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Trash | Oct 28 2001

My former neighbor Barbara, back in the days when I lived in a so-called artist’s building (where no one, technically, was supposed to live), used to keep these enormous plastic bags of trash in her loft, every piece of which had her name on it. You would see the bags when you entered, stacked in the far corner. For the longest time I didn’t know what was in the bags, nor particularly care (artist-types save all kinds of strange things), but then one day Barbara stopped me in the hall and asked if I knew anyone who had a fireplace where she could, um, burn some trash. I asked why she didn’t just throw it out and she explained that she had once been fined for illegally dumping trash on Cambridge Street and that the police had tracked her down by going through the bags and finding various pieces of mail with her name and address on it.

“But I’ve seen you dumping trash,” I said. “We’ve even done it together.”

“Yes,” she said, “but none of that trash had my name on it.”