Writing a couple of articles for this issue and for the previous one about recycling and salvage conjured memories of my Dumpster misadventures years ago. When my brothers and I were old enough to pull a hoe, my dad had us labor for his tuck-pointing jobs on Saturdays. Our duties included cleaning the jobsite, loading debris on his pickup truck, and unloading it into a Dumpster at the material yard the next time we went there to pick up supplies.
One day, the Dumpster was gone. This was during the 1980s when landfill space was dwindling and municipal garbage dumps were closing. Disposal fees increased to the point where our material yard stopped offering the service. For a while, we stored garbage in our garage until we could haul it to an inconveniently located waste yard.
Eventually, this crisis gave birth to a sort of game similar to dine and dash. I called it speed dumping or hit-and-run dumping. I hated this game. On our way to a job in the mornings, dad would keep his eyes open for a Dumpster and size up candidates by height (lower walls offered quick access), obscurity (residential neighborhoods had too many witnesses), and ease of escape. On the way home, we made a detour to his pick for that day. Dad stayed at the wheel with the motor running, while my brothers and I sheepishly jumped out, tossed the garbage in the bin, jumped back in the truck and sped away. We were always relieved when it was over without incident.
One time, dad picked a Dumpster sitting in the middle of a corner lot. It was convenient and looked unguarded, but it violated his criteria by being obviously out in the open. I cringed at this selection. We pulled up beside the Dumpster and started unloading. From nowhere, a black Cadillac sped toward us, skidded to a stop, and a man stepped out screaming. I froze. My dad smiled, picked up one more bucket, dumped it over the side, tipped his tweed lid, and muttered something in a brogue that neither I nor the guy could understand. We drove away as the man wrote down our license plate number and yelled, “I’ll get you. I know who you are.”
But what was the guy going to do? The cops had more serious matters than pursuing people who “borrowed” a Dumpster. However, years later, I found myself in the Dumpster guy’s shoes. My wife and I were remodeling our home by taking down a wall between the kitchen and a bedroom to create an open floor plan. Demolition created a lot of garbage, and I needed every square foot of our Dumpster to get rid of it. As I pushed a wheelbarrow load toward the box, I arrived just in time to see a pickup truck with four guys sitting in the bed drive up. The truck stopped beside the Dumpster and the foursome picked up a huge couch and a table and tossed them in. I lived just three houses from an intersection with the longest red light in town. But at that moment, the light flicked green, enabling the dumpers to quickly escape. It was over in seconds. Half of my vacant Dumpster space was now filled with someone else’s garbage. Over the next few days, I think most of the neighborhood tossed their junk in there, too. But what was I going to do? I just accepted my comeuppance as the revenge of the Dumpster guy with the black Cadillac.