| |
A Trash Picker's Guide To Life
By
Angela Havel
Picking up Strangers
Saturday, February 17, 1992
San Jose, California
3 a.m.:
How did I end up here? I’m driving aimlessly in my ’75 Ventura, one of the only cars on Market Street. The radio blares a Nine Inch Nails song. There’s an eerie feeling in this part of downtown; every tree and bush under the streetlights glows with an unearthly aura. A smell of rancid coffee grounds hangs in the night air. I could drive all night if I had enough gas, but I’m down to a quarter tank and I have only $15 to my name. I tell myself I’d better hang on to it.
I’m still a little drunk and restless. My gut is grinding. There’s a Jack-in-the-Box hamburger joint on the corner; I feel myself being drawn in by its neon lights, the only spot of humanity in this miasma.
My face has lost at 28 whatever feminine softness it once had. I started out in life trying to look around every corner; went to college to prepare myself for success, but somewhere along the way I screwed up big time, otherwise instead of driving around at 3 a.m. I’d be in bed like a normal person, getting the last few hours of REM sleep before waking up to drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic to a ladder-climbing job. But wait a minute: wouldn’t I be even
more screwed if I was in that rut? At the moment I don’t have a job, and it feels good in one way, like I’ve beaten the system or something.
I drove out to California from Kansas. This is the second time. The first time was right out of college. I worked nondescript office jobs for two years, ran out of money and went back home for a year. But I couldn’t quell my wanderlust. After resting up awhile, I decided to give San Jose another shot.
I’m staying with my brother. I’m in my third week of what’s supposed to be a month-long visit; I haven’t told him yet I’m planning on staying longer. He’s letting me use a small upstairs room in a warehouse-turned-rehearsal studio he manages called The Rock Garden a few blocks down on Market Street. The room has a stained, leaky shower, no heat or AC, and there’s crumbling spots where the lath shows through on the walls. He keeps saying it’s no place for me, gives me hints I need to find my own place, but he won’t kick me out, because he’s my brother. So I’m not totally screwed. I’m not living in my car like some people. If I could just forget that I have no money. The $250 cash I brought with me is gone, spent on food and gas.
The realization hits that I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do to survive. One part of me just wants to stay here and slack awhile. Another part of me wants to go out and make a name for myself. Try harder this time. Find a great job as a reporter for the
San Jose Mercury, maybe. With my journalism degree, that would be the big time. Then find a nice place to live. All it takes is will, I tell myself. But I haven’t got around to applying at
The Mercury or anywhere else yet. Just when I steel myself to start filling out apps or type up a resume, I think of a reason to stall.
Having only a few bucks left on you makes you want to just blow it. At least that’s the way I am. Why not on a slab of greasy dead animal? Maybe I’ll think better if I have something in my gut.
3:15 a.m.:
There’s a guy standing next to me in the food line. He’s bedraggled, an old jean jacket covering his thin frame, a backpack slung over one shoulder, a New York Yankees baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes. I glance briefly at him, then look down, rummaging through my purse, counting out one-dollar bills. I hate these fast-food places, the unrelenting fluorescent light makes everyone look sad and tired. At 3 a.m. it’s even worse. Behind the counter, the employees move in slow motion; maybe they’re stoned. My head is buzzing uncomfortably now; my lips are tingling. Why the hell did I drink that last beer? Maybe for about five minutes I had that nice ocean-wave feeling where everything seems halfway okay, but reality is always too strong with me. Even in the midst of the ocean-wave feeling I’m usually thinking to myself "I’d better enjoy this" and so I never really can.
3:17 a.m.:
He’s asking me for a cigarette. The New York Yankees guy. I’m looking into his eyes, maybe they’re gray, maybe light green, I can’t tell under these unnatural lights. He has long eyelashes, a doe-eyed look. His eyes are asking me to not say "no." He looks like a lost kid, but he’s probably 25 or so. I feel kind of sorry for him.
I tell him I don’t have any cigarettes on me—they’re in my car—I’ll get him one after I get my burger. He cracks a small smile and walks slowly over to the exit. My mind quits buzzing and starts working.
Something tells me I should have said "no."
