Trash
I am your knight in shining garbage. It is a thankless job. You bring your waste to the corner and arrange it. I come in and take it away. You sleep. I stink. Perhaps you are on your way to work.
There are infinite odds and ends in the garbage. Most often, garbage is pictured as a contained object. A can. A black bag. The wastebasket by your bathroom sink. But that isn’t true. Garbage takes many forms. We as a people like to compartmentalize garbage and waste. But it cannot be contained, not truly. It is ever present. Think of all the wasted time, all the wasted money, all the wasted love. I take your waste. I am one with waste.
Waves
“What do you think you’re going to find in Ann Arbor?” I asked her.
“It’s a bigger city. I’ll fit in. Make friends. There’s just nothing for me here.”
“What about me? You like me.”
“I do, but that isn’t what this is about. I have to go find myself. I have to give it a shot,” she rubbed my knee with compassion. I pulled it away.
“I’m going to come visit you as often as I can.”
“I don’t think they’ll let boys sleep in the dorm, but of course. We can stay in one of my friends’ houses on Catherine.”
I thought about it and said one of the smartest things a future garbage man would ever say, “You know, you can ride the wave there, but if you stayed here, you could make the wave.”
Dispose.
It’s easy to throw something away. Once it’s been used up or has no value left to you, toss it to the side. We all do it. I can envision a world in which we didn’t do that. I once thought of a paradise, in which everything was used up in its entirety. Every material was entirely used, the way Native Americans treated buffalo. Even bodily waste. I ask God, why create us as shit factory’s? Why can’t every little bit be used for energy?
The neighborhood
You just don’t know your neighbors lives. You think you do, but you don’t. I live in one of the neighborhoods I serve. I actually pick up my own refuse. I set it out to the curb and pick it up. It just makes the most sense for me. Where the south side begins, there’s a group of kids that call themselves the Wenzell Gang. I live on Jackson, right off Gratiot. They’ve tagged the area. One night they yelled some crazy stuff in my direction while riding on bicycles. My eyes locked with the one kid who did not yell.
On my way to work, early in the morning, I saw him. He was jogging in his Lumberjacks sweats. He ran in the street because the sidewalk was too kittywampus. He stopped at a vacant overgrown yard. I heard the clink of a bowl. Something distributed in it. When he resumed running, a few cats came out of hiding and into the street light. I couldn’t see them in the dark cover near the bowl.
Trucks
I don’t drive the truck anymore. It’s a luxurious position. Sometimes you don’t even have to get out. A lot of people have family businesses. Mine were in Waste Management. Back in the heyday of this city, my grandfather was the go to guy for garbage. And it was lucrative! The plants had huge contracts. Rubbish was at a high. They started a junk and scrap yard on the side. They got rich in the world of garbage.
Drugs
It’s hard not to be centric. Ethno, socio, any of the o’s. As I drive through the East Side, I can see the ravages of poverty. The industry fell right out. We feel it only happened here because it was so bad. But it happened everywhere. The whole of I-75 felt it. The economy boomed in the 60s in Detroit. It boomed here. Crack hit hard in the 80s. It hit hard here. If you’ve been to Detroit lately, it looks a whole lot different. I expect it will start looking different here.
Poverty
The houses are small. The yards are smaller. I moved to a place with no yard, because I don’t like to mow the lawn. It seems frivolous and useless to me. I don’t have the time. Maybe all my years in the scrap heap taught me to regard space. It is to be used.
But the kids need a yard. On my route yesterday, a young boy dragged a can to the end of the road.
“Is that your mom?” I gestured to the woman in the window.
“Yeah,” the boy looked in the direction of the house.
“Do you always take the garbage out?”
“It’s the rules. If I want to go play with my friends at Hoyt today, I have to take the garbage out.”
Hoyt isn’t much of a park. It has a pavilion, some swings. But it’s just an expansive field of grass. It’s more of a sporting place. I could see a tough boy arranging a football game there. Perhaps I didn’t care for it because of all that grass.
In the back end of it, there were some bushes. Across the street from the hospital. It was full, night and day of family members who had to take a break from their family. Most of them smoked cigarettes. Some just paced.
There were some years in which I felt this city was pacing.
