Alleyway Dumpsters

A man battling with his own sanity decides that to calm himself, attempts to make an impact on society if in the smallest way possible.

    I don’t count myself a singular case. I have found my niche and I am comfortable in it.
    My brisk walk down an abandoned alley way is one I've made so many times I couldn't count if I tried. I mean that, I have tried to count, once when I contemplated seeing a therapist, but because I couldn't come to a certain number I gave up the idea.
    I’m haunted by the sound of claws scratching against dry, vindictive pavement as the felines of this waste neighborhood jump from the tops of dumpsters and fences and onto the ground, alerting passers-by to my presence. The quiet cars taking raspy breaths past the break in buildings always incite a fight or flight response in me, I dread the thought of being caught in my prowl. I suppose it’s the thrill that keeps me coming back. On occasion, I’m sure I just need to find something better to do with my time, but that remains only a fleeting thought.
    I can’t tell you why I do what I do. I’m like a crack addict. Sure, that street mistress could find other things to do with her money; rent an apartment, feed her children, buy descent clothes, but she’ll much sooner use it for a fix.   
    Today, my stash drags behind me in two trash bags, with yellow ties that cinch the tops and leave enough slack so I can carry my load, as if leading a beloved pet dog. I don't look behind me. I look down at my freshly shined Ferragamos, breathing heavy despite the fact that my necktie has been carefully loosened.
    I have been to the local shopping mall, and to the grocery superstore Costco. I know shopping malls. I’ve been to at least twenty of them. I rotate, I don’t go to the same one twice, not for reasons pertaining to paranoia but rather because, well, it is a  part of the ceremony. I’ve been to the Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Macy’s and Saks inside. I’ve purchased a stock of jeans from one store, shirts from another, and undergarments and accessories from a third. From the fourth, I purchase shoes and socks. I buy these in nearly innumerable amounts. I pull each item off the shelf into the large mesh bags that are “for my convenience” and take my new found goods to the cashier who folds them neatly into two or three bags, so that by the time I leave, I have at least ten to twelve bags to carry.
    Then, I go to the nearest grocery store. I get staples. That is, the staples in a human diet. I usually focus on perishable goods, but that is a new preference of mine. There was a time when I didn’t care. Lately, bread, milk, eggs, and meat seem to sooth my soul with the ease that Mylanta sooths an aching chest.
    These bags, if compacted correctly, can usually fill two large trash bags as they do today, but there have been times when I purchased enough to fill three. I have a spending minimum, one thousand dollars. Lately, I’ve been spending closer to three. I’ve been especially disconcerted lately, and as pressure rises, so does my spending limit.
    My mother would say I need a hobby. My father would say I need to get laid. They’re both wrong.
    I’ve loved once. I wouldn’t dare venture those dangerous grounds again.
    The last woman to touch me may be the last for awhile. She was the last woman who I came close to loving, but not close enough to even call it an infatuation. I couldn’t comment on her hair ‘like the mane of a stallion’ or her eyes ‘deep as the sea’. No, she was an ordinary girl. Shoulder length brown hair, strong features, high cheekbones. She was about one hundred thirty in weight, one good head below me in height. She spoke well. She was well educated. A Yale grad. She worked in the building across from mine; we were like Romeo and Juliet when I snuck up to her 34th floor law office, scampering from the competing legal partnership I worked for. Reed and Pierce, of which I am the later, against Thorpe, Thorpe and Robertson, of which she was neither.