3:20 a.m.:
After I give the guy two Rainbow 100s and wish him luck, he says "I really appreciate it," and lights one up. Then: "If you don’t mind my asking, why are you out at this godforsaken hour of the morning?"
I don’t know what to say, so I tell him the truth--that I just got back from seeing a band called "Morbid Angel" in Santa Clara.
He’s silent for a moment, then says, "Hey, I had a little bad luck tonight and got my bike stolen. I’ll give you $20 for a ride to my place."
Now what? I scramble mentally. I figure maybe he thinks I’m a hooker, although what I’m wearing--jeans, a plain black sweatshirt, and a jean jacket--certainly aren’t hooking clothes.
"Where’s your place?" I ask, but all I can think of, I swear to god, is the $20. If I scrimp--buy generic peanut butter and bread and Ramen noodles--and don’t drive anywhere unless I absolutely have to--the library, the grocery store--that’s food and gas for maybe two weeks.
"Santa Teresa. It’s only about 20 minutes away."
Damn, a dollar a minute.
"Uh, you don’t have a knife or anything on you?" I ask, my eyes squinted at him a little suspiciously.
"No ma’am," he says, and opens his jacket up so to emphasize the point.
"Get in," I tell him.
3:25 a.m.:
I take Monterey Highway, headed for his place. I’m a tad nervous, wondering if he’ll suddenly pull a gun he had hidden in his sock, order me to drive off to some side road, rape me and then shoot me point blank in the head. I remember something I saw on TV about ramming your car into a light pole if you’re carjacked, take your chances the criminal will get scared and run. I mentally calculate how fast I want to be going if I have to ram my car into a pole, and hurriedly start buckling my seat belt.
Then the guy says, "Uh, I didn’t get your name." I hesitate. Telling someone your name opens a door. Maybe I don’t want him thinking I’m friendly. I just about tell him "It doesn’t matter" then I reconsider and tell him "Angela." He tells me his name is Mike, that he’s from the East Coast, he’s been in San Jose about a year, and spent this evening drinking and puking his guts out.
I realize he’s probably not going to kill me, being sick and hung over and all. I ask what he does for a living. He doesn’t answer for awhile, then says "I recycle stuff." I ask what he means, and he tells me he’s a dumpster diver; he picks through trash in dumpsters for resalable stuff. He tells me it’s a legitimate, perfectly legal "job" and growing in popularity. I hadn’t ever heard of it before.
I could have just dropped him off and scuttled home, but then he says he’s looking for a business partner. I say I’m between jobs at the moment, and could use a few bucks.
"Anyone can do it. If you want, I’ll show you how," he says, flipping his cigarette out the window. He sounds sincere. I want to believe him. I hadn’t made any close friends from my earlier attempt at living in San Jose. I thought maybe he could be one. I hear myself say "Sure."
Thus began my short tortured life as a "diver."
4 a.m.:
Actually, I’m going to be the driver. When we get to Mike’s apartment (your basic beige-carpeted place, but nicer than I expected for a trash picker) and have a beer, he tells me about losing his license (and car) a couple of months back, when he got his third D.U.I. As if to atone for this fault, he says he’ll do the dirty work of actually picking through the trash. All I have to do is drive, he says. All over Silicon Valley.
Mike shows me his stash of trash picking loot: scattered domino-sized chips on the living room carpet, boxes of keyboards and assorted cords and wires ranged along the wall, three monitors on his dining room table.
I hear myself ask if he wants a back rub. I don’t know why. Must have been the beer.
Somehow we end up in his bed. I feel like touching him, for some reason. All I want to do is rub his back. I figure he might return the favor, and we could just talk.
Instead, he wants more and gets really grabby. I end up crying to get him to leave me alone. I tell him I don’t want to mess around, I’m not the sleep-around type. He’s probably thinking to himself "Why the hell did you ask if I wanted a back rub then?" But I swear I didn’t realize he’d get so horny.
Mike quits grabbing at me after that. I feel too lousy to try to drive home so I ask if I can stay until morning. We can still try looking in dumpsters, I say.
