Lunch Special

"Lunch Special"

By: Adam Benson


Most people don’t understand the difference between a landfill and a dump. The landfill is the place where other people take your trash. The same people that use the word “landfill” probably refer to their garbage as “waste”, as if it has some glamorous purpose like it’s the unfortunate by-product of human progression that has to be dealt with—as long as it’s dealt with by other people. The dump is the place where you have to go and work in the stinking rot. People that say “dump” call it “garbage”, “shit”, or just “trash”.

I spent a couple days working out at a dump. We were stationed right before a fork in one of the dump roads, just to the left of a big partitioned sign. The top half had a big arrow pointing right and said Consumer Waste- Plastic and Household Trash. The bottom half had a big arrow pointing to the left and said Trees and Shrubs, Grass Clippings, Fill Dirt, and Dead Animal Pit. These dump signs are like inanimate airport ground controllers. They funnel things where they need to go. Without the signs old junk would all get mixed together and there would be chaos. Everything has a place. Without some sort of designation where to put your trash you won’t have effective waste management. Something has to direct this trash here and that trash there, so they put up signs. The St. Peter’s of old shit.

My job was to deal with old tires—the black remains of mass transportation. I ran a big compactor/baler that would smash tires and put them into bales. I stood on a metal-latticed platform that was about three feet long and seven feet wide. It was dented all over from years of abuse. My boss drove a skid steer and shuttled me fresh old tires from a black mountain that cast shadows the wrong way to get shade this time of day. He’d dump them next to me on the platform, occasionally crushing my feet, and make my small space even smaller. I’d have to bend over, pick up the tire, and toss it into the jaws of the compactor. Some tires would have the tread torn and it was like picking up big, floppy, dead bodies. The exposed wires would cut my arms up like hungry fireants. After I threw about five or six tires in, I’d press down on a lever and the compactor would slowly smash the tires to the bottom. Then I’d push up on the lever and the crusher would rise up as slowly as it crushed. When each bale was done, you’d unlatch the heavy door and leave it to be picked up. They’d pick up these big black bales with another skid steer and set them on top of each other like a black rubber haystack.

Every time we’d make a new bale, I would walk over to the side of the machine, take my gloves off, and scratch a tally into the grease and grime that coated the hazard-yellow baler. Underneath the black mess there was an overly patriotic image of an Eagle clutching the American Flag with the name of the company who manufactured the machine. Each new tally would reveal bits and pieces of the image. A wing. A talon. The flagpole. Some stars and stripes. Was I supposed to take my hat off every time I looked at it?

After we had twelve or so tallies on the side of the compacter we would shut off the machine. I would sit down on the platform with my feet on the ground for the first time in five hours. My boss would get out of the skid steer and go turn on his truck.
“Hey. Time for lunch” he said.
“Okay.”

We ate almost every meal at Maggie’s Cafe. In the mornings we would wake up at five-thirty and go to Maggie’s for breakfast. I was always the only person under the age of fifty and the only one that didn’t have a hat with the name of a pesticide on it. Lunch was pretty much the same. The same old farmers from breakfast. Sometimes some new people would come in. I would always hope that some clean blonde girl with big breasts would walk in. She would give me something to think about later.
A waitress would come over. She had curly brunette hair trapped up in a hairnet and a dirty white apron. It looked like she was probably in her fifties. It was hard to tell with the tired bags under her eyes.
“What can I get for ya’” she asked.
“I’m going to get the hamburger,” I told her.
“Wha’dya want on it?”
“Uh, just lettuce, tomatoes, and ketchup please.” I wondered if this was Maggie or just some waitress.
“Sure hon,” she said as she scribbled down my order on a notepad. “What about you?” she asked my boss.
“I’ll have the half-special.”
“Alright. One hamburger—lettuce tomatoes and ketchup, and one half-special” she said looking at my boss.
“Sounds fine,” my boss told her. She walked back towards the kitchen. My boss watched her until she was out of reach and then lurched forward onto his palms.
“Why didn’t you get the special?”
“Huh? I didn’t want the special. I wanted a hamburger.”
“Yeah well, when you come to a place like this you always get the special. There's good reasons to get the special.”
“I wanted a hamburger.”
“See Adam, if you get the special they have it all ready in the back and you can get it quick. If we get our food quick, we can get back to work quick. It’s even better to get the half-special because you get more than half the food for half the price.”

We ate. My boss paid the ticket and left some paper and coins on the table. I slid back into his truck and he drove us back out to the dump. I rolled down my window and stuck my face out to avoid listening to Rush Limbaugh. The hot air felt pretty good on my face. Sometimes I had to keep my eyes shut from the dust that passing dump trucks would kick-up. The sagebrush out there looked real tough like old men who don’t give a damn what you think and aren’t afraid to tell you so.

I turned the machine back on and cringed at the deafening mechanical sound. I got back on the platform, threw some tires into the compactor, and laid weight onto the lever. The big hydraulic presser inched down, bending tires and flattening them against the bottom. I stuck my head over the edge where the safety gate was supposed to be closed. Clouds of dust and grime sprayed out. You’re never supposed to watch it crush. Sometimes an inflated tube gets left in the tire and it explodes up into your face. The burst throws flak of dump up into your eyes like shrapnel from a grenade you were standing over. You have stop working for a moment trying to figure out if your blind or not and your boss starts yelling to get back to work. You don’t hear him over the ringing in your ears. You stand there, deaf and blind, when your mind starts to wander. You start thinking about lunch at Maggie’s. You think about the tired waitress and the old men with pesticide hats. You think about that girl you saw in her summer shorts and that hamburger with lettuce and tomatoes and ketchup you ate for lunch— goddamn that was a good hamburger.
I stared down deep into that black mass of tires writhing and twisting under the hydraulic compactor. The tires began to wheeze in dying breaths and the rusty wheels cracked like old bones. Dust poured into my nostrils and lungs, drowning in a vast ocean of dry particles where your feet don’t touch bottom. And yet, I stood staring down through each clogged breath, like an astronomer gazing out over the whole universe, willing to sacrifice it all for a chance to have a revelation, an epiphany, to feel the big bang and see the world as you never have seen it before or feel like you will never see it again. My gaze was in a black hole where everything is trapped and light struggles like tied in stiff ropes. Time is so bent and misshapen that the moment is a portrait, a masterpiece, hanging from a nail and an old rusted wire on an unpainted wall in the living room for everyone to see.
And then there is no explosion and it is all over.