A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag

by Gordon Korman

  Sean looked nervous. He had already noted that the file folder seemed woefully thin. He set up his steno pad, arranged a stack of file cards in front of him, and took out two ballpoint pens (just in case one ran out of ink). Then he opened the Gunhold folder.

  The two boys found themselves staring at the obituary page of The Toronto Telegram, July 23, 1949. At the top of the sheet of yellowed newsprint was a small headline that read:

  GAVIN GUNHOLD, 1899–1949

  Gavin Gunhold, service station attendant and poet, was killed tragically yesterday waiting in line in the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce when the Queen Street trolley car jumped the track and crashed through the bank’s front window. Gunhold, three months overdue on his rent, was in the bank to cash the fifteen-dollar cheque he had received for the publication of his first and only poem, “Registration Day,” by the recently bankrupt Toronto Review of Poetry.

  Raymond emitted a short gasp, as though he’d been hit full-force in the stomach by a battering ram. He slumped back in his chair, face turned straight up. “That’s it. They finally got Jardine. Gunned down in the research wing of the New York Public Library.” He turned to Sean. “He’s dead, Delancey! Dead! And he only wrote one poem!”

  Frantically, Sean riffled through the folder. There was a copy of “Registration Day” and six blank sheets of paper with NOTES printed at the top.

  Raymond continued to lament. “It’s over. I may as well throw away my Swedish phrase book and start learning to speak fish. This is the end. good-bye, Theamelpos. good-bye, beautiful beaches. good-bye, Mediterranean sun. good-bye, Nordic beauties. good-bye lifetime of wonderful luck. Hello, New Jersey. Secaucus — prepare to receive Jardine! He’s beaten! There’s no fight left in him! A broken man with a broken dream!” He turned his face to the ceiling. “You hear that? Jardine surrenders! You win! You’re the better chess players! Thirty-eight years ago, you sent a trolley car into a bank — in Canada — just to wipe out Jardine’s chances of going to Theamelpos! Well, you did it! Congratulations! You destroyed me! I wave the white flag! I throw in the towel! I quit!”

  The poetry specialist stuck her head into the cubicle. “Shhhh!” she admonished. Then, as an afterthought, “Shh.”

  Raymond turned to Sean, his face open and sincere. “When you work in a fish gutting plant, your life is in suspended animation. You are no longer a participant in the world, because you smell like fish guts. Families of cats follow you around on the street. You hail a taxi, and the driver takes a whiff and speeds away. Department stores won’t let you try on clothes unless you promise to buy them. And can you blame anybody? I mean, when the President is checking the guest list for a White House dinner, he doesn’t say, ‘Make sure you invite at least one guy who smells like fish guts.’” He sighed with indescribable melancholy, gurgled something that sounded like “Arrxbblgh!” and slumped forward so far that his head was very nearly touching the floor.

  “We’ll change our topic!” said Sean suddenly. “Kerr won’t get mad because — uh — we’ll figure out an explanation for why it took two weeks. Like — we won’t tell him we’re changing our topic. We’ll just do it, and say that we told him, but he forgot to write it down. No, I’ve got it — we’ll tell him the truth! We picked the topic three minutes before the deadline, and didn’t follow up on it for two weeks because of our Halloween party. No, ditch that. We’ll say that the book said there were lots of other Gunhold poems, and the book was wrong, and it’s not our fault, and the two weeks were spent — uh — sick. No, that’s no good. We were in class. Come on, Raymond! Don’t just hang there! We’re really up the creek! Think!”

  Raymond lifted his head another inch and a half to shrug miserably. Shakespeare himself could not have come up with a more perfect image of tragedy and despair. It was at that moment that it dawned on Sean that Raymond was out of this game, totally incapacitated, sitting on the bench, an empty shell. Delancey had the ball now, under his own basket, down by a point, a second left to play. This was no time to pass, dribble or even think. This was the time to heave the ball across the court and hope for the best.

  “We’ll write more poems,” he said abruptly.

  Raymond sat bolt upright. “What?”

  “We can’t change our topic, we don’t have enough stuff to analyze, so we write new stuff and say it’s Gunhold’s.”

  “New stuff?” Raymond echoed, hope stirring in his heart.