I try to sleep for awhile but it’s no use, especially after I find a hammer under his pillow and ask "What’s this for?" and all he says is "in case of trouble." It makes me nervous but I don’t leave, I’m just too tired and bummed. By this time his apartment is getting lighter with the dawn and I see myself in the mirror. I look like hell, mascara running down my cheeks, my eyes bloodshot. My contacts are sticking to my eyelids when I blink. Mike even tells me, "Man you look like hell." I take it in the spirit it’s offered, as commiseration for my miserable state.
Most women would have left at the point where he got grabby, so he was probably starting to realize I was stupid about men. Or maybe just all-around stupid. I don’t mean
stupid: I got A’s in school. But I’d led a sheltered life, grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere for so long I developed no street smarts. I hated that about myself. I wanted a real life, full of strange adventures, not the cloistered kind of life most people lead, creating warm little cocoons for themselves, staying away from dangerous people and situations.
I feel a gallows bravado in my core, of a person who has come to terms with their own mortality, and who can therefore thumb their nose at staying safe. None of us are safe in this world anyway, I tell myself. What would it hurt to tempt fate, do something strange before I got old and regretted my wasted life?
7:45 a.m.:
We’re back on Monterey Highway, two hung over losers in search of gold—the precious element kind—which Mike assures me anyone can find. "It’s ripe for the picking," he gushes, "of course it takes a little work." At his apartment I’d seen a gallon jar full of tiny glittering gold pieces, pins and part of chips he’d carefully removed from computer boards with needle-nose pliers.
I was wondering exactly how much work it took, but I was soon to find out.
Driving to our first dumpster I notice clotted gray clouds overhead with a sickly ochre light trying to peek through. California would have beautiful skies, I think to myself, if they were just free of smog, telephone lines, and buildings. City life was starting to eat away at my psyche just as it had the first time, but I was determined to stay, a kernel of
stubbornness deep inside that wouldn’t let me go back to Kansas.
I notice Mike out of the corner of my eye, alternately biting his fingernails and drumming them on the car window. We’re both quiet, embarrassed after the episode in his bed. There’s this voice inside again, telling me I’m being naive, there’s something off about this Mike guy. But then I’d always thought there was something off about me too, so I watch myself get into this situation without the ability to walk away. What else was I going to do? Go find an office job that I knew I’d hate?
I tell Mike about an area north of Los Altos with lots of computer corporations, where I used to deliver
Metro newspapers during my former stay in San Jose.
"Let’s go there," he says.
8:05 a.m.:
The clouds clear, and a California sun beats down on my aching head. I’m hung over and don’t have my sunglasses. The light pierces through my eyes and into my cranium like a laser. I’m knee-deep in soggy computer paper, rotten banana peels, empty milk cartons, aluminum pop cans, broken glass bottles, old carpet, crumbled pieces of sheet rock. I look around at the parking lot, notice the sign Avantech and think how strange that three years before I had walked through its doors to deliver papers and now I was digging in its dumpster.
It’s a Saturday morning and no one’s around. This dumpster is the size of a single-wide trailer; there’s about two feet of stagnant water in the bottom, creating a kind of lagoon. It doesn’t look inviting. But this is my maiden voyage, and I’m determined to give it a go, ignoring Mike when he says I don’t have to get in the dumpster. I pull myself up the side rail, carefully lower myself into the depths and wade around, scooping out trash in soggy handfuls. Mike starts pulling up pieces of wet carpet to see what’s underneath, and I follow his lead.
Suddenly Mike pulls out a three-foot plastic tube full of computer chips. I look over to where he stands a few feet away; he’s nosing around like a bloodhound after a scent, pulling up more tubes.
"YES!" he whoops, "there’s GREAT stuff here!" Then we both start scrambling for tubes; both of us pull them up, one after another. My hand rakes against something sharp; a red rivulet of blood streams down my knuckles. Mike sees the blood and tells me to quit and let him dig, but no, I want to prove I’m in this as an equal. I keep digging and let the blood flow.
