"Post-college graduation blues, back home in the suburbs at the parents' homestead sharing a bunk bed with my little brother, working temp jobs because of a reluctance to join the magazine journalism world and a love of Bob Barker and Price is Right.”
One month after I graduated from Ohio University, CBS temporary services called me up and offered me the illustrious chance to pick up trash at U.S. Express, a trucker hub located off a major highway. I initially balked at the trash pickin' offer and the $8/hr because cleaning up trucker filth didn' t seem like a sanitary idea, but common sense and a dwindling bank account led me to say, I'll do it!”
I arrived on time at 8 a.m. on a sunny Tuesday, hangover in tow due to yesterday' s personal birthday celebrations. I checked into the office with Charlie, my trash supervisor, who shook my hand in the GI-Joe “I' m a fuckin' man” kung fu grip and looked me over. Charlie wasn' t one for words, but he apparently approved of my tattered jeans and “I <heart> Pepsi” t-shirt because he grunted, handed me a wad of black plastic bags and wordlessly led me outside.
“This,” he emoted, taking pause for dramatic effect as he waved his hand across the hundreds of gleaming red trucks parked in rows, allowing me to soak in the automotive glory that are trucks, “is your job. Clean up all the trash under the trucks, near the trucks, next to the trucks and anywhere around where you think trucks may have been. I' ll check in with you in a couple hours.”
I nodded, unable to vocalize thanks to a vodka-influenced hangover, and headed off to pick up mo' betta trash.
With the early morning sun bleating down on me, I walked to the first truck. Let me mention that I wasn' t handed gloves and I was expected to be captain fuckin' garbage with nary a sanitary scrap of sanitary rubber. This was nothing new at temp jobs.
Several years go I had the pleasure of cleaning a department store with high-powered chemicals and my bare hands. The boss at that job, a meaty woman of 40 with a pockmarked face, handed us rags and a box of chemicals labeled “CLEANENG.” For three days I scrubbed and buffed the displays of designer clothes, which I' d never afford due to a paltry salary cleaning up said displays. I ignored my sore, red hands and the incessant itching because I thought I had wussy hands tenderized by too much schooling.
It wasn' t until the last day when I found my thinking cap and read the bottles clearly labeled HAZARD in bold, red letters, with the accompanying warning “wear gloves when handling this product because it may cause skin irritation.” I kindly requested gloves for the last four hours of my departmental cleaning duties.
But Charlie was lost in the land of trucking for several hours and my hangover-addled mind had forgotten to ask when given the chance, so I began my garbage man impression.
I bent down under the first truck and picked up a few candy wrappers and a flattened Mountain Dew can, depositing them into my bag. “This isn' t so bad,” I thought. I didn' t have to deal with annoying bosses that think they are superior because they have full-time jobs and you are but a measly temp worker and my hangover could vamoose quietly.
I steadily worked for the next couple hours, bending and standing bending and standing to pick up the assorted menagerie of trash from road life: cigarette packs, fast food wrappers and oodles of styrofoam coffee cups to keep truckers awake on those long hauls. In other words, nothing too dirty. Who needed steenkin' gloves? Charlie came and went, tossing me encouragement about my prowess for trash. I smiled and went on my merry way.
Things turned so horribly, awfully wrong that I longed for the days of hazardous chemicals and no gloves. The events of the next several hours are indelibly burned into my mind. Allow me to begin.
After an early morning of candy wrappers, I began to encounter capped off drink bottles filled with a yellowish liquid. I shoved a couple in my trash bags before curiosity tackled me. I unscrewed a particularly filled bottle and (gag) sniffed. I was smacked with a whiff of pungent, festering urine.
It seems that truckers, when stuck on a haul that doesn' t allow for pee breaks, simply chug a lug a bottle of their favorite beverage, wait for their bodies to process the drink, piss it back into the gaping hole of the container and then wait until the final destination is reached whereupon the truckers casually toss the piss bottles under their rigs where unsuspecting shmucks forced to work temp jobs just to save enough money to move away from home pick up the bottles and sometimes smell them because it' s pretty fucking boring to pick up trash all day.