Broken Glass in the Streets
Garbage is routine. This one house always leaves recyclables out on the wrong day. A green box full of perfectly cleaned, vegetarian baked beans cans.
I saw a dog in a garbage can once. There were flies all over it’s carcass.
My coworkers who work the night runs carry guns. You think, who would rob a garbage man? But there are far more petty reasons than theft.
Silence.
You can’t tell anyone what you’ve seen.
The route I started on as a kid, in the garbage empire, went through a golf course. It was a township route. I saw perfectly good bicycles thrown away. And they were never fined for inappropriate rubbish collection. I kept my mouth shut because I assumed I would be the director one day. I didn’t want to cause trouble while I was young.
A couple decades back, the mayor got in trouble for taking bribes. It was pretty scandalous I guess. My father lost his contracts and then his position.
Family
Some of them are on drugs.
Food Desert
There are very few banks or ATM’s on one side of town. The largest grocer closed due to losses. Poor people tend to eat the same things over and over. There isn’t a diverse diet. I see the same things in everyone’s trash. In jail they eat “Burrito’s”. These “Burritos” aren’t real burritos. They ‘blow up’ ramen noodles in an empty potato chip bag. This means they pour hot water on them and wait for the noodles to soak up all the water. Then they add crushed potato chips, preferably of a spicy variety and maybe some cheese whiz, aerosol cheese or packaged pickles. People eat this outside of jail too.
University
Most of them aren’t from the city. They aren’t even from around the county. They come from ‘up north’ in Michigan. They think they’re moving to ‘the big city’. While they live in dorms they stay in the shopping district between Tittabawassee and Bay. Once they turn 21 and move into the townhomes, they figure out where the bars are and they call it Downtown. It’s Old Town, but they are the only ones at the bar, so there’s nobody to correct them.
Downtown is an old growth forest being culled for its lumber.
They have planned to extend other universities into the area. It’s one of the few hopes we have left. I’d love to have that route. See the hopeful faces of college students right in the heart of the city. It’s the energy injection that this city needs. Their garbage would be full all of the time.
Kids don’t know how to utilize time. What a luxury.
The River
It seems crazy now. I had this friend who would drive a Z28 down the boulevard in the winter. He would get going pretty fast and then slam the emergency brake on. This would cause him to skid and do a perfect U turn right around the grass island in the center of the street. Crazy thing is, he’d do it for well over an hour! Using the boulevard like a race track. No one ever seemed to care.
One day him and I took a crappy fishing boat up the river. We rode it right to this German, tourist-trap of a town. Docked it and drank all their beers. A police officer on a horse told me to get out of the street when I stumbled into his path.
“Or you’ll take me to Das Jailhausen? Where they’ll make me wear lederhosen?” I cackled.
We got out of there before the sun went down. When we came under the court street bridge he said, “Let’s Jump.”
“Out of the boat?”
“No, Off the bridge.”
“Do you want to die?” I asked.
“I’ve done it before. It’s crazy. C’mon.”
So we docked the boat right there on the side of the river. We had to run up two blocks to get to the start of the bridge. He told me we had to run full tilt and never to hesitate. And that we could catch our breath as we climbed over the railing. At the top it looked higher than it did when I was under it.
He let go. So I let go. Both of us just sort of jack knifed into the water. Except I let my left arm out a little bit. It hurt like hell. I smacked the water so hard. Even my feet hurt. I had to swim with mostly my right arm. And the current was strong. You could never guess how strong that current is.
On the surface it doesn’t look like much, but it will whisk you away.
I came to shore much further down than my friend. He came running to me laughing.
“I’ve never done that before. I was fucking with you.”
The Return
She didn’t stay in Ann Arbor after school. I heard that she lived at the American Embassy in Moscow for a while. When she came back she wore pencil skirts.
“I’m pretty open minded now.” She said.
She was gorgeous.
“Is the Savoy still open?”
I told her it was. That I would buy her a drink. I told her about all the new places that had opened. All the ones that had a good run but just couldn’t make the distance. I told her that I met my wife on my route. That picking up garbage was the best thing that ever happened to me because of it. I told her that crime went up while she was gone. But that it was again lower than ever. I told her that last winter it snowed so hard that everything closed for three straight days and it was almost magical. I told her that someone planned to revitalize the theater on Court Street. I told her that I found a rare vinyl record with an unopened sleeve once and when I cashed it in, it was worth almost two thousand dollars. I told her that they had to open a new dump at the farthest edge of the city.
