As a Brick in the Wall of My Elementary School

Nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize

A portion of the following appeared previously as “The Dive” in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (March 2022)

As a boy I dreamed I was thrown out with the family garbage. The garbage man would dump me out of the can into the back of the truck and the iron slab would swing down, breaking my bones, making me one with the garbage of our neighbors. In slime and sludge and broken glass I was cut, made to bleed, the garbage roaring around me in the darkness as I struggled for air. The impacted clumps of us were dumped out at some factory. I was sorted onto a conveyor belt that took me to a place of automated chopping knives. My naked body was cut to pieces, my hands and feet, shoulders, knees, my parts falling into a vat of liquid material that was then forged into bricks. The dream invariably concluded with me encapsulated within a brick that was a brick in the wall of Timberlane Elementary where I went to school. As a brick amongst hundreds of other bricks, where I was the only brick that could feel, I watched my classmates play on the playground during Free Play, screaming happily, running after each other through sunshine. I thought but had no mouth. I saw but had no eyes. Nobody heard me. Nobody knew I was there.

Why did I dream it? Did I feel “out of the picture” of my family? “Out of the picture” of my school? Did I feel silenced? Did I feel tied down, unable to move? Were these dreams manifestations of the experience of being tied to my bed in the metal leg braces, something done, understandably, to keep me from prowling around at night, getting into trouble? Were these dreams transfigurations of my forgotten moment of abandonment when my parents left me for a tour of the Communist Bloc when I was six months old, returning three months later? Could I have comprehended, then, that they might ever come back? It strikes me as likely that, from that moment forward, I felt “thrown out.”

Another image, this one pruned from reality, not dream, shows my body stuffed into a garbage can in somebody’s kitchen. I am seven, naked, at my friend’s place while his dad is away. My legs and arms dangle over the rim of the can, below me the garbage they’ve been throwing out throughout the week—potato chip bags, banana peels, apple cores, spaghetti sauce scraped off plates. I have a boner. My friend says, “Drool on it,” so I drool on it. He says “Thump it,” so I thump it. He says, “Hit it,” so I hit it.

Garbage has been a mainstay, has followed me through my years, provided me with food and pleasant memories of yogurt and spoiling mushrooms, refrigerators overflowing with cheese. Am I not the guy who picks food off the sidewalk to put in his mouth? Instead of buying coffee and zucchini, I pluck it from the dumpster, the provident cornucopia of laughter and sustenance. I’ll not forget the time I was in Boston with Hyejin, my first post-divorce girlfriend. On a street outside Harvard University, where people milled, I saw a candied cherry on the sidewalk that totally had my name on it. A guy who looked like Don Cheadle was walking by. I said, “Is that your cherry?” and pointed at the cherry. Don Cheadle looked at the cherry. His eyes grew big and round. He said, “Is that your cherry?” I was supposed to pick the cherry up now and pop it in my mouth, yummy delish, being the cherry did not belong to Don Cheadle. I would have done that, but Hyejin, I saw, wasn’t into this. I did not want to freak Hyejin out. I had gotten my laugh, so left the cherry there for the ants.

For thirty years dumpster cuisine was (and is) a staple in my life. I dived in upstate New York when I lived on the commune, and in Baltimore as an industrial worker of the world. I dived in Tallahassee as a college student living in a shotgun shack. I was vegetarian then, so all this meat, I’m serious, like thousands of dollars in steaks, I drove out south of town to Woodville where I gave it to my poor redneck friends whose extra money went for beer. My extra money, too, went for beer. I mean, who wants to go inside a supermarket and pick and choose when behind the building, out back, your food is already picked out for you?

Jumping into the dumpster saved time, saved money, was fun, gave me a sense of purpose. I loved the smell to come from the dumpster, the pungent miasma to hit me in the face when I poked my head over the thick steel rim of a scorching July afternoon, and peered down, taking in the lay of the land, a ground made of tomatoes, squash, and cottage cheese. Or golden Twinkies, flower bouquets, apples. Can anybody say gourmet olives? What of red wine, celery sticks, filet mignon? I loved jumping into the dumpster, how the surface you landed on gave way, sinking unevenly according to what treasures lay below. Always, beneath it all, were treasures.

Dumpster diving is a sensual sport. I like jumping into them with women in cutoff shorts, say, and cheap sandals, us scooping stuff up, feeding each other with fingers, right there, on the spot. I’ve done that! Hot days when the dumpster is filled with half-gallon boxes of ice-cream, who can resist peeling off a lid and dumping back swallows of cold strawberry cream? Check it out: my face is lifted sunward, my eyes closed, the liquid overflows from the corners of my mouth. This happened in real life, I am telling you. See me drop to my stomach and reach down through a hole. My hand feels around for promising things to eat, and what’s this? Oh, he’s pulled up a large block of Swiss cheese! He throws it in a box then reaches through the same hole to pull up block after block of cheese, cheese, melty cheese, hard cheese. We’re talking cheddars, muensters, Colby-jacks and brie. I’ve in the dumpster found heaps of peaches, plums, mushrooms, asparagus. Yogurt. There’s never a shortage of delicious veggies, fresh fruits and bakery breads, canned goods and, as much as I hate to say it, sweets.

If you are healthy, or anyway feel healthy, and are not one to worry about developing cancer one day, what will you do when presented with that glazed chocolate donut sparkling down there, sending out diamond rays inside the magical food machine? What will you do upon encountering those boxes of gleaming pastries? Take them home and eat them, right? What about the gallons of chocolate milk? And chocolate soymilk? You will drink them and eat them and eat them and drink them.

Imagine doing this year after year, and the years turn to decades, eating thousands of dumpster donuts and cookies and cakes and candies, and all that sugar passing through your bowels. If “the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar,” as Otto Warburg famously warned us a gazillion years ago, then why do we eat so much goddamned sugar?

For a while, I looked seriously into the ketogenic diet, said by some to cure cancer. Seemed credible. Studies showed that tumors in mice shrank when deprived of carbs, but then I read of a curious doctor who tried keto on his dog with anal gland cancer. The tumor disappeared. The doctor pronounced his dog cured. When the dog started back up on his regular food, the cancer returned “with a vengeance,” turning the whimpering canine’s poor butt into a steaming purple cauliflower that quickly led to death.

Oh, my childhood dreams of garbage were powerful. Of the many thousands of dreams I’ve forgotten, my early dreams of garbage remain vivid. As a brick in the wall of my elementary school, I looked out upon the field where the children of my class played and laughed and ran and had so much fun. As a brick in the wall of my elementary school, I felt distanced from the things that mattered. I felt restrained. I could do nothing but watch and yearn, same as today as I look out at the world through the window of the big hot box we call the dumpster. If one thing about me is true, it’s that I was a dumpster child, a filthy little dirty little garbage boy who grew into a garbage-eating dumpster adult, a man of sludge, of oily slime and potential poisons.

Garbage has influenced me, right? Has been with me, has never let me down. Garbage has never threatened to leave me. I love the smell of it, of slimy, oozing, rotting garbage, don’t I? In garbage I am home, yes, and so eat garbage, it is in me and I am in it. I am garbage.

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