The Way the World Works: Essays (4 page)

Though we call it a dump, technically it isn’t one: it used to be a landfill. Behind the main building there is a steep man-made hill, covered with yellow wildflowers, with two T-shaped structures poking up from it. These are vents; they release trapped gasses from the heap. Now all the trash that we bring goes in trucks to the nearby town of Biddeford, where they burn it. Biddeford residents complain of the smell; for unknown reasons, Biddefordians sited their incinerator in the center of town. I told Jim the Manager that our dump was looking very clean these days. When Jim took over a year ago, the place was a mess; now everything’s in order, and there’s no smell. “Every night we clean out all the recycling cans with a mixture of Simple Green, bleach, and water,” Jim said. “We don’t get any bees. When I got here, there were a lot of bees.”

Agamenticus Road is the way to the dump. Agamenticus is the name of a mountain nearby; there are rare plants that grow only on Mount Agamenticus, but I’ve never seen them. There is a pile of rocks on top of Mount Agamenticus, too. Indians supposedly had a tradition of commemorating a sacred burial site by arranging a large pile of rocks; now visitors to the mountain bring their rocks as well. I’ve been to the top of Mount Agamenticus once; I’ve been to the dump hundreds of times, often with my son. You take a
right at the Civil War statue onto Agamenticus Road; you drive past some houses and a cemetery; and then, just after the ice cream stand and potted plant store, you take a left and you’re in a paved area in front of the dump’s main building, a brown shed. Next to it is a yawning opening—a sort of double-high garage door—into which people toss their clear bags of trash. One of the pleasures here is in throwing: today I flung each bag underhand, so that it had a final airborne moment of multicolored spin before it fell into the compaction pit. Sometimes I overturn the whole garbage can (which I’ve brought in the back of my van) and shake out its contents, holding it high over my shoulder: the bags emerge slowly, hissing slightly, held by the vacuum I created several days earlier when I stuffed the bags down into the can in order to close the lid. The bags holding regular trash must be transparent, so that the dump attendants can verify that you’re not throwing in something forbidden, like cat litter. Cat litter goes into another enormous container separate from the main one, a receptacle entirely devoted to mattresses, old couches, and cat litter.

There are three windows in the main building—one window is labeled “Brown,” one says “Green,” and one says “Clear.” Formerly the windows were fitted with swinging flaps of Plexiglas, but the flaps have been removed now—an improvement. Into these windows we throw bottles and jars. When the bottles fall into the bins on the other side of the swinging flaps (or where the swinging flaps were when there were flaps), the clinks they make are painfully loud. When the bottles break it’s a relief: shattering is noticeably less noisy than intact clinking. Why? Perhaps because some of the kinetic energy is used up in the breakage, and there are no broken inner bottle-hollows to muffle the radiating noise.

Down a slope and to the left of the main building are two dark-green containers, each the size of a mobile home. One holds newspapers and magazines, and one holds cardboard. You can flip pizza boxes like Frisbees into the container for cardboard, hoping to lodge them at the top of the pile, way back in the shadows. Often the boxes slide back out again. I took several bags of newspapers into the newspaper-and-magazine bin. There is a partition up halfway back, to hold the four-foot-high tide of paper from pouring forward. It’s hushed and warm deep in this news-vessel; the shiny advertising inserts make slushy whispering noises as you release them from the bag.

The most exciting place in the dump is the little shack with a cement floor and a sign over it saying “Swap Shop,” where people leave their serviceable junk. Today at the Swap Shop I noticed three toasters, two toaster ovens, a bike, a textbook of surgery, many pairs of shoes, two tape recorders, and an infant’s car seat. A man with a large, high stomach dropped off a green and white poolside chair that he had no use for; half an hour later I saw a grandmother walking off with it, while her grandson left with a toy parking garage.

