Historical November 1979 report or notice. Original dates, prices, contacts and program details describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
The announcement by the city that it would launch an experimental trash collection system was greeted by my heart and mind with pure astonishment. Surely the article I was reading was a reprint from a Minneapolis or Kansas City newspaper. But no, it was indeed to happen in St. Louis and, not only that, ours was to be a neighborhood first supplied. Had the bureaucracy gone berserk? Efficiency? Rational planning? In the sanitation division? After all those years of garbage strewn alleys and cans thrown helter-skelter? I’m still stunned.
As I ran into the street to proclaim the good news I was greeted by friends and neighbors with fire in their eyes. Who in hell thought up such a hair-brain idea and it just won’t work. Nonsense, I argued. It’s a great idea. Just give it a chance.
Within a few weeks they came back, meekly, to confess that I was right. The alleys are clean, the containers are big but don’t block traffic, the city’s saving money, we don’t have to buy cans anymore, and it’s a great idea they said. Yeah, I said, it’s great. But already the grey Spector that I feared was Big Brother had begun to grow within me and instinctively I knew there was something perverse about these harvest gold flip-top boxes lined up so neatly.
At first, it was a vague, ominous, haunting feeling whenever I opened the lid to throw in my trash. There was something evil in there. Within a matter of days the uneasiness had crystalized and entered my conscious thought. It was not really evil, but it was unsettling and to be avoided. I was looking at my neighbor’s trash. Their debris. What was left after the good times and the bad and I knew things about them I had never known before; things I didn’t want to know. I slammed down the lid and smashed the fingers on my left hand. No matter. I deserved it. I felt so unclean, so pitiful.
Each morning as I crept alone towards it with my trash bag I fought to resist and not look in. But I found it had control over my very being and that I was part of it or one of them. I had become a trash-aholic, a garbage voyeur, a junk junkie.
I would stand and gaze into the great can, first one side, then the other. I knew where neighbors shopped, whether they ate canned or frozen vegetables, what they shaved with, all kinds of things I didn’t want to know. But at last it dawned on me. The thought that freed me from the can’s horrible grip, its curse. My neighbors know the same about me. Only those who use trash compactors are safe. The rest of us are as we were when we came into this world. No secrets. All is known.
We’ve got to start to fight back. If we don’t, who knows what someone in city hall will want us to share. You may scoff but this is serious. George Orwell was right.
Give me back my old metal can. It was dented and the garbage truck ran over the lid the day I bought it, but it was mine.
Don’t make me look at my neighbor’s trash. I like them the way I imagine them, not the way their garbage really is. If this abomination is not lifted from our alleys soon, our only recourse and salvation will be to call once again on the powers of the fox. For you who remember the fox, I need not recount his awful vengeance. For you who do not, I hope you never have to face his wrath. But maybe I’ll tell you about him sometime.
Originally published in The Paper, November 1979.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1979_11.pdf, printed page(s) 3; PDF page(s) 3.
