Not that there is anything wrong on principles with a trash pile. Like any boy, I liked them. Maggot and I always begged to go with Mr. Peg whenever he took the week’s garbage to the county landfill. There was so much to see. People carting off more than they came with in the way of furniture, appliances that might have potential, etc. Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were. Landfill, pawnshops, Walmart. All places for moving things one way or the other along that road. I had this nonsense idea of a comic strip with no superhero, just some item of earthly goods like a chair that gets passed downhill from one family to another until it’s a chair-shaped dirt pile. I would call it Earthly Bads.
I’d always thought every good American took his garbage to a landfill every week, but it turns out if you live in town, like the McCobbs did, there are people that come and take it for you. I was amazed. An entire truck existing for the sole purpose of garbage. Men working their way down the street, emptying people’s cans. A town thing. Out in the county, obviously we’re on our own. Mom and I toted ours next door for Mr. Peggot to haul away. At Creaky Farm we burned it, or if it wasn’t burnable, tipped it into a steep gully on his back forty where he’d had a pile going for maybe a century. You’d see things like a wringer-washer machine poking out, fenders, bed springs, all rusting back into the ground, which is how I got my comic strip idea. That’s the normal for a farm. But some won’t have farms or any place for their trash other than the landfill, and that can be a hell of a drive, especially if you don’t have a pickup.
That’s where Golly’s Market came in handy. People could pay a small price to dump their trash in the lot out back. That was the separate business, with boys hired to pick through it. Anything worth money like aluminum cans went in one pile, plastic bottles in another. Batteries another. My new boss wasn’t around. Mr. Golly told me to wait there, he’d come back soon and get me started. Then he shuffled back to his register, and I had a look around. Behind the trash mountain I found shock number two, standing there washing out plastic pop bottles: Swap-Out.
“Wildman,” I said. “What’s going down?”
He stopped hosing out his bottle and stared at me. The spray nozzle was leaking all over the place, and the little guy was shivering, hoodie and jeans all soaked from where he’d sprayed himself. Then his face lit up and he screeched, Diamond!
I couldn’t believe he remembered my Squad name. This kid that reliably did not remember to zip his fly. I wanted to hug him but of course didn’t. We just stood there like lost boys on our own garbage island. I tightened up the hose nozzle for him and asked questions. He was working here now, every day. No more school, he was done. Meaning he might actually have been sixteen. Or else over at Elk Knob they figured they’d done their worst, and gave up. He wasn’t at Creaky’s now, living with some guys in an apartment, the who-what-where I couldn’t really guess. Swap-Out’s way of telling you anything was like his sentences got dropped and broken all to pieces. You had to take whatever you could pick up, and work backwards.
He wanted to know if I was working here now instead of Rotten Potatoes, whatever the hell. Is that a thing or a person, I asked him, and he said yes. Rotten Potatoes was a person. Was he our boss, I asked, and Swap-Out said no, a kid. He puked all the time and got fired. The boss guy wasn’t there right now, and his name was Ghose.
Gose? I asked. No. Goes? No.
“Whoooo,” Swap-Out said, flapping his hands, scary. “Ghose like a dead guy!”
Ghost. That was my new boss. We watched his truck pull in around front, but I couldn’t see him go into the store, nor from there into the back room that Mr. Golly had told me was the headquarters of the recycling business, which I was not ever to go into because it was private. I didn’t get a look at my boss till he came out the back door and gave me surprise number three.
Ghost was the pale, white-haired guy with the crazy ink, Stoner’s friend that I’d met one time in Pro’s Pizza. With the other one, Hell Reeker, that had come over and teased Stoner about foxes whelping their pups, Mr. Grin and Bear it, all that. Ghost was Extra Eye.
If I say I had to sort through people’s filthy, crappy trash, I’m saying there were diapers. Human shit. If I say there were rats, I don’t mean we saw one or two. Rats were part of how we got through our day. Target practice, company, whatever you want to call it. Some we named. Rinsing bottles and squashing cans was Swap-Out’s department, and Ghost put me on the jobs that took any brains whatsoever. He said finally the damn gook had hired him some help that was playing with a full deck. Evidently the kid he’d just fired, Rotten Potatoes, was missing the cards in his deck that tell you not to eat food that’s been in the trash too long before you find it.
