Crazy Tree Guy
As every schoolchild knows, an invaluable resource for any homeowner is having a Crazy Tree Guy.
A Crazy Tree Guy is … wait. Is it possible there’s some part of that you don’t understand? He’s a crazy guy who works on trees!
More to the point, a Crazy Tree Guy is very knowledgeable about trees, possibly from residing in them, and does good work for cheap. He’s also in his way reliable: the Crazy Tree Guy won’t necessarily appear at the time appointed, or even on the day, but he will show up and do the work. Compare that to, say, the cable company…
Yesterday my Crazy Tree Guy reappeared on my doorstep. He’s a tall, skinny, middle-aged white guy who shaves his head and face, although I seem to recall seeing him with white stubble. He’s not a bad-looking guy, though in twenty years I can see him being the very image of Popeye the Sailor Man. He moves in an oddly stiff and abrupt way, a bit like a lizard.
He mentioned that after I hired him to trim the huge dead limbs off the big Siberian elms in my front yard, he had promised to come back this spring and clean the trees up for me. Actually he did the trees two years ago in August, and promised to come back last Spring. But what the hey: Crazy Tree Guys aren’t bound by your boring whitebread calendar!
Of course, as a self-employed (which in the eyes of the Corporate State means unemployed) full-time professional writer I don’t intend to fling handfuls of poo at Crazy Tree Guys, or anyone, for being unorthodox and free-walkers.
Anyway, I’d noticed the elms were sending up big bushy shoots from the roots and crowding the sidewalks, and had about determined to go out myself and do battle with them, possibly with the cool Ontario Knife Co. machete a friend gave me years ago. Or just my kukri. But, ah, one salient trait of Crazy Tree Guys is that they work cheap enough that I, not yet rolling in the dough, can afford them. So I told him sure. He then, in his inscrutable Crazy Tree Guy fashion, wandered off.
My best friend Joe has been off sick from Los Alamos all week with a nasty flu that makes it hard for him to sleep by night or concentrate by day. Given what he does you’re glad, very glad, he doesn’t go to work when he has trouble concentrating. You want to take my word for that. Anyway, I drove him down to Garcia’s at Fourth and Mountain for a nice steaming bowl of chile’n'guts, which is to say menudo. I had the less adventurous carne adovada and eggs; I like menudo just fine but wasn’t in the mood. We also had coffee that while good was strong enough to swallow container after container of creamer before appreciably lightening.
When we came back my Crazy Tree Guy was just finishing the trees. He had an assistant who looked as if the Crazy Tree Guy had hired him right out the door of the Midnight Mission for five bucks and a six-pack. Joe theorized the Crazy Tree Guy hired him to make him look respectable. Worked.
He did a good job. Of course. That’s what Crazy Tree Guys do. He then proceeded to give sage, semi-scrutable advice on how to care for the freshly-shorn trees. I thanked him, paid him the agreed amount, and he vanished.
It was my friends John and Gail Miller who turned me on to the phrase “Crazy Tree Guy.” Sometime after mine did my trees they mentioned they had had one, who’d done much good work for them, but that he’d disappeared off their scopes. Ah, well: they don’t call them Crazy Tree Guys for nothing.
By that time my Crazy Tree Guy had phased out of this plane of existence as well. Now that he’s visiting Planet Normal again, I’ll try to get contact information for them.
But of course there’s no guarantee they’ll actually be able to reach him. Such is the Way of the Crazy Tree Guy.
Hail to thee, Crazy Tree Guy! Long may you run