By the time Jane and I got there, I was sick. Things looked worse than I’d remembered. There wasn’t even a blade of brown grass on my six-by-eight-foot front yard. One Popsicle-stick shrub twisted out of the soapy dirt like some animal’s pitiful gravemarker. Chalky dog turds broke up the dusty monotony from chain-link fence to chain-link fence. And there was a brand new sign on the billboard over my house. “Give the United Way,” it said, and it pictured a little boy in a wheelchair.

Jack Rafferty was a real scream. He asked if the Dunphy house was an “hysterical landmark.” I was sort of relieved that he’d come right out with it, though, and I even laughed when he said that the inside smelled “like centuries of chicken soup” because it did. Jane tried to be more gracious. “This is great,” she said enthusiastically, “your next-door neighbor’s only ten feet away. I have to walk about two miles to visit my nearest neighbor back home.”

That night I phoned a bunch of guys and told them to round up a party. It was the first time in years that my friends entered the house. They’d made it a point to avoid the old man. By nine-thirty things were progressing well except the guy/girl ratio was running five to one. I was at the kitchen table with Jane when DeCenz stuck his head out of my bedroom and said, “What happened to your trees, Dunph?”

“Had to get rid of them,” I said. “They were getting too big.”

Years earlier I’d tried to grow a couple potted trees in my bedroom. No matter how much attention I gave the droopy bastards, they refused to grow. It was like trying to get a palm tree to take root in Siberia. Some plants grow through cracks in the sidewalk, but even with chemicals and nutrients and loving care mine wouldn’t budge. The problem was that my bedroom window was in an alley and the sun only managed to flicker in for about six minutes a day—half that in winter. Eventually I gave their skeletons to my Aunt Dot because she had a huge picture window. When I visited her six months later, the trees looked like they’d been dipped in glue and rolled in grass clippings. They were about seven feet high and four feet wide.