One More for the Trash King
By Doctor Lawyer Jr.
Truthful Fiction | 13.5 minute read | 3680 words
MONDAY
Pops was a sanitation professional with thirty years in the business, a true specialist with no other discernable skills. In those decades he met the love of his life, raised three beautiful children, and kept their home and lives as clean as a sanitation professional possibly could. The whole family showered, brushed their teeth, and washed their hands exactly three times a day as a habit. And Pops was happy with this.
Pops was a proud employee of Sparkle Pimp, the city’s largest and most monopolistic cleaning corporation. They cleaned offices, schools, and Thai massage parlors. The work was straightforward, the pay was good, and the Thai gave great massages. But today was something new to Pops. Today was the very first ever volunteer day held by Sparkle Pimp, at the mandatory order of the city court. The court also gave the CEO of Sparkle Pimp twenty years in prison, but that’s a story for another day. It was a good company. Pops had faith in his long-term employer.
Pops scratched his clean-shaven, baby-butt chin as he observed the job in front of him – bathing homeless peoples, college dropouts, cave hermits, work-from-home entrepreneurs, morbidly obese superhumans, and anyone else in the city who desperately needed a bath. The city was trying to smell better, Pops concluded, and he supported this cause. Dozens of extra-large plastic tubs choked the wide alleyway, all filled to the brim with foam soap and water. Pops and his colleagues gripped their brittle brushes, ready to scrub these odorous individuals into minty-fresh model citizens.
The first round was a breeze, like cleaning the dishes, except the dishes kicked and screamed as iron brush bristles scraped the dirt from their pores. Blood power-washed away by Pops himself, these citizens were made anew as they ran away shrieking, naked into the streets. The college dropouts were now ready for employment.
Next up were the homeless peoples and cave hermits. The grumbling, gruff crowd waddled their way into the freshly-refilled plastic tubs, plopping in, turning the bathtub waters various colors unique to the individual. A few patrons dissolved completely into the soapy water, leaving a bubbling goo that a Sparkle Pimp intern emptied with a rolling fifty-gallon vacuum and drove back to headquarters for further analysis. As the rest of the homeless peoples and cave hermits kicked back in their warm foam-soap baths, Pops and his fellow cleaners lubricated their brushes with the proper solvent chemicals, ready to approach Round 2 with finesse. As his colleagues picked their favorite cave hermits, Pops eyed the remaining crowd. A scruffy, old man or woman in his or her late 50s to 80s stared back with fat squinting eyelids. His or her massive matted afro called for the iron bristles of Pops’ brush. The sanitation professional had found his match.
Confidently, Pops approached the afroed individual with precaution. He stood in front of the bath assessing the thick mass - reminiscent of a head of broccoli - as the man or woman stared back with his or her fat squint. Pops stretched on his latex gloves and safety goggles, then leaned down to apply his brush to the extraordinary afro. At the very moment his brush touched the furthest particle of hair, the man/woman shot his or her hand up, gripping Pops’ shirt collar with grimy fingers, and dunked him into the murky bathwater. Pops jerked his head out, gasping for air. The man/woman tugged him close to his or her chubby, wrinkled face. The squinted eyes shot open, blood-red, staring into Pops’ pupils. Pops flailed to no avail. Like a hair dryer of dog-breath, a toothless mouth spoke:
“BORN AGAIN, one more for the TRASH KING!!”
Then Pops once again was baptized in the thick waters, his entire body pulled into the pool. As he emerged gasping, the man or woman was gone, completely dissolved into the chemical soup. His colleagues gaped at the scene in shock, doing absolutely nothing. The intern hustled over with her fifty-gallon vacuum and sucked up the goop from around Pops. Pops stood up, swaying left and right, high as a Russian space station from the solvent waters. He collapsed on the sogged concrete, blacking out.
TUESDAY
With a sledgehammer-esque throbbing headache, Pops awoke to sounds of tin cans crackling over an open fire. The night was dark. He was still in the alleyway, but all his colleagues and equipment were gone. His Sparkle Pimp shirt was gone. Even his Sparkle Pimp belt buckle. Shirtless and fearful, he darted his head toward the tinny sounds. In the corner of the alleyway, hidden behind carefully arranged dumpsters, was a humble hobo camp. He stood up, holding his unbuckled pants as professionally as possible, and approached the scene.
A barrel of plastics set ablaze, cooking a box-full of canned beans still in the box. Two old homeless men rotated the bean box slowly with a metal coat hanger they had stuck through it. They looked up at Pops like an untouchable.
“Gross.”
“Ew.”
Pops stared back at these two scruffy grandpas with disbelief.
“Hey! I shower three times a day!”
“No you don’t. You’ve been lying over there for almost two days now.”
“Yeah man, we thought you were dead, and rotting or something. Smelled like it. That’s why we’re all the way over here.”
