Dumpster Hotel by Willie Smith
A scrawny drifter crawls in to spend the night. A rare but not unheard-of treat. He squirms a moment, then settles down. Mutters half asleep treatment locked him out. Because the social worker sent him first to Harborview. Where he encountered the wrong desk.
Security frogmarched him off because he was drunk. Took till sundown to convince further authorities he had come because he was drunk – needed a medical pass.
Subsequent to the Second Coming of Christ, a nurse appeared. A nurse neither cute, female, nor polite. But who, after lengthy abuse, duly certified him an alcoholic.
He leaves pass in hand. Weaves downhill smack into a tart. Receives from her pimp a cauliflower. Breaks his wrist on a parking meter attempting to retaliate. Shoplifts a quart of Schenley’s to kill the pain. Fleeing a cop, ditches the gin in the gutter after one lousy swig.
Loses the pass in a gust that seems to affect nothing else in the area. Recovers pass from Second Avenue, inadvertently causing a bus to sideswipe a Mercedes. Observes the paper to be now covered with blood, gin; somehow fecal matter.
Hides in a doorway to cleanse the document with urine. Is in the process accosted by a razor-toting crack freak with a thing for penises. Escapes jewels intact – even zipper zipped – in some fashion currently escaping memory, as he mumbles near dawn into a garbage-strewn slumber. But not before divulging he finally did rediscover the door to treatment. Only to learn his bed, in the meantime, had been awarded to some other inconsiderate addict.
Although direct sun won’t reach the alley till high noon, shapes have become visible. The pigeons are awake, puttering about. Out on First Avenue rush hour clamors. The truck has rumbled up; having squeezed down the block, narrowly missing scraping mirrors on the rears of shoulder-to-shoulder buildings.
The prongs take hold. I am given my weekly lift up over the cab. Held in midair above the opened body of the truck. Comes the hydraulic jolt that shakes wide my lid.
But as I thrill to the mechanics of being emptied to the last egg shell, cantaloupe rind, coffee ground, cigarette butt, tin can, kitty litter bit – fear and pity cloud the ecstasy…
The compactor – reacting to a switch thrown up in the cab – whines, groans, screeches… the poor bum!
Already I had grown fond of his warmth – my lily of the alley, my fecal rose of pus and phlegm. Looked forward to his arriving night after night, setting up housekeeping, dozing through familiar snores, wet-dreaming into my bowels. Perhaps one day I would even become his personal ferry to the beyond…
When at last above the clashing steel I detect a scream. And so does the driver, I realize, as the compactor stops dead.
Continuous shrieking proves he lives. Relief washes over me, as I hear – hung upsidedown here above the truck – the frantic driver on the radio, swiftly followed by the eruption of a siren a few blocks north.
This time they will take him straight to the right desk. And he will survive the loss of limbs, shattered ribs, broken pelvis, ruptured spleen, popped intestine. For in this our beloved country, though addiction baffle the experts, trauma we know precisely how to treat.
Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human. His work celebrates this horror. His novel OEDIPUS CADET is available at amazon.com or from Black Heron Press. His story collections SOLID GAS, GO AHEAD SPIT ON ME, EXECUTION STYLE and STORIES FROM THE MICROWAVE are collector’s items. More of his work can be viewed by googling “deeply ashamed of being human. Visit his YouTube channel.