Birds
Futures.
He showed up for the position 15 minutes early. Sat in the car for a few minutes primping himself. He was dressed in a suit of course. He decided to text the vice president of his arrival and then make his way to the lobby.
The secretary met him before he got to the desk. Two other employees escorted him to the elevator. The secretary stood outside and watched the elevator doors close with the three of them in there.
“Are you ready?” One of the employees asked him.
He chuckled. “I’m thrilled.”
They shook his hand as the door opened. They remained in the elevator and two more employees, this time male walked him to a giant glass office. He could see inside of it. There was a large table with 7 white executive men at it. When the two men delivered him through the door the executives stood.
They lined up to shake hands with the potential new hire.
Great to meetcha.
Welcome to the upper office.
We like to say this is where the magic happens.
“Are you ready?” The Executive Director asked.
Across from the executive table was a giant gyroscope. The new hire put his briefcase down. He put his feet in the allotted boot holders. The director fastened the giant mechanism around his waist. The new hire reached up and locked his hands onto a very worn in handle. The director strapped his hands in. Afterwards he made sure the boots were tight.
“There is no America. No democracy. No free will. There is only the flow of capital. The movement of assets. The shifting of weight from one ledger to another. You are not here to change it. You are here to survive it.
We are not gods. We are not visionaries. We are not revolutionaries. We are custodians of momentum. And momentum, not morality,is what keeps the lights on.
You will learn quickly that loyalty is not to each other, or to yourself. Loyalty is to the cycle. Upturn and collapse. Boom and bust. Expansion and extinction. The great wheel turns and turns, and it grinds everything beneath it. Your only job is to stay inside the motion, and pretend it’s all by design.”
(He leans in slightly, his voice dropping to a near whisper.)
“They will tell you to dream. Ignore them. They will tell you to lead. Laugh at them. They will tell you to believe. Pity them. The only virtue here is velocity. The only sin… is standing still.”
He smiled thinly, almost sadly, and gave the gyroscope its first shove.
There were three small cranks on the side. A few of the executives came out from behind the table and gave the wheel a crank. The new hire began spinning in many directions. His face could only be seen at odd angles. His mouth open. His cheeks were pinned by the wind.
The executives were taking turns spinning him and saying
Pivot or perish! Balance is a hallucination! Momentum is loyalty! Ego burns at this altitude. If you stop moving, you stop mattering!
Every few cycles he would slow down enough to see that people were gathering at the glass. There was beginning to be a great crowd. They started to cheer when they saw how long he was holding on for. That his face wasn’t even red yet.
They were proud of him and he knew it. He began to say small phrases back as he passed by. But no one could hear him. The velocity with which he was spinning was so great, he could barely get out a whisper.
“You think you’re walking into a temple, but it’s a stomach.
There’s no center. No circumference. Only edges, sharpened by repetition.
I understand now. We don’t move through time. Time moves through us. Like an illness. And when it’s done with us, it spits us out. Bones polished. Smiling still.”
Derek has an interview to be the Assistant Manager of a mattress store tomorrow. Him and Milo are galavanting around a thrift store.
“Gffo dude, 13th Floor Elevators. That’s a crazy find in a thrift store, “ Milo says.
They get home and put the record on the turntable. A tiny little ziploc falls out. Derek picks it up. He holds it in the light.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. This looks like blotter paper.”
Milo snatches it out of his hand. He looks at it. “This could be from the 60s man.”
“It’s probably no good by now.”
“I don’t know. I think acid lasts a long time. It might not be as strong, but it’s probably still got something to it. Looks like 8 hits.”
They took out the blotter. It was neatly folded. It was 10 hits. They couldn’t see the folds through the bag. They talked each other into trying one tab a piece. They put it on their tongues. They changed the record to a Dead record. An hour went by. They didn’t smoke any weed, but both split one cigarette.
“Lemme hit that,” Milo said. He dragged the cigarette. “So much better than a vape. I understand why people are so hooked on these. They are fucking incredible.”