One of the first jobs Ghost showed me was how to drain the acid out of old car batteries. You hammer a nail through the bottom to puncture it. Most batteries have several compartments so you figure them out, punch a hole in each one, then turn it up and drain out the acid into something glass, like a jar. (Not plastic. Never plastic. Rotten Potatoes evidently was missing those cards too.) Ghost collected up all the acid into metal cans where he wrote “acid” on them, lined up alongside of his paint thinner cans outside the back door of his HQ, by the propane tanks. He said he didn’t want all that shit inside stinking up the place.
Which is a joke because he’d come out of there stinking to high heaven, sometimes like rotten eggs, usually cat piss. He had window fans running all hours, even on cold days, and the cat piss smell coming out of there hung over the place worse than the stink of garbage. What Ghost was up to, anybody’s guess. He’d have frying pans and bottles for us to hose out, and bottles he said to put straight directly in the landfill pile, do not mess around. We’re talking things that are no friends to your skin or your clothes. I got some of the acid on my jeans, and after they ran through the wash, every stain was a hole. I got why Ghost had put me on the batteries instead of Swap-Out. Poor little guy, a few days of that and he’d be a window screen.
I got paid four dollars an hour, sixteen a day. Cash. I went straight from school, and Mrs. McCobb would pick me up around nine after she got the kids in bed, so it was more than four hours a day, but after dark Swap-Out and I would come in the store to eat Mr. Golly’s leftovers. He had a bathroom where we could wash up. I helped him stock his shelves after deliveries came in, and saw what people around there were living on. Mainly beer, toilet paper, Campfire pork and beans. Cold medicine, holy mother. He’d get in a hundred boxes of Sudafed. Two days later it’s gone. I didn’t see people buying it, either. If Mr. Golly was having all those colds, you’d not have known it. Actually, if he was alive, you couldn’t be sure of that. He had a grayish look to his skin, and would sit for hours not moving. Watching his little TV he had by the checkout.
Mr. Golly didn’t at all mind us hanging around. He said he grew up working in a junkyard as a boy, just like us. But! Happy ending, now he lived in America and could send money back home to his family. He’d had a wife at some point, but lived by himself now in a small apartment in Duffield. He said he didn’t need anything in his apartment because he lived at the store, cooked his food and everything, which was true. If he ever closed, I didn’t see it.
There weren’t any houses around that area. People stopped on their way to someplace better. Sometimes it would be a mom with kids, obviously unfamiliar with the layout and only there to get somebody into the bathroom ASAP. They’d buy a Coke or some little thing for a cover story, but you knew. Then there were the respectable types that would pay Mr. Golly their ten bucks, drive around back to drop off their month’s worth of trash bags, maybe purchase a chili dog to celebrate. Other than that, it was a rough crowd. Some, and I’m saying more than one, did not use trash bags. The back of their pickup was the trash can, and after it got piled high, they’d drive over, pay their fee, open the tailgate, and rake it out. I’m discussing bathroom trash and all. You tried your best not to picture the homestead.
Worst were the regulars with no involvement in the trash enterprise. They’d get their beer and beans up front, then slip around back to do their business with Ghost. I was getting the picture. Golly’s Market catered to lowlifes, and I was working there. So I was a lowlife too.
Some are going to say I was never anything better. Not even born in a hospital to a mom fixing to take me back to her mobile home, but born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash. Kids like me with our teen moms putting whiskey on our gums to shut us up, Coke in the baby bottle, we’re the pity of the world. But I started out as decent as any kid, saying please and thank you, doing my homework, figuring out how to get smiled at. I played to win, with all my little prides and dreams. So what if they were junior-varsity dreams, like marrying Carol Danvers and being an Avenger whenever I grew up. I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.