In fifteen minutes we dig up what Mike says is $400 worth of chips, which ends up to be more like $150, but when Mike sells the chips to a used computer shop called "Weird Stuff" and I pocket the $75 I feel kind of good. Fifteen minutes of digging through dirty water and a cut, swollen finger isn’t so bad a trade-off for that kind of money, I reason. To have such good luck our first time out was a sign we would make a good team. I push back the rational part of my mind that says I should be looking for a real career. I make a conscious decision to see where the day will take me.
If it Seems too Good to be True...
Feb. 28:
Mike was fairly cordial our first day together, but things have steadily deteriorated from there. He hates my driving. He’s moody. He does things like yell "TURN HERE!" when we’re already in the middle of an intersection, and he doesn’t say which direction to go, then gets irate that I can’t read his mind.
He’s in a bad mood again today. He isn’t talking. We usually don’t talk much anyway, except for him saying "Head over to Santa Clara" or "Pick me up tomorrow at 8 a.m." He never asks what I did the night before, or what I’m going to do when we get done picking for the day, the usual kinds of things you’d ask a person to pass the time. I don’t ask what he does on his off hours either. We’re always wary of each other. I know it’s because of that deal in his bed, but I avoid that topic like it’s a sack of rotten meat.
Heading south down I-280 one morning, I notice a section of road construction ahead, with those concrete dividers that turn a four-lane into a two-lane. I slow down and steer carefully, feeling Mike’s eyes trained to my side of the car.
"Watch it," he says, "You’re going too fast."
"No I’m not," I say.
"God damn, I said you’re going too fast. And you’re too close to that divider."
"I am not."
He’s silent for a minute. I keep up my speed of thirty. We tail a brown Datsun; an Isuzu pickup crowds me from behind.
All of a sudden Mike blows like he’s been waiting to do it all along.
"You crazy IDIOT! Can’t you fucking DRIVE? Jesus, you’re gonna get us both KILLED!"
I hadn’t put us in danger; there’s a two-foot span between my car and the concrete. I can’t believe he’s yelling like this. My brain scrambles for a retort; instead I panic at the sinking in my chest, like going under water for the last time with the inevitability of death the drowning victim feels.
I finally say "God, you drink too much caffeine," in what I hope is a nasty voice.
I was no stranger to rage, having grown up with a father whose fury often erupted with the intensity of a behemoth being slaughtered. Being the target of my father’s rage I got used to, but I didn’t expect to be the target of a guy I barely knew. Mike’s vitriol made me freeze up, go numb, like a paralyzed mouse in the face of the cobra.
March 6:
I already want to quit this dumpster diving thing. But I have $225 hidden away in my copy of
Wuthering Heights, all from computer chips and boards we’ve found in dumpsters. Last night my brother and I went out for steak and lobster, my treat. I like being able to do that. Today I bought four CDs and didn’t feel guilty about it. I’m getting addicted to the feel of cash in my hand every few days. We go diving every other day, and I don’t have many expenses, so the money is adding up. I’m saving most of it--$100 here, $50 there. I like watching it accumulate.
I tell myself I can hang in a little longer, get some money built up so I can move out of the dismal rehearsal studio, where losers shuffle around night and day, pounding away futilely at dreams of rock stardom, ending their evenings of practicing and drinking cheap beer by puking all over the toilets in the communal bathroom, the same toilets I am forced to use.
March 7
9 a.m.:
While loading my car trunk with scrap computer wire (seventy-five cents a pound) I clip the bone of my eye socket with the trunk lid. I experience the kind of pain where everything else just blanks out for about thirty seconds.
"God DAMN!" I yell.
Mike stands there, silent, like he’s smirking to himself at my pain, then says nonchalantly, "Watch out for yourself."
The cut bleeds for about twenty minutes and it still hurts like hell an hour later.
I’ll have a scar for life, I think to myself. For life.
2 p.m.:
I sit in my car, watch a slow rain falling. My eye still throbs. I’m parked right next to one of Silicon Valley’s finest dumpsters. I think it’s called Gen-Tech, or is it Compu-Tron? The names all sound alike; the people going in the buildings all look alike, yuppie guys with gray suits and ponytails hanging down their backs, yuppie women in red power suits with knee-length skirts. I get a feeling of constipation about the whole Silicon Valley world of technology.
