Luigi’s penthouse

Luigi Lefty’s barkeep
where I met him on the nude beach
Zipolite, Oaxaca
Two thousand fourteen
Big Italian went chest first
no shirt
and drank from the bottle
ran drugs from a friend’s bar
the Colivri
Hummingvird
I never told you
Lefty told me one day
I was Luigi’s gardener.
I squinted out across Lefty’s garden
It was a backyard full of
chest-high weeds
soiled cast-off diapers
smoking tires
unraveled barbwire fencing
rotten posts
fire ant hills the size of toyotas
I said
Wow did it look like THIS garden
(This is a lot I had told Lefty
not a garden
many moons before
but he’d looked at me like I was a bug)
Lefty said
Luigi told me he had a pool
Just needed to clean up the garden
Said he would hire me to help but
by the time we got there
it was fucking jungle
We had to hack through it with machetes
We, wheezed Lefty
No, me
while Luigi sat in his thongs on the balcony
and directed the gardener.
Turns out said Lefty
wasn’t even his house.