Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  For the most part, then, he spent his solo days skating a desultory, unproductive downtown route on his longboard, occasionally kicking curbside bags in much the same pointless way used-car buyers kick tires. What was in there? Garbage was in there. And as much as he dug what Tal and Micah were doing, how they’d engineered this whole presto-chango disappearing act from society, how they were giving a righteous middle finger to the whole capitalist grind, living pure and all that shit, still . . . garbage was garbage, man, it was tampons and diapers and smeary pink meat wrappers and chicken bones and cat litter and scratched CDs and dull razors and expired coupons and ballpoint pens that didn’t work anymore. To hear Tal and Micah tell it, however, it was like some barely known wormhole into another dimension of society, the flip side, the ass end, where everything is genuine and raw because it’s not meant to be seen—that garbage was the only truthful thing civilization produced, because that’s where all the dirty secrets went, all the adulterous love letters and the murder weapons and the abandoned poems and the unflattering photos and the never-to-be-counted empty booze bottles and the wads of Kleenex dampened by a woman who can’t understand why she rises from bed at 3 A.M. and goes creeping by her perfect sleeping husband and children to weep at the kitchen table about imperfections she can’t quite name. It was all in there, Micah and Tal said, just waiting to be hacked: the secret files of mankind, dragged weekly to the curb.

  “What do you see?” Talmadge asked him one morning, as they were peering into a dumpster behind a nursing home on Henry Street. Talmadge was deploying his guru voice, all wise and zenny-sounding: his dumpster Yoda routine. Matty squinted hard. “I just see paper,” he finally said, with the peeved tone of someone who’s failed a riddle, a flunking Jedi. Because, aside from the black and red bags, that’s all Matty did see: a fat white mound of mail and document-looking stuff, as though a file cabinet had barfed.

  “Look harder,” Talmadge said, but without another glance Matty snapped, “Dude. Paper.”

  Talmadge heaved himself upward, using his abdomen to balance himself seesaw-style on the edge, and then, kicking his legs back, lowered his upper body into a corner of the dumpster. “Come hold my feet,” he instructed Matty, who did so, staring up at the grid of windows above him and wondering what all those old fucks must be making of the sight. If he rubbed his belly and pouted, he suspected, cookies might come raining down from the windows. “Okay,” Talmadge grunted. “Got it.”

  When Matty pulled Talmadge back upright, he saw a ten-pound sack of rice in Talmadge’s hands and a wide satisfied grin above it. Together they assessed the sack, looking for holes in the fabric indicating rat or insect damage, or any odd, disturbing stains. But it looked as clean as the day the Sysco truck delivered it. “Who the hell knows, man,” Talmadge said, hefting the bag onto his shoulder. “Maybe someone over-ordered. Happens all the time. Excess, man. This’ll feed us for, like, forever.” Matty trailed him into a narrow alley that led out to Henry Street, on the way punting an empty bottle of Pepto-Bismol with the same force he’d once applied to penalty kicks. “Fucking paper, that’s all I saw,” he grumbled.

  But Matty Boone was not without resourcefulness. His late grandfather had always insisted that the family’s Boone-ness could be traced back to the original Boone, that being Daniel of coonskin cap fame, and though Matty, from an early age, smelled a ripe whiff of bullshit—Granddad Boone had also claimed to know the precise whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa’s body, about which he would say only, “It’s not where you think”—he reserved just enough faith in the claim to put it to occasional use. His probably-not-but-possibly noble ancestry was like an emergency well he drew from in moments of lowered confidence: entering the Oregon State Penitentiary, for instance, or getting kicked off the Ole Miss soccer team, or, further back, when he was forced to meet Mark Coreno in the woods behind the Ramapo Ridge Middle School baseball field to settle the affections of Kaitlyn Stulik: I got Daniel Boone’s blood in me, he’d tell himself. There’s no bear, panther, or Indian in the world I can’t kill. Boone, baby, Boone. True, this turbo-boost of confidence hadn’t stopped Mark Coreno from beating the crap out of him, or his cellmate in Oregon, a short wiry Russian with a spiderweb tattooed across his face, from actually crapping on him one night while Matty slept (“So you know where you stand,” the cellmate explained in the morning, shrugging, “nothing personal”). But like an itty-bitty reservoir of adrenaline secreted deep inside his brainpan, Matty’s Daniel Boone gene, synthetic or not, kept him stiff-jawed and resolute through these events, allowing him to feel—even with a prison turd on his chest—unbroken and maybe unbreakable, down but not quite out, fated for better days. So he’d suffered a few setbacks; according to Wikipedia, so had Daniel Boone. And maybe, from another, wider, and, like, Buddhist angle, they hadn’t really been setbacks at all: Last he’d heard, Mark Coreno drove a plow truck and had gotten banned for life from Dave & Buster’s after sticking his boot through the screen of a NASCAR simulator game, Kaitlyn Stulik had one white baby and one black one and was stripping down in Passaic, and his cellmate Gleb, first impressions aside, turned out to be the best roomie he’d had since Tal. Gleb, in fact, had accorded Matty special status because of his lineage, since Gleb, too, claimed a famous ancestor. “My great-grandfather very famous inventor,” Gleb said. “He invent pistol you shoot underwater.” At the time Matty wanted to ask why anyone would need to shoot a pistol underwater, but because Gleb had shit on him forty-eight hours earlier he just said, “Wow.”

