THE FULL(EST POSSIBLE) STORY OF THE FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING PRESS CONFERENCE ~ INTELLIGENCER

This is correspondence to a friend while reading 4-Seasons Landscaping story yesterday

rŌbert

as i began my descent yesterday

i read Olivia Nuzzi’s 4-Seasons fiasco

i about choked on the Pacifico i was sipping

She’s is an absolutely hilarious writer with

a straight ahead style

with politicians like that you’ve

got to laugh just to keep from crying

By Olivia Nuzzi, New York’s Washington correspondent

Whether it’s war and peace or public relations and gardening, sorting out the truth is a complicated endeavor when it relates to Donald Trump. Everyone involved in anything, no matter the size, no matter how stupid, seems to lie as a first resort, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, or to know just enough to send blame in another direction, and the person in that direction seems to lie also, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, but perhaps they have a theory that sends blame someplace else, and over there, too, you will find more liars, more know-nothings, and before long, a whole month will have passed, and you still haven’t filed your story about how the president’s attorney wound up undermining democracy in a parking lot off I-95 on a strip of cracked pavement in a run-down part of a city that ordinarily would command no consideration from the national political class or the very online public or the equally online mainstream media, which, when forced to look, found lots of reason to laugh.

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The circus is gone. The presidency is ending. The mystery endures. Photo: Olivia Nuzzi

On the afternoon of November 13, Mike Siravo was standing outside his family’s landscaping business in Northeast Philadelphia, dressed in khakis and a company polo shirt, watching as strangers pulled up in nice cars, parked without care on the busy street, and approached the barbed-wire-topped fence with iPhones gripped in outstretched hands. They all came for the same reason: to see for themselves the words FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING. SINCE 1992. PARKING ONLY. ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED AT OWNERS’ EXPENSE. In packs, they laughed openly. Alone, they wore bemused expressions, eyes focused on their screens. All of them spent a few minutes taking in the sight and, more importantly, documenting their visit with selfies.

Workers walked in and out of the parking lot, sometimes shaking their heads but mostly keeping them down and not saying much to any of the outsiders for whom the landscaping company was now an unusual monument to the end of America, or the end of the thing that had symbolized the end of America, or something. It was three o’clock on a workday. “I’m just an employee,” one of them said. “I don’t know anything.”

A man on a bicycle paused near the front office to stare at the building. On the other side of the blinds, there were desks and filing cabinets illuminated by fluorescent light and people going about their day, which would have been a normal one were it not for the 20,000 T-shirt orders to process and the intrusion of tourists who saw the place as some kind of zoo exhibition. There was an awkward silence, but then Siravo smiled and shrugged in the direction of the sidewalk, asking the curious bicyclist the obvious question: Was he looking for a photo? He leapt down the steps to take the man’s phone and, with the enthusiasm of a mall photographer, instructed him how to pose. Siravo leaned back into the street, making sure the angle captured the green-and-white awning with the company name.

A couple of feet away, a family of four was staging a holiday card. Lois Neuberger and Matthew Gold said they were in town from California, visiting their daughter at school, when it occurred to them they were just a short distance from the festive greeting–slash–political meme of a lifetime. “It’s become such a thing that we decided it would be a fun idea,” Gold said with a laugh. “Everyone will get it.” (Including me, in the literal sense, since the Neuberger-Golds kindly added my address to their mailing list.)

By then, there were all sorts of rumors on State Road about the Siravo family’s connections with the Trump campaign and the Philadelphia Republican Party. But it had been nearly a week since Rudy Giuliani’s press conference in the parking lot out back, and the only evidence anyone could turn up to support the theory that what had occurred here wasn’t just a freak public-relations accident or hilarious fuckup were a few pro-Trump Facebook posts from Mike’s mother, Marie Siravo, who owns the business. She had been shrewd enough to release a statement amid the frenzy that said the landscapers were not partisans and then to mostly avoid speaking to the media as she rushed out the door, clutching a Louis Vuitton bag, to a white Jeep with a FOUR SEASONS license plate on the front bumper. The Siravos were nothing if not good marketers, and by December, they’d sold more than $1 million of the merchandise they’d drawn up to capitalize on all the attention, like stickers that read “Make America Rake Again!” and “Lawn and Order!”

