Slugfest

Five

After the bigger shows in Philly and Boston, the Big Apple Flower Show was the Northeast’s oldest and most prestigious, sponsored by a consortium of local garden clubs. I’d only been once before and not as an exhibitor. I’m a gardener. It’s been three years since I hung out my shingle in Springfield, Connecticut: Dirty Business Garden Solutions. Quite a change from my former job producing videos for a boutique production company in lower Manhattan—just as much dirt but of a different sort. At least that’s how I started. More recently, only some of the solutions have been garden related. I’ve developed a reputation as something of a problem solver.

I wouldn’t have been at the Big Apple show if it hadn’t been for Babe Chinnery and an eccentric artist named Primo Dunstan. Babe owned the Paradise Diner, where I spent more time and ate more carbs than I should since moving from New York to Connecticut.

Primo was her pal. And he was a character. No one referred to him as strange or antisocial, although he was certainly both, and no one spoke of him as the town hermit either, although he lived alone in the house his parents had left him surrounded by two acres full of scrap iron, broken lawn furniture, and machine and auto parts that made his yard look like the innards of an old television set or that stretch of New Jersey highway that resembles a giant computer motherboard.

Primo had startled some young girls on their way to school one morning and there’d been an ugly rumor until one of the girls recanted. After that, he rarely ventured out except to ride his bicycle around town, filling two hand-wrought wire baskets with interesting junk he obtained foraging through garbage. That was how he’d met Babe, behind her diner.

The good ladies of Springfield worried about Primo and were pondering their humanitarian course of action when one day he showed up at the diner with a five-foot-long iron dragonfly he’d hoped to barter for food.

Babe was appreciative and happily fixed Primo lunch while he and Babe’s boyfriend, Neil, soldered the oversized darning needle onto the diner’s neon marquee. The next day, she got a slew of offers for the unusual sculpture but turned them all down. Instead, she encouraged Dunstan to bring in smaller works she’d display and sell in the diner. That’s how Babe’s makeshift gallery was created. That was when Primo’s status was elevated from weirdo to a “character,” code for a weirdo with money or an artistic bent.

Since then, Primo’s found-materials sculptures had gotten modest press, giving him a reprieve from the do-gooders who wanted to fix whatever it was they thought was wrong with him—his hair, his clothing, and his social life or lack of one. Some said he had Asperger’s, but Babe insisted he had just never gotten around to cultivating his social skills. She was the one who had the bright idea Primo should exhibit at the flower show with me managing the booth, since he was far too shy to do it himself. Like I said—I’m a sucker.