By fifth grade I was taller than everybody, including some teachers. Guys wanted me on their side for whatever we played in gym, and I’m saying always. Girls flirted. Emmy had said I was tenderhearted, good-looking, and everything. Plenty of poor kids got their faces punched in just for existing. Up to that point I’d not thought much about what I was, but I wasn’t that. This was in the before-time, last days of. Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let’s us be better than those guys so we can hate on them. Our school had two computers in the library, one that worked. Some few kids did a project where they set up their mailbox address on there, to get mail from a robot we thought, ha ha. What existed at that time for calling people out was the cootie game, where little kids would touch some loser and then run around threatening to spread loser germs on you. In some cases, like the Houserman kids, genuine head lice could be involved, so. Heads up.
But in fifth, we weren’t children. Loser boys got fists. Girls had their girl shit of no interest to me, like their slam books that got passed around. Skinny spiral notebooks like you’d have for a subject, but with SLAM BOOK and PROPERTY OF on the front to let you know it’s not for a teacher’s eyes. Some girl would poke me in the back with one, to pass on up the row. These were the enterprise of the popular girls with plucked-to-the-bone eyebrows and hair parted in the shape of a lightning bolt. Look, you’re sitting behind some girl all day looking down on her head, you notice the hair. The notebooks though, I didn’t, even after they were getting pushed at me. Even with girls writing in them and looking at me like something’s dead hilarious.
Then came the day of Demon’s education. Everybody was set for recess, unless on detention which I usually was, for fidgeting or drawing on my desk. We had the one-piece type with the tiny chair attached, pretty much hell for a kid my size, and the wooden desk tops all gray around the edges with the ground-in dirt of our forefathers. Our parents and grandparents used these desks, and had some of the same teachers, including the mummified individual Miss Huddles we had in fifth. Miss Huddles famously had leathered my mom in front of the entire school for faking a striptease in Christian Music Assembly. (Mom and God, it just never worked.) To look at the old bat now, though, a shrunken head in a dress, I had no fear. These desks had so many names, hairy penises, and doodles carved in them, it seemed senseless not to carry on the tradition. You’re sitting there with a pencil. Hours to get through before you die. I prided myself on excellent cartoon characters for the enjoyment of prisoners to come.
So here’s the bell and everybody files out. A yellow notebook is slapped down on my desk. Slap goes another one as they walk by, girls detouring past my desk on their way out, laughing because this is all so funny. A pile of slam books to cheer up Demon’s detention.
The first page is numbered. You sign in next to a number, so that’s your code. Turn the pages. Each page has one kid’s name at the top. You write your opinion of them, signed with your number. This is all new to me and I’m thinking, pretty hilarious, using a number for your not-at-all-secret identity. On the page of every popular girl, everybody writes Cute sweet nice fun to be with. Always those words, in whatever order. The religious girls get Too straight no fun. Or else L-7, which is the known code for “square,” which is the known code for Too straight, no fun. Guys have pages also. Popular ones being Hella hunk the bomb all that home skillet.
Maybe I didn’t think these books would have a Demon page. Maybe I did. Either way I wasn’t ready for that hot spreading feeling like I’ve pissed myself. Shit eater loser trash jerkoff. No exception. Somebody wrote Asshole. I mean. I’d gone quiet since Mom died, and probably hadn’t said more than five or six words in that class since Christmas. It takes some doing to scrape together asshole out of that.
Nothing was different afterward except for my fresh loser eyes, noticing it all. People steering clear. Not touching me in gym, not even cheering if I sank a shot. Holding up their plate to my face in the lunchroom, like I’d eat off it like a dog. I wanted no sun shining on me now. I erased myself like a chalkboard. In my outgrown high-water jeans and the old-man shoes Mr. Peg had loaned me at Christmas, I joined the tribe of way-back country kids with no indoor plumbing and the Pentecostals that think any style clothes invented since Bible times is a sin. My specialty, acid holes. Who was going to take me shopping for new clothes? Hair over my collar, and who’s going to cut it? Miss Barks had noticed I was getting ratty, and kept reminding Mrs. McCobb how the monthly check from DSS should more than cover those things. And Mrs. McCobb kept saying she meant to get around to it, but just so busy with her kids.