Derek held his hand out, “Dude, do you think my hand looks weird?”
Milo blew smoke all over his outstretched hand, “You are going to be the mattress king!”
“No dude, do you think my hand looks funny? Different?”
Milo looked at it. And yes, he did think it looked funny. He could see all the lines in it. And the blue blood that ran beneath the skin. And the thought occurred to him that palm readers were just making shit up, but it was still a valuable service because people need reassurance, at least the type that are willing to pay a palm reader. And maybe they were little hand freaks, like we all know foot fetish people are weird, but what if they are lil hand fetish freaks, but no that doesn’t make sense because palm reading isn’t sexy, its artful, its saying, its storytelling, but maybe they go masturbate after holding all those hands.
He didn’t ash the cigarette and it had a giant cherry and ash trail.
“Do you feel like the clouds are low?”
The acid was good. It was strong. It was challenging. They took two more hits a piece and didn’t sleep through the night.
“I can’t do the interview like this,” Derek said.
“Do they know who you are?”
“I was referred by Mikey. But no, I don’t think they know me know me.”
Milo put sun glasses on. He put his arm around Derek and they both sang the chorus to Guilty by Streisand and Gibbs
And we’ve got nothing
To be guilty of, our love
We’ll climb any mountain
Near or far, we are
And we’ll never let it end
We are devotion
Milo turned the music down a little. “Who am I?”
“Barry Gibbs?”
Milo pulled the sunglasses down his face, “I’m Derek.”
Derek slumped off the couch down on the ground with a look of profundity. He lit a cigarette in the house. He reached out and high fived Milo, “My dawg.”
Milo put on a suit with no tie. Derek’s suit actually. Derek drove him to the interview. Milo had a briefcase with nothing in it.
“Leave that in the car man,” Derek said.
“Nah, it’s extra flavor. This shit gonna get us the job.” He looked at it and the leather was slightly breathing. “I think, I’m going to sell a mattress on the spot.”
Milo walked in. He shook hands with the manager. He stated that he loved his resume and loved that he had sales experience and inventory, but that not having any experience in mattress sales did seem like a bit of a stretch.
“Derek, you have to understand, that here, we sell mattresses. I think about mattresses when i go home at night. Now, I don’t expect you to be that way, but there are perks of the job, like, you could take one of these home.”
Milo was fixed on a circular clock on the wall just behind the manager. He was thinking of Dali and persistence of time. He turned and saw a customer that was perusing the mattresses by himself.
“Watch this,” Milo said. He opened the door and walked with both arms outstretched. “What brings you in today? Are you looking for a mattress?”
The customer looked wild eyed and desperate, “I don’t want a mattress. I want resurrection. You people — you think we’re here to buy foam and springs like rats buying extra straw for the flood. But listen to me — the world’s collapsing outside. There are screens whispering at us from our pockets. The oceans are boiling. Every time I close my eyes, I hear emails screaming to be answered. My bones ache from invisible wars I didn’t even enlist in. I’m not here to buy a mattress. I’m here because I need one pure place left on this planet to be unconscious. I need permission to vanish for eight hours a night without feeling like I’m squandering my one wild and precious life,” he stopped for a second and Milo realized that the customer had a hold of his wrist. “Do you have that? Do you sell permission?”
Milo stared at him like glimpsing the divine.
Milo was smiling, swaying slightly, “Brother…sleep is the last rebellion. It’s the only true protest left. You lay down, you turn your back on the algorithms, you tell the whole machine: Not tonight.
You dream of things they can’t monetize yet.”
The customer stared at Milo, jaw slack, overwhelmed.
The manager appeared out of nowhere, fake-chipper, “We actually have a Presidential Posturepedic UltraRest on sale this weekend — patented memory foam layers to maximize your REM cycle! Financing available!” He clapped his hands once, stiffly.
Neither Milo nor the Customer even looked at him. They’re locked in.
The customer reverently said, “I’ll take whatever he recommends.” He pointed to Milo.
“Follow me, pilgrim. We’ll find you a bed for your revolution.”
They drift toward the back of the store like two prophets wandering into the desert. Derek is laying on one of the mattresses and the manager begins his sales pitch on him.