The Treemen Cometh, Part Three

Adam opens the door to see Greg standing there.

“The trees are here,” he says. Sure enough, a tractor-trailer bed full of conifers is parked nearby. It arrived sometime in the night. With the generator working—they got it hooked up late last night, after a frigid first one—they hadn’t heard it pulled in.

Adam and Willie join a young guy Greg brought with him to help unload the trees—300 North Carolina Fraser firs. Unlike many tree sellers in New York City, Greg deals directly with growers. Last year, he even went so far as to try and start a cooperative with a number of them, allowing them to bring their trees directly to the city and, thus, buyers. Things fell through when it turned out the growers weren’t particularly good at the distribution end of the business.

During the summer Greg works with small local buyers to generate enough pre-orders on trees to justify a delivery. The hardest part isn’t finding people to buy from; it’s having enough trees on a truck to make it worthwhile for everyone involved. He visits the actual tree farms in central North Carolina to find the best growers at the best prices. The tree lots aren’t usually acres and acres of trees. In reality the trees—which have to be grown on the sides of hills to avoid root rot—are on disparate plots: one here, another over there, some 30 miles away. Very few if any of the growers’ properties are contiguous.

The lots are usually leased from landowners for seven or eight years. How do you grow a full-sized Christmas tree in that amount of time? Most growers start with plugs—an inch- or two-tall baby trees—that are planted in yearly waves. Trees grow about a foot a year; after seven or eight years, you’ll have a tree about that tall. Want a smaller tree? Find one planted a few years later.

Fraser firs have become the preeminent tree in the city. Not as plush as, say, a balsam fir or as aromatic as a Douglas, but the tree retains its needles and holds up to the demands of ornaments quite like a blue-hued Fraser. They dominate every stand Greg owns.

Trees come off the truck wrapped tightly in blue twine. Each tree is color coded according to quality; gold is the best, purple the worst. A tag reads, “Greg’s Quality Christmas Trees.” Greg sees it and is floored.

“I’ve never seen such a thing,” he says, beaming.

It takes a few hours but soon the stand is officially open for business. Not long after, Willie gets a shot at the first customer—a woman who lives in one of the nearby condos.

“How much for this one,” she asks. It’s a monster of a tree; a beautiful 12-foot-tall Fraser. It’s as much a trophy as a celebratory decoration.

Willie is feeling his beginners luck. “$240,” he says

She thinks for moment. “OK. I’ll take it. I don’t really care how much it is, it just has to be big.”

Willie is beside himself. A $240 sale on the very first tree anyone’s asked about, let alone it’s one of the biggest trees they have—the hardest type of tree to get rid of. Adam explains the system: $10 to $15, per foot, depending on the quality of the tree. But here he bags a whale of a sale and they’d barely begun.

“Do you take credit cards,” the woman asks. Willie is crestfallen. Greg was supposed to have brought the credit card slips, but had forgotten them.

“We’ll have them tomorrow.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, hold it for me. It’s the one I want. “ She walks away and doesn’t return.

Each day, Adam, Willie and Corrie do something to improve the stand, even just a little bit. In the beginning it’s the essentials: getting the lights strung above everything, putting the tarp up and making it secure against the wind, hanging wreaths from lattices secured to the side of the trailer. Adam finds a rocking chair on the street. He and Willie fix it up for a nice place to sit. Corrie brings her dog, Olive, a small, shorthaired little bullet of a thing.

The weekdays are spent preparing for the week nights; the weekends are consistently busy. They sell trees morning, afternoon and evening, though. People would stop by at 1 a.m. The bars across the street tend to make things interesting.

Shortly after midnight on their first Sunday, a young woman wanders into the stand. She has two friends with her. She is a bit drunk—not total word slurring or wobbling yet, but close. She approaches Willie.

“How much are the trees,” she asks. It’s the most common question.

“Depends. How big a tree are you looking to get?”

“The biggest fucking tree you have,” she says.

Willie laughs. “OK, well, we have some big 12-footers back there.”

“No, no, no,” she says, waving the thought away. “How much is this one?”

Willie shows her and her friends different trees, pulling them forward, knocking the trunk against the ground. Her friends find the whole thing sort of suspect, but the young woman—a petite blond in a sharp red button-down jacket and gold slip-ons—was determined to get her tree that night. Though that appeared to be as far as things would get.

“I’m too drunk to decorate it tonight,” she says.

Finally they settle on a nice five-footer. There’s one problem: the woman insists she has a stand somewhere—at home or her parent’s place or somewhere—but is concerned she won’t find it. She tries to negotiate a cheaper price from Willie since, obviously, she probably won’t actually need the stand.

“How about this,” he says. “If you find your other stand, just bring this one back. I’ll give you a refund.” Willie knows there is no way they will bring the stand back once they have the tree in it.

Deal!

Willie pulls the tree through the plastic netting shoot. It’s good to go. The woman’s friend, however, is only helping her bring the thing home if he can get another drink.

“We’ll just bring the tree with us,” he says.

“Just tell them you got it from us,” Willie says.

One friend on the stump end, the other at the top, and the young revelers march across the street and into to the bar, tree and all.

“I watch people’s first reaction,” Corrie says. “If they don’t immediately respond, I’ll say, ‘I don’t think this is the tree for you.’ Some people don’t care, others care about every little detail.”

Willie helps a young couple pick a tree. There is a degree of uncertainty about the process. Maybe it’s their first tree in their first apartment. Willie sells them on a modest four-foot fir. It’s not the fullest or the most symmetrical but there is a connection. As he starts cutting off the base—something they do for all the trees—joy comes over the couples’ faces. They kiss.

Willie hands them their tree. They smile, thank him and walk away, bodies close to one another.

Adam wants to put a tree on top of the trailer. He crosses the street to survey the situation.

“Last year, when I was in College Point, we mounted the biggest tree we had on the roof of the bowling alley next to our stand,” he says. “We threw lights on it and lit it up. It was the second biggest tree in New York after Rockefeller Center.

“We used a five-gallon bucket, filled it with stones and stuff to secure it. I remember going under a bridge somewhere gathering stones. I think we put some water in as well.”

He stands in silence for a minute, staring at the roof of the trailer. It’s getting dark. The generator is on, humming in the background. The stand lights glow.

[Read Part One here.](/article-21973-the-treemen-cometh-part-one.html)

[Read Part Two here].