One Man's Trash

by Ivan Coyote

  I jumped to my own domestic defense, pointing out that I actually had six jam jars that matched.

  “See, Mom? It’s a full set.” I said this with feeling, as though Martha Stewart would be proud.

  She shook her head. “We’re taking you shopping.”

  We returned the next afternoon with a sparkling array of drinking receptacles. It turns out there are different glasses for water and highballs and even little ones for juice. Who knew? Even more surprising was that I acquired all sixteen for less than the cost of six jars of organic raspberry compote.

  Doing dishes became an exercise in household pride. I liked to see my newest additions shining in my cupboard in neat little rows, like glass soldiers ready to jump forth and fight thirst. It inspired me to throw a dinner party. Vodka and cranberry, anyone?

  I felt so grown up.

  I got matching tea towels next, and four coffee mugs the same colour as my teapot. This move precipitated the purchase of an actual kettle, because grown-ups don’t boil water in a soup pot. Everybody knows that.

  I was unstoppable. I bought an almost brand new carpet from a set sale to replace the old worn rug in my front room.

  One spring day I came home to find a scratch-and-win lottery ticket in my mailbox. It looked like a bingo card and claimed that if I was one of the lucky few to scratch the right boxes, I could be the proud winner of a set of steak knives, a framed picture of a mallard duck, or a brand new twenty-four-inch colour television. Steak knives? What luck! I’m not fond of beef, but I could use them to cut up other things. I answered the skill-testing question and called the number right away. All I had to do was let a nice salesman come ’round to my house and demonstrate a new product. Then I could claim my prize.

  In less than an hour he was at my back door, a guy in his early twenties, perspiring from hauling a remarkably large box up my back steps. His shirt was wrinkled and he had those little tassels on his brown dress shoes.

  “I didn’t win the duck picture, did I? What I’m hoping for is steak knives.” I explained this to him as he unpacked a rather complicated looking vacuum cleaner. It was sleek and black, with ergonomic handles. I wondered if he worried about scratching the paint. I would.

  “Impressive machine you got there, young man.” I cleared my throat. “What is one of these things worth, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Well, without the hepa filter, and drape cleaning attachments, or the steam cleaning unit, about sixteen hundred dollars. The whole package will run you about three grand,” he said without looking up.

  I almost dropped my matching mug.

  “Well, being as I am recently unemployed, I should probably tell you right now that the chances of my spending the bulk of my retirement savings on a vacuum cleaner are fairly slim,” I said politely. I felt I should be honest.

  He stopped assembling and stood up with a sigh. He suddenly looked older. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  He dialed the number from memory. “Let me speak to Charlene.” He held the phone between his chin and shoulder, and looked at his watch. “Charlene, it’s Ricky. I’m in East Vancouver. I’m still in East Vancouver, Charlene. Do you think you could find it in your heart to get me a client who has a job? Uh-huh.” He scribbled something down, and hung up.

  “Nothing personal, you know. Charlene gets paid by how many houses she sends me to, but I only get paid by how many units I sell.”

  I nodded in sympathy. He began to pack up his box.

  “I guess this means you’re not going to vacuum my floor for me then?” I was pushing my luck. He knew it, I knew it.

  “You’re lucky I’m letting you keep the steak knives.”

  “Hey, I won those fair and square. I bingoed and answered the skill te–”

  “Everybody wins, lady. That’s the deal. I haven’t seen any colour TVs, though. Just a whole lot of steak knives.”

  “What about duck pictures?”

  He shook his head, took his vacuum, and left me thinking on my back porch.

  The world was indeed a treacherous place, and I needed a new vacuum cleaner. I share my attic apartment with two dogs, the evidence of which could be seen collecting in corners and on carpets. Tumbleweeds of fur appear daily under the bed, an uphill battle any pet owner can attest to, one that had been bothering me more and more since the jam jar incident.