It didn' t bother me that the truckers took a leak in the bottles. Hell, most guys have thought about it at one time, only to be scared off by the dreaded spillage possibility. I applaud the truckers for their aim while cruisin' in an 18-wheeler. What irked my temporarily employed ass was that I had to pick up their bathroom break with my bare hands. And I couldn' t complain because I was but a temp and easily replaced if I opened my mouth.
I was pissed.
It got worse.
At least my mind forgot the hangover.
After my run in with number 1, I met up with number 2. Underneath a rig I bent down to pick up crumpled newspapers. It smelled like shit below the truck, but I chalked it up to leaky oils and fluids. After all, I' d never been underneath a truck before that day and any number of smells could lurk below. I grabbed the papers and yanked them out.
Whew doggie! The smell donkey-punched my senses. The only way to describe the scent is diarrhea left to bake in the sun for days. I wanted nothing to do with what lay inside the papers, but morbid curiosity, much like the macabre fascination one has when watching the ambulance cart away the victims of a particularly bloody car wreck, tickled me well.
Pinching my nose with left hand, I gingerly opened the papers with my right hand. What met me were the remains of a particularly runny, messy and hellacious shit. Where the fuck were gloves when you needed them? I nearly retched, but had enough sense to rapidly close the poopy papers and toss them into my trash sack, taking care not to get shit on my fingers. The smell never leaves. Unfortunately, I was too hasty with my disposal because a couple wadded blue tissues that must' ve been trapped between non-shat on sheets (no signs of brown) fell out. I cringed.
What magical mystery lay inside those tissues? Remains of snot, an M&M that traveled down the wrong hatch, nothing? Whatever it was couldn' t have been as bad as messy bowel movements. I know, I know, I should' ve just quit right there and walked straight to my car and motored on home, far away from poop and piss land, but I have this silly thing known as a work ethic which often forces me to work absolutely deplorable jobs with a grin and bear it countenance.
In high school I gleefully cleaned out the congealed grease from Burger King' s deep fryers and gladly stuck my hand into the steaming mouth of Ponderosa' s dish washing machine to retrieve loose plates and chicken bones, often resulting in burns, scars and cuts. Chicks may dig scars, but they don' t dig scars you get from Burger King.
Braving deeper emotional scars, I stooped down to take a gander at the tissues. Adjusting my glasses, I looked nice and hard and this is where the sex part comes in. Condom wrappers with used condoms peeked through the tissue' s ruffles. Some trucker, tired of pulling off on his hog as someone talked dirty to him on the CB, must' ve picked up a lovely lady of the night and tried to show her why truckers call themselves “kings of the road.” Or maybe because every other receptacle and paper product in the cab was filled with various forms of excrement, he ripped open a condom, slipped it on and jerked it real good right into the reservoir tip to the soothing sounds of trucker chatter so he wouldn' t have another mess to clean up.
Fuck that. That trucker, that sick motherfucker, took a shit in the same cab he fucked someone (or himself) and then put the cum-filled condom in between sheets of shit-covered newspaper. I took no pleasure in his. What type of mentality allows someone to do that with a clean conscience? What type of mentality allows someone to pick up that newspaper and examine it along with the love tissues? A mentality paid $8/hr or $2 for every urine bottle. I cleared my mind with thoughts of me frolicking with the $64 I' d have at the day' s end and went back to work.
Kicking the tissues back under the truck I went on my trash picking way,
$64 floating through my head, cleaning up suspiciously filled hydraulic
fluid containers and mysterious paper piles sans curiosity, exacting revenge
all the while by pissing nice and hard on the trucks' chrome door handles.
When 4 p.m. struck I sped home like Speed Racer and showered until the hot
water ran cold.
(Spring 2006)