Stephen Dixon - Garbage

“Really, it’s not the money. I’m bushed, six hours straight on the streets, I have to sit and be quiet and eat.”

“But you can see what kind of shape. I got hit. Long ago but haven’t paid much attention to it. I think I could be dying with a brain clot for all I know.”

“You’re not dying, it’s just all of a sudden you’re scared you are. You’ll be fine. There are plenty of available cabs. I’ll go some other place for my break and see you another day. Lots of luck to you, friend.”

He leaves and I lock up and call a cab and go to the emergency section of the hospital. I see a doctor and after some neurological nose-touching and barefoot walking she says I have the headachy remains of a concussion and a slight infection and gives me a prescription for it, repatches me with a small bandage and that’s that. “Stay off your feet for a week and don’t take any alcohol with your pills and you’ll live.”

“I have to work.”

“Then work less, nothing fatiguing, but you’re in no danger and practically healed.”

I get the prescription filled, take a couple of pills, have a soup at a shop and go back to the bar. I feel relieved and even stronger now and my headache’s almost gone. I even look better, looking in the bar mirror: at least the hat when I wear it outside covers all the bandages now and doesn’t make me look so dumb anymore. And without the hat my whole forehead and top of my hairline now shows and I can comb some of the hair over the patch, though being thin and wavy it never stays and I was warned not to wet my hair and slick it back as the patch and tape have to stay dry.

That night I unidentify all my garbage, stick it in several trash bags and tell my customers before I close that the next drink or a grilled cheese sandwich is free if they take a bag each with them when they leave and drop it only where there are other trash bags and cans legally placed. A few customers take me up on it and I put the rest of the bags and cartons of garbage in the basement where I already have a stack of them.

Morning following the third night I do this and when I’m just about getting rid of all my garbage this way, I find five big trash bags in front of my bar and under my door a summons for leaving these bags on the street overnight. I didn’t think I could get away with getting rid of my garbage forever like this but I hoped I could till I thought of a longer-lasting plan. I look in the bags and see none of them are mine. The name of the inspector I know is on the summons, as it wasn’t on the last one I got, and I phone him, he’s not in and much later in the day he calls me back.

“Mr. Fleet?”

“Mr. Fleet? Shaney. That garbage you gave me a summons for, Dolph, isn’t mine. Some group, and I know whose, put the bags there just to intimidate me more than they’ve done for the last couple of months.”

“You read the papers?”

“When I’ve time.”

“If you read it every day you’d know my reason for not skipping you over this morning, or at least before I spoke to you about it, and also why I have to get tough with your sidewalk snow. There’s been charges, maybe some that are founded also, besides hidden-camera photos showing corruption going right to the top of our department. That’s why everybody has to do his extra effort to prove it’s not true and even no small spotlight falls on him or his brass, understand?”

“All I’m saying is that garbage wasn’t mine. No corruption, no payoffs, none of those.”

“Okay. Say I’m talking as though I never knew you, why should my section assume it wasn’t your garbage in front of your bar when it was clearly in front of your bar and garbage?”

“Because I looked in those bags I got a summons for. It’s not bar trash. No twenty squeezed lemons and limes or long sandwich bread bags or empty gallon salad oil cans or a thousand cigarette butts and maraschino cherry stems. That was mostly household junk, old disposable stuff, paper diapers, breakfast cereal boxes, cat crap and banana scraps and used toothpaste tubes. But no envelopes and such identifying it as mine. One bag was even full of things that had to come from a drugstore, so it’s plain someone put it in front of my bar from there.”

“The drugstore bag I can probably get the drugstore for, as that one really shouldn’t be in front of your bar. But someone else’s envelope could’ve been disposed at your bar and diapers changed when the customer and her baby were there, so could still be part of your trash.”

“And the cat crap?”

“You can distinguish between cat crap and a kid’s?”

“They stink differently.”

“Listen. You know bar garbage and I know all garbage and when a cat and kid eat milk and meat they both stink the same. And what bar doesn’t have a cat?”

“Mine because the city health law says I can’t have loose pets lying around. But also, who’d bring in a big empty box of laundry detergent just to stick in my trash?”

“Who’s to say? People are forgetful and might’ve forgotten on their way to your place to drop it in a street can like they intended and only realized when they got to your bar that they still had hold of it. That’s happened to me, it hasn’t to you? I’m not saying it’s absolutely so in this particular case, but you want whys and whatfors and I can give you all of them and some. But keep the drugstore trash there and a man will come by to pick it up.”

“No, I know the druggist and he’s a nice guy and sometimes customer and I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

“Either you’re a great storyteller or you’re showing yourself as this over-holy martyr, but if not the drugstore then what do you want from me? For one thing, I can’t do you any more favors, even tiny inconsequential ones which for the record was all they were, for things now are too hot. For a second thing, I might’ve just slit my throat out with all that talk now about favors and things being hot and inconsequential, because a colleague here known for her eyes said she saw some of our phones being bugged by the special anticorruption force. For I hope a final thing, if garbage is in front of your bar when it shouldn’t be, then until the current scandal’s over, it’s your garbage and only yours. I can’t be expected to inspect every trash bag to see whose it is.”

“What should I do then — stay awake every night in my place to see that no one dumps garbage in front?”

“Tell me, why would they?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Come on. Maybe with all my garbage knowledge I can help and even the anticorruptors bugging this phone if they are — why would they?”

“Okay. After hollering till I’m hoarse about it I kept quiet because I thought they’d go away, but it’s obvious they won’t. You see, for years I had the same carter. You know me so you know never a garbage or sidewalk violation from you guys except maybe a rare mistake that’s one, but anyway now the old carter won’t cart. A new carter wanted to and for all I know frightened the old one into not carting for me anymore. But now the new carter which wanted to cart less trash for more money, won’t. They also I think think I’m going to start off like a snowball a whole slew of small stores not to throw in with them too.”

“This new carter’s Stovin’s?”

“You heard what they’ve been doing to these neighborhood stores?”

“I only know them because they’re the only new carter in your area, so two and two makes sense. We’ve heard no complaints about them.”

“People are scared. I am too in a way but I don’t want to commit business suicide, because this bar’s my life.”

“Storeowners haven’t even complained that they’re scared. No sign of coercion in any way do I get and I speak to them every day.”