  My hand-me-down Hoover had expired in a gasp of smoke a couple of months earlier, and I had been borrowing my neighbour’s ever since. It was a geriatric drag-along model which wheezed and complained whenever I plugged it in. Every Sunday I feared might be its last. It made a high-pitched whining sound when it rolled over area rugs, and I would almost feel guilty for making it work so hard. It had one broken wheel and should have been retired from active service. It had done its time and dog hair seemed a little too much to ask.

  It was the first time I ever read a flyer, and it worked. I bought a new vacuum, just like the one in the ad. I was too excited to read the manual, much less watch the instructional video. A brand new re-conditioned Phantom ThunderVac with dual cyclonic action and on-board attachments stood shining triumphantly in my hallway. It even had headlights. I finally understood those guys who wax their cars by hand every Saturday.

  I called my mother long distance. “Mom, guess what? I got a brand new vacuum. I am the proud owner of a remarkable advance in household cleaning. I am about to change the way I feel about carpets by harnessing one of nature’s most powerful forces. As soon as I install my patented cleaning wand.”

  “Good for you, honey. Maybe my allergies won’t act up so much when I visit at Christmas.”

  “It has a hepa filter, Mom. Are you allergic to hepas? Because they won’t trouble you any more. Not in my home.... I’ll call you back in a bit.”

  I hadn’t felt this kind of anticipation since I was twenty-one and had a bag of magic mushrooms and a long weekend ahead of me. I plugged it in, and both dogs leapt onto the bed for safety. Poor things. They just weren’t used to the sound of this kind of raw power in our living room.

  “It only hurts the first time,” I said to my cowering Pomeranian, and set to work.

  Minutes later, I sat down and surveyed my spotless living room. My dogs sniffed around, as if unsure they were in the same house. “Go ahead, shed your little heart out,” I told my husky. “I’m not afraid of you any more.” I wished I had taken before and after pictures.

  The phone rang. “Hi, Mom. It looks amazing in here. I can hardly wait for my house to get dirty again, and I have you to thank. This whole thing started with the jam jars.”

  “What are you talking about?” It was my friend Michelle. “Are you okay? You haven’t been taking too much Nyquil again, have you?”

  “Sorry. I thought you were my mom calling back.” I knew Michelle wouldn’t understand about the ThunderVac. She hadn’t turned thirty yet and still boiled water for tea in a soup pot. She wasn’t ready to relate to this kind of advanced home improvement.

  “Whatever, man, I just wanted to see if you were into going for a beer.”

  I wasn’t. What I really wanted to do was be at home, at one with my new vacuum cleaner. Besides, I couldn’t afford a beer. I was saving up for cutlery.

  MAVIS FOR PRIME MINISTER

  I work in the movie industry, in the props department. This means it is often my job to hunt down and purchase strange and obscure items, which often takes me to strange and obscure places. This day was like any other, and I found myself somewhere deep in the suburbs, seeking cheap pieces of foam to stuff into luggage for a scene we were shooting the next day at the train station.

  There is a certain kind of woman, we all have met one or two: they waitress in truck stops, balance budgets in banks, answer phones at car rental places, take your tickets in airports, and today, charge you for three hundred pounds of foam in a warehouse somewhere next to a river you don’t know the name of but wouldn’t fish out of. These women are all, of course, unique and special, but I have no
ticed certain character traits they have in common. They are somebody’s grandmother, the evidence of which is usually thumbtacked close to where they work. They smoke at their desks. They wear cardigans, and still call a shirt a blouse and a pair of pants slacks. They are not the highest paid employees, but chaos ensues if they call in sick for work, which they very rarely do. When they take their yearly trip to Reno or Vegas, no one can find anything, and productivity grinds to a halt. They are the only ones who know how to fix the photocopier or where to find the keys for any number of places. At home, they never run out of toilet paper and outlive their husbands by decades.

  This particular woman’s name was Mavis and for me it was love at first sight. Her voice was like sandpaper taking candle wax off of an old oak table top, and she had me pegged right off the bat.

  “You got a bed in the back of that piece of shit you call a van out there?” she asked, gesturing to the loading dock where two well-muscled lads were loading foam into my ’72 Ford Clubwagon. “I thought as much. You need a piece of foam for it? Come with me, sweet pea, we’ll fix you up.”