I’ve already quit climbing into the dumpsters like I did at first. When Mike comments on this, I remind him the agreement was that I drive, not hunt through trash. He tells me I better get serious about trash picking because he quit his electronics classes so he could go diving full time. Man, he’s nuts. I have no intention of doing this every day.
I absently watch Mike as he climbs up and over the side of a dumpster, holding a flashlight in his mouth like a miniature beacon. He hoists himself up and over the side with a kind of dogged determination I’d admire if I didn’t dislike him so much.
We’ve been to three sites in the last hour and all we’ve got is one lousy computer board. At the last site, Mike was ordered to "get the hell out of the dumpster" by an overweight security guard.
I could look for a regular job again. I could go buy a nice suit, apply at a few places. Maybe try for an internship at the
Metro. I found out The Mercury News only hires reporters with three years experience, so that’s a dead end. It’s almost a relief, though, because I know that kind of job takes a shitload of energy, which life in the city sucks out of me like a vampire.
I realize I can’t quit this dumpster thing yet because then I’d be back to square one—no job, no money coming in. I dread being without plans when I wake up each morning—that feeling that the whole day is before you and you have to think of something to do. Although the possibilities are endless, you find yourself not wanting to do any of them.
March 9:
In a dumpster at Apple there’s two wizened-face Vietnamese, presumably husband and wife, looking up at me with furtive rheumy eyes. There’s a moment of recognition. They’re digging for pop cans and white recyclable paper. I say "Excuse me" and climb back down, strangely embarrassed. I feel a moment of superiority, that I’m hunting for computer parts, and they’re merely aluminum and paper scavengers.
The employees we see walking into and out of the high tech firms sometimes glance at Mike and I while we’re in a dumpster. Some of them quickly look away, as if we’re going to poison their eyesight. If Mike sees an employee looking our way, he waves and says "Hi," as friendly as he can. I guess he figures this diffuses some of the weirdness of the situation.
When I see someone looking our way, I crouch down. If I can’t see them, maybe they won’t see me.
March 16:
I tell Mike this afternoon that one of these days I’m going to drive off while he’s in a dumpster. He bristles and says "You probably would, wouldn’t you? Try it and you’ll be sorry." What a fucker. I meant it as a joke, but of course he didn’t take it that way. He pissed me off earlier by asking "Did you do a lot of acid in your past? Because you act like you’re not all there." Then a half-hour later he points out this woman skating on the sidewalk and says "Look at her. She’s beautiful. And I’ll bet she has a good heart." He may as well have told me "You’re ugly and evil."
The sick thing is, I let it go on. All for money. Capitalism. But this isn’t capitalism, this is cleaning up after the capitalists. We’re scavengers—vultures—subsisting on the carcasses of computers. Mike says it’s honorable to recycle; we’re helping save the environment. But I feel like I’m becoming a piece of trash myself, unredeemable, used up.
I’m starting to wish I could just disappear. Not die, exactly, just vanish to a place where I don’t have to earn money, where people treat you decently and where I could start over with a clean slate.
Sometimes I think my abusive father is in the car with me, laughing hoarsely and without mirth, as I imagined the devil would laugh, saying "I told you you’d have a hard row to hoe...now you see what I mean."
I remember something else, how he used to go through our trash at home, opening up plastic bags of bathroom trash, kitchen trash, picking through it slowly before dumping it into the burn barrels out in our backyard. Dad was probably going through some kitchen trash right now, rifling through the orange juice cans and moldy bread to find some important note he’d written to himself. He was probably muttering "god damn it" in long syllables because he couldn’t find it.
March 28:
I scared myself today. While Mike was hunting in one dumpster, I went into the dumpster next to it, but instead of finding computer boards, I found a half-eaten container of strawberry cream cheese, which I hid under my shirt, took back to the car, scooped out with my finger and ate. I didn’t care if it made me sick. Jesus. I wasn’t even hungry.
