Hauling Secrets

The other day I saw this little display someone had made on the counter at the scrapyard.  I thought it was an amusing response to Anystate’s recent ban on the practice of using bait to attract deer.

Trying not to be seen, since scrapyard and landfill operators usually don’t allow photographs of their operations, I took out my phone as I journeyed up the side of the landfill on a nice sunny day and captured these shots:

Sorry, that’s my finger in the last one.  From the top of this mountain of trash, on a clear day, you can see the next city 40 miles away.

The other day, Handyman and I had a no-show at this client’s house and no one answered any of the phone numbers we had, so we left a note on the front door (as we tend to do, saying “Sorry we missed you, call ###-#### if you still need your junk removed” or something like that) and headed to our next job.  Just before we got back on the freeway, the client finally called and told us we had the wrong address.  So we turned back around and headed back to where we just were.  The place where we turned around was exactly where we had gotten off the freeway to begin our route to the client’s house, and we got stopped by the first light we came to in exactly the same position in the left-turn lane.  As we crept to a halt, I said “Whoa, deja vu.” Though stupid, this was supposed to be somewhat of a joke, since it was obvious that we had just been there fifteen minutes earlier.  But it was also intended simply to note the coincidence of our being stopped at the same exact place as before.  Handyman gave an obligatory chuckle.  Then, for a moment, we imagined out loud a sort of Groundhog-Day like scenario where we had to relive the same moment again and again.  The light turned green, and as we rounded out the turn, a new game was born.

Credit goes to Handyman for inventing this magical game.  See, there was this bowling alley just past the light where we’d stopped.  The first time around, Handyman had noticed the new paint job and said “Whoa, they painted the bowling alley!”  I noticed that some of the signage was still orange and black, the official colors of the local High School.  “Used to be school colors?” I asked.  “Yep,” Handyman replied, “Town pride or whatever.”

Well, the second time around, Mark noticed the bowling alley again. As a joke, after our deja-vu conversation, he said: “Whoa, they painted the bowling alley!”  I waited for a second, then responded: “Used to be official school colors?”  Another pause, then he: “Yep. Town pride or whatever.”

The rest of the way down the road, we did an almost word-for-word re-enactment of our first trip from the stop light to the client’s house.  Our memories were aided by the successive reappearance on the side of the road of each of the landmarks that sparked our original conversations: the bowling alley, a car dealership, an overpass.  At first it was amusing.  Then hilarious.  Then it got creepy. Handyman laughed that half-fake kind of laugh that serves to terminate a joke, as if to say, “okay, that joke was funny, but now it’s gotten awkward and I don’t want to continue with it”.  But I wasn’t about to let such an interesting experiment end.  And it was a fun test of our memories to see if we could keep it going all the way back to the client’s street.  So I pushed it further, and Handyman responded with impressive powers of recollection.

And what was interesting about this game was inextricable from its creepiness, awkwardness.  That sense of being removed from the self you were fifteen minutes ago and having to act out what only then were genuine thoughts, feelings, conversations.  Now they seemed contrived, foreign, robotic.  The person who’d said the things I’d said seemed more than fifteen minutes less experienced than I was now.  That little bit of distance was enough to observe the silly pragmatics of our conversations, the turn-taking and the starts and stops, and make it seem as if the first time around was just as much a charade as the second.  What we had thought were a few real moments of our lives, now seemed empty and formulaic, and not at all how we’d remembered. And even after the short passing of only fifteen minutes, no true reliving could ever occur. We were already lifetimes away from the persons we used to be. To feel it was a kind of ecstasy, a being out-of-body.  This game was strange and terrible, and I couldn’t resist it.

Or at least that’s how I felt, if only for a fifteen minutes, before we arrived at the house and had to get out of the truck to greet the waiting client and do our job.  Thanks, Handyman, for summoning the spirit of my old gaming partner The Edge and playing along for such a long time.

Handyman and I loaded a truck full of car seats from a testing agency’s storage unit and came across this little crash-test-dummy child:

The creepy thing is that they make real crash-test-dummies to be about the same weight as a normal person would be, so that when I picked this one up, it felt like I was picking up a real boy.  A real boy in two pieces.

