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Better Neighborhood Housekeeping
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
Sooner or later, everyone needs more than a smelly garbage can. It's time for serious garbage cans. Manly garbage cans. The kind of garbage cans that kick butt and take names.
It's time for a dumpster.
The classic dumpster of television lore and detective drama is usually located behind the cheap restaurant, filled with garbage and smelling of summer heat. It was never the status symbol it is now. Growing up as a kid, no one wanted their children anywhere near those nasty, rat-filled things that leaked green stuff all over the alleys and probably held dead bodies.
So, naturally, us kids thought they were great. Climbing up on them you could see into all the backyards behind the stores, and diving down inside them meant you could hide, not just you, but you and your bike, during a good game of hide and seek. Our parents would have died to see us in those vermin-riddled bins.
Later on in college, a friend of mind on welfare taught me all about sanitary dumpster diving--going behind schools to collect all the brand new, but outdated, supplies; hitting the farmer's markets for fresh whole melons at the end of the week; and pulling out boxes of brand new paperbacks the book store employees had stripped of their covers.
We always had the posh stationary at the end of the season, the great cheap blouses when the discount stores folded and furniture that held up for years even though it was gouged or scratched. During that time I learned that we are, without a doubt, more wasteful than any other country on earth. I understand why Second Harvest Food Bank exists and know full well all the healthy food that gets tossed out when its beauty fades.
Nowadays in my neighborhood, we eagerly await the dumpster, no matter to whose home it may be coming. We have, within my small court, a firm belief in dumpster etiquette.
Amy Vanderbilt never wrote about this unique aspect of American life and culture, but I am sure each of us instinctively understands how it works. I rent a dumpster, and after I get all my crap into it, any room left over is then available to the neighbors, if they ask first. This means that one $300 rental can hold three to five homes'-worth of trash, as well as an old roof and a broken five-speed. The folks across the street can dump their busted microwave, the next-door neighbors can toss in a floor lamp and a kitchen chair and three other buddies on your block can add their used bricks, automotive parts and a dead lawn mower. Nothing makes a whole neighborhood look better than an old dumpster.
If your neighborhood is also the kind where you have a block party every now and again, you can get your neighbor to help you lift in the odd dishwasher, extra tires for the Jeep you sold last summer and the kiddie pool that won't be used now that your son is in college.
Unfortunately, unattended dumpsters attract the clods of this world who have no compunction about using other people's property and feel a need to dump their crap without asking. They are also sneaky low-life cowards who have to do it in the middle of the night.
There can't be much worse than to have a dumpster for a construction project and find a stray couch tipped into it on the day before demolition. Not only do you have to wrestle it out of there so you can use the space, some dope has now saddled you with his garbage. I am sure these are the same people who let their dogs out late at night to pee all over the neighborhood between 10 p.m. and dawn. I am sure they know what scum they are, but for some reason they get away with it enough to encourage the behavior indefinitely. Someday, I would love to be granted the opportunity to see some sly boots stuffing his used carpet into a dumpster while the dumpster owner's stray dog pees inside the carpet owner's nearby car.
I have always thought dumpster companies were missing a sure thing by not painting dumpsters in better colors. I have a sneaking suspicion that more women would jump at the chance to rent a dumpster every year and really get a handle on spring cleaning if dumpsters came delivered in decorator shades of cream, pale rose and something in a trendy sparkly candy-apple red. Maybe with flames on the sides. You never know.
Deborah can be reached at DTHollis@SVCN.com. Send her your Halloween haunting tales of terror online!
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