March 30:
Mike showed me some rare kindness today in buying me lunch and then jumping over a chain-link
fence to secure a garbage bag full of outdated potato chips from a dumpster at a Lays factory for me when I ask him to. In this semi-friendly state, I finally ask Mike something I’d been wondering all along—how could he afford his basic-but-decent apartment on dumpster diver wages? He didn’t have any other job. He gets quiet for a minute, exhales impatiently, and says "None of your business." I let it rest. Then an hour later he tells me out of the blue he gets disability checks for being diagnosed an alcoholic. I’m amazed that he discloses this. I start to understand him better, sort of. He tells me he’s going to AA meetings but I notice he always finds excuses not to go. He’s the first guy I ever knew who admitted doing it with a prostitute. He also tells me he once called his mom a cunt. This is especially repulsive, although it reminds me of the time I’d called my own mother a bitch.
I could overlook a lot of his faults because he was pretty good at making money. And today I almost start to like him. Almost. It’s when we start talking about our pasts. I tell him about my tyrant of a father.
"If you hate him so much, you ought to make a success out of yourself...that’s the best way to get even," he tells me.
"Easier said than done." I tighten my lips as I pull up to a dumpster.
Later that day he tells me a little about his family.
"My mom called last night," he begins slowly, like he’s feeling me out for responsiveness. "Yeah, anyway, she was crying, because she had pulled out some of my pictures from grade school." He’s quiet for a second or two, then: "Told me she was sorry she wasn’t a better mother."
I don’t say anything, and Mike is quiet too. We’re on the way to dropping him off at his place. He invites me up, says he’ll pay me to wash his dishes. I wonder if he’s just trying to get me inside for some company, maybe hoping we could try giving each other backrubs again. If that’s what he’s thinking, I’m not interested. But I couldn’t turn down the $10 so I go upstairs and wash the dishes. It’s just one sink full, and only one greasy skillet, so it doesn’t take long. Mike sits on the couch and stares at an infomercial for Slick 50. We don’t talk. When I’m done I tell him I’ll be back at 9 a.m. the next morning to take in the loot we’d found that day. "Why not 8 a.m.? Damn you’re lazy," Mike growls. "Nine’s early enough," I say. I add "you jerk" in my head as I look at him sitting there with a pained scowl on his face. Then I leave.
I resolve never again to let someone like Mike make me feel so shitty. But the further I get into trash picking with him, the harder it is to quit. It’s weird. When Mike calls the rehearsal studio and honks in his New York accent "You better get over here early tomorrow, we got a lot of picking to do," I jump like I’m electrified.
There are no Logical Conclusions
May 15:
During the three months we’ve been diving, I’ve made about $1600, which sounds pretty good until you stop and think. The money’s about the same as a half-time minimum-wage job. It kind of seems like more because it’s cash, I don’t pay taxes on it, and I get it every week or so. And I don’t work at it full time. We go out maybe twenty hours a week. This diving experience is as hellish and soul-deadening as any minimum-wage job, though. Besides dealing with Mike, the traffic is what really gets to me. The traffic jams make me want to ram into some shiny new Beamer just to hear the satisfying crunch of metal on metal.
Mike keeps saying, "If you stick to this long enough, I guarantee you’ll hit it big. I just heard about a guy who found a whole shitload of gold scrap in a dumpster. He cashed it in for $100,000."
Man, the California Gold Rush, 150 years later.
May 24:
Mike’s all excited. He says this is our chance: a dumpster he earmarks THE ONE is going to pay off big. Gold will be dumped, and lots of it, or so he claims, next Monday. A friend clued him in that the company is moving.
"If it’s really worth so much, why doesn’t one of the employees get hip to it and cash in?" I ask. I forget what Mike answers, something vague; he doesn’t pay attention to practical stuff, but is the kind of guy who treats life like a Monopoly game: if he has one bad roll, there’s always the next roll, and he truly believed he would win big someday. But his big dreams would be wasted. He would go out and get drunk, start a fight and get himself beat up. The last time this happened someone hit him with a wrench. Mike gave me fifteen bucks to take him to the hospital, so he could get forty stitches in his head.
So I could see through his thin veneer of hope, and while I kind of admired his ability to not let anything get him down for long, I still saw him for what he was: a poor sad fuck. Like me. Our kind always find each other.