  So Matty figured it this way: Daniel Boone lived rough and wild, had to hunt for his supper, had probably also gotten pissed off at pigeons for knowing more than he did. Matty could endure it, then; at least for a while, anyway. Not that his present deal was really all that bad: He had a place to crash, even if it required a two-hour pitstop at Starbucks every morning in order to charge his cellphone, and he had Talmadge to buddy around with, even if Tal had turned kinda priestly since college. No rent, no bills, no pressure: just undiluted downtime, a big fat pause button he could press until he could plug in the next GPS coordinates in his life, could point himself x-ward. The scavenging sucked, true, but Micah had laid down the law, announcing a “family meeting” after he’d been there for a week—one of those awkward things, like an intervention—during which she said he’d have to “contribute” if he planned to stay. Matty’d thought he had been contributing, by letting Tal raid his weed stash whenever he wanted, but Micah meant food and shit like that. Afterwards Tal had taken him aside to apologize for Micah, saying she was “sorta hardcore” and wasn’t actually harshing Matty despite, you know, the way it’d sounded. “Dude, it’s cool,” Matty said. “My last roommate took a dump on me.”

  But Matty’d known the score. If he wanted to prolong this ride, he needed to please Micah.

  Wandering Union Square one grimy afternoon just after the New Year, a Kaopectate-colored sky pissing equal measures of snow and sleet onto his head, he noticed, in an open truck bay on 13th Street behind a giant gourmet grocery chain, a dude in a green apron tossing what appeared to be shrinkwrapped packages of meat into a space age–looking dumpster. This looked promising. Matty stepped inside.

  The grocery dude was a fat white guy with a beard so orange and splotchy that from a distance it looked like a birthmark. From atop a loading dock, he was flinging the meat into the dumpster frisbee-style, fetching one package at a time from a waxed cardboard box at his feet and hurling it sideways so that the trays went whirling through the air before disappearing into the big steel bin. It looked like fun—frisbee golf with meat!—though the dude’s puffy scowl argued otherwise. From his expression, you’d think dude aimed to punish the meat with those whirlybird slingings, somewhat like the way (according to Gleb) Russian gangsters chopped the arms and legs off their victims, then seared the wounds with blowtorches, before killing them. (This had struck Matty as a seriously inefficient use of time and energy, but, again, to Gleb he’d just said, “Wow.”) Dude’s scow
l only deepened when he glanced up and saw Matty.

  “Wassup,” Matty offered warmly.

  At least thirty degrees chillier in tone, the grocery dude replied, “Wassup.”

  “That stuff still good?”

  Grocery dude rolled his eyes. “Don’t even ask,” he said, resuming his dumping chore though without his prior flair. The meat went thwunk, thwunk into the bin. Matty watched several red porterhouses go sliding from the dude’s pudgy hands.

  “Ask what?”

  “This is private property.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything you see.”

  Matty thought about this for a while, his eyes trailing a package of hamburger meat in freefall. “I was just asking if any of that stuff was, like, still good to eat.”

  “Yeah, I know what you’re asking, man, and the answer’s no. Store policy.”

