Victory at last

My sense is that many people deal with many "issues" in a variety of ways. That sentence does not make any sense, thus, in editing, I will remove it, which means, this sentence, referring to a sentence that makes no sense will also be removed.

Last summer we hired a slow witted Native American psychotic fake jew to help with our garden, which came to be known as our victory garden. We called it a victory garden because prior to the summer a certain degree of tranquility has settled on our ghetto. This would have been the time prior to angry momma moving in, a woman unable to parent, eat properly or find happiness. Strange how that happens.

Slow witted Native American Fake Jew (SWNAFJ) came to us via a slum lord who had rented a nearby house to a severely retarded young man with a massive amount of tattoos and an equally massive amount of missing teeth. Somewhere in this blog are posts referring this young mans self proclaimed ability to not only kill people but to be able to dispose of bodies without a trace. I believe the vast majority of those winners on death row had this same story.

Our knowledge of SWNAFJ was based solely on what he told us. He had grown up on a reservation in some god forsaken area of the world, maybe Pakistan, maybe Utah, at the time we could care less and over time, we found the ability to care even less. His story, almost all made up on the spot, involved tragic tales of drunken family members, fake stories of abuse only found in bad books and Dr. Phil shows and even his own fight with demons like drugs and alcohol. What we found out in the few hours we employed SWNAFJ was that every word he said, every thought he had, every sandwich he made was developed in his tiny little brain, that had one function and one function only, create spellbinding stories that had no basis in reality.

SWNAFJ used a shovel to turn the ground that would become our victory garden. One day, while actually working, because quite honestly, SWNAFJ was not really a worker, I am trying to remember the medical condition he suffered from, I believe is started with psycho and ended with drama, but I forget the words in between, then again, maybe there were no words in between.

Anyway, one day I came home from my job at the salt mines and I found SWNAFJ sitting on the front porch, with one or two of our less than employed neighbors, smoking marijuana by the handful and demanding that I order pizza. I knew then what would have to be done. That night I told SWNAFJ that it might be wise for him to pretend to do some studies in a new city. "But..." he stammered, still a little stoned and always a little slow, and I cut him off and said, "now, SWNAFJ, we have tried to be kind. We gave you that room in the basement and we allowed you to eat with the dog and we even lent you a shovel so you could dig up the ground for our garden."

SWNAFJ again said but, and this time he started to put together one of his infamous sentences regarding persecution of his people. The joy of SWNAFJ is that he had piled on enough persecuted people into his personal history, that at any time he could throw out a holocaust reference, or how his native American brothers had been lied to and how not a single treaty, oh never mind, you get my point. Even though SWNAFJ never had been persecuted, or felt the pain of a nations betrayal or even lost a family member to one of these so called genocides, SWNAFJ was able to draw upon a Barrymores worth of emotion to seek sympathy for his pathetic life choices. Plus, we were all pretty sure that SWNAFJ was no either Native American or Jewish. Heck as far as we could tell, he was just a big dumb hick from some small town in the sticks. A hick from the sticks is how the girls referred to him.

"The garden is really all done," I said, avoiding all of his references to past injustices. Then SWNAFJ threw out his last card, tossed it on the table, like it would be the point that would win him the ability to continue to exist in our basement. "Does this have anything to do with me being gay?"

Oh SWNAFJ I wanted to say, no one cares that a fake Native American Jew with a guilt complex and an unwillingness to plant a garden is gay I wanted to say. Instead, I believe I said, yes. This has everything to do with you being gay.

This past weekend my youngest daughter and I planted a beautiful garden. I checked it last night and many of the plants seem to be finding their way. It made me think for an instant of our week with SWNAFJ. Soon after accepting that all of my dislike of him was based solely on his gayness, he moved out and moved on, leaving behind a crusty t-shirt and a box of books no one felt like reading.

A garden has a way of renewing a home. We will have fresh basil for the summer. The salads we have with dinner will be fresh and tasty. Somewhere SWNAFJ is plying people with his sad stories of betrayal and anguish and somewhere someone must be listening and wondering, how could a middle aged man in America not understand which end of the shovel is used to break ground.