Pops held up his arm and smelled himself, instantly whiplashing his neck away, cringing so hard that his face turned into spaghetti. One of the old homeless men poked him with a glowing orange coat hanger, setting his chemical-soaked pants ablaze. Pops shrieked and ripped off the loose, flaming pants, throwing them as far away as possible.
“Whoops,” the old man scruffed, “Didn’t mean to do that. But those pants are probably better off burnt anyway. You smell better now. Just a little bit. Anyway, I was gonna invite you to sit down with us.”
Defeated and baffled, Pops sat down on a spare barrel in his tightie-whities, stained fluorescent brown from the man/woman’s goop. He looked up at the men, his right eye twitching.
“All I knew in life was clean…”
“And that’s where you fudged it up, man. High expectations will leave you shirtless, pantsless, abandoned by society, left in an alleyway to be eaten alive by street wolves. That’s what happened to us.”
“Something… something must be wrong. A misunderstanding. I… I have a job. I have a family. I have rituals… rituals of hygiene and sanitation!”
“You have new rituals now, man. We saw what happened to you from our bathtubs. You’ve been chosen by the Trash King, baptized and bound to his rites.”
“The Trash King?”
“Yes.”
“Who the hell is the Trash King?!”
“They say he lives atop the tallest trash mountain in all of the city, a pile higher than a Saudi Arabian skyscraper. No one knows how he got up there, or how long he’s been up there, but he won’t come down. And he shakes his fist at everyone who comes too close to his mountain.”
“What does he want with me?”
“I guess that follower of his thought you were worthy. You got dunked into destiny, like a breadstick into marinara. There’s no going back now. You’re a trash man now, follower of the Trash King.”
“This… this is bullshit. I don’t believe you guys. I’m out of here, I need a shower.”
“Good luck out there, trash man. You’ll believe it soon enough.”
The two old men chuckled dryly. They cracked open a pair of heated bean cans, toasted each other, and poured the refried slime down their throats. Pops walked away in disbelief. There was no Trash King. How could a man survive on top of a trash mountain? How could there even exist such a trash mountain?
In the cold night, Pops walked home, clothed only by shoes, socks, and undergarments, avoiding cars and pedestrians with great smelly shame. At last he reached his suburban home. The house lights were off, as were the porch lamps. Like a starving, shivering ferret, Pops scavenged the nearby bushes for the spare key. It was missing. The porch lamps flickered on. He turned to the front door to see his wife of twenty-five years pointing a double-barreled shotgun at his greasy forehead.
“Mary! What are you doing?!” he cried at her.
“I could smell that stench from a mile away. You woke up our children!”
“Just… just let me in! I need a shower! A really, really hot shower!”
“No, Pops! I cannot let you into this house!” She cocked the gun.
“Jesus Christ, why are you pointing that thing at me?!”
Mary plugged her nose with a plastic clamp. Continuing to hold the shotgun at her quivering, mostly-naked husband, she ruffled through her robe pockets and threw a wad of legal papers at him.
“I want a divorce!”
Pops held the papers in his hands. “Why?”
“Because you smell like the Trash King!!”
“How- how do you know about the Trash King?!? Why does everyone keep talking about the Trash King?!?”
“Everyone knows about the Trash King, Pops!! Now get out of here before I shoot your head off in front of our children!”
Pops looked at the front window where three little clean children stared wide-eyed at him, noses plugged with clamps of their own.
“Okay, okay! Damn, woman!”
Pops backed away slowly, then turned and ran through the neighborhood streets. At a small cul-de-sac park he found shelter, curled up for warmth inside a tube slide. It was there he slept through that cold, lonely night.
WEDNESDAY
It was an odd feeling, like a crinkling plastic stickiness being placed all over his forehead. It was a bad, highly tactile dream, surely. Or not. What was that weight on his cranium? It felt like a hundred pounds. Some form of headache experienced only by the unkempt? Pops’ eyes shot open. He moved his hand to massage his aching head, but ended up poking something squishy above him. Little chunky hands placed another plastic sticky on his forehead. Pops rotated his head back and spied a dangerously overweight child halfway down the tube slide, resting on his head, holding a miniature tape dispenser.
“What the hell are you doing to me, kid?”
The doughboy made no response, and continued to place another tape strip on Pops.
“Hey, stop that! Why are you doing that?”
Another tape strip.
Pops shot his hand up and grabbed the tape dispenser from the fat kid. The kid began kicking his chunky legs on him. Pops scrambled out of the tube slide and slid to a grinding hault in the woodchips below. The overweight boy slipped out of the slide, then jogged away with his mutton legs as fast as he could, heaving and huffing, disappearing around the block. Where was this kid going – Pops did not care.