  “Yes!” Sean continued, bearing down. “I’ve got news for you, Raymond. ‘Registration Day’ is a stupid poem written by a gas station attendant. We’re qualified to pump gas, so we can write poems just as lousy as that one.”

  “More poems,” Raymond repeated, a little more positively.

  “That’s right!” said Sean decisively. “More poems.”

  “More poems,” said Raymond again, the color returning to his face. His eyes took on a lively gleam. “More poems!” Suddenly, he leaped up, hauled Sean out of his chair, spun him around a couple of times, and sent him reeling dizzily into the wall of the cubicle. “More poems!” He looked up at the ceiling, gesturing wildly. “Did you hear that? We’ve got more poems coming! Forget what I said before! Jardine is still in this thing!”

  “Oh, shut up, Raymond!” said Sean in annoyance. “Save the celebration. We’ve got a lot of stupid, unnecessary hard work ahead of us, and it’s all your fault. ‘Oh, Gavin Gunhold is such a terrific poet!’” he mimicked savagely. “‘I can hardly wait to read the rest of his stuff. He’s been writing since the nineteen-forties.’ Or he would have been, except that there was a trolley car with his name on it! If you’d listened to me and picked somebody normal, we’d be half finished by now! But no! We had to do it your way! So not only do we have to come up with thirty pages of analysis, but first we have to write the poetry! I could kill you, Raymond!”

  “That’s a little strong, Delancey. But because of all we’ve been through together, I’m going to let it pass. That was some real clutch thinking you did back there, and Jardine is grateful.” He shook his head as though to clear it. “Whew! What a close one! I thought I was in Secaucus for sure. But we’re going to try five times as hard as everyone else and pull this off somehow. Trust me.”

  ***

  Raymond and Sean caught the two-fifty-six back to the Island and reported to Sean’s house for their very first case of writer’s block. Deciding to write poetry, they found, was a lot easier than actually doing it. And it wasn’t any help to have to listen to the shouts of delight as Mr. and Mrs. Delancey experimented with the argon-neon laser, using aerosol spray to illuminate the invisible beam.

  Sean crumpled up yet another piece of paper, and tossed it into the overflowing basket. “My apologies to the late Mr. Gunhold,” he said savagely. “It takes just as much effort to write stupid poetry as the good stuff.”

  “Well, why don’t we try some of that heartwarming garbage?” Raymond suggested. “You know — tweeting birds in the meadow, hosts of golden daffodils — that stuff.”

  “Because Gavin Gunhold wouldn’t write about that.”

  “I should hope not; a man in his condition! He should be getting a lot of rest. So then why don’t we try a style like all those downer poems. You know, ‘Death, death, oh, welcome death.’ Huh? How about it?”

  “Raymond, no! We’re trying to sound like the guy who wrote about taxidermy school. It’s impossible to guess how his mind worked. I’ll bet you in the entire history of the English language, he’s the only writer that even mentions a taxidermy school. Face it, Raymond. He may have been the best service station attendant in Canada, but as a poet, he was weird. For all we know, he got his ideas by taking a dictionary, throwing it open at random, and writing about the first word he saw. That’s the only explanation I can think of for taxidermy school.”

  Raymond snapped his fingers. “Delancey, you’re a genius!” He ran over to Sean’s bookcase and pulled out an enormous volume entitled The Encyclopedia Dictionary for Growing Young Minds. He paused a
s he read the title. “Hmmm. Grown any young minds lately? Okay. To business.” He plopped the dictionary down on Sean’s desk, threw it open about a third of the way, closed his eyes, and stuck his finger in the center of the page. “Well, Delancey, what’d I get?”

  Sean regarded the pointing finger. “Fruit fly,” he reported. “Now there’s a subject to stir the heart of any poet.”

  Raymond scanned the entry. “I don’t know. There’s drama here. Listen, if you’re a fruit fly, your whole life takes place in three lousy weeks. That’s tragic. Wait! I’m having an inspiration: ‘Due to the tragically short life span of the average fruit fly —’”

  “‘College is not really an option,’” Sean finished in disgust.

