The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir (5 page)

I took a calming breath and stepped into the darkness. There was a slight step down, and immediately the temperature dropped at least 10 degrees. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the near complete darkness. My skin felt wet.

In the dim light I began to make out shapes. The crypt was larger than I’d expected. It was difficult to tell how cavernous it was from the outside since it was built into a hill. The interior looked to be about ten feet by fifteen feet. It was entirely made of stone, and the ceiling was constructed in a graceful barrel arch. From it hung an iron candle chandelier. At the far end of the wall were what looked to be shelving. I deduced that that was where the coffins were once stacked.

“What happened to the caskets?” I asked.

“Dunno,” Michelle said. “Long gone.”

Not everything was long gone I quickly realized, as I rested my hand on the shelf only to discover I was petting a human jawbone.

I gasped. “It’s someone’s head!” I said.

Brent, the doctor, immediately inspected my find and offered positive identification—as if a bone that looked like someone’s chin could have been anything other than a jaw.

“Yep,” Brent concurred. “And here’s a tooth. And here’s a sheet of lead left over from someone’s coffin.” He tried to hand me the tooth. I politely declined.

“The workers found a lot of bones around here when they were restoring the grounds,” Michelle explained. “Most of them were reburied under the slate floor. But some they found later, I guess, and just put them inside. Rumor has it Beekman went through a lot of slaves.”

As if it wasn’t bad enough to have been desecrating some rich white guy’s bones, we were also fondling the remains of people who had good reason to hold a grudge.

“And now let’s see the pool,” Michelle called out, exiting back into the light. “It’s right next to the crypt,” she added, “so if any of your guests drown, you won’t have far to drag them.”

I assumed she was joking. Then again, we were dealing with people who live in a veritable ghost town. Death and dying probably didn’t faze them much.

The rest of the tour went by quickly—too quickly. I forgot to take any pictures of the interior, or the crypt, or the pool, or the historic barn, or anything, really. I had nothing to remember the place by—the place that for a couple of hours at least, I imagined would be mine.

But it was all too grand anyway. I couldn’t think of a single reason why I deserved to have a place like this. This was not a place where I would live. This was a place where Martha would live.

I was the first to head back to the car while Brent and Michelle pointlessly exchanged e-mails and whatnots. I rolled down the window to breathe in the country air one last time. Now we’d have to race to get back to the city in time for Brent’s dinner meeting.

Brent slid into the driver’s seat.

“We are going to own this place,” he proclaimed with steely determination.

“We can’t afford a million dollars.”

“Then we’ll talk her down.”

“To what? Half?”

“To whatever we need to,” Brent said. “Don’t you like it?”

“That’s not really the issue,” I answered.

“Just answer the question.”

“Yes, I like it. Of course I like it. I love it, in fact.”

“Then we’re going to get it,” Brent answered. I still looked dubious. “Look, I get paid a lot of money. You get paid a lot of money. We’re very fortunate that way.”

He was right. We were very, very fortunate. I worked hard to get to where I was. I’d worked my way up the corporate ladder after having started out by dancing on speakers in clubs in order to pay the rent. He’d worked even harder. Seven years of study to become a doctor, and then three more for his MBA. We had the money. We just weren’t used to living like we had it. We were still packed into the same small apartment we’d had for the last seven years; the same small apartment we’d moved into while he was still a resident.

Wasn’t it time to splurge a little? Everyone else we knew had been buying up weekend places in the Hamptons or Fire Island. Maybe it was time to relax, to cut our pace a bit. If we had a nice weekend place in the country, I could write even more.

I could write a book about a high-powered advertising executive and his vice president boyfriend who cashed it all in to lead simpler lives as gentlemen farmers.

It would be a bestseller.

I’d get rich.

I’d live in a mansion.

Three weeks later, we made a lowball offer and it was accepted.

Chapter Three

We delayed the closing until spring—partially to enjoy one last winter without heating bills, and partially to be sure that we weren’t experiencing a sort of conjoined temporary insanity. There wasn’t much in either Brent’s or my résumé that would have indicated that we were destined for either a farm or a mansion—and certainly not a combo.