Pops grumbled, pulling the divorce papers out from his undergarments pocket. He held them in one hand and the tape dispenser in the other. Then he taped the papers around his exposed body for warmth and decency. The last thing he needed was to be naked in broad daylight. That kind of stuff gets you fired from your job. And today was a work day. Pops was going to work, as he had for thirty years straight.
Surely his Sparkle Pimp colleagues would help him. They saw what happened. Maybe they’d give him a new shirt. And let him take a shower. And lend him some pants. Covered in crumply legal papers, the cleaning man trekked just ten miles to his employer headquarters. With confidence drawn from his last noodle of hope, Pops approached the intercom to get buzzed into the building. He pressed his thumb into the big purple button.
The intercom gatekeeper spoke. “…Yello?”
“Bill! Bill! It’s Pops! Please! Please let me in!!” Pops had overdrawn his confidence bank, and was overcome by desperation.
“Yeah… no-can-do, Pops! Management fired you two days ago!”
“What- WHY? WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT?!?”
“You were gettin’ high on the job, Pops!”
“I WAS INTOXICATED BY SOLVENTS BILL!”
“Same damn thing, Pops. It’s against the rules. Plus, you smell like the Trash King, and there’s no getting rid of that. We’re a cleaning company for God’s sake. We can’t have our people smelling like they just climbed Trash Mountain!”
Pops fell to his knees, holding his finger on the intercom button. “Please. Please Bill. I have nothing.”
“Uh, I guess I can call you a cab?”
“You will?”
“Sure.”
Pops let go of the intercom button and lay on the asphalt, eyes wide and bloodshot, wondering when this nightmare would end. A taxi pulled up. Pops picked himself up from the ground and shuffled to the rear door. He opened it and got inside.
The cab driver pinched his nose and put a scented pine-tree air freshener on his mirror.
“I don’t want no trouble.”
“I will cause you no harm, cab driver, but I might kill myself after this.”
“Where you going, stinky man?”
“Alleyway downtown.”
The cab took off with great speed, with the cab driver as desperate as he. With a few sharp turns, they were there. As he exited the vehicle, Pops paused.
“I don’t have money for the fare.”
“You owe me new car!”
Before Pops could even shut the door, the cab driver slammed his pedal and took off, crashing into incoming traffic in a great, mushroom-cloud explosion. Pops shed a tear.
“I am cursed…” he mumbled to himself.
In the alleyway shade, the hobo camp was still lit, but only one hobo remained. Pops approached, twitching and tweaking. The old man looked up at him.
“You’ve come back, trash man. I knew it was only a matter of time. Why are you covered in tape and paper?”
“I have no clothing.”
“Wow, you might be the dirtiest man alive.”
“That’s probably the case.”
“So why did you come back, trash man?”
“Tell me where I can find the Trash King.”
“He lives on Trash Mountain, trash man.”
“Where is Trash Mountain?”
“Over there.”
The gruff old man pointed off in the distance. Pops turned to look. Past the city skyline was tall, glimmering, multicolored shine. It stood taller than any skyscraper downtown.
“That’s Trash Mountain?!”
“It is.”
“How have I never noticed it before? I’ve lived here for thirty years!”
“You were blind, and now you can see, trash man.”
“No! I refuse to believe that freaking mountain of trash has been there more than a week!”
The hobo checked his watch. “Yeah, I guess it’s been about a week since Spring cleaning.”
As he looked back up, the former sanitation professional was already storming off in the direction of the mountain.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, trash man,” he called out to the angry Pops.
The old man turned back to his burning campfire, lifting his red-hot hanger into the air.
“One more for the Trash King.”
THURSDAY
The early morning grew grey as storm clouds blanketed the city from above like a powdered wig. Cats hissed at the tape-and-paper-covered former sanitation professional as he slipped through the last alleyway at the other end of the city. He had come a long way, traveling by foot for more than a day. The mountain was in sight.
It looked much bigger up close. But then again, it looked pretty big to begin with. Still, Pops was baffled to hell how something like this could exist. He looked up to the top. Pops choked on his own jaw drop. In the distance, he could indeed see a figure of a man moving around up there, silhouetted and as small as a mouse, thousands of feet up. The Trash King lived.
Gated by nothing, the mountain base stood where the city dump used to be. Pops had been to this dump many times before in his career. But the dump was no longer; the mountain had completely consumed it. How had it gotten so bad that the city built an entire mountain? How would they ever get rid of it? Pops watched as entire families drove up in minivans to the base of Trash Mountain, throwing offerings of over-bloated trash bags onto the pile. Vagrants bowed at the edge, cloaked in musty hoodies. And just as that homeless old man had told him, the Trash King shook his fist vigorously at them all from the top.
Pops walked up to the mountain, perplexed and pissed to hell. With nothing to live for, not even a single warm shower, he clamped his hands onto the edges of a broken plasma screen TV at the base and began climbing his way up. The vagrants watched silently as he