Sex and the smell of lilacs is all that keeps Mo Squar going. He’s a hard man, a crude man and a rough man, but he’s a cheap gardener, a keen gardener and a genius gardener.

The girls he takes back aren’t pretty, and it takes some talking to get their clothes off in front of the painting of Mother Mary with her eyes gouged out.

But once he gets that pure explosive joy, he’ll topiary a hedge into any exquisite shape or contort a bonsai older than the hills. A lilac tucked behind one ear, he saws a shovel through the broken earth and stabs seeds deep into its fresh thick earth.

There are three mattresses in his apartment, one across another on the floor and one sagging down the wall. The mattresses are for the girls. He perches eyes open in a tree, hunched in sleep until the barest sunlight dusts the welkin pink.

Then its plowing and rutting and delving for another day, spraying his seed to whomever come who may.