We were both raised without much money. We both went to work as soon as the laws in our respective states allowed. In fact, if my first job at age twelve was any predictor, the last place I wanted to spend my middle-age years was a farm. In my rural Wisconsin, the summer of sixth grade didn’t mean summer camp and pool parties; it meant “detassling corn.” Dozens of us would be dropped off by our parents each morning outside the gates of Waukesha County’s largest farm. We stood there in the beating sun, or pouring rain, like pint-size illegal alien itinerant workers clutching Smurf lunch boxes. Eventually a parade of massive tractors hauling flatbed wagons would roar down the road. Once they reached us, they would slow to about 15 mph—just enough for us to run alongside in a mad scramble, chuck our lunch boxes aboard, and swing ourselves up onto the wagon like miniature hobos.

The wagons would take us out into the cornfields where we would walk dozens of miles down rows of five-foot-high corn plants, reaching over our heads to strip the stalks of their deceptively fuzzy tassles at the top. In reality, the tassles were like prom corsages made of razor wire, which, over the course of weeks, turned our soft preteen pink hands into the calloused mitts of steelworkers.

For all this, we earned $1.65 an hour, and we were to be grateful since it was a dime over “agricultural juvenile minimum wage.” The fact that Wisconsin even had such a designation should explain why the state is now complaining that it doesn’t have enough young farmers left to take over its agricultural industry. Drinking warm milk from a thermos cup held by bleeding hands at high noon four miles deep in a cornfield makes even the most dedicated Future Farmer of America fantasize about an exciting career in accounting or insurance adjustment. Or drag queen turned ad guy, as the case may be.

Brent’s upbringing was in many ways similar to my own. He worked at McDonald’s through high school in North Carolina, and put himself through college, med school, and business school while working full time. He completely paid his own way and walked away with every degree without a penny of debt.

But even though our combined industriousness had paid off with rewarding careers, we still weren’t accustomed to spending much of the money we made on anything other than necessities. During the winter following our discovery of the Beekman Mansion, Brent and I debated whether we should really go through with the closing. We padded around our cozy 850-square-foot urban apartment questioning what could prepare us for owning a 4,500-square-foot historical mansion and 100-year-old barn located on 60 acres. How would we possibly be able to take care of all that? Our home repair tool kit consisted of a hammer and two screwdrivers—one of which was for eyeglasses.

But for every argument I had one unbudgeable rebuttal: I was in love with the Beekman. Having spent a good part of my childhood growing up relatively poor, the prospect of owning a mansion complete with pool and formal flower gardens represented some sort of recognition for the hard work I’d done to get to the place where I could afford it. And the fact that the Beekman was also a farm brought my dreams in a strange full circle. I often felt my hard-won advertising career came at the expense of the values with which I was raised. It’s no secret that American advertising sometimes stretches truth to the point of breaking, just like the slow-motion cheese-pull shot in a Pizza Hut commercial. While I’d somehow avoided typical career conundrums like shilling cigarettes to children, I had to occasionally readjust my moral compass in the pursuit of a paycheck. Early on in my career, for example, I’d been assigned to the U.S. Marines account. At the time I’d managed to convince my staunchly pacifist and gay self that recruiting disadvantaged young men and women into a life-threatening and homophobic environment was a fair tradeoff for their prospect of free tuition down the road. A few years later, when challenged with the task of making horse racing sexy again for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, I enlisted Hollywood celebrities and recruited fashionistas to the nation’s horse tracks, knowing full well that what I was really doing was making those with gambling problems feel cool.

Owning a farm, I felt, would at least bring me back in the direction of my Wisconsin roots. I could grow my own food, support a hard-hit local economy, and metaphorically raise my middle finger at the factory farm industry that was causing so many of our nation’s ills—from high-fructose-corn-syrup-induced diabetes and obesity, to hormone-injected meat that caused nine-year-old girls to grow breasts.

