Forty Bucks a Day and All You Can Eat

Forty Bucks a Day and All You Can Eat
(Copyright 2009)

In my life I’ve been many things; a roofer, a janitor, a painter, a drummer, a roadie and yes, a garbage man. Being a garbage man was the realization of a cherished dream I had held since I was a toddler. I used to run to the edge of the street to watch the trash being crushed inside the hopper, as I though this was the ultimate job anyone could ever have. I was convinced that one day I would be the lucky guy to operate that glorious machine – a garbage man, the most noble of professions only a four-year old can envision.
During my ten month run as a “picker,” (the guy who hangs precipitously on the back and grabs the bags off the street), I had my share of adventures including being stabbed with a syringe that some fool left unsheathed in the Hefty bag. I felt the prick against my leg when I carelessly let the weight of the bags bounce off my calf (a cardinal sin in trash collections), and I remember thinking as I climbed back into the cab, “damn, that felt like a bee sting.” I became a little more alarmed when I pulled up my pant leg to find a swollen, reddish pin-prick just above the top of my boot. At the next stop I made my way to the back, praying the whole way that it was nothing. I tore into the bag and all my fears were realized in the belly of the hopper as a deluge of syringes came pouring out. A trip to the hospital for a Tetanus shot, a blood test and a lecture and I was cured of ever letting that shit bounce off my leg again.
Another experience left me inches from becoming a road casserole. I was hanging on the back of the truck just after a light rain. The road was shining like a candy wrapper; just wet enough to make it hazardous. Over the top of a hill a teenager came, hauling ass in a beat-up Olds Omega. He panicked when he saw the truck sprawled out in front of his path like a beached battleship lying in the middle of the street. He jammed the brakes and skid the car sideways right into the heart of the beast, bearing down like a kamikaze. I narrowly escaped being wiped clean off the side only by scaling the truck as it was still prodding forward. I shit my pants and watched the involuntary killer bounce off the gas tank inches below my feet.
My tour of duty ended finally when I was running a city route one afternoon with an old, black-toothed driver named Earl. Earl was the genuine hardened article when it came to garbage men. He was a sawed-off, heavyweight, tar spitting and slurring redneck. His rusty complexion, carved face and dark, intense glare gave off the perfect impression of a simple man destined to lug garbage for his entire existence; something he pursued with the militant zeal of his Teutonic lineage. Every morning we’d leave the yard and just a few hundred feet up the road a deranged, old man would stand at attention at the street corner and salute all the trucks as they went by. Earl would always drag the truck to halt and throw back a sharp salute with all the pageantry of General Patton. He enjoyed his position of status in this world – an extremely formidable fish in an extremely small pond, wanting nothing more and nothing less; his self-worth measured daily at the weigh station in “tonnage hauled.”
Among many tall-tales, he used to brag about digging holes in the middle of the night atop the landfill under the supervision of the owners of the company, an Italian crew, who told him and his helper to “Stop asking questions and keep shoveling.” He was quirky and would hold his empty, sausage-fingered hand up in his side-view mirror, as if he was holding an alarm clock for the picker to see, and would repeatedly screech “Ain’t got no time, hurry your ass, ain’t got time!” He lived to drive his pickers to exhaustion and extinction without mercy. In general, he was gruff, mean and ruthless and nobody liked working with him. I didn’t mind so much because I would just ignore his constant berating, but for one fateful incident, I could not ignore what he had done.
We were heading down a city block and were flanked by mountainous trash sties as far as we dared to look. Earl was dragging cans from the truck side and I was running and picking up the other side. As I approached the back with a load, Earl was cycling the blade and grinning and chuckling like a guilty kindergartner. He was obviously proud of something he had done and was eager to tell me. I knew better than to ask but for some reason I decided to indulge him. After some inquiry, he finally revealed, barely able to quiet his laughter, “This cat always runs up here every week, begging. I hate fucking cats.”
“Okay,” I said apprehensively, “What did you do?”
“I hate that fucking cat,” he stammered, coughing up a laugh worthy of a Vincent Price movie. “I grabbed the son-of-a-bitch by the tail and threw it in the hopper!”
“What? No you didn’t!” I protested hoping it wasn’t true.
“Fuck an ‘A’ I did,” he boasted, as if insulted I would even question his word.
“Bullshit,” I said, “You’re a fucking liar.”
“Fuck you, you pussy,” he shouted as he cycled the blade up halfway and the contents of the last load dropped back into the hopper.
Among all of the filth falling from the top down, came the body of a dead cat, which he had supposedly picked up and swung by the tail and slammed violently against the back of the hopper and then cycled it through!
I was horrified! If there is one thing I have no tolerance for, it is cruelty toward an animal. I saw that lifeless cat laying in the swill and I snapped faster than Michael Richards at an Obama rally!
“You’re a piece of shit,” I screamed. “I should kick your fucking ass!”
“Fuck you bitch,” he snarled and moved toward me raising a fist. “I’ll…”
Before he could get the rest of the sentence out I blasted him bull’s-eye in the face; abruptly reversing his charge with all the subtlety of a brick sandwich and sending him flailing backward. I hit him so hard he fell against the hopper; his expression suddenly an empty canvass, erased of any pretense of nerve, or bravado and replaced by a dazed sheen of confusion. His knee found the pavement as he caught the back of the truck with his right arm. In shock, he staggered to the curb.
I’ve been in enough fights to know that the satisfaction of knocking someone senseless is usually followed by a long period of regret. In this instance however, even though he was almost twice my age, I felt no such pangs of remorse. That son of a bitch got off light as far as I was concerned. I turned and walked off the job and left him cursing and clutching at his nose, blood trickling to the pavement between his fingers.
By the time I found a Convenience store and called in to the shop, he had already called the bosses out to the scene and changed the story. As far as the bosses were concerned it was Earl’s word against mine and since Earl knew everyone in the entire place, I was fired. Earl was a thirty-year veteran who supposedly kept quiet about things like holes in the landfill in the middle of the night and I was a punk kid who was lucky enough to be getting away with only a pink slip and no assault charges.
As I walked out of the shop, Earl, sitting in the break room with his nose, swollen and taped, tried to tell me through a checkered flag grin that he’d picked the cat up off the road and it was already dead – it was a joke and he had the last laugh.

Maybe so.

© Copyright 2009