How Many Polacks Does It Take to Build a Garden Gate?
Well, I’ve been working on this fucking fenced enclosure for my wife’s garden for the better part of three months. I’ve got the wire fencing mostly vertical in a horizontal sort of way and the support stakes are anchored into the ground in such a way they barely sway at all in the gentle summer breeze funneled through the mountains.
But that’s not enough for my wife. She demands an operating gate, preferably made of wood and wire, the whole thing screwed and stapled together and mounted on posts with hinges that allows for easy opening and shutting, smoothly and with minimal effort, yet solid enough to confound the local gang of bandit rabbits maddened with an insatiable lust for purloined cucumbers.
And I’m tasked with constructing this impossibility with a hacksaw, a cordless power drill somehow bereft of every bit that could possibly be of service, and a fork.
Admittedly, unless I can somehow summon the strength of will to gouge open my carotid with the dull tines, the fork is pretty much useless.
The wife is not interested in excuses. In her delusional wonderland, Polacks are routinely capable of building garden gates with a few dog-legged planks of wood and a handful of screws. The secret to success is to have a PLAN. Elon Musk just made his first trillion. Because he had a PLAN. I’ve never planned for anything my entire life…
“You should’ve been watching YouTube videos this morning. You had the phone glued to your hand. What were you looking up?”
“Well, I checked the Cubbies score. They won by the way. I think they’re threatening to climb out of the cellar.”
“For two hours?”
Was it that long? Could I have possibly been doomscrolling social media and pricing items on Ebay all morning? How is it I somehow know more about Clavicular’s recent plastic surgeries than I know about building garden gates? The wife sensed my irresponsible use of time away from the factory and she wasn’t digging it.
I didn’t want to say this to my wife, since honesty is really the last resort of morons, but I watched those YouTube videos. Watching some jackass dressed head to toe in flannel, perfectly leveling and aligning posts with preternatural precision with a length of string was nowhere near as interesting as videos of black dudes watching Iron Maiden concert videos and offering their first time reactions. Which I’m pleased to announce are universally positive.
But no. Let me tell you, how-to videos are bullshit. They never resemble real life. You can’t build a fully functional tiki bar out of some cast-off cinderblocks and two 40×40 pallets. You can’t build a garden fence from some eight-foot long 2x4s and a goddam gnawed zip tie.
“You just don’t care” is the conclusion my wife comes to. “You’d just be happy to sit there writing your bullshit columns about how clever you think you are while those rabbits run amok all over my tomatoes.”
At this point, I felt like I couldn’t tell her I intended to knock off at a quarter to three so I could make an appearance on the Roadside Assistance internet poetry reading. I’d have to navigate these treacherous literary waters carefully. I’d already lost one wife to my adherence to poetry. Not so much reading poetry in lieu of finishing up some bullshit carpentry. Mostly for writing a sheaf of erotic poetry centered on the dancers at Uncle Buck’s Booty Bungalow. But, you know, regardless, I figured the way forward was fraught with danger, and I had to practice extreme caution if I wanted my marriage to survive the garden gate fiasco.
“Perhaps if I took another drive out to Home Depot…”
“Again? Every time I tell you I need that gate finished, you fuck off to Home Depot and nothing ever gets done. What is it this time? What have you forgotten to get this time?”
“Tools, I think. Also, my drill bit doesn’t match any of my screws.”
She fixes me with a withering stare. If I were to wax poetic here, I’d write a verse detailing Destiny the daytime stripper at Uncle Buck’s response to me running out of folding money.
“You know what? Fuck it. I don’t need a gate. I don’t need it. Rabbits can just come on in and eat my vegetables to their little rabbit heart’s content. Whatever’s left over, we can make the tomato sandwiches out of that.”
I don’t even like tomato sammiches. Throw some bacon and lettuce on that sumbitch, I could eat thirty-three of them. Just tomato and mayonnaise on white bread, bullshit. People in Alabama, they swear by that shit, though.
“You don’t have to be so mean,” I mumble.
And she was mean. Really, it felt like she resented me for being utterly incapable of performing tasks that took less than five minutes on a YouTube video. I didn’t even want to imagine her disappointment should she choose to watch Pornhub.
“I’m trying my best, you know,” I offered, lamely.
She snorted derisively and dismissed me with a flick of her hand.
I looked at what I had assembled so far. It was the premonition of a garden gate. There were four hacksawed planks of wood, none of them could agree on a length. I’d bound them together with flimsy metal brackets and diminutive screws with the penetrative powers of Trump’s flaccid little mushroom cock.
I was getting angry. The rage got my atoms vibrating, slam-dancing against the outer edges of my tense flesh. How dare she expect things from me? I didn’t expect dinner from her, how dare she ask me to construct an entire garden enclosure in under four months with nothing more than vague notions and inherent laziness?
So, I called my old chrome partner, Austin. Austin was the sort of guy, if a light went out, he’d immediately change the light bulb rather than curse the darkness for a week. A psychopath, basically. But I needed his energy. His competency. His ingenuity. He wouldn’t even need to watch YouTube videos. He’d just look at a pile of lumber and just naturally know what to do with it. He’d built an entire chicken empire through sheer strength of will, and a wife who didn’t have to ask him twice.
I dialed his number, and no one answered. Whelp, I sighed. I guess I could always move back up north. Move in with one of my brothers. They couldn’t build garden gates, either. Fucking idiots.
My phone rang, and to show you just how desperate I was, I didn’t let it go to voice mail.
“Hey, Polish Hammer, you okay?”
Austin knew I’d been sick all last week. The sickness would have put most folks on their death beds. For the Polish Hammer, the traumatic headaches, full body tremors, crippling diarrhea, blurred vision, clammy sweats, escalating fever, phlegmatic cough, sore throat, a severely impaired sense of balance and dangerously reduced color coordination, stomach cramps, muscle weakness, near total systemic depletion, and mild paranoia was merely a minor inconvenience. His wife, Candace, had graciously concocted a blend of herbs and such into tea bags, when steeped correctly in boiled water would guarantee to allow me to continue confronting the true horror of my existence. Steady employment. Austin seemed concerned. Perhaps he feared that the medicinal remedy counteracted poorly with my boner pills.
“I’m all right.” I allowed a hint of a sob to creep into my voice. “But not really, Austin. My back is against the wall. The gun’s to my head. The fuse is lit. And I’ve shit the bed.”
“All right. What can I do?”
“If I don’t get this garden gate built and attached to this garden enclosure by the end of the day, the quality of my life, such as it is, is going to fucking plummet eyelevel to a red ant. I’ll be alone. Sleeping under the overpass, surrounded by five thousand books and ten thousand comic books, and an interesting assortment of signed collectibles…”
“You got tools?”
“Ha… tools.”
“Okay, I’ll bring mine. Give me ten minutes.”
True to his word, Austin and his wife, showed up at my door in no time. Austin grimly surveyed the loose affiliation of wood and with a flurry of tool craft rarely seen outside of YouTube videos, he constructed and erected a fully operational garden gate and saved my marriage. Not quick enough to enable me to read some internet poetry about those Booty Bungalow strippers, but then I probably should have got out of bed before noon.
So, anyway, this column is dedicated to Austin and Candace. Next time I see you, the tomato sammiches will be on me.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
