Taking out the Garbage

All the Hartman garbage went to the Carteret dumps. I think our neighbors were even amazed by that. With ten kids and tons of friends, two parents and some pets we had A LOT of garbage. This was many years before mandatory recycling and we would fill ten steel garbage cans. “121” spray painted on each of the ten cans so nobody would steal them, like somebody is actually going to steal a garbage can. The garbage came fast and furious and some of the cans were so heavy that taking them out required several people and one of which hopefully had a degree in engineering. These cans were battered to hell. None of the lids lasted more then one week, (those were probably stolen) and the rusty ripped open sides made things even more adventurous. The holes actually worked in our favor if they were close to the bottom. This would filter out, what me and my brothers called “Garbage Juice”. Garbage Juice was an accumulation of everything liquid that can be garbage. It settled to the bottom of the can and mixed up into a real stinky and disgusting potpourri of absolutely lethal proportions.
How do I know this? Because one foggy garbage day evening I was told to “Take out the damn garbage.” which I obediently did. Carteret N.J. did not have this elite service where they came to the side of the house and quietly took your garbage to the truck and then came back with your empty pails to where they belonged. No, you had to take the garbage to the curb and if it wasn’t there (like it wasn’t many times) then it stayed on the side of the house. While dragging out one particularly old can one day, the sharp edge of a hole ripped into my calf and deposited several ounces of fresh garbage juice into the open wound.

It was a very lucky thing that I was young, strong and had a good immune system because otherwise I think I wouldn’t have survived the ordeal. “How did this happen?” my mother asked after the swelling finally went down one week later. “It was the garbage juice, Mom, that stuff is really bad.” as to which my mother asked, “What the hell is garbage juice !?!” Carteret had city workers in city trucks come by twice a week to pick up garbage. How I envied our neighbors, The Gitter’s and Deloredo’s how they neatly packed their garbage into one or two cans juice free. The Hartman’s were the freaks of the neighborhood. Our ten rusty split steel cans of overflowing horror was an amazing display.
Today in a modern museum it might be called an ” art installation” SO HERE COMES the raggedy old blue and white hand painted Carteret Garbage Department Trucks coming down the street. It was a chance to actually see a black person in our town as I remember these guys like it yesterday. They were hard working and dedicated men. They were fast. They were loud. They were proud. They hung on the backs of the trucks and surveyed their next target. Jumping off the truck and sliding the ridiculously heavy ten cans and heaving them up into the back. When the back got filled they would hit a lever on the side and this giant mechanical bar would come down and scoop out the back and pull it into the truck. This was a magical act that the entire sidestreet gang found extremely fascinating. We would follow this damn truck for blocks and the skinny black men hanging on the sides must have certainly thought these little white kids had very boring childhoods to be following the garbage truck. I’ll tell you what it was certainly better then the street cleaner but nothing ever came close to The Mosquito Man. The Mosquito Man was and always will be a legend in it’s own time. I remember these leaky old garbage trucks clanging and banging through the streets…leaving potent trails of garbage juice and flies. It was the great mystery, later in our childhood that we would conquer the great unknown mystery of ….The Carteret Dumps….where they actually took the garbage. If you never visited a garbage dump then you haven’t completely seen the world.
Our garbage situation was so intense that one day my father bought home a Sears Garbage Compactor. This was without a doubt one of the biggest wasted investments in 121 Whitman Street that ever was. The only thing that it was good for was for scaring friends and neighbors that visited and put our cats in there and pretend to hit the “COMPACT” button. I think at peak, the garbage compactor actually did cut our garbage output by two or three cans a week. But the thing wasn’t industrial and we wore it out after a year, besides the “compact bags” that came with it ran out. Buying new ones turned out to be an expensive ordeal so I think the white Sears Super Garbage Compactor (for households) turned into a nice side table to hold six-packs of bud and unfinished homework.