My son and my wife once brought me home a bicycle from the Swap Shop: it has two flat tires, but it’s otherwise in good shape. Another time we found a pair of antique sleds there. Our friends the Remicks have gotten a treadmill, several extension cords, and an outdoor cooker, all from the Swap Shop. My prize was a complete set of the
Golden Book Encyclopedia,
with trompe l’oeil paintings on the covers—my beloved childhood encyclopedia. Since then, I’ve seen several more sets of this encyclopedia here—I suppose families must be getting rid of their copies all over the country at the moment. This afternoon, I selected a fifties paperback of
Lao Tzu and a book about Czechoslovakia in 1968. (Lao Tzu says: “Rule a large country as small fish are cooked.”) The bookshelves are in the back of the shed—sometimes I take a strange pleasure in straightening up the rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Now a woman of eighty or so, with a fresh white perm, is walking with stocky but sometimes unsteady steps toward the dump-mouth. She is wearing blue easy-care pants and carrying a small clear bag of tidy aged-person’s garbage. She tosses the bag in, watching it take its place in the pit among everyone else’s contributions. Maybe it’s the clearness of the bags that makes the dump seem like a place of confidences—everyone can see just what everyone doesn’t want.

A few times every Sunday, one of the crew drives the toothed bucket of a backhoe deep into the container full of cardboard to compress it: as the motor strains, the drooping arm of the machine disappears into the welter of boxes, which are forced up as well as back, and then it withdraws, like a hand reaching into a basketful of tickets at a raffle to pick the winner.

(2000)

S
ome years ago I bought an industrial dispenser pack of two hundred pairs of Mack’s earplugs from earplugstore.com. Mostly, though, I buy them from the drugstore. Recently, Mack’s began offering them in orange, which is less disgusting than white.

I can sit anywhere, in any loud place, and work. Everything becomes twenty feet farther away than it really is. The chirping, barking, jingling cash drawer of a world is out of reach, and therefore more precious.

You must have a good seal. When you unstick your thumb from a jammed-in plug, your eardrum will make a tiny, silent cry of pain, like a word in Arabic. Then you know you have a good seal.

(2007)

O
ne summer I lived in a house that was being renovated, in a bright yellow room, with a mattress on the floor. I woke up late and tried to type in bed. I was working on a story about a man who by chance runs into his brain on the street. His brain is wearing a jaunty hat and is in a hurry. It has some kind of a sales job. At night I walked to a restaurant called Gitsis Texas Hots and ordered two hot dogs and a cup of coffee and reviewed the day’s work on “My Brain.” The story was never finished.

One summer my family went on a boat in Georgian Bay with another family. There was a girl who slept on the boat with her eyes open.

One summer a friend and I went on a bicycle trip. In a small town in New York State, somebody opened a car door and we both collided with it and fell down on the street. And we were fine. Later a flock of birds gathered in the tree above our sleeping bags in the early morning.

One summer in California I owned a hundred shares of stock in Koss Corporation, the headphone company. I bought a newspaper and discovered that the stock had doubled in value. I sold all my shares and bought a Honda Passport motor scooter. My girlfriend rode on the back, wearing a red helmet, and I had a blue helmet, and it was lots of fun except that she burned her leg on the muffler and had to go to the emergency room.

One summer my girlfriend and I got engaged and we went to Jordan Marsh and bought a mattress and a box spring from a salesman named Sam. Sam said his wife liked a softer mattress, but he liked a firmer mattress. He led us to a mattress that was both firm and soft. The thing about this mattress, he explained, was that on it the two of us could “sleep to the edge.” If you got a cheap queen-size mattress, he said, it was really like only getting a full-size mattress, because you couldn’t sleep to the edge. We bought the mattress Sam recommended and twenty years later we are still sleeping to the edge on it.

One summer I painted the floor and ceiling of a room in the same day. The paint didn’t stick very well to the floor, however.

One summer I tried to write about a man I’d interviewed named Pavel Moroz. Mr. Moroz had invented something he called a microcentrifuge. He took tiny spheres of liquid and spun them at the highest speed he could spin them at, using a dentist’s drill. Nothing spins faster than a dentist’s drill,
apparently. Mr. Moroz believed that ultracentrifugation would transform matter into new states of purity and enlightenment. But nobody paid attention to him. When I talked to him he was taking classes to become a licensed masseur.

One summer I had a paddleboard and I went up the side of a big wave to the top. Then I was under the wave looking up at its sunlit crest. Then I was turned some more, and I saw sand and gravel doing a little polka on the bottom. I had no idea there was so much going on inside a wave.

