Ode to My Garbagemen

On the lunacy of indignation

Living in close proximity to other human beings is a masterclass in tolerance. Not that coexisting with one another is merely a grim test of virtues, but it can certainly feel that way sometimes, especially in the summer when my next-door neighbor across the alley consumes her podcasts at dawn with the window open and no thought as to who else might now have to listen to her favorite incensed liberal commentators rage on before a man has even had a chance steel himself with a strong cup of coffee. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m a resplendently rainbow-hearted liberal myself, just not before the sun rises. Then again, my neighbor has to deal with our mushroom ceremonies, which, if stuff really gets going, can involve a buffalo or elk hide drum, cries of agony and anguish, sobbing, retching, and an un-dam-able river of roaring whitewater song, so I suppose we’re . . . even.

But I wonder if merely tolerating each other is to miss the point entirely. Could I experience coexisting with my neighbors as one continuous celebration? Could Tana and I celebrate every time our apartment fills with the skunky odors of the blaze-fest from our neighbor downstairs? Celebrate what? That we are able to smell such things at all. That we are alive. That we have an apartment. That we can play host for so many guests, including the smoke of this man’s loneliness and longing. The guy lives alone. He’s about my age. His daughter stays with him a couple nights a week. He works as a caretaker for an older disabled man. Last time he blazed, Tana asked him not to do so inside because the smell sneaks up the walls and inundates our apartment. He texted back, apologized, said he’s going through a hard time. I remember going through hard times alone, without Tana. She and I could celebrate, you know? That we have each other. The invisible stink of his loneliness could be a reminder. But indignation is a tough habit to kick.

Then there’s the goddamn rooster in the flock of chickens that the folks in the building behind us keep in the back alley. Why would you have a rooster in an urban area? You’re living around dozens of other people, maybe even hundreds, who are all trying to sleep, do you really need a rooster? I mean hens, sure. Hens are great. Hens lay eggs. They cluck. Whatever. But what’s a rooster give you? He gives you a long look in the mirror at four or five o’clock in the morning, shows you the part of yourself that would strangle another living being just so you can sleep a little more.

Before I moved in with Tana, she was living here alone, and one day someone left a note on the back door that said simply, “Please remove the rooster.” A strange, desperate cry for help. A few days later, the rooster was dead. The note-writer just couldn’t take it anymore. The chicken people went to the police. Didn’t take long for them to get another rooster. (Tana read this and wants me to clarify that she was not the one who killed the rooster).

Nothing like neighbors to really teach a man tolerance. But again, maybe it could be more than tolerance. Maybe I could somehow celebrate the rooster.

This morning at 4:30, I woke up to the dump truck, which happens two or three times a month. I gave equanimity the old college try. But that clanging and banging of metal. The plaintive perpetual beeping. And then inside: the cacophony of my indignation, the racket of my rage. Maybe not rage, but certainly whispers of Why do they have to do it this early, and Can’t they come back some other time, and Please just hurry up and get it done for christ’s sake, and Are you really still backing up, like, really? 

“Please remove the dump truck,” Tana mumbled in her sleep as I surrendered to my awakeness, got out of bed, and began to write this little story.

It all ought to be a wonder. And it is. It’s a wonder to me (when I remember to be enwondered) that I live this life in which a dump truck comes a few times a month to take away my garbage for me. It’s a wonder that I buy so many things that turn into trash. Bags of corn chips, for example. Corn chips are an absolute wonder.

Give me a minute to celebrate the wonder of corn chips, okay? Consider the corn chip. The high technology of it. The futuristic freakishness of it. The impossibility of it.

First, you gotta grow corn. For that, you need seeds. Think of the ancient baton race of that epic endeavor, when humans first learned to cultivate corn, saved the seeds, planted them again and again for ten thousand years or more, traveling across the face of the earth until the 21st century rolls around and you pop into existence, hungry for corn chips, providing the demand for the corn farmers of today to plant the seeds they’ve inherited. This is all quite remarkable.

But then what? The seeds grow into corn. That is a wonder in itself. The corn is harvested by miraculous machines whose oil you couldn’t change if your life depended on it. That’s amazing. The corn is transported by more miraculous machines that then travel over highways which are also miracles. Think about what a highway is. You could not make a highway any more than you could make the Grand Canyon, or a corn chip. The corn finds its way into a factory where god-only-knows-how it is turned into many millions of chips, or is it billions, because god-also-knows I am obsessed with corn chips and surely I’m not the only one and may said god please forbid that any of us should ever have to go more than a half-day or so without our precious corn chips. That salty crunch! Give me a grapefruit seltzer with a handful of corn chips, and I’ll show you what a holy communion looks like.

But I forget how holy it is. I take the miracle for granted. I fail to recognize the body of christ in the corn chip, the blood of christ in the seltzer. The christ in the men outside, taking away my miraculous refuse. I take communion every day, and the miracle is lost on me, and I munch and slurp and rise indignant when I am awakened before dawn by a dump truck.

A practice in tolerance? Is that really the best I can muster? How about a goddamn jubilee, an uninterrupted, unceasing, balls-to-the-wall exaltation of every breath, every corn chip, every rooster, every dump truck, every man and woman who have agreed to spend significant portions of their lives dedicated to the task of cleaning up the messes I make.

It’s all a wonder. And yet, I mutter darkly in the dawn. These garbagemen. These goddamn garbagemen.

“Do garbagemen refer to themselves as garbagemen?” I said aloud in bed as they wiped me clean and fastened a fresh diaper around my ungrateful ass. “Sanitation employees,” Tana said in her sleep. “Or maybe waste disposal technicians?” I said. 

It’s a wonder, that we are so very needy, and so very provided for, and so very upset when the rooster crows or the traffic slows or the bank teller is late for our appointment. It’s a wonder, that in the midst of our unfathomable interdependence, we commit the crimes we do each other, in the dark thought and the dark word and the dark deed. It’s a wonder, what I do to myself when I forget to wonder.

I imagine they rose from their own beds way before dawn. They left their wives still slumbering beside them, or maybe they live alone and maybe they got high last night because they’re lonely. They probably didn’t have time to shave, haven’t had time to shave in weeks between working full-time for the city, taking care of the kids, the house, the dogs, or just surviving their depression. We all have something that keeps us from shaving. So they woke up. They didn’t shave. They poured themselves some coffee. And then what, they drove out into the dark of the night, into the darkness of the indignation they would soon incite in the people they woke up early to serve, and set about the holy work of taking care of us all.

The etymology of the word “dignity” means “the state of being worthy.” Indignation is “to regard as unworthy.” Maybe the way it works is that I lose my own dignity when I succumb to indignation, when I regard anyone or anything as unworthy of my love. We are all in this thing together after all, banging the drums of our respective ceremonies, our roosters crowing, our podcasts blaring, the smoke of our many sorrows drifting into the lives of the people we love and the people we try to pretend don’t exist right there next to us, below us, above us, behind us, all around us. Turns out we’re surrounded. Turns out we need each other. Maybe that’s the vulnerable core of my indignation: the realization that I am utterly dependent on and beholden to my numberless neighbors. It rankles the myth of independence, the delusion of self-reliance.

I imagine them now, the garbagemen, the magical trash-disappearing gods that they are to me, the diaper-changing uncles. They are no saints. They have thought terrible things, as I, too, have thought, and they’ve done terrible things, as I, too, have done, as we all have to do every day in this society, this trash heap, this wondrous assemblage of miracles. I thank the miracle of them in this moment of remembering, and I thank the miracle of you. May we all remember, as I try to remember now, the worthiness of all things, every rooster, every human, even the indignities of our forgetting.