Drop the Container

There is a hospital administrative building behind our apartment building that has a trash pickup everyday at 5 am. The daily drill that gets run goes like this; the driver puts the truck into reverse and enters the lot with the annoying reverse safety mechanism shredding the near silence as he backs the distance till he finally reaches the trash container. Then he exits the truck and attaches the container to a mechanism on the truck and gets back inside. Then he activates the hydraulics, lifts the container up a foot and a half and drops the fuckin’ thing to the concrete and ruptures the peace of 5 a.m. with a loud ass bang. Once is not usually enough, so another 2 or 3 impacts follow the first one. By then he can count it as a job well done if his intention is to wake me up, which it surely must be.

I woke up one morning under the described circumstances with a surge of annoyance because it was, no lie, the fourth day in a row that it happened. I raised up and grabbed two bottles off of the counter. I opened the back door quietly and slipped onto the fire escape. I threw both bottles one after the other and got back inside before I heard them hit with a double smash. I just threw towards the parking lot, I didn’t try to hit the poor bastard or his truck. I felt a little bad, I mean the guy is probably just doing his job, but hell, I don’t know how many times I had been jolted awake, thinking about how to deliver the message. This just sort of happened without a whole lot of thinking, I had just woken up seconds ago. From a window I saw him jump out of the truck to see what happened, and no doubt he saw the broken glass on the ground. It must have had the desired effect because after that it stopped happening.