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Garbage | Feb 26 2002

Returning from China Star last night, I noticed that someone had spilled a pile of garbage in front of my building, behind the little wall where the garbage cans are kept. Seeing this, I recalled an incident from a few nights back. Just as Rachel and I reached the door, I saw a man crouched behind one of the cans, apparently digging through something. I was in the middle of telling Rachel a story when this happened, and abruptly stopped. Rachel looked at me, saw that I was looking in the direction of the garbage cans, and looked there herself. Neither of us said anything. I remembered but did not relate a similar incident which occurred seven years ago, outside a friend’s apartment in San Francisco. As Nick and I were walking up his stoop, he saw some guy taking a dump behind his trash can. This was in the middle of the day. “You can sleep there,” Nick said (at first I didn’t know who he was talking to; it wasn’t his normal voice), “but do me a favor and shit somewhere else.”

I’d been impressed with how Nick handled that, and this played into my silence when confronted with the crouching man. For from what I could tell, he wasn’t crouching to relieve himself but to be closer to whatever he was looking at. This wasn’t a worth a confrontation, I decided; if people want to crouch behind my trash cans, they can crouch behind my trash cans, no biggie.

Tonight, though, I wondered if I had made a mistake, for the garbage was piled in the exact spot where the man had crouched. Coincidence? I think not. I think the man dumped it there in a fit of pique. Something he was looking at upset him, so he poured a can full of garbage on top of it, to bury it.

If I’m correct, then that thing is still under the garbage. Which means that if I look hard enough, I might be able to figure out what upset him so much, I just have to wade through a bunch of garbage; the thing that upset him will be the thing on the bottom.

I’m not doing this.