"Garbage!"
Every once in a while you get shown the light. In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
Dr. Pepper was never more serious than when he told a joke. This one’s not very funny. I don’t suppose that’s the point. I do find it helpful, maybe you will too. I’ll try to get back to our regular rock and roll programming anon, I hope you’ll enjoy this in the meantime.
Friday afternoon in August, Fifth Floor tenement walk up, pre-HVAC. Air so thick and close it might as well be water on the outside of a gin and tonic. A man sits immobile at a kitchen table, shoulders hunched in defeat.
BZZZZZZZZTTTTT.
The stillness is shattered by the loud buzz of an intercom, followed by a disembodied voice of the Super, weary from his long week.
“Garbage!” The distorted speaker bleats noisily.
The broken man can barely rouse himself to grunt an acknowledgment, and the Super moves on to the rest of his end-of-week chores.
The stultifying atmosphere remains unchanged by the brief interruption. The man curls further into his shell, seemingly oblivious to the Super’s entreaties. The stultifying miasma coats everything with a greasy film which dulls sickeningly as dust falls like snow. Minutes pass.
BZZZZZZZZTTTTT.
The loud buzzer again pierces the stillness.
“Garbage!” More insistent this time. And more distorted, as the caller raised their voice, trying again to just get the recalcitrant tenant in 5B to pop his weekly trash in the chute. Performing as Super in a building like this was no easy task. The only thing between yet another sweltering shit week and a blissful weekend with his feet in an ice bucket and cold beer in his hand was this self-absorbed asshole, refusing to do the simple act of lifting the bag from the can and depositing it across the hall through the little door and down the chute.
BZZZZZZZZTTTTT.
“Señor, please, last one…”
The commotion seems to have no effect. The only motion in the sweltering apartment is the insistent and incessant tapping of a pencil on paper. No writing, just the tap tap tap, almost a shiver. All the man’s energy is directed inward. Though he remains perched atop the wooden chair, his posture is so collapsed as to resemble a parenthesis. No signal penetrates the noise of his defeat.
BZZZZZZZZTTTTT. BZZZZZZZZTTTTT. BZZZZZZZZTTTTT.
“Pendejo, c’mon, you’re beginning to bug me.” The old intercom equipment seems to have no trouble picking up the sotto voce aside.
“Ahem, I mean, Señor, please! Garbage!”
At last, something snaps, the man lifts first only his eyes, then his head, then manages to rouse himself. Not to fetch the bin, merely to mutter, listlessly,
“Fine! Send it up.”
Chris, señor, ¿esta es una historia sobre usted?