  Matty nodded, stuffing his hands in his coat pockets. He stood there rocking on his heels while the dude finished emptying the box, wondering how long the meat would stay cool in the dumpster (the air inside the bay was fridge temperature, he guessed) but also why the grocery dude was being such a complete assbucket. When the grocery dude/assbucket was done, he stood there, six feet above Matty on the loading dock with the bloodstained box in one hand, and snorted, “What?”

  “What about later?”

  “Later, what?”

  “After you close or something. When no one’s looking.”

  “The dumpster’s locked, man. And there’s cameras. Don’t even dream it.”

  Matty frowned, bewildered by this technical point. “Why do you lock up a dumpster?”

  “Freaks like you,” came the reply, and with that the grocery dude turned to go inside. But then he stopped, pulling his hand from the doorknob, and turned back toward Matty. Cautiously, and with what appeared to be frictional deliberation, he looked to his left and then to his right, leading Matty to suspect he’d softened and, having ensured no one was watching, was about to divulge classified instructions for when and how to raid the dumpster. Matty smiled up at him, awaiting benevolence.

  “Here,” the grocery dude said, and dropped the box down to the concrete. “Guess you can lick that if you want.” An amused and self-satisfied sneer followed, but before Matty could respond, he was gone, his apron strings waving a caustic goodbye as the door squawked shut behind him.

  “Fucker,” Matty said, and hocked a loogie toward the loading dock. And fucker, he thought, for several hours afterwards, over and over again . . . that fucker, he thought, even when he wasn’t thinking it, like when he’d get a song lyric auto-looping in his head (that McDonald’s jingle, for instance, which for him was a recurrent mental rash: Give me back that filet o’ fish, give me that fish) that’d play behind his thoughts or, worse, ooze right into his thoughts. That fatassed motherfucker, he thought, while trying to distract himself with a pile of skater mags at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, then while getting rid of the smoke (fucker) from a one-hitter by blowing it into the toilet in the bookstore’s bathroom, then while roaming the aisles at Shoe Mania where he considered stealing a pair of hightops until a headsetted salesdude with telepathic powers pinged him with that uh-uh look, and finally, when the sky stopped dripping, while sitting on the park steps hoping an Asian tourist chick would ask him for directions or to help her shave her legs or something—fucker! What was dude’s problem? Talmadge had warned him about the various trash-guarding assholes you encountered, like Mr. Unger the Stale Bagel Sentry, but he’d never suggested they’d be like . . . that. Guess you can lick that if you want? The High Emperor of Fuckers.

  Prowling the streets in tightening circles around the store, he noticed steam roiling from beneath a manhole cover and felt like he was staring into a mirror. Identical puffs of steam, he felt sure, were jetting from his ears. What’s worse, he was hungry, and not just normal hungry but day-twelve-of-being-stuck-on-a-lifeboat-in-the-Pacific hungry, the sight of those steaks having roused the inner carnivore he’d been sedating these past six weeks while growing sallow and limp from a diet of exhumed tofu and infinite variations on vegetable mush.

  At nine, when the last shoppers trickled out of the grocery store toting reusable sacks filled with free-trade coffee beans and free-range poussins and organically farmed salmon and imported bottled spring water, and the saggy-shouldered store manager locked the automatic doors and penciled something onto his clipboard, Matty was watching from across 14th Street, leaning against a lightpole and swirling his tongue around the inside of his mouth like a snake prepping venom. He was getting those steaks. He was getting that hamburger meat. Matty Boone was going ninja on these motherfuckers.

  Ten minutes later he was crouched behind the store, where one of the rollup doors had been left with a two-foot gap, peering underneath to survey the scene inside. Dude said there were cameras but Matty didn’t see any. Who would train cameras on a dumpster, anyway? He rolled under the door, then scurried behind a giant rack of pallets the way he’d seen people scurry in action movies. Everything looked clear: beautiful. He bounded up the loading dock stairs to where the dumpster’s hopper doors were spread open at its top. The bin was startlingly deep, maybe six or more feet downward, and must’ve recently been tipped out because there wasn’t much inside it—a dozen or so bulging bags, a box of Eco-Planet Non-Dairy Cheddar Crackers with a squashed corner, a ripped bag of Organic Pizza Pie Puffs, several bunches of brown bananas . . . but there, seen as gleaming red bits peeking from beneath the other garbage, was the meat. Matty felt a sloshy agitation in his torso that could have been his stomach churning, his heartbeat accelerating, his Daniel Boone gene kicking in, or maybe all of these. He paused to listen for a moment, but heard nothing more menacing than his own breath. There were DANGER signs everywhere but there were always DANGER signs everywhere. He jumped.