One summer there were several cars with trick horns installed that played “La Cucaracha.”

One summer I heard someone next door typing on an electric typewriter while I sat outside in the sun. I listened to the swatting of the keys and thought how rare that sound was now. I tore an article out of the newspaper about the bankruptcy of Smith Corona.

One summer I sat at a table with Donald Barthelme, the short-story writer, while he drank a Bloody Mary. He said he was planning to buy a new stereo system. I recommended that he go with Infinity loudspeakers.

One summer I worked for a company that made modems. I began working twelve hours a day. In the morning, driving
to work, I held the coffee cup in my teeth when I was unwrapping a doughnut. Once, passing a truck, I forgot that the coffee cup was there and I whipped my head around to be sure a car wasn’t in the next lane, sloshing coffee on my shirt and my seat belt. Another time a can of 7 UP exploded in the glove compartment. The car, a Dodge Colt, began to have a sweetish smell that I liked.

One summer my grandmother took us to visit a blind woman who lived by the sea. The woman told us that when she swam, she would listen for her dog, who barked whenever she drifted too far from shore. Once she went out to do errands and didn’t come home till very late. Her dog had had a bathroom emergency under a knicknack shelf, away from where she would step, which she thought was very considerate. We agreed.

One summer I went on a bike trip through Quebec and Maine, eating four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a day. The roads in Quebec are very straight and flat.

One summer I worked at a place where they stored old copying machines. I learned to drive a forklift, and I drove it around the old copying machines, beeping the horn, which made a plummy “meep meep.” The second floor was filled with metal desks, and when it was break time, I would go up there to read spy novels. One of the people I worked with wandered around these desks drinking clear fluid from a bottle. That man sure drinks a lot of water, I thought. He opened and closed the
drawers of the desks, checking to see if something of value had been left behind. I listened to the sound of drawers opening and closing, far away and nearer by, and fell asleep.

One summer a raisin stuck to a page I was writing on, so I drew an outline of it and wrote “A Raisin Stuck Here—Sunmaid.”

One summer I went to Italy with my girlfriend and her family. My girlfriend’s uncle brought a set of dissolvable capsules containing foam circus animals. Every night at cocktail hour we dropped one capsule into a glass of water. As each foam leg emerged, we would say, “There’s another leg!”

One summer two of my friends and I found a loose door. We hauled it up to the top of the garage roof and positioned it there with some struts so that we could sit on the door and look out at the world. There wasn’t much to do once we were up there except eat crackers, and the asphalt roof shingles were soft and easily torn, like pan pizza, we discovered. They overlapped unnecessarily, wastefully, so we tore off quite a number of them and flung them down. They glided like Frisbees. My parents were unhappy because they had to have the garage reroofed.

One summer my friend and I bought Corgi toys, about fifteen of them, and built a parking garage for them out of blocks. Then we had an argument, and my friend took the Corgis he owned back to his own house.

One summer I worked as a waiter in a fancy restaurant that had been owned by a reputed mobster. The mobster sold the restaurant to the head chef for a lot of money. But many of the people who’d gone to the restaurant had been friends and associates of the reputed mobster—when he stopped going, they stopped going. So business dropped, and I stood wearing a ruffle-fronted shirt with a black bow tie, looking out at the empty tables. Once a waitress told the chef that a patron wanted a simple chicken salad sandwich. The chef, whose speciality was veal dishes, was affronted. “Chicky salad?” he said. “Tell him to bring his dick in here, I’ll make him some nice chicky salad.”

One summer I converted all my old word processing files, written on a Kaypro computer, to DOS. And that was fun.

One summer a guy down the street got mad at the fact that people were allowing their dogs to poop every day in front of his yard. He took some white plastic forks and put them in the dog poops. They looked like little sailboats.

One summer we had four fans set up in the upstairs bedrooms. One fan started smoking and our alert dog barked to let us know. Then we had three fans.

One summer I read the Edmund Scientific catalog a lot of times and fantasized about owning a walkie-talkie and communicating with my friends with it. But they cost a hundred dollars.