  She sold me a piece of four-inch-thick foam for twenty dollars, and instructed the boys to throw that in as well. She scoffed at me and shook her head when I told her I had been thinking of picking one up at Home Depot or something for a while now.

  “What are you, made of money? You need foam, you come to me.” That’s another thing these women have in common. They always say things like “What am I, made of money?” or “I knew there was something funny about that guy right from the get-go,” or “That’s just how I am. Don’t ask me to change.”

  I, for one, hope that she never does. The Mavises of the world keep things from falling apart.

  As I started up my van, Mavis ground her cigarette out with the heel of her pump and winked at me. “There you go,” she smiled, and nodded towards the back of my van. “Now she’ll have something to rest her elbows on.”

  It was just as I suspected. Mavis doesn’t miss a thing.

  THE SAFE WAY

  It’s almost impossible to look sexy in a Safeway, but she did. She had one of those long, lawless curls that fell into her eyes when she leaned over to smell the avocados, and she did that combination head-turn-blow-air-through-your-lips move to return it to its rightful place. That’s when she met my eyes, and smiled.

  I felt a flirt turn under my ribs. I smiled back, then pretended to compare prices of red russet versus golden nugget new potatoes. But when I looked up, she was gone, and standing where she had been was a man with thick fingers and wire brush eyebrows, bagging lemons.

  I don’t know if she purposely stood in the nine items or less line right behind me or not, but there she was. She had more than nine items in her basket, too. Maybe she was cruising me, or maybe she was a grocery rebel with no regard for her fellow shoppers, or maybe she just couldn’t count.

  I casually glanced into her basket, trying not to look like I was trying to look into her basket.

  Two bricks of medium firm tofu, balsamic vinegar, alfalfa sprouts and assorted greens, four heads of garlic, chamomile tea, a bag of dried red lentil beans, and most tragic of all: Rice Dream, the dairy sustitute.

  I felt her eyes pass over my chest, down my arms, and across my groceries.

  I am about to purchase a block of cheese, eggs, a quart of milk, and one of those already cooked chickens. It’s all over, I think.

  But she passed a pink non-smoker tongue over her lips, shifted her weight with a smooth swing of velvet-clad hips, and winked at me.

  She was flirting with me. What was she thinking? This couldn’t work. She’d want to go on a hike or something, with plenty of fresh air punctuated by lectures on what I’ve still got in my colon or my lungs. I’d try valiantly to cook her dinner, but she’d be allergic to wheat, or my dog, or my hair pomade. She’d try to slip soy products in my coffee the next day, insisting that I’d never know the difference, but I always do.

  I knew I couldn’t keep up this charade any longer. She probably spelled woman with a “y.” We were all wrong for each other.

  But I was blushing. She had impossibly long eyelashes and her nipples were pushing at her t-shirt. And my eyes were caught in the hollow spot at the base of her neck and my lips wanted to touch her there.

  I could wear my blue shirt and tie, and zip up her dress in the back while she stands in front of the mirror with a lipstick in her left hand, a colour called rubine or del rio or diva. I like expensive lipsticks; they’re the only ones that don’t make my neck break out in a rash.

  She would turn smoothly towards me, raised up on her toes to meet my kiss. One cool hand would slip around to the back of my neck and she would hold my bottom lip in hers for just a little too long, and graze it with her teeth.

  She would smell like essential oils, and soy milk, but I wouldn’t notice. I would smell like expensive French deodorant and get dog hair on her velvet, but she wouldn’t care.

  MAKEOVER

  I liked it when she ran her fingers through my hair, even though she had ulterior motives. “How about just a blonde rinse, or maybe we could just frost the tips?” she would whisper into my ear, like foreplay.

  She couldn’t help herself. She was a professional. Hair was her thing. We had been dating for a couple of months and the reality was that I was not going to last unbleached or undyed much longer. I was sleeping with a colour technician, and my hair was, well, boring.

  “It’s not quite brown, but it’s not really blonde either,” she would wince, as though it pained her somehow. “Can’t we just do ... something? I could fix it.”