  “Great!” cried Raymond. “I love it!” He sat himself down in front of Sean’s old manual typewriter and began to peck away slowly with his two index fingers.

  “Aw, come on, Raymond, quit it. This is stupid. Kerr’s going to kill us if we try to feed him poems about fruit flies in college! I suppose you’re writing all about this beady-eyed bug in a cap and gown!”

  Raymond fairly shrieked with delight. “Caps and gowns! Great! Oh, man, this stuff writes itself!” When he pulled the sheet from the roller and handed it to Sean for inspection, it read:

  “Fruit Fly” by Gavin Gunhold

  Due to the tragically short life span of the average fruit fly,

  College is not really an option.

  Caps and gowns don’t come in that

  size anyway.

  Sean looked thunderstruck. “My God, it’s terrible! It’s so bad that — it sounds just like Gavin Gunhold wrote it!”

  “I don’t know,” said Raymond critically. “I kind of like it.”

  “You liked ‘Registration Day,’” Sean reminded him. “But this is — okay. Only, we’re going to have to write an analysis. What can we say about ‘Fruit Fly’?”

  Raymond shrugged. “We can always put something about education, or the underprivileged. And if that doesn’t work, we say that it comments on society. The important thing is, we just doubled Gavin Gunhold’s total output, with one word out of a dictionary. Somewhere under that trolley car, I bet Gav is smiling.” He picked up the dictionary and threw it open again. “Eyes closed, right there.”

  “Consommé,” read Sean.

  “Consommé,” mused Raymond. “Hmmm.”

  Sean blew up. “How could you even try to think of a poem about consommé? It’s soup, Raymond! Soup!”

  “Well, yeah, but I mean, we’re being artists here. We’ve got to use our creative imagination. Sure, on the surface soup isn’t too interesting, but let’s toss it around a bit.”

  “There’s nothing to toss. It’s consommé. You eat it with a spoon. You can’t swim in it, paint a fence with it, or wax a floor with it. It’s no good as insect spray or shampoo, and it won’t cure athlete’s foot, run your car —”

  “Run your car!” Raymond howled. “That’s it! What a Gunholdesque idea! Can you imagine if cars could run on consommé?”

  “The oil companies wouldn’t stand for it. Really, Raymond —”

  “Oil companies!” cried Raymond, running back to the typewriter. “Come on! Keep thinking!”

  “You’re going too far!” Sean thundered. “Consommé is clear broth! The most poetic thing that ever happens to it is parsley!”

  “Beautiful! Beautiful!” crowed Raymond, his index fingers working like pistons. He ripped out the sheet and handed it to Sean.

  “Industrial Secret” by Gavin Gunhold

  The oil companies don’t want you to know

  That the average car will run on

  Consommé,

  If you can figure out a way

  To get the parsley out of the carburetor.

  “Not bad,” Sean said weakly. “Here, give me that dictionary.”

  Sean ended up with “multiple,” which he and Raymond argued up through “multiple contusions” and “multiple birth” to settle finally on “multiple personality.” Then the fight began in earnest, with Sean claiming that he was going crazy, and Raymond hacking at the typewriter and chortling with glee. When the dust cleared, the result was:

  “Group Therapy” by Gavin Gunhold

  When my psychiatrist went insane,

  Only six of my multiple personalities

  Were cured.

  The rest of us want our money back.

  Raymond flopped back in his chair. “Oh, we’d better give it a rest! With artists like us, you shouldn’t overtax the creative muscle.”

  After a few minutes of relatively companionable silence, both boys realized that they were completely exhausted.

  “Well, it’s no wonder,” said Sean. “Do you realize what we’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours? Yesterday at this time, the party hadn’t even started yet. Just think of all that’s happened to us since then.”

  “Yeah, life’s like that sometimes,” Raymond agreed. “It’s another one of the ways they have of trying to get at Jardine. When I think about it, it’s pretty amazing how well he came through this last bit.”

  “What do you mean ‘get at Jardine’? Don’t you remember who was with you every inch of the way, through that nightmare party? Through that pleasant little business at the library this morning? And through these hours of marvelous creativity that almost killed the two of us? How do you explain the fact that, over the last day, another person has had just as much bad luck as Jardine?”

