Editor’s note: Jon Dawson is in Chapel Hilltoday collecting an armload of awards from the North CarolinaPress Association. This column originally appeared in The Free Press on Oct. 22, 2012.
I’ve written about dumps before. Some of them were clubs I’ve played music in, while others were the type that occur when a computer has decided to make years of work disappear in an instant. Even the “William Tell Overture” — better known as the Lone Ranger theme — extols the virtues of the dump, da-da-dump da-da-dump dump-dump-dump.
Last Friday afternoon, I had an intense encounter with a lovely woman at a dump of the trashy variety. No, this wasn’t a house of ill-repute or a Denny’s, it was an actual trash dump. A place where seemingly good people routinely deposit the most disgusting byproducts of their existence: used tissues, food scraps, spend deodorant canisters — and if you’re like me and live with a 2-year-old who routinely mistakes gun powder for pepper — once-clean diapers that have been transformed into glowing orbs of inconclusive hazard.
For the past several months, my trips to the dump have been blissfully non-eventful. I play along to the point of separating cans and plastic bottles, but I will neither confirm nor deny my adherence to local policies such as keeping used Tic-Tac containers separate from “regular” trash. Is there a concern that the worms chowing down on this stuff might end up with fresh breath?
There’s also some rule about mixing in yard waste with the rest of your trash. I guess it would be toxic if something like part of a tree that was meant to biodegrade in a safe manner was thrown into the mix. A friend of mine in Boston said he could be fined if old clothes were found in his garbage. I guess it’s feasible that a pair of worn-out socks could accidentally mix with lasagna remnants and the resulting Socksagna mutant could terrorize the eastern seaboard. This would explain how we ended up with that yenta Joy Behar.
So I pull up to the dump and pop the trunk on my car. Before I get the first bag completely out of the trunk a woman — who was a civilian, not an employee of the dump — got in my face in a Joe Pesci-like manner and asked what was in the bag.
“Do you work here?” I asked.
“No, but that doesn’t matter,” she said. “I want to know if you’ve got cans or bottles in that bag.”
I didn’t know if this person was for real or if she had her buddy filming this for a potential lawsuit, so I turned away and went on about my bidness. After tossing the first bag of trash into the giant bin with the power and grace of a young Johnny Unitas, I headed back to the car and picked up the second and final bag.
“You’re going to tell me what’s in that bag!” the self-appointed Sheriff of the Landfill demanded.
I saw this as a chance to be an adult and diffuse a potential volatile situation with a cool head and a kind word. In actuality, THE BAG WAS FULL OF OLD PAPERS AND NOTHING MORE. Instead of simply telling the boring truth, I looked this twit straight in the eye and said the following:
“Okay, you got me — it’s full of kittens.”
Just as I finished the sentence I shook the bag a little and made a little “reower” cat noise under my breath.
“I thought it would be cool to have some kittens, but they whine all night and it turns out I’m allergic to them …” I said, my voice trailing off.
With that comment, the lady screamed as if someone had pinched her bottom with a rusty pair of salad tongs.
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?” she shrieked as I twirled the bag in a Roger Daltrey-esque fashion while still making the corresponding “reower” cat noises before flinging it a good 20 feet into the back of the big metal bin.
“Can I help you with anything else?” I asked as the woman ran over to the little office to bother the attendant on duty.
As I drove off and watched as that crazy person dug through my trash with the attendant watching from a safe distance, I realized any chance I’d ever had at becoming a well-balanced adult was now gone forever. My slide into inevitable dementia will be as flawless as the great Shelly Long/Kirstie Alley transformation of 1987.
Here kitty-kitty-kitty.
Jon Dawson’s columns appear every Tuesday and Thursday in The Free Press. Contact Jon at 252-559-1092 or jon.dawson@kinston.com. Purchase Jon’s book “Making Gravy in Public” at the Free Press office and at jondawson.com.