody. Back-to-back-to-back, we hear songs like “Mr. Roboto,” “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and “Whoomp! (There it is).” Everyone is miserable. We even hear Arthur bellowing out of his cracked car window.

Break time creeps up. Some of us rest, some of us smoke, others clean up dogshit. All of us blow black soil-snot out of our noses. When break is over, Dale tells us we are too slow. Worse than he’s ever seen. Says he could do it himself quicker. To combat our sluggishness, he wants us to stay late. Heads nod in anticipation of extra money, but Dale explains that he doesn’t have to pay time-and-a-half, just a continuation of our $5.00 an hour thanks to a 1938 law that considers him an agricultural employer and us seasonal workers. Sniggers abound. One of the metalhead women says, “Fuck that. Clock hits five I’m gone.” Nobody stays, except for two people. I am one. I stay for four years.

Cayenne Pepper (Capsicum annuum)

Larry arrives at Zeke’s Greenhouses straight from county jail. Keeping the job has something to do with his parole, but he quickly makes it clear he will only work with dirt. He refuses to touch plants, saying that he wants to do men’s work and only women play with flowers. Whether fresh bags of soil or the acrid soil from old, unused flats saturated with mouse piss, he lords over the dirt table and brags about being in prison without confessing why he was sent there.

It takes two people to keep the transplanters going. Dirt duty is standing all day next to the ex-con, box cutter in hand, slicing open fifty-pound bags of soil and filling plug trays, flats, baskets, and pots. Sometimes it’s emptying dirt from pots and flats that never sold; the dirt barely comes out, and sometimes there’s more mouse waste than dirt in the holes. Every day, the boss tells someone else to join Larry, and every day, I hear that person whispering about it being their last time ever on dirt duty.

Today is my turn. I stand next to Larry and nervously click the button on my box cutter back and forth as he mumbles a few directions. He warns about splinters from the broken plywood table and shows me one festering under his fingernail. We begin to fill pots, and he launches into a monologue about city life and how it feels good to drink Yuengling again. Pieces of mica and vermiculite glisten in his greasy reddish-blond hair and matching moustache.

After a while, he pontificates on which televised cop shows are the most real. I nod half-heartedly, avoiding his stare. Suddenly he throws his box cutter down and reaches into his pocket. I keep filling my trays as my eyes strain sideways to keep tabs on him. Larry whips out his wallet, cradles something in his hand, and moves so close I can count his nose hairs. “Hey, bro!” he says, as he thrusts a picture in my face. I see a woman in a stars-and-stripes bikini standing in a dingy green living room. She has short, spiky hair and wears Oakleys. She is flexing her biceps. I wonder why I’m looking at her when Larry leans even closer, stares crazily into my eyes, and says, “You’d like to fuck her, wouldn’t you?”

A million thoughts go through my head, none of which concern copulation. Me with a box cutter sticking out of my Adam’s apple. Me stuffed into a dumpster full of dead flowers and mouse shit. Me choking on a hanging basket’s worth of dirt. I quickly try to discern what the ex-con wants to hear while not breaking his stare. His breath is warm and yeasty. Whatever the answer is, I guess, it must come with enthusiasm, so I commit and shout, “Yeah man, she’s hot.” Larry smiles and says, “Well too bad, bro, that’s my girl. Heh, heh, heh.” He tucks her back into the wallet and reaches for the box cutter and a new bag of soil.

After professing my hearty lust for his girlfriend, I find Larry sitting on the hood of my car when I punch out. All the other men claim to go different ways, and none of the women give him rides after one found out from a cop friend that Larry had been medicated in jail for excessive masturbation after repeated complaints from cellmates. The cop was mum on why Larry had been sent to jail. Larry just settles in my passenger seat and says, “Bro”, just take me to your place and I’ll walk to the bus stop from there,” but I say it is absolutely no problem and drive him right to the bus stop. On the way there, he asks, “So where’s your house?” I point vaguely at blocks of row homes. The rides last for a while until one day he dries up, disappears, and leaves a saturnine parole officer in his wake.

Poppy (Papaver orientale)

Peggy starts crying while transplanting impatiens. She is an older white woman, and with her rigid posture and long, pleated ponytail replete with an upward-facing feather, she resembles the crying Native American in the old anti-littering commercials. Somebody asks her why she is crying, and she sobs, “Because they don’t want to be in these trays yet. They’re too young to be separated.” The other transplanters sneer at her and continue cramming little impatiens into the soil.

I soon find out that Peggy cries often. One day, the transplanters stop to help hang baskets. Peggy drops a non-stop begonia and doubles over. Her tears splash against the rough concrete floor and she clutches her stomach. I ask if she is alright. She undoubles and smiles. “It’s just the pain of childbirth,” she says as she pats her abdomen. I ask her how long it had been since she gave birth. “Thirty years, but it never really leaves you.”

Dale cannot handle her crying—this is the man who enjoys finding full glue traps and snipping mice heads off with scissors. A crying transplanter will gum up the works. A crying transplanter is worse than thrips because she can’t be sprayed with chemicals. Dale tells me to keep Peggy away from the others and have her water instead.

When I tell Peggy of her reassignment, she is elated. At lunchtime, she is still glowing. After a few days, however, I begin to notice that Peggy just might be the world’s slowest waterer. When we pick orders, some plants need prayers more than water. We give the greenhouses nicknames like “Kalahari,” “Gobi,” and “Sahara.”

The order pickers begin to notice she spends more time stooped over plants than watering them. One day I pause a monorail cart full of marigolds to watch her adjust the hose, but I see her mouth moving and notice the water isn’t turned on. I hear her talking to the plants but I couldn’t make out the words. When I approach, she hears the crunching gravel and reaches for the hose. “You heard me didn’t you?” she asks. I nodded. She continues: “Well, they are happy for the most part, but the verbena are awful mad.” I ask her to take the steps to make the verbena happy, but she says water has nothing to do with it.

As the heat of spring intensifies, the plants grow higher and higher, and the ones we pick are soon replaced by more seedlings. I see Peggy talking to the plants day after day, but I don’t tell Dale; we rely on the sprinklers for life. Soon, Peggy invites me to gatherings out at her place in the country. I find little notes in my time-card slot imploring me to bring a drum and some free verse but I never go despite wondering what the parties are like.

During the last week she worked there, I run into Peggy in the middle of a greenhouse. While we talk, I noticed she fixates on a point over my left shoulder. She doesn’t blink as I babble, just stares and smiles over my shoulder. I stop and ask her what’s going on. She finally returns my gaze and says, “Can’t you see him?” I turn around and see nothing but a bunch of dehydrated celosia flats. Peggy continues looking over my shoulder and says, “Don’t you know the Archangel Michael has been following you? He and many others are expecting big things from you. You have a lot of good to do in this world yet.”

I never see the Archangel Michael and Peggy is fired as soon as Dale upgrades the automated watering system. Dale presses her about the lapses in watering, and Peggy explains that the plants do not wish for inevitable death and simply want to die right there while they are young, happy, and together. She punches out and nobody sees her again, although a few weeks later I find a medieval herb book on the front seat of my car. A note on top reads, You are the only one there who loves the plants and who the plants also love.

I have moved many times since working at the greenhouse, but every now and then, a Christmas card somehow arrives from Peggy. I open it, always finding an invitation to a solstice party and an inscription that reads, “They’re still waiting for you to do something good—“ I shut the card and feel my cheeks flush.