Trash War

“Hey Bill, looking good. Retirement treating you well?”

“Very well, my friend,” he said, shaking my hand as we sat down to lunch. “I’m glad you could get away. Things aren’t too crazy at the office?”

“Crazy? It’s normal crazy, you know, the usual crisis mode. Same old same old. Hasn’t changed a bit since you ditched us for the peaceful life.”

“Peaceful? I’m not too sure.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it’s funny how quickly things change when you retire. One day you’re making million dollar decisions, the next day your biggest decision is where to eat lunch.”

“Well, this looks like a nice place. You’re doing a great job.”

“Thanks, smart-ass. I mean, it really changes your perspective, this being home all the time, no job, answering only to yourself. It shrinks your world.”

“Is there no peace in your shrunken world?”

“You haven’t heard about the trash war.”

“Trash war?”

“Well, my gardener comes on Wednesday, trash day is Thursday, so when the gardener’s done he takes the cans out to the curb for me, leaves them out there overnight. He’s done this for years. Anyways, now that I’m home all the time, I generate more trash, and I hate leaving it in the house so on Thursday morning, before the trash guys come, I do a sweep of the house and fill another bag. So, one day I walk out to the curb with my bag and open the lid of my trash can and what do you think I saw?”

“Body parts?”

“No, trash bags. Someone else’s trash bags. In my trash cans. Stuffed so full there’s no room for my trash bag.”

“A neighbor?”

“That what I thought. Maybe a neighbor had a particularly heavy trash week and needed to borrow some of my capacity. The city only give us three cans, one for trash, one for recycling, one for yard clippings, and it won’t take anything that doesn’t fit in the cans. You have to pay extra if you need more trash cans. A lot. So it would’ve been nice to ask first, but I figure let it go, it’s understandable, and I’ll be spending a lot of time on this street with these people, so let’s preserve the peace.”

“After a career in the trenches, you’ve sure earned a little peace.”

“So, anyways, the next week there’s even more bags. I’m starting to think this is an every-week thing, they’ve probably done it for years, but I never noticed it when I was working. Too busy to take the trash out mid-week. So I’m standing there at my trash can holding my trash bag, and there’s no room because someone else is hogging my capacity, and I’m thinking this is ridiculous, I’m getting really pissed off, so I start taking the bags out, gotta make room for my bag, why do I have to do this. Then I get an idea.”

“Uh oh.”

“I open a bag, sift through it, looking for something with a name or an address on it. The first bag’s got nothing but kitchen trash, coffee grounds and banana peels and that sort of thing, so I pull out another and it’s filled with diapers.”

“Ouch!”

“Unbelievable stench. I didn’t bother looking through it. I pulled out another bag and bingo! there it was, a bunch of magazines with address labels.”

“In your trash can?”

“Yeah, they didn’t even bother to recycle them, just stuffed them in a trash bag.”

“Bastards.”

“Exactly. So it’s the yuppies across the street.”

“The ones you hate?”

“The ones I hate. The ones whose dog shits on my lawn, the ones whose kid broke my sprinkler and denied it. And then there’s the parties, these big noisy parties they’re always throwing, cars everywhere, clogging up the street.”

“And they never invite you. Model neighbors.”

“I wouldn’t go if they did. Model assholes. Anyways, I pull out the rest of the bags, pick them all up, and walk across the street. Time for a showdown.”

“Was it high noon?”

“Night. I walk up to their porch, drop the bags, and ring the bell. By now I’ve cooled down a little. I’m thinking I’ll just say ask me before stuffing your trash into my cans. Nice and neighborly.”

“And maybe borrow a cup of sugar?”

“Right. No one answered. Before I rang the bell, I could hear them inside. Their lights were on, where else are they gonna be on a Wednesday night, but no one answers the door. I ring the bell a few times, knock loudly, nothing. Silence. I’m sure they’re there. I wait around for a few more minutes, then leave the bags and head home.”

“Message delivered.”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you? A week goes by, I don’t see them, and I’m thinking they got the message, but let’s not let this happen again, so I do some early spring cleaning, enough to fill up the trash can and the recycling can so there’s no room for their stuff.”

“The best offense is a good defense.”

“I checked on Thursday morning, no new bags, so I figured everything was okay until that afternoon, I’m taking my cans in, and I notice the yard bin is still full, and there’s this note from the city telling me I mixed regular trash with yard clippings, and I open the lid and it’s stuffed full of trash bags. Their trash bags.”

