A Long, Long Time Ago...

One time, way back when I was in college, I moved all my stuff out of my boyfriend's house while he was away at work one day.
And I didn't tell him where I'd gone.
I'd caught him making out at a party the weekend before, with a girl who had both nipples pierced. When I approached them in the yard, at the party, he asked her to lift her shirt for me. So I could see that both nipples were pierced.
That summer, he'd been working at Nordstroms in men's suits. She'd been working across the aisle at the cosmetics counter doing makeovers.
I'd been upstairs working at J.Crew as head cashier.

So I left.
I moved into a house, up in the hills with a gigantic backyard in the eucalyptus trees, with three guys. One had his weiner pierced, one was an artist with a pet rabbit and a turtle and one was still in school majoring in philosophy. And after a few weeks we decided that we all got along ok enough that we'd make a go at having a garden out back.
And maybe make a few bucks while we were at it. Because my new $6 an hour job at the local latte' shop just wasn't cuttin' it.
So we planted our garden in the back yard. We watered the garden. We sprayed their little leaves and we sheltered them. We named them. We transplanted each plant into it's own pot. We fed them perfectly mixed nutrients and we waited and hoped while they grew.
And then one day while I was alone, there was a knock on the front door. And there were three men in utility suits standing on our front porch.

There's a sewer line on the top right side of your yard and we need to do some maintenance, they told me. We're letting you know that we're going up into your yard.
And before I could stop them, they'd walked around to the side of the yard and were proceeding up the side stairs straight into the plant area.
I went back into the house and opened the sliding glass door to the yard and let our two large and threatening dogs out into the back yard. And then they laid down on the patio to watch the festivities and lick each other.
And then I walked out to the side yard to greet the utility men while they walked through all of our "potted" plants. I stood in the middle of our carefully manicured forest while they made their way through them, looking around in wonderment.
And as the last of the three men passed by me, he pulled his sunglasses down to the edge of his nose to look me directly in the eye and he smiled big at me.
As they climbed our hill, I stood there, with my arms folded. And when they got to the top, they called down to me and waved and pointed to the sewer area as if to say, see, there really is a sewer line here. And then they lifted the cover and chatted a little and placed it back and chatted some more and then left down the side of the house still chatting.
And then I went inside and locked all the doors and smoked a bowl.
By the time my roommates starting returning a few hours later, from their daily activities, I'd already pulled every single one of our "plants" into the house to safety.
And then I sort of forgot about what happened and made myself a liverwurst sandwich and sat down to watch Welcome Back Kotter, when the first roommate arrived home.
What the fuck he said. Yeah, what the fuck I said.
And then we made the executive decision to shred them all, with the exception of keeping two each. With that, we reasoned - as we statistically evaluated the probability of at least 1/3 of the plants actually being female, we'd still have something in the end.
So we did. And we ended up with better statistics than the 30% ratio we'd predicted. And then I bought myself a neat little old red karman ghia.

And then one day on the way to my new job of selling flowers, I got out of my newly purchased karman ghia with my new boyfriend and ran into my old boyfriend. And I said hello to him and introduced him to my new boyfriend Jeremy, the one with the pierced weiner.