Fiction -- Short story

[amtronic]

Experienced Mower for Sale


My main moneymaker from the ages of 9 – 14 was every neighbor who recently returned from vacation to be greeted with a yard waist-deep in overgrown grass. Tired from the drive home and unwilling to tackle the job themselves, they easily fell to my salesman skills.

Not known to them was that I kept a short list of who was away and when to expect them back. My Vacation Special was 2x the cost of regular lawn mowing. And a hell of a bargain.

Also not known to them was that without exception I had been visiting their yard during their absence and giving it a heavy watering with their very own garden hose. This insured a bumper crop of grass shoots waving a greeting to them as they turned into their driveway. As a result, my service sold itself.

All except one neighbor, Mr. Stojan. Somehow he had cottoned to my scheme. I may have left his hose out by accident, or possibly gave it away myself by knowing exactly where he kept his rolled up garden hose as I re-rolled it and put it away. Maybe he just looked out his window at a neighbor’s house as I was watering the grass over there.

Without admitting anything I negotiated with him a cut-rate price of just the cost of the gas I needed (his cost, not my cost). I had learned that gas used for agricultural use did not need to have any tax paid on it, which let me buy it for pennies a gallon instead of the price shown on the gas station sign. I kept records in my notebook for when I was surely to be chased down and hauled in by the coppers for tax evasion, but they never did nab me. So, I still made money on Mr. Stojans yard.

But it galled me to lose that larger profit. I wanted more, I wanted to best him, and that was my undoing. I decided to get gas for free by siphoning it from his car. It might as well have been the F.B.I. with guns drawn walking around the fender of his car and catching me in the act. I had no defense. My own gas can was full and sitting right over there by my bike. At least I hadn’t taken more than the pint the mower held. So now I had a customer I had to service on the arm. My gas and my time, no cost to him.

Much later, 7 or 8 years or so, I got a sort of payback on those years of free labor. I scored with his daughter in High School. And while she was pretty enough and pleasant enough and accommodating enough, it felt like I was screwing him instead. When he told her to stop seeing me I didn’t argue the point.

My mowing technique for a Vacation Special cut was to jack up the front wheel adjustment and lower the rear wheels to open up the maw of the mower as much as possible. This really helped with the ritual of push forward, pull back before it stalls, push forward again. I may have charged twice the price, it was twice the work. My arms should have been Charles Atlas class yet were the same size from wrist to shoulder.

Since I hated to rake, I usually employed a counter-clockwise cutting pattern to scatter the cuttings back across the cut lawn. This also helped cover up the ragged cut caused by the uneven stance of the mower. And it did not help that one wheel was a different size. This was caused by me not being fully aware that small tires rotate much faster than big tires for the same speed.

To get to my different jobs I hooked the handle of the mower over the back roll bar loop of my imitation Sting Ray bike. A bent coat hanger let me sling off the two gallon gas can and away I pedaled. Sometimes too fast for those tiny wheels on the mower. Hitting a chuckhole broke one wheel right off and I never found it. I had to mow three wheeled that day, lucky I was able to scrounge a replacement wheel that I fit with some extra washers for spacers.

I don’t know who actually manufactured Yard-Rite brand mowers, but I do know that what they advertised as a 22” cut mower actually had a 20” blade on it. I suspect it was made in a country where inches are not a commonly used form of measurement.

Late in my career, I went from a business low to a high and back. A company had built a nice new complex in an industrial park not far away. I had given them a call to lock them in to an agreement for me to provide them with grass mowing. The lady I spoke to was either hard of hearing or not paying attention to the conversation. When I quoted her $30 to do the mowing, she responded that $130 was much more than they were willing to spend.

Somehow my thirty had morphed into one thirty. I quickly “dropped” my price to an even $100 and she agreed to it right over the phone. I set it up for the next Saturday and over the next couple of days, spent that hundred dollars a thousand times in my mind. The lists I made of what I was going to buy! An actual riding mower, some type of trailer to transport it, a go-cart to pull the trailer, a bigger gas can, even a thermos jug to carry cold water so I wouldn’t have to drink hose water.

Then Saturday came. I got to the company and the lady wasn’t there, she didn’t work Saturdays. I found the foreman and introduced myself. He took one look at me with my 22”/20” actual cut mower and fired me. He asked me if I realized that it was a ten acre field I was supposed to be mowing, then handed me a couple of bucks and sent me home. That was a bitter disappointment. I suppose it kept me from dying from heat stroke.

And right now, that damned 22”/20” mower with the mismatched wheel is still sitting there with the $10.00 FOR SALE sign on it. Here comes a kid with his nose buried in his phone. If he showed even the slightest interest in it, I would probably give it to him for free, but I dearly would love a bit of the old back-and-forth banter to carve out a deal.

It will most likely go out curbside and await the trash man, along with the rest of the claptrap from the yard sale that didn't sell. But I just don’t have the energy to use the mower anymore. And I can’t take it to hospice with me.

It’s a shame. That little mower has seen a lot.

~!

[MadamMeow]

This story is AMAZING if you read it as if Joe Pera talks with you.