  “It’s not the same,” said Raymond simply. “You had a heavy twenty-four hours; Jardine had a heavy sixteen years.”

  Sean sighed. “Go home, Raymond.”

  “What were you two doing in there?” Gramp asked after Raymond had left. “It sounded like World War III.”

  “Oh, we were working on our poetry assignment.”

  “Huh! Well, I guess poetry is rougher stuff than I thought it was.” Gramp lit up a Scrulnick’s. He always smoked more when the hurricane season was over. “You and Jardine seem to fight a lot.”

  Sean shuddered. “Gramp, that guy drives me crazy.”

  Gramp shrugged. “Crazy’s not so bad. It’s a lot like prune juice — too much is a disaster, but a little can be just what the doctor ordered. You should learn to appreciate Jardine. That’s one kid who’s never going to turn into a robot. He reminds me of the old neighborhood.”

  “Why? Because he likes the Weather Channel and runs out of gas in front of your deli? He’s a Looney Tune!”

  Gramp smiled smugly, indicating he was not convinced. “I’m going to watch some weather. Jardine and I are betting on some early blizzards in the Midwest this year.”

  Sean groaned. Since kindergarten, Gramp had yet to approve of a single one of his friends. Why must he take to heart the one guy who seemed destined to ruin Sean’s comfortable life?

  ***

  On Monday morning, Q. David Hyatt, Engineers Sopwith and Johnson, and Senior Engineer Quisenberry led a delegation of six Korean energy specialists into a small presentation room adjoining the office.

  “We’ve prepared a short videotape,” Quisenberry explained, “to give you an overview of the project before you can see SACGEN itself.” He popped a tape into the VCR as Sopwith dimmed the lights.

  Mr. Hyatt had seen this tape at least fifteen or twenty times, but he never tired of it. He always felt a thrill of exhilaration when the music started, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. His ears perked up. Instead of the usual music, Bob Dylan was singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Well, this was something different. The Department of Energy must have updated the tape. There was a new narrator, too, a young, vibrant voice that instantly appealed to him, although virtually any one of the twenty-two hundred DeWitt students could have identified that voice as belonging to Howard Newman.

  “What you are looking at is the windmill,” announced the audio as the screen showed various angles of SACGEN. “First, a little history. They built it over the summer. Now some technical data. It’s bigger than
a breadbox, but smaller than Pakistan. And if you drop it on your foot, your career in ballet is pretty much shot.”

  In the dark, Quisenberry elbowed the principal.

  “Hyatt, what the hell is this?” he hissed.

  Hyatt looked bewildered. “This is your tape.”

  “No, it isn’t! It’s the school’s tape!”

  The video now showed the interior of the SACGEN control room, with Sopwith and Johnson, unfrazzled and smiling. “This is the control center, where everybody goes to pretend that they can run the windmill. Truth is, the windmill doesn’t work.”

  Everyone froze, and the visitors began whispering among themselves confusedly in Korean.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Howard’s voice continued pleasantly. “You’re asking yourselves why did my government send me halfway around the world to look at a useless pile of scrap? Well, look on the bright side. OUR government put up the thirty-three million bucks to BUILD —”

  Quisenberry lunged at the stop button and, had the lights been on, his guests would have seen that his face was bright purple as he said, “Ha, ha, ha. We seem to be having a little difficulty with the tape.”

  ***

  “Your attention, please,” came Mr. Hyatt’s voice over the PA system. “Would the person responsible for tampering with the SACGEN orientation cassette please report to the office immediately.”

  “No, no, no, Q-Dave!” said Howard in obvious pleasure. He looked at the five poker players around the table. “He’s so dense! He tries the same thing every time, and every time I don’t show up.” Howard was doubly happy because he was making a killing at six-handed poker, ahead nineteen hundred toothpicks in scarcely half an hour.

  One of the other five hands, and easily the morning’s big loser, was Sean, who was personally out of pocket nearly six hundred toothpicks. He was making a valiant attempt to ignore the fact that Raymond was standing a few feet away from the table, signaling madly. Raymond just couldn’t seem to figure out that poker was something Sean played to avoid him.

  “What did you put on that tape, Howard?” asked Chris McDermott as he examined his cards.