Gnomes in the Garden of the Damned

Jason Snell

Copyright (c) 1992

Ray and I had walked into her shop just before closing time. `Dorothy's Garden Shoppe' was what the sign read, with the cheap elegance you usually see only on funeral parlors and heart-shaped boxes of candy.

I had bought one of those boxes for Valentine's Day the year before, and had given it to my fiancee Jenny as a declaration of love. That was about five minutes before I told her I never wanted to see her again.

She made an ugly scene. We were in an expensive restaurant, the kind with cloth napkins, and she began to throw glass salt and pepper shakers at me. After she exhausted that supply, she decided to toss the box of candy right back at me.

Fortunately for me, of all geometric shapes, hearts have only one sharp edge. Unfortunately, the side that found my eye was the sharp side.

"You got any gnomes?" Ray asked the hag at the counter who reeked of mint-flavored shoe polish.

She pointed into the corner. Behind all the aluminum windmills and depression-era daybeds, we saw what we had come for.

We dropped the ceramic lawn creature in the back of my Pinto and laughed at the woman. I pulled onto the road and headed for the cemetery. That was where we danced with gnomes. This was no Kevin Costner shit -- we danced around our gnome in order to commune with the spirits of the dead Methodists who dwelled there. That, and because there was nothing else to do in Eastvale on a Friday night.

"We can't go there yet," Ray told me. "We don't have everything."

I pulled into the 7-11 parking lot, and decided to leave the compact space for some Buick or Chrysler with a desire to scrape the door handle off of a Yugo... Inside a few guys with those red and black plaid flannel shirts that you only expect to see on lumberjacks were arguing over who planned on buying the beer, while others concentrated on Pac Man. We headed straight for the Slurpee machine.

I have always found the slimy consistency of the Slurpee one of life's pleasures. My tongue bleeds in anticipation. I grabbed two Coke Big Gulps and a six-pack of Minute Maid Orange Drink for backup, and we were gone: Back in the Pinto, heading north on Main toward the Eastvale Methodist Church's Eternal Acres Old People's Farm.

"It's time," Ray said. "Time for us to make our magic."

"Sure it is," I told him, and opened the car door. "Get the gnome."

I watched as Ray unbuckled the gnome from its seat belt and placed it on the damp ground between two moss-covered gravestones. He took a deep suck on his Slurpee, and began dancing like a spastic woodchuck on crack. He moved faster and faster around our hardened clay icon, and began to shout.

"Come on, Jimmy!" he shouted. "Join in!"

Ray was an idiot, of course. He was my comrade-in-arms by default, simply because he was the only person who shared my love for pottery, Slurpees and Methodist grave sites. But I knew Ray was destined to end up as the guy who you'd hire to upholster the couch you had soiled on the night of a party...and then Ray stumbled on something and fell on top of the gnome.

When he stood up again, I saw that the gnome had been reduced to chunks of rubble. It was made in America, no doubt, along with Lee Iacocca's K Cars and the Salad Shooter.

"Good work, shit-eyes," I told Ray. "That was probably the last gnome in town."

"I don't know what happened," he said. "I didn't mean to do it. It must've been all that caffeine."

I told him that it was his duty to get us another gnome, at any cost. He said he would, but as we got back in the car I knew that we'd destroyed the last gnome in town.

Screw it, I thought. A Chia Pet will work just as well.

Jason Snell is a senior at the University of California, San Diego and is graduating shortly with a B.A. in Communication and a minor in Writing. He is the editor of `InterText' and editor in chief of the `UCSD Guardian' newspaper. He will be attending a graduate journalism school in the fall of 1992.

jsnell@ucsd.edu