    I cared for her, because she kept me grounded. Once, when I thought I could trust her, I told her why I was never available on Thursday nights.
    “Couldn’t you just throw a thousand dollars down a garbage disposal and turn it     on?” she asked me.
    “No, my dear, much too easy. There is no thrill, no chance of anyone happening     upon the ruined money.”
    “Then fill a garbage bag full of dollars.” she suggested.
    “No. Still too easy. No one would root through it. A bag of cash resembles a bag     full of paper towels from a public restroom too closely.”
    “Well, that’s all you’re doing! You’re throwing money away, that’s all.”
    I disagreed. There is a method to my madness, if just a loosely threaded one.
    When I go to the malls and purchase one thousand, maybe two thousand dollars worth of things, I am stimulating the economy. Thus, that stimulated economy thrives. The tax dollars I’ve paid give the government more money to screw the bums on the street and those not strong enough to survive in this dog eat dog world. They build bridges they’re not allowed to cross or live beneath; they put parks in place that they’re not allowed to sleep in. Their eyes light up when they realize there are enough funds to spend on trivial things and forgo welfare funds. They educate children who will grow up to be CEOs who will snub the street rats when they pass. Money trashed or shredded is wasted. It is not taxed and it does not filter back into the economy.
    “Now that would be destructive. Insane even.” I tell her.
    She said I was insane and left me that afternoon.
    Feeding the overpriced goods to the dumpsters- that’s the most amusing part.
    At first, I hadn’t been able to plan it right. I would drive past the dumpsters and see vagabonds piling in and out of them with new coats and cans of Campbell soup in their clutches. It made me retch to watch them. To see what the people I share a species with had stooped to, like filthy pigs eating the scraps of others- disgusting.
    I regrouped and changed my methods. Now, I shred the blouses, burn holes in the soles of the shoes. I began enjoying it. It was a little game for me. I would watch them root through the treasures they believe they have found, then come up disappointed to see the eggs are rotting and the loaves of bread have turned green. This is something the vagabonds are accustomed to, diving through grocery store dumpsters only to find out exactly why the food has been trashed in the first place.
    Sometimes, I’d watch them scarf the food down anyway. I’d turn my head in this event. Other times, I’d watch disappointed faces turn away and sulk back to their musty corners.
    I’m making an impact, I tell myself.
    She disagreed. She said what I was doing was a waste of time, money and was probably not too good for my ego either. She said, maybe, I should start putting the money into the begging cans of these homeless people so that they could stimulate the economy in liquor stores, and maybe, if I was lucky, they’d kick the bucket from liver disease or alcohol poisoning. She reminded me of the excise tax on alcoholic purchases.
    “See? Why don’t you just screw ‘em that way?”
    She thought she was ingenious, but really, she was just as inept as the rest of them.
    The bag gets caught on an old restaurant chair with its legs sticking out where it had been abandoned on the ground. I stop to free it, and when I straigten up again, a young woman is standing in front of me.
    “Need help with that?” she asks me.
    Her hair is matted, and her face is leathery. She is wearing two or three layers of clothes, each layer more tattered than the one below it. Her smile is crooked and lackluster. She seems to be trying to be genuine, but whatever she has experienced in her past is pulling at the corners of her lips, turning them down, while memories are haunting and brooding deep in the pupils of her eyes.
    “No, thanks.” I say and continue on my way.
    “I know you.” she says. “I mean, I’ve seen you. But I thought you threw your trash out two blocks down.”
    
