Aluminum Cans

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The Sun is not up yet, and I don’t know what the time is. You hold open the lid. Like a monkey, I’m over the side and into the dumpster with just a hop and a dive. Today is garbage day, but the compactor trucks haven’t made their rounds yet, so I land on a lumpy pile of slick plastic bags. I know what I’m looking for. Aluminum cans. No steel, no glass, no plastic. And they need to be empty. I hold the handle of the mini flashlight with my mouth. You keep an eye on the windows of the first row of trailers, making sure none of the lights come on.

People hide their empty cans in white bags tied shut with red drawstrings. I used to waste time loosening the ties. You taught me not to waste time over and over until my goose-eggs had goose-eggs, until it sank in. I pull the bag apart in the first place my hands get hold.

Rotting food spills out across my shoes. Damn-it. These are my nice shoes; my school shoes; my only shoes. “Stop whining,” you tell me. I still can’t keep from gagging when blackened cabbage clings to my shin. You call me a sissy.

Ten cans from the first bag. I toss them out to you and you stuff them in a black Hefty bag. You could crush them now. There is plenty of time between cans, but you’ll just have me do it later. Three more cans from a second torn bag.

You toss the bag into the dumpster with me and drop the lid. Thats the signal. I switch off the flashlight and wiggle myself down into the garbage. Something wet and cold soaks into my shorts. I wish it were clean water. There is no way it could be.

“Hello,” you say as I hear your footsteps in the gravel fading away. Someone mumbles back. The lid opens and two more bags fall in, adding to the weight on top of me.

It takes minutes for you to return. I can feel things crawling on me. Maggots, probably. I think I can hear them eating. While you are gone, I daydream of catching some horrible, painful sickness, just so that I can give it to you. The black plague would be nice.

You pound on the dumpster when you return. My ears ring with the echo. When you open the lid and tell me to toss out the cans, I try to hit you with the bag. I miss and fall, my hand landing in an untaped diaper. I retch and heave, but have ate nothing to throw up. I find a used paper towel to wipe my hand off. You remind me that I’m a sissy.

We fill the bag and then another. I am tossing out the first few cans to begin a third bag as you take the second to the car when a security guard chirps his siren. We are trespassing, and we know it: time for plan B. I jump up onto the lid of the dumpster and fling myself at the barbed wire fence topper. Trash spills from my back as the guard tries to grab hold of my leg, but I am wiry and he is fat. I teeter over the fence, the barbs cut into, and run down my stomach, but I am free and my heart is pumping so I hardly notice. The rent-a-cop jumps, but his feet almost don’t leave the ground. He and I look at each other a moment, and behind him I see you backing the car away. He shouts at me, but he’s on that side of the fence, thats all he can do. I know you’ll be in the parking lot at the mall a couple of miles from here.

I run all the way there.

You could give me a hint where you are parked, a honk, a wave, but don’t. I ask the strangers I pass for change as I hunt for you. They pity me, I can see that, but they are also disgusted by me. The ones that don’t pretend I don’t exist all but throw their loose change at me, anxious to get to their early morning power-walks. “Don’t touch me,” I read from them like a comic book. I feel like a villain.

I hide the coins in my socks so that they don’t jingle. I know that if I don’t, you’ll take them.

I find you, sleeping in your Impala, between a red minivan and a silver BMW. I recognize it instantly because of the way the paint peels up and curls. You make me put trash bags under me and sit in the back seat. I have to roll the windows down. I can’t stand the smell of myself. I can’t stand touching my own skin. I can’t stand the Elvis playing on the small speakers in the front dash, I try to ride with my head out the window.

We do this again and again, trailer park after trailer park. Those are the best places to get cans you tell me. Except ours. There are never any cans in our own dumpster.

Sometimes I find prizes in the dumpsters: toys, clothes, comics. I find a pair of shoes. Nice ones. The kind you never buy me. The left one has dog crap on it, but you let me keep them anyway. I find a G.I. Joe, but you don’t let me keep that. I’m too old to play with dolls. Now that it’s light, you tell me to look for other things. A VHS tape is in here. Some old John Wayne movie. You take that, and a nudie mag with coffee grounds on the cover that make the woman there look like she has a hairy chest. You toss me a black T-shirt to cover the blood in my own. It’s too big.

Bag by bag we fill up the trunk of your rusty old car with aluminum cans. When we can’t close the hood and have to use a bungie to hold it closed, you drive us to the beach. We crush the cans in the parking lot, shooing away the seagulls. They’ll take the cans if they can get ahold of them you tell me, garbage birds. As I see all our work reduced to only four bags, I start to feel cheated. I worry we won’t get enough out of the cans for you to give me the ten dollars you promised, and I don’t ever expect you to pay me the hundred you owe me for other the days like this over the past year.

Once the last cans are crushed I run out into the ocean to wash myself. I can feel the sand being washed out from under my shoes, the tug of the sea trying to take me away with the rest of the trash. The cut in my stomach stings in a way that makes my teeth tingle. Hundreds of smaller cuts I didn’t know I had burn all over my body. There is gum stuck in the stubble of my hair when I return to the car. You tell me its time to shave my head again. I hate when you shave my head. Your hands shake and you always cut me. I let the sun dry my clothes into stiff card stock while you smoke. You flick the butt into the sand at the edge of the parking lot and smile at me.

“Payday,” you say.

You push a cassette tape of The Coasters into the radio and we sing together about Charlie Brown along with the tinny sounding singers. This is the time I like being with you. The few minutes between having nothing and having something. The few minutes when you are too tired, too sore, or have just run out of reasons to yell. It’s the moment when we both dream of what we are going to do with our payday, before you drink it.