  Working swiftly and sharply, he uncovered the meat by digging out the bags and heaving them behind him, the way a dog digs, then swung his backpack forward and unzipped it. He wagged his head, grinning. The bounty was even better than he’d hoped: porterhouses, strip steaks, thick pink veal chops, two-pound packages of ground beef, a chuck roast, and also some sweetbreads which he passed on taking because he had an idea sweetbreads equaled testicles and some oxtail he likewise ignored because who wants to eat tails and what’s an ox anyway? The sell-by dates were either today or yesterday—this shit was still fucking good! As he loaded up his backpack he did some rough calculating: $10.15 for the hamburger, $28.77 for two mega porterhouses, $17.54 for the veal, and so on . . . that was, like, fifty bucks’ worth right there. And his backpack was barely full! Now he understood, at last, why Tal got so stoked about this—it was free, man, it was like wheeling your cart past the cashier and right out the fucking door, it was just like discovering back in college that every song you wanted was free for the downloading on BitTorrent networks. When he’d stuffed his backpack to the point of unzippability, he tried cramming the meat down harder, which didn’t do the trick, then knelt there agonizing over what to leave behind—not the veal, that shit was pricey, and not the porterhouses either—maybe the ribeyes but man they were bone-in and thick and looked good. So he went at the meat again, grunting and panting as he squashed it down until finally he got the zipper around it all; when he was finished his backpack looked pressurized, as if a knock against a sharp edge might blow meat on anyone within a ten-foot radius. Awesome, he thought, and stood up, feeling as rich and giddy as he’d felt since his release, raising and lowering the backpack to guess at its weight: ten pounds, fifteen, or—?

  Sounds: the raspy squawk of the door swinging open, voices, foot-clomps on the loading platform. Matty went crumpling to the bottom of the dumpster and froze.

  “They got no depth in the secondary,” a voice was saying. “None.”

  “You don’t even fucking need a secondary against Chicago, brah,” said another, more familiar voice. “It’s a total ground game.” Matty recognized that voice: It belonged
to Grocery Dude/Assbucket/Emperor Fucker.

  Hunkered down on all fours, and holding every cell rigid lest he cause a bag to crinkle and thereby give himself away, Matty angled his head upward and stared at the ceiling, expecting, at any moment, to see Grocery Dude’s round pale orange-fuzzed face appear above him. He could imagine the tickled sneer: like when Tom the cat would have Jerry the mouse trapped in a corner, with all that lip-licking and what-do-we-have-here theatrics. He scanned the dumpster but there was no decent escape. Getting out would require a slow graceless clamber up the side, directly to where the meatheads were standing, and even if he could somehow bust out of the bin without getting plucked in the process, the subsequent need to roll himself under the door would entail a fatal delay. For that matter, he wasn’t sure his backpack would even fit under the door. No way around it: He was trapped.

  A sudden shadow came into view above him, and he stiffened even further. But it wasn’t a face. It was a bag, a big black bulgy bag that came sailing over the edge and landed squarely on Matty’s back. It wasn’t heavy, which was a relief, but something like a glass jar hit his spine, just south of his shoulder blades. With superhuman effort he suppressed the natural ooooof.

  “They’ll fucking run it on third and fifteen,” he heard Dude saying. “’Cause there’s no protection from the oh-line, zero.”

  “I don’t know, man,” the other voice said—sounding threateningly close to Matty, right above him in fact, but with the bag splayed atop his neck Matty’s view was blocked. His spine was tingling with such disturbing force that for a moment he feared paralysis; he wiggled a toe for reassurance. He heard a clicking, followed by some kind of mysterious machine-like hum, but his attention was focused on much more appealing noises: the fading of Dude’s voice (“the kicking game is what should be scaring you”), the raspy creak of the door in motion, and then, with a sound as beautiful to him as the three-whistle signal that concluded his old soccer games, the door slamming shut. Exhaling, Matty felt his muscles go rubbery. In the hummy almost-silence that followed he shook off the garbage bag and reached his hand around to rub what would clearly be a major bruise on his back, whimpering.