    I stop.

    “I’ll help you if you want, I don’t want you to get that suit dirty.”
    “What are you doing here?” I ask her. She looks much too young to be out on the streets alone.
    “Oh, everyone asks me that.” she bows her head,  shyly. “I couldn’t go home     anyway. It’s safer here than it is there.”
    She followed me as I dragged my trash bags to the dumpsters, and watched me as I heaved my bags into them. The thrill had been lost from the act, I felt horrible throwing the damaged goods into the receptacle as this young girl watched me, her own tattered clothes dangerously close to deteriorating.
    When I walk away, I seeher turn and watch me as well. Then she sulks away into a corner, the way they always do.
    It just like the way I’ve seen half of my heart sulk away, as if called into the dark alleys. Because all I could give her wasn’t enough, couldn’t course through her veins and alter reality the way the poison she injected  into her veins sitting in those alleyways could. She was beautiful, even after she traded the diamonds for tattered scarves to keep her warm at night. She was a woman of the night, because the night could satiate her in a way I wasn‘t able to. I loved her, but I couldn't survive the many nights that she crept out of our home in the early hours of the morning, not to turn up again until months later when I carried her limp body out of an alley. There, where she was being nursed by stoned and livid bums, she lay incoherent and thin as a waif. It’s the bums who took her from me. The bums and their candy lured her. I cleaned her up and put her in my bed, and she was gone again by the time the sun went up. One of those mornings she left, but never returned. I've stopped waiting. Love has been a stranger to me since then.
    “Hey, don’t you have a dollar or two you could spare?” the young girl calls to me from her corner, half of her face hidden in the shadows. “I could give you something for it. I found this shirt in the dumpsters the other day. It’s torn up, but you could sew it up again.”
    I shake my head.
    “I don’t like to do this. I’m not a beggar.”
    I am still. I stand a quarter turn away from being on my way out. “It’s okay.”
    “It’s just that…I’ve never been so hungr-” she fell silent. “Never mind.” she says as she watched my back.
    I quicken my step. Her voice fades away into the distance. A few hundred dollars slip from my wallet and onto the ground, and I turn to see if she's noticed. She approaches the money. Once I know she's got it, her voice is forgotten as I try to replace it with Tchaikovsky's waltz, thinking of sleeping Beauties and the kisses that wake them.
    My car just around the corner, I rush to get away from it. I climb into my car and drive away from the alley, away from the last dumpster to ever receive my tidings, but not from the young dejected girl. I remind myself that she is just like the rest of them. She has a bed somewhere. She’s just a child, she could call someone. She’s just like her. The one who left our home for an easy way out. And yet I’m teased by a horrid idea, the pestering thought of my own insignificance, my failure. I should’ve helped more, but I couldn’t stand to look at her, to see her-- 
    The poor girl, who much too closely resembled the love that I lost.
    





 

Author's Note

I want add this to my portfolio, so if it sucks, let me know.
please be honest beyond honest. Don't spare my feelings, I'm a big girl, i promise!I understand its hard to feel sympathy for the main character, but reserve it for the woman who changes him in the end!

Reviews

[Sseoni]

I found this writing to be very interesting! I was a little confused at first, but it made me want to read more and more of it until I finished it! It was well written, greatly detailed, emotional, and I thought it was great!

[Flo_writer]

Sorry to say but I find this guy is to be a real douchebag. I understand why he looks down on the lower half of society seeing as to how he lost his lover to the stoned and livid bums. But I can't seem to feel sympathy for him because I feel he takes pleasures in watching the hobo's live life the way they do. Even though at times he's disgusted by them. This was a very interesting story to say the least.

[Gandré]

this is a powerful story, well done. I thought it was pleasantly structured and it leads me to a thought that the fundamental issue could be put like is society ‘natural’ or is it ‘conventional’, a historical product of human activities which vary across time and space?

[Brjden (Bridge-Den) Cre..]

This was an interesting piece. I feel like I'm reading something from Tim Burton or even Spike Lee sometimes when I was enjoying this, but at the same time confused by it. Your writing and descriptions are that of an experienced, seasoned writer!
I fell in love here.........


"When I go to the malls and purchase one thousand, maybe two thousand dollars worth of things, I am stimulating the economy. Thus, that stimulated economy thrives. The tax dollars I've paid give the government more money to screw the bums on the street and those not strong enough to survive in this dog eat dog world. They build bridges they're not allowed to cross or live under, they put parks in place that they're not allowed to sleep in. Their eyes light up when they realize they have enough money to spend on trivial things and forgo welfare funds. They educate children who will grow up to be CEOs who will snub the street rats when they pass. Money trashed or shredded is wasted. It is not taxed and it does not filter back into the economy."

The socioeconomic and class statistical s**t that you put in here was incredible! I loved it!!!! Very smart, and informative, and true to life!

I just got lost in this woman. I'm assuming she's rich and decides to throw away the money or clothes, but I get wrapped up in believing she's crazy. I just don't know. Maybe you can explain it to me. Maybe you want me to think and form my own resolve. But still, an interesting write nonetheless!