  “I didn’t realize my hair was broken,” I would retort, trying to lighten things up a little. But she was dead serious.

  I caved a few days later, after two glasses of red wine. She wanted to bleach me blonde, but I was just about to turn thirty and I figured, it’s now or never, buddy, both feet first. If you’re gonna dye your hair, dye your hair.

  “I want blue hair. The colour of a propane flame. Give me really blue hair. Quick, before I chicken out.”

  The thing that real girls never tell you is that it’s true. They actually do have a higher pain tolerance than ... well, the rest of us. Bleach hurts. But I got what I asked for.

  Shining on top of my head was a crop of titanium-coloured fluff. It felt like August straw and my scalp hurt to touch.

  I don’t own much propane flame-coloured clothing, so dressing for work the next day brought on a deep and disturbing fashion crisis. I almost had to call in sick.

  I didn’t recognize myself. I would catch my reflection in windows out of the corner of my eye, and whirl around to find only me, in Technicolor, with clothes that didn’t, that couldn’t, match.

  About a week later we were in the shower together when she let out a shriek that dropped a rock in my belly. “What do you think you’re doing?” She looked panicked.

  I looked down at the bar of soap in my hand. I was going to wash my hair.

  “You can’t use soap on colour-treated hair. You’re killing me. You need a balanced alkaloid shampoo and a good conditioner. And you haven’t been wearing your shower cap, have you? Do you think I don’t know? You are impossible to work with. Your back is fading out already. Sit down in the tub. I’m going to have to touch you up.”

  “Look, if I had known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have gone through with it,” I sighed. “I liked how we were before. I didn’t know it was gonna involve this kind of commitment. Maybe I’m just not ready for colour-treated hair. Maybe I just can’t handle the responsibility.”

  She left me for a bisexual esthetician, and my hair faded to television screen blue, then for a couple of weeks I walked around looking like a seventeen-year-old boy who had prematurely greyed, then blond. A couple of hair-cuts later, I was back to nondescript, not quite brown.

  Then I met the stiltwalker. Stiltwalkers possess a penchant for spectacle and costume. Stiltwalkers wear a lot of make-up. Everything was
fine, until she spent the night.

  I heard her scuffling around in my bathroom, going through my drawers. “You okay in there?” I asked her through the closed door.

  “Where is your facial cleanser?” she called out.

  “You’re joking me, right? There’s a bar of soap on the little shelf in the shower.”

  She shot out of the bathroom, looking disgusted. “I can’t wash my face with a bar of soap,” she said, incredulous.

  Just what you can wash with soap is still a mystery to me. I must have missed that chapter in the handbook. Perhaps I was at hockey practice when they covered the proper uses of soap, not to mention the difference between pumps and open-toed mule shoes. I have a lot to learn.

  “No make-up remover?”

  I shook my head.

  “Moisturizer?”

  I shrugged, palms up.

  “Okay.” She shook her head. “Just tell me where you hide your hairbrush.”

  I was afraid to answer. My cupboards were bare. “I have mechanic’s hand cleaner,” I said hopefully. “It takes oil and grease off. It contains lanolin. It smells like oranges....”

  Turned out, if I were to properly entertain female company, I had some serious shopping to do.

  The woman at Eaton’s was very kind. I was overwhelmed, and slumped, my elbows resting on her cool glass counter.

  “I thought you could wash your face with soap,” I explained plaintively. “Can you help me?”

  “Oh, honey, don’t worry, I’ll fix you up. I’ve worked with worse. You just need a skin profile. And a three-step regimen. It’ll be okay. Repeat after me: cleanse, tone, moisturize.”

  Her eyes grazed over my shorn hair and flat chest, but she never blinked. She passed no judgment upon me for thinking toner was only for photocopiers, and I loved her for it. Her name was Madeline, and she spent forty-five patient minutes with me. Every time she leaned over to touch my skin I couldn’t help but breathe deep in the smell of her. I had an almost unbearable urge to rest my head against her ample chest. I felt so grateful, I wanted to mow her lawn, or change her tires, or something.