the irresistible fleet of bicycles

One Man’s Meat
An entirely original essay
By Charles Graeber

A short list of reasons why I cannot possibly be a farmer would include:

a) lack of a farm/ farm implements
b) Brooklyn apartment
c) my landlord said I can’t.

Compare this to the longer list of why I may, in fact, be a farmer:

a) I was born in Iowa
b) my mother said so
c) I have grown corn
d) my mother said so.

Whenever my mother calls to remind me that I am an Iowan farmer, she means that I am not full of crap, even though I live in New York and write for a living. I try to take her reminders metaphorically. My mother means “be humble, keep it real”. She certainly never means “go out and at great personal expense attempt to literally grow Iowan corn as an existential exercise”. That was my idea.

The problem is, I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, between a natural gas utility and the Domino sugar factory, in a graffiti-soaked two-story brick walkup attached to a warehouse. The warehouse is where my Chinese landlord imports the broccoli to garnish General Tsao’s chicken for Lucky Moon’s and Lucky Moon II’s across the East Coast. The roof of that warehouse, which is essentially a football field of tar, lies just outside my kitchen window.

This is where I would build my farm. It would be an Iowan Eden. It would remind me who I am and keep me real. Also, it would block my view of the power plant.

(READER’S NOTE: While Olde Williamsburg, Virginia is a pre-colonial ruin repopulated by actors in woolen stockings, Williamsburg, Brooklyn is an industrial ruin repopulated by hipsters in ‘trucker hats’, and is where those trucker hats first became unspeakably uncool and replaced by those Fidel Castro-type caps one expects today.)

(FURTHER READER’S NOTE: ‘trucker hats’ are actually farmer’s ‘feed caps’. Ashton Kushner, famous chiefly for wearing these hats, hails from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and should know better. Apparently, Mr. Kushner’s mother never calls him to render her unconditional Iowan acceptance despite his residence in Hollywood, California and soft-handed job as triple-threat actor/producer/executive producer.)

As any wizened farmer will surely tell you, every field begins with a dream. I sketched mine on a legal pad, drawing my farm (a big square), then sketching the location of my plants (smaller squares, circles). Soon I had a reasonable drawing of a square filled with squares and circles. Then I drove to the Home Depot and spent $800.

The dirt came in bags. My farm-plots came in white plastic spackling buckets with “Danger” in Spanish and an icon of an infant drowning headfirst in wet spackling goo emblazoned on the side. My implements were a spoon and one of those hearty killing knives they equip you with when you order steak at Chevy’s.

I started my farming at daybreak, or just after daybreak, while it was still morning. I planted practical garnish crops such as jalapeno peppers and parsley. I planted a hibiscus because the promise of enormous tropical trumpet flowers on my crappy rooftop would be like constant special guest appearances by Charo. I planted morning glories because they’re cheap and cheerful and not too snotty to grow in Brooklyn. And, of course, I planted real Iowan corn.

Amazingly, it worked. The pepper plants produced peppers. The morning glories twisted up the fire escape and exploded in economical little bouquets. The hibiscus flared like a big orange Earth Wind and Fire horn section.

And the corn grew. Dry kernels pressed into earth only a week before sprouted and variegated. Soon the stalks were tall with leaves broad as green machetes. And I loved them. I loved my corn plants like couples sometimes love babies. My corn rustled. It was green and good. It was corn and I was a farmer.

In the afternoon I’d drag my corn-buckets into a long sight line from the sink, or a V of shorter rows leading toward my face, like perspective in Van Gogh’s “The Sower”. Sometimes I’d crowd the pots thickly around the window, like tourists mobbing the Today Show’s plate glass studio. Now I was, you know, in the corn, somewhere wholesome and leafy and far away.

Which was a delusion. The problem was what farmers call, or could call, “cereal biodensity”. I didn’t have any. The reason was that, with the rising cost of plastic buckets and farm implements and seed stock and whatnot, I was only able to afford about 9 corn plants which, if I had to be ‘real’ about it, more closely resembled hair plugs than a fungible crop. Mine was the sort of farm which Patsy, my super-Iowan grandmother who unsmilingly refers to anything less than 100-acres as a ‘garden’, would not refer to at all. Plus, I was still definitely living in Brooklyn with a power plant in my back yard.

And yet somehow, I didn’t care. Whenever possible, I’d invite people over and point out the window. “Gaze”, I’d say, “at my maize.” I was insanely happy.

Of course, the highlight of life in any farm community is the harvest. As we watched, buds became ears, and grew. And grew! Then stopped growing. Then started to rot.

Whether it was the inadequate depth of my spackle buckets or an instinctive sense on the corn’s part that it had been tricked into growing on a Brooklyn broccoli warehouse, I’ll never know. But the final result was that each lipstick-sized ear was not much bigger than the corn you find – and in fact only find- in Chinese food. I had invented baby corn.

Call it a coincidence, a miracle or simply raw instinctual genius, the fact was that I had somehow instinctually stumbled along the same path as the first genius human ancestor to ever domesticate Mixed Vegetables. I briefly considered contacting the landlord about distribution possibilities. It seemed, for a second, like a sort of victory. Which, of course was another delusion.

Notice of my delusion came last week, by mail. It was a letter from my Broccoli-baron landlord. It was three lines long.

The first line reminded me that the garden (garden!?!) on his roof was illegal.

The second informed me that if I didn’t trash said illegal garden (!!), he would send a crew of laborers to relocate my farm to the dump, then charge me for the experience.

The third line was “sincerely”.

Reader, believe every line. I have watched my landlord’s wholly Mandarin-speaking crew swarm a broken air conditioner with the time-lapse intensity of soldier ants stripping a wildebeest carcass. I have no doubt that by the time you read this, my farm will, sincerely, be as much a vestige of olde Williamsburg as woolen stockings or trucker hats.

Which, of course, sucks. But as any Iowan can tell you, that’s life on the farm, for real.