I’d been thinking about Emmy moving here in a few months, the walks we were going to take. Hand-holding. Now I just hoped she and June would move to some far-distant part of the county where she’d be in a different school and never find out what I was.
It happened after one of these shit-most days of school, and more of the same on my shitpile job, that I kind of blacked out and threw some punches at the dash of Mrs. McCobb’s car. Scaring the living piss out of her. All she’d done was ask if I had a nice day. I don’t know why that set me off, but I landed my punches and she got quiet. Finally she said she was worried about me. I said maybe she should worry a hell of a lot more. It was dark, and I couldn’t see her face, which helped. “You’re so scared of Haillie and Brayley getting tormented at school,” I said.
She said “Yeah.” Sounding scared. Like she knew what was up.
“Well, take a look at me.” I let her have it then, told her about the slam books, the getting shunned, all of it. Kids pretending to sniff around me, asking did somebody shit himself. “And guess what,” I said. “They know who I’m living with. It’s getting around.”
I felt her going stiff over there behind the wheel, the McCobb family name going down.
On Sunday she took me to Walmart. I got new jeans, T-shirts, belt, shoes, and also a new toothbrush, which I hadn’t had in a while, ever since Brayley launched mine into the toilet on accident. Those kids loved to goof around in the downstairs bathroom. I thanked her, and she told me not to tell Mr. McCobb we’d spent almost everything I earned at Golly’s that month.
But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.
What few friends I had now were some high school guys on the bus I rode out to Golly’s. “Friends,” meaning they let me sit with them and didn’t run me off. Redneck guys that everybody knew to leave the two back rows of seats open for, no discussion. Mostly they talked about girls: which ones were skanks and whores, which to stay away from because of hep C or the clap. Also drugs, who had what and for how much. They didn’t say a lot to me personally other than “Hey, how’s it going” whenever we got on the bus. But I kept my mouth shut and got educated. They did ask some few things, like what grade was I. Thinking they wouldn’t want a fifth grader in on those types of conversations, I said eighth. They asked was I doing JV football and again I lied, saying yes, and I was going out for varsity next year at Lee High. I told them I was friends with Fast Forward, and they were just amazed by that. These guys were on the team. Not first string, but still. They said they would be glad to have me on the Generals because I looked like I would make a good tackle or tight end. I remember which one of them said that, and the day. Due to that being the one nice thing anybody said to me that year.
Most days passed without a word coming out of my mouth. If I talked, it was to Swap-Out and Mr. Golly. Or Haillie, if she came in my room to play with my markers. I let her, even though they were all I had, so I was scared of them running out of ink. She wanted me to draw a cartoon of her, so I invented the Howliiie Fairy that left Oreos under your pillow. If bad guys showed up, she screamed them off the planet. So that’s what I had to work with: some gangbangers, a second grader, a foreign hundred-year-old man, and a guy with scrambled eggs for brains. Miss Barks mainly now just hounded me about school, why my grades had slipped. No big secret, I said. I hated school. I told her how ruthless the kids were. She said to hang in there, in middle school the kids would be nicer. I did not for one minute believe her.
It’s hard to believe I could look back on Creaky Farm in any wishful way, but I missed having Fast Forward on my team. Fast Man that had made me feel hard and shiny as a diamond. I knew there was a dark side, he let others take his lickings, but that was him teaching us: a person can keep his head up and rise high, even if he wasn’t lucky enough to get born up there. In all the years of no adult ever taking my side, he showed me it was possible to work them at their own game and win.
That summer I started getting the faintest red shine of hair on my upper lip, one more embarrassment. If I still lived with Fast Forward, he could have taught me how to shave. I’d have one person to talk to that actually knew what a kid like me was dealing with. He would have told me straight up whether it was true, what I’d started to think. That I was working for a meth lab.