Of course nine-year-old girls with breasts sounded like something I might dream up to help sell hormone-injected meat had I been assigned the challenge.

My weariness with advertising had been growing over the years, but particularly lately during my agency’s regular status meetings. Each week, the creative department gathered around the large conference room table to report on its progress on current assignments.

During one of these meetings that February, I realized that I’d been working on one particular project—a print campaign for a medium-size health insurance company—for exactly one year. All that was needed were three quarter-page newspaper ads. Three. I’d presented dozens of campaigns over the previous twelve months, flown to six different cities across the United States to sell them, worked over the Christmas holidays, and sat in five rounds of focus groups, and was now rereading the same exact status report as I had one year ago.

And I’d gotten a huge bonus because of it. But I hadn’t, as one of my colleagues was fond of saying, “moved the ball down the field” even an inch. I was working nights, weekends, and holidays and getting nowhere. All that mattered, though, was that I kept the clients happy. Success to many clients equals working hard and ending up with nothing. You can only get fired for doing something wrong if you’ve done something in the first place.

I guess I really am good at what I do.

But I knew—I knew—there was more I was born to do. There had to be something else—something I could show for my life other than a clutch of television commercials and some magazine ads. Even a fistful of corn tassles seemed more substantial.

At the Beekman, I could plant corn again. And detassle it myself (even though twenty-five years later, I still had no idea why corn needed to be detassled in the first place). And perhaps eventually, as we paid the mortgage down, we could sell our apartment in the city and live a full-time life of stylish agrarian subsistence at the Beekman. My days as a corporate shill could be over sooner than I’d planned.

By the time we’d settled on a closing date, I’d sold myself on the idea that I was only a few years away from penning my last tagline, which was one of the biggest pitfalls of a life in advertising. If you start buying your own bullshit, you risk becoming management material.

Chapter Four

“You first.”

“No, you first.”

“I’ll carry you.”

“Like hell you will,” I said. “You’re not going to drop me and break my neck on my very first day as a mansion owner.”

We’d barely made it to the Beekman Mansion’s front door while there was still light outside. The days were growing longer as the spring was progressing, but the sun still disappeared around 6
P.M
. It was remarkable how far behind the seasons were in Sharon Springs compared to the city, a scant four hours south. While the trees were in full leaf back home in Central Park, in Sharon Springs the majestic oaks we stood under the previous fall barely had visible buds. It still felt more like February than the end of April.

“Okay, I’ll go first,” I relented. “I’m fucking freezing.”

Only ten hours ago we’d woken up exclusively urban dwellers. It had been a busy day for both of us. Brent stayed behind in the city to finalize the mortgage, while I took the train to Albany to go see about buying a car. It’d been years since I’d purchased a car…thirteen, in fact—the entire time I’ve lived in New York City. And I’d certainly never purchased a pickup truck before. Everything I knew about trucks could fit on a lesbian’s pinkie finger. But as new farmers, I reckoned that we would need one, as well as begin “reckoning” rather than merely thinking. So the moment I arrived at the Albany train station, I took a taxi to a random used car dealership with an envelope containing $20,000 cash. I had no illusions that I could possibly outwit a seasoned used car salesman, so in the end I drove away with a 2004 used Ford something-or-other and the reassuring conviction that I’d been completely ripped off.

None of that mattered though when I picked Brent up at the train station. Still in his suit and tie, I thought he looked hilarious climbing up into the passenger seat of our “gently pre-owned” truck. He was grinning wider than I’d ever seen.

“Let’s go!” he said, holding up the signed mortgage papers.
“We’re officially gentlemen farmers!”

“Hurry up,” Brent said. “It’s like January out here.”

The wind had picked up, and my fingers were growing numb as I tried to jiggle the key every which way in the lock.

“Maybe it’s the wrong key,” I said. Michelle had left the key under the mat for us.

“Nope,” Brent replied. “I asked her at the closing. She’d just used it yesterday.”