Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [5]
“No, son. I’ve got too much work to do.”
“Later can we play checkers?”
My father continued to scan the page with his red pen, making a note in the margin. “No, son. I told you, I’ve got a lot of work to do and later I’ll be tired. You go out and play with the dog.”
“But I’m sick of the dog. All she wants to do is sleep. Can’t you play one game?”
Finally he looked at me. “No, son, I can’t. I’ve got a lot of work to do, I’m tired, and my knee is acting up.”
My father had a bad knee. Arthritis caused it to swell, so he would have to go to his doctor and have it drained with a needle. He limped and wore a constant pained expression on his face. “I wish I could just sit in a wheelchair,” he used to say. “It would be so much easier to get around.”
The one activity my father and I did do together was take the garbage to the dump. “Augusten,” he called from downstairs in the basement. “If you load the car up, I’ll take you for a ride to the dump.”
I slipped on a mood ring and ran downstairs to the basement. He was wearing a red-and-black checkered field coat, hoisting two green plastic bags over his shoulders as he winced in pain. “Make sure the top is closed,” he warned. “You don’t want that bag breaking open and spilling garbage all over the floor. That would just be a nightmare to clean up.”
I dragged one of the bags across the floor toward the door.
“Jesus, son. Now, don’t drag that bag. You’ll tear the bottom and we’ll have garbage all over the place. I just warned you about that.”
“You said check the tops,” I said.
“Yes, but it should go without saying that you can’t drag a garbage bag across the floor.”
He was wrong. I’d seen the commercials for Hefty garbage bags on TV “They won’t break,” I corrected him, dragging.
“Now, Augusten. You’ve got to carry that bag. If you can’t behave and carry that bag, I won’t let you come to the dump.”
I sighed deeply and carried the bag outside to the Aspen, then returned to the basement for another. We tended to let garbage collect for weeks, so there were always at least twenty bags.
When the car was filled, I squeezed into the front seat between my father and one of the trash bags. The sour smell of old milk cartons, egg shells and emptied ashtrays filled me with pleasure. My father, too, enjoyed the aroma. “I rather like that smell,” he commented as we made the six-mile trip to the public dump. “I wouldn’t mind living next to a landfill one bit.”
At the dump, my father and I opened the rear hatch of the station wagon and all of the doors. Perched on the ledge overlooking the pit where we threw the bags, the car looked poised for flight. Its doors were like wings and the grille in front seemed to be smiling. Here, I was free to pull out a bag, drag it across the ground and then hurl it out.
Afterward, we drove past the gray cinder block recycling building where people left the remains of their broken baby strollers, rusty stoves and unwanted dollhouses.
“Please, can I take it home?” I whined upon seeing a chrome coffee table with a chipped, smoked-glass top.
“No, we’re not taking any of that stuff home. You don’t know where any of this garbage has been.”
“But it’s still good.” I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor’s office. And it certainly wouldn’t be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours.
“No, son. Now stop touching that filthy thing and get back in the car. And don’t touch your face now that you’ve got those coffee table germs all over your fingers.”
My mood ring went black. “Why can’t I have it? Why?”
My father sighed, exasperated. “I told you,” he said through clenched teeth, “we don’t know who that dirty thing belonged to. We just finished taking trash out of the house. We don’t need to be bringing more trash in.”
I sat pressed against the unlocked door, miserable. It was my secret hope that the door would fly open on the highway and I would tumble from the car, rolling onto the highway where I would be crushed beneath the tires of the Barstow onion truck