Yes, that is - was - a large bag full of shit, and yes, that is my tire tread that went right through the middle of it.  How did so much shit get stuffed into a shopping bag?  Your guess is as good as mine.
Sometimes I think I should just never look down towards the floor at the MRF.  I don’t want to know what’s there.  Thenagain, I don’t want to step in it either.

So we were clearing out the house of a man who had collected vinyl.  Instead of using shelves, the guy had stacked records on top of each other in six-foot-high piles along every wall in just about every room. There must have been a few thousand records.  The collection gravitated heavily towards folk, bluegrass, and, somewhat unusually, Hawaiian.  Think of every novelty “Hawaiian” record you’ve ever seen in the dollar bin at the record store - this guy had them all.  I noticed in some of the pictures on the walls a woman - probably his wife - who looked Hawaiian. All of the Hawaiian records were well-worn, like they’d been played many times.  All except for one, which was in pristine condition:

The guy must have seen “Hawaiian” in the title, bought it on a whim, listened to it once, realized it was rap, thrown it into a pile and never looked at it again.  Here’s a detail of the record’s back cover:

Had he looked at it again, he might have noticed that the figure crouching in back there is none other than a young (about 19 years old) Shawn Carter, aka Jay-Z.  The guy in front is Jay-Z’s “mentor” Jaz.  Sound confusing?  It is.  Sound like the perfect setup for a saucy hip-hop feud?  Yes, it’s that too.

I haven’t been able to confirm this, but someone told me that this record is actually Jay-Z’s first time ever on wax. Wikipedia has the rest, much of which is merely “reported” or “claimed” or “known” or simply “stated” to be true: Jaz (also known as Big Jaz and Jaz-O) discovered young Shawn Carter, brought him in as a sidekick, let him do background stuff and then some verses on some of his songs, and then faded into obscurity.  His young protege went on to become what even some people besides Jay-Z himself call the “greatest MC alive”.

And somewhere in there, the relationship soured, to the point that each rapper has made a point to “diss” the other on many of their recordings.  Apparently it has sweetened enough that the two have joined each other on a few recordings, but as of November 18th, 2008, it’s back to sour.  The relationship has even helped fuel another more well-known hip-hop fued by being an important subject in Nas’s diss track “Ether“.

Yet look how comfortable they are with each other as Jay-Z mysteriously parachutes into the background of the set in the video for “Hawaiian Sophie”, which has elicited many vituperative comments, one of my favorites being: “A black man should never wear a Hawaiin shirt.  Period.”

And I couldn’t resist sharing another one with you, which harkens back to those days in the late 80s-early 90s when dignified Afrocentrism was the cool thing to do in hip-hop, when everyone was “Nubian” and Salt-N-Pepa could still utter “No we ain’t tryin to be sexy!” and be taken somewhat seriously.

But I digress.  The point here is, well, the point is…sometimes it’s nice to be distracted from the point.  Normal experience and human traffic patterns have a way of censoring what kinds of objects (not to mention people, perspectives, ideas, etc.) we come into contact with. Haulers have constant access to a steady stream - steady waste stream - of objects from all eras of history and strata of society.  And if you have any curiosity, some of these objects require explanation.  Which is dangerous if you have a point to make, or more ‘important’ work to do, because these objects can suck you in and make you spend an evening researching obscure hip-hop feuds.  I could be writing something more useful or relevant right now.  But sometimes some hip-hop needle in a haystack of folk and bluegrass just begs to be examined, and I get to remind myself that the world is full of little digressions, objects with rich backstories just waiting to be discovered.

Sunday, June 8, 1980
Dear Lee Chin,
Sorry I haven’t written in a while.  But I’m writing now, so there.  Tomorrow Linda, Billy, James and I are going to see Genesis at the Ampitheater.  I can’t wait.  That’s gonna be so fun!  I haven’t seen Jeff [the “foxy” gymnastics coach from Dear Lee Chin #5] in a while.  We have so many coaches now, I guess they don’t need him so much any more.  We have this one new coach from Othertown, and I guess he’s pretty nice I mean I like him but he’s so gay looking.  He’s got an ass like a woman and he always wears his pants really tight and he’s got volcanic acne.  His name is Jeff.  Speaking of volcanoes, last night the sunset was so pretty.  It was like these purple clouds set against a dark pink sky and it was so pretty.  The sky was so pink that when I looked out my window the street looked pink.  Then I went out to look at it.  I wish I was an artist or a poet or something so I could have captured it (I know that sounds corny).  I at least wish I had a camera or something.  It was so beautiful!  Springfield was really a blast.  I danced a slow dance with Chris.  He’s a doll.  I don’t know why, but George Harrison reminds me of him.  Any road up I’ll write again later.
Till then, Mary