May 28:
We’re all set to make the big score, at this high-tech firm on First Street. I start to get excited about it, just like Mike. Desperation will do that to you. I tell myself my lackluster life will be vindicated if I can just WIN for once.
He knows the dumpster will get filled at 3:30 p.m. tomorrow. That’s when we’ll be there. Waiting.
May 29
3 p.m.:
The dumpster Mike says is our ticket to freedom sits glowing in the sun before us, framed by my windshield. We haven’t yet discussed how we’d divide the spoils, but I assume it would still be fifty-fifty. I decide now’s not the time to bring it up. We have a half hour to wait until the big moment. I could sit and wait here for hours, but Mike’s getting antsy. Paranoid. He thinks a guard is looking at us. So what, I think. Yeah, my old car sticks out like a sore thumb in the BMW-flanked parking lot, but I see no reason to move. What we’re doing is legal, I remind him. He won’t listen. He tells me to pull out of the lot and drive across the street to a Burger King.
3:25 p.m.:
We pull back into the First Street lot. My stomach does a sick spin. One of those paneled station wagons, a beat-up looking one, is backed up to OUR dumpster, and in the slanted sunlight of a California afternoon a couple is loading what looks like sparkling gold chips. The man and woman are loading like their lives depended on it.
"Son of a bitch," Mike whispers, dumbfounded.
"Fuck," I answer.
We both just sit there.
May 30:
This is it for me, I can tell. Me and dumpster diving are over. Back there in the parking lot I had a revelation. I looked at the woman loading that station wagon. I looked real close. She was haggard, stringy hair hanging down. Her eyes were blank. She looked like a zombie. I didn’t want to look at her.
It strikes me that’s why those yuppies walking by the dumpsters, seeing me and Mike digging through their trash, had averted their eyes. Some things are just too strange to face. It was like the time my dog had killed a bird but it wasn’t quite dead yet, and the wing was still flapping rhythmically, pitifully. I couldn’t look at its last motions as a living thing. It hurt too much to see a freedom-loving creature die.
It didn’t matter if that woman had struck gold—and I don’t think she did; I’d just built it up so much in my mind that’s what I
thought I saw.
All the words I’d held down just to make a few bucks start rising in me. I light into Mike.
"I’m through working with you," I say, starting out calmly and slowly, then out of nowhere my voice enters a higher register and I’m yelling at him like he’d yelled at me. "Don’t call anymore. Don’t say anything about my driving anymore. You’re mad at the world because you’re a damn drunk. And I hope I NEVER meet anyone like you AGAIN. You HEAR me?"
Mike sits rigidly on his side of the worn-slick upholstered bench seat of my car. We’re both silent for the time it takes to repeat in my head what I’d just said to him about five times, reveling in it. Then I start peeling an orange.
"You were just using me the whole time, weren’t you?" he accuses.
"You want the truth?" I ask, "You’re right."
I feel a stab of remorse for saying it.
It was worse to face the fact that my life had been reduced to this level: use or be used.
Mike’s quiet. Then I hear a sniffle. He tries to cover it up, but I know he’s crying. Jesus, he’s a trip. He did everything he could to make me hate him and then got all weepy when it worked. He’d used me too, so he had no right to feel sorry for himself. Anyway, I figure he’s probably crying about all the other rotten stuff in his life. This episode is just an excuse to let it out. I try to take some of the sting out of the situation. I tell him in a sort-of contrite tone "This is a using kind of city, you know? It wasn’t intentional."
I think maybe Mike was crying because he realized what he was and what he wanted to be
and how wide the gulf was between the two.
June 5:
I gather my few belongings from the rehearsal studio, pack my Ventura, and take off without a goodbye to anyone except my brother. I have $500 in my wallet—the last of the trash picking money. I want to see some existential Arizona landscape. I’ll make a point of staying alone this whole trip. Simpler that way.
I’m not sure what I’m looking for anymore, but maybe that’s good. Remember that feeling you got as a kid when you saw the sun rise and you wished you could sit there and watch it forever, it was so round and pink and glowing, felt like a warm hand on your back, made you want to run in the grass and shout?
Maybe I’m leaving to find that.
Copyright ©
2003 Angela Havel
|