“We don’t really know how it happened. We heard it might’ve been a mistake or something,” Mike Siravo said. “We just kinda picked up the phone and said yes and cleared some stuff out and managed to make it happen.”

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A man locks the gate at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The sign has become a prime backdrop for selfie-seekers. Photo: Olivia Nuzzi

If that was true, it didn’t explain how it came to be that the phone rang at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in the first place. Siravo wouldn’t say who had called, or if he knew how Donald Trump’s campaign had even heard of the small landscaping business, or anything else, really, that might tell how this stretch of asphalt became the official site of the end of the presidency and the beginning of the ass-backward pseudo-legal effort to reverse the results of the election. According to the New York Times, there had been a miscommunication between Trump and the event planners. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the campaign made the staging choice that morning, after calling one of the Siravo’s employees. My search for answers involved — I swear to God — more than 37 sources spread throughout the White House, the Trump campaign, the president’s network of advisers both formal and informal, the Republican Party, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

This is not counting Siravo, who said he was sorry, but his family had decided not to talk — except, he added, about golf. They’d just done an interview limited to the subject of Four Seasons Total Landscaping’s approach to manicuring courses.

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READ THE ENTIRE STORY, IT’S HILARIOUS

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Bernie D’Angelo didn’t blame them. An electrician by trade and a Rolling Stones fanatic, D’Angelo has owned all kinds of businesses over the years, including a health-food store and a pizza parlor, but Fantasy Island, theadult book store he inherited from his parents, is by far his favorite. He appreciates how it’s “a lot more fun” than the others, generally, and specifically, he appreciates how the adult business strips the airs from anyone who ascends the steps under the bright-yellow sign outside to cross his carpeted threshold. “This is reality,” he said. “When they come in, they check their egos at the door, because look: It is what it is. There’s no sugarcoating it.” He gestured to the wall of dildos on his left.

Fantasy Island owner Bernie D’Angelo, who voted for Joe Biden, said he wants America to “chill out a little.” Photo: Olivia Nuzzi

That Saturday morning, D’Angelo said, he was keeping to himself when a customer ran in to report “a problem going on” outside, where police had suddenly appeared to block off the road. “So we looked out and found it was Giuliani who made a big mistake.” He laughed hard. “He was at the wrong Four Seasons hotel, the wrong one!” He paused to laugh with every few words. “‘Cause that’s a … landscaping! … And not a hotel! … A five-star hotel! … And that’s … one-star … landscaping!” He could barely breathe. “So you’ve got dead people, landscaping, and pornography!”

When I first visited, right after the press conference, the joke was still alive. A local newsman and his camera guy had been set up for a live shot on the sidewalk all afternoon. But soon they were gone. Why wasn’t I? I came back even after I got into a car accident between the landscapers and the Pentecostals (little was damaged beyond my already poor reputation with Avis). After a few days, I wasn’t sure if I truly believed that history had been made in that patch of tar behind Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It was true that the presidency had officially ended there, but it was also true that the site itself felt like someone had erected a somber memorial at the scene of one of the lesbian pillow-fight pornos for sale at Fantasy Island (not that I looked).

Rudy Giuliani did not visit Fantasy Island, according to its owner, who said Giuliani’s posse was “eyeing” his porn shop that Saturday but did not submit to the temptation. Business has since taken off. Photo: Olivia Nuzzi

About those dead people: Regulations keep crematories out of the way of most businesses, but Delaware Cremation Center would blend in fine in a more developed area, even if the pandemic has made it an unusually busy place. On State Road, it sticks out as weirdly nice-looking. The sign over the doorway is new, the brick façade unweathered. The black shutters around the window complement an iron bench and gate. If a place where bodies are turned to ash can be welcoming, you could call it that. There’s a space inside for mourners to gather to drink and eat, and there are pews in which to pray. You can see, in these and other small details, how the business of caring for the dead is often about caring for the living. Viewed from here, the Four Seasons Total Landscaping circus looked as much like an indictment of a certain kind of liberalism as an illustration of Trumpian incompetence. But picking at the bones of any joke will make it unfunny after a while, and by the time I was looking at the drawers where they push the bodies in, I’d been trying to make sense of what happened there for too long.

As one Philadelphia Republican official told me: “Duuuuuude! It’s sooooo embarrassing! Oh my God! It’s the height of idiocy!”

It was probably always that simple.