10/29
I remember one day a drunk forced his way trough the iron grate in front of the shop and he stepped where the cars usually stood, stumbling over the pulverized remains of his cigarette.
10/27
Sometimes we'd work special jobs for the city zoo and Lo' and I, broke, desperate, the only garbagemen without families, we'd volunteer together, ya know? And I learned, or at least, Lo' and I saw... that once a year the giraffes would drop dead. Like... KAPUT! Like a snap. And it was hush-hush, very grave when they came to us, the zoo officials. They pulled me and Lo' over and told us not to speak a word of it and to take the bodies out. They offered to pay us a little extra, something to give us some breathing room, which I felt good about thinking that this is some big scientific discovery. But I never saw anything on the TV about their study. And Lo... well Lo took that money and ran. Couldn't be a garbageman forever! He used to laugh at me as we hauled the dead giraffes across the rim of the enclosure, into the real world. That motherfucker... he would read on the shitter, you know that? Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse, he'd peek his damn cigarette out through the crack of the door, scruffy face buried away in some book about something you've never heard of. He was old and mean and smart as hell, I tell ya. Old, mean, and smart as hell.
10/26
Every day you touch me every day I feel you and I want you and I need you and I do things for you and I take the garbage to the curb behind the theatre in the parking lot that smells like the ocean. I used to be afraid of dogs gnashing their teeth in the churning water of the shadows and I took it for granted that I could take my trash to the trash heap and the garbage man could pick it up and take it to the landfill and it could rot there, they trucked it around the country figuring out what to do with it - Hell, we took it to the middle of nowhere, bumfuck Nebraska and for shits and giggles one time, get this, one time we dumped it there. Imagine that! Gunpowder breath, a god damn heap of trash in Ma's forgotten land. I looked at it and I tell ya... It was bigger than ever.