“No!”

“This time there’s nothing to identify them, no names or addresses, but a lot of shredded paper. I know it’s them.”

“Of course it is.”

“So again I take the bags over to their house, again I ring the bell and knock, and again there’s no response, so again I leave the bags and I’m thinking this is getting old.”

“So what did you do?”

“I considered calling the police, but what would I say? And talk about escalation. I’d make an enemy for life. So instead I kept an eye out for them that week, figuring we need to talk it out, nip it in the bud before one of us does something he regrets. But they never come outside, their kids no longer play in the front yard, they keep their shades drawn, and I only see their cars driving in and out of the garage, never see them in person.”

“They’re avoiding you?”

“You think? Anyways, the next week I’m ready. I fill all three of my cans so they’re overflowing, no way they can stuff any more trash in there, and I keep watch. I can see my curb from my home office, so I sat there for hours Wednesday night, watching and waiting.”

“Staking out your own trash.”

“Surveillance is really hard work. You just sit there and nothing happens. I tried to stay awake, but I kept nodding off, finally falling asleep sometime after 1:00.”

“You slept in a chair?”

“It’s really comfortable. I wake up early, the first thing I do is look out the window, and there’s trash everywhere. My cans are knocked over, and I’m thinking those crafty yuppie bastards, they made it look like a dog or a raccoon got into it. But I know they did it.”

“It’s escalating.”

“Rapidly. By now I’m shaking with rage, I want to kill these bastards, but I know I need to step back, take stock, figure out what to do. I want this to end. I don’t want to sit up another night. I don’t want to pick my trash up off the street again. I don’t want my trash to be the most important part of my life. How sad is that? So I decide to compromise. I tell my gardener not to take the cans to the curb, I’ll take them out myself Thursday morning. It’s annoying to have to do this, but there’s a malicious nut across the street and I’m in my twilight years and I really don’t want to fritter them away them dealing with trash.”

“Life’s too short.”

“Especially mine. So the next week, Thursday morning, I’m wheeling my cans out the curb, and I notice the first one’s really heavy, and I open the lid and it stinks to high heaven. Diapers and dog shit and rotten eggs and there’s a million flies. They must’ve snuck into my side yard that night and filled my cans.”

“Oh my god, what did you do?”

“I flipped out, I really flipped out. This is so fucked up, I'm thinking, as I wheel the trash can across the street to their driveway and dump it.”

“Serves them right.”

“Exactly. And then I walked back, got another trash can (also full of shit, by the way), and dumped it too. And did it again. By the time I’m done, there’s this garbage dump in the middle of their driveway.”

“You showed them.”

“That’s what I thought. Until the police knocked at my door.”

“The police!”

“Seems I dumped more than their shit on the driveway. I also dumped my own trash. With my name all over it. Stupid, I know, but I was crazed.”

“What did they do?”

“I tried to explain, but they didn’t care. All they knew was what they saw. And what they saw means criminal trespass, mischief, vandalism. Normally they’d issue a warning, but the yuppie insists they press charges. The D.A. may or may not take the case – I’ve hired a lawyer, meter’s running at $500 per, and he thinks he can beat it back. Used to work in that office.”

“Oh my god, that sucks.”

“Tell me about it. And I’ve installed one of those high tech security systems, alarms and sensors and monitors and 24 hour infrared cameras recording everything that moves, it’s like I live in a 7-11 or something. Cost me a fortune.”

“So much for the peaceful life.”

“Well, it’s better than sitting around, just waiting to die. You know, retirement isn’t easy for a guy like me. For years I’ve operated at the highest level, solving only the toughest problems, managing only the biggest projects, never having to bother with the small stuff, then all of a sudden my life revolves around picayune shit like this, stuff I would never have cared about, or even noticed, when I was working. It’s like I built up this huge materiality threshold while I worked, then it disappeared the day I retired. Now I notice everything. Nothing is beneath my attention. Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know, but all I know is a few weeks ago I was bored stiff, thinking I needed a really big challenge, to wrap my mind around a tough problem, one with lots of risk, big consequences, if I want to keep my blood flowing.”

“Now it’s boiling.”

“At least my life has a purpose again.”

“To get that bastard back?”

“Exactly.”

“You should thank him.”

“You can bet I will,” he said as he picked up the menu, smiling for the first time since we sat down.