The Raccoon Situation

The dumpster behind the strip mall on Hillsborough has been a problem since roughly the Clinton administration.

Russ had been on the truck about four months by then. Long enough to have opinions. Not long enough to have earned them.

They pulled around back at 6:15 and there they were. Three of them. Sitting in a row on the rim of the dumpster like a small municipal board that had been waiting for the meeting to start.

Russ stopped walking.

“Gary.”

“I see ’em.”

“Gary, there’s three.”

“I know how many there are, Russ.”

The big one in the middle was fat, unbothered, and wearing what appeared to be a bandana somebody had tied on him at some point in his life and he had simply decided to keep.

Gary set down his gloves.

He walked to within about six feet of the dumpster, put his hands on his hips, and tilted his head sideways.

The big raccoon tilted his head back.

Neither one of them moved.

Russ, at this point, made a sound.

“You NAMED him?”

“I didn’t name him. He came named.” Gary didn’t break eye contact. “The one on the left is Diane. She’s the smart one. Don’t let her get behind you.”

“And the other one?”

“That’s Steve.”

Steve sneezed.

Russ went down. Hands on his knees, wheezing, gone. Four months of professional composure evaporated behind a strip mall at a quarter past six in the morning.

Gary never looked away from Gerald.

After a long moment, Gerald stood up — with tremendous dignity, the way a man stands up when HE has decided the meeting is over — and climbed down the back of the dumpster. Diane followed. Steve fell off, recovered, and pretended he had meant to do that.

Gary picked his gloves back up.

“Alright. Let’s work.”

The Espresso Machine

Same route. Two hours later. Bayshore side.

There was a note taped to the can.

“SHE GOT THE HOUSE. TAKE THIS.”

And sitting on the curb next to it, in the wet grass, at 8:40 in the morning, was a commercial espresso machine. Chrome. Twin group heads. The kind of machine that lives on a counter in a place that charges seven dollars for coffee.

Gary stood there holding his gas station cup.

He looked at the cup.

He looked at the machine.

He looked back at the cup, which had gone cold roughly forty minutes ago and had never, at any point in its existence, been good.

Russ was already carrying it to the truck.

“Russ.”

“Yep.”

“Russ, put that down.”

“Nope.”

“That’s — Russ, that’s somebody’s —”

“It’s on the curb, Gary.” Russ said it over his shoulder, entirely delighted, hauling forty pounds of Italian chrome across a lawn like it weighed nothing. “You taught me the rule. It’s on the curb, it’s ours.”

Gary opened his mouth to argue.

Then he looked at his cup one more time.

“...Get the door.”

What People Throw Away

That machine lives in the break room now. It has been rebuilt twice. Somebody named it, but that’s a different story and Linda has asked us not to tell it.

Here’s the thing Gary will tell you if you get him going, and you will get him going:

Everything at that curb was somebody’s. The TV somebody saved for. The turkey somebody cooked. The books somebody bought hoping this one would be the one. The machine somebody built a morning around before the morning fell apart.

A garbage man sees the whole arc of a life in reverse, one Tuesday at a time. Most people never think about that for a single second, which is exactly how it should be — that’s the job working correctly.

But somebody’s out there at 4:47 thinking about it.