Oh, if only young Mary knew that she is a poet.  The poet who gave us the term “any road” (and the new variation “any road up”).  A poet still being read today.  And at the bottom of the page, we see that she is an artist, too, as she’s drawn some smoke rising and lava pouring from the top of one of the mountains in the diary page’s decorative borders and labeled it “Mt. St. Hellen”.  (Speaking of volcanoes.)

Just below that entry the diary continues:

Dear Lee Chin,
I decided to write again though why I don’t know why, I really don’t have anything to write.  Martha and I have a debate due on Friday and we’ve got shit now, I know we’ll never get it done.  We shoulda worked on it today but I forgot.  I’m so pissed!  Any road, seein’ as how I have nothing to say, I reckon I’ll by mosyin’ on.  Catch y’all later!  (That reminds me of in Springfield Cynthia was always saying “y’all”.  I guess she’s always said it but I never noticed, any way it bugs the shit out of me!)
Mary!!!!!!!!!!!!

Keep writing, Mary.  Your nothing is better than a lot of people’s somethings.

So I turned 30 the other day.  I hauled all day.  A long, tiring day.

Around the middle of the day, I pulled up to the little shed at the Recycle Station where people hauling recyclables pay their fees and fill out paperwork.  I did what I sometimes do when no one is waiting in line behind me and I cut my engine to relax for a minute and talk to the person in the shed.  That way the person inside doesn’t have to smell my truck’s diesel fumes, and we can hear each other better.  The way my work day is (when we’re not in a mad rush) you really get to treasure these little interactions with familiar faces, even if it’s just a minute of small talk. Both of us are doing what amounts to customer service all day, and when you see someone you know, you can have a little break from being ‘on’ all the time.

Most of the time, and this time, the person working the shed is Shirley.  Even though she’s been working there longer than anyone, she always has some kind of trouble with the cash machine.  It’s cute. This time was no exception.  So as she fumbles with the machine, apologizing, I decide to share with her that I’m turning thirty today.  She stops what she’s doing to turn to me and say “Congratulations” in a way that doesn’t seem more significant than anyone else registering my big two-number-change that day.  “Thanks,” I say, putting my fists up in a little mock celebration: “I made it!”

She asks me why I’m working on my birthday and I say that I don’t really care enough to think to take the day off ahead of time.  As we exchange the rest of the usual chit-chat, she laboriously punches keys on the machine and finally gets it to print out a receipt for me to sign.  “Sorry,” she says as she hands it to me, rubbing her glazed-over eyes.  “It’s one of those mornings.”

So I sign the receipt and go on my way, and it’s only after I go through the warehouse and finish dropping off my stuff that I realize what a profound mistake I’ve just made talking to Shirley.  I’d completely forgotten what I’d heard a few months earlier - that Shirley’s son had recently committed suicide.

He was about to turn 30.  I realize now that Shirley might have been forcing back tears when she rubbed her eyes, that it wasn’t just the usual fumbling that had slowed her down just then.

So I pull the truck back around, get out, and walk up to the window of the shed.  Shirley’s inside, sitting, smoking a cigarette.

“I’m an asshole” is all I can think to offer.  She returns me a dazed look.  “Your son,” I clarify.  She puts out the cigarette and comes to the window. I stammer some kind of apology about saying “I made it” when not everyone does, while she listens and shakes her head, telling me that it’s okay.  After a minute we’re both crying.  Then she takes both my hands, squeezes them, leans forward and says, “Let me tell you something.  You have so much ahead of you.”

That’s probably what she didn’t have a chance to tell her son.

I didn’t really know what to say except “Thank you.”  She squeezed my hands again and thanked me back, and we froze there for a second until a truck pulled up to the shed and interrupted our moment.  We pulled away from each other and I got back into my truck and went on my way.

And now every time I pull up to the Recycle shed, the small talk never seems quite as small as it used to.

I just realized two things:

1. I skipped Pornface #11.
2. Pornface #13 was posted almost a year ago.