My experience of life is one that few will ever know. I spend my days surrounded by garbage. In twenty years, I’ve hauled nearly seventy thousand tons of trash, and this fact cannot help but shape the man I am today. The looks I get along my route show me that people sometimes mistake me for the trash I handle. But the way I see it, my job is of great consequence. I’m a garbageman. Day after day, I heave and haul the detritus of the most polluting civilization in human history. My fellow garbagemen and I scrub clean the stains of our consumer society. Our work behind the scenes keeps the whole edifice from crumbling down, at least for now.
The world of garbage is a Wild West, and that’s exactly what I love about it. I love straddling the fine line between dirty and clean. I love the joyful chaos of garbagemen, our anarchic spirit and vague desperation. I could justify this by telling you that if I were to choose between the squabbles and revenge fantasies of my coworkers and the lawyered-up criminality of transnational waste disposal corporations, I know where my sympathies lie . . . I could make arguments about the impunity of the rich and the hypocrisy of the middle classes . . . But the truth is more complex.
I love the chaos of the garbage truck for its own sake. It gives me a space of freedom I can’t find anywhere else. Offer me this deal and I’m all in, without equivocation or qualification. So when corporations and governments come along with plans to regulate and organize this chaos, it does nothing for me. Is it necessary? Maybe. But I’d prefer not to.
It seems eminently reasonable to me to maintain a gray area, one where those who struggle to find their place in society can form a community. Try to conceive of it as a recycling system for “human waste.” Call it social ecology, or reintegration in society. You could think in terms of solidarity among outcasts, a miniature society of people unfit for mainstream consumption, a self-management scheme for deviance, a universal brotherhood of trash. I call it me and my garbageman buddies.
Even with the best of intentions, they can’t fathom why anyone in their right mind could possibly want to be a garbageman. Trust me, it’s perfectly possible to do this job because you want to. Many of us do.
If you told me I was going to die tomorrow, I’d go out for one final run on the back of a truck, without a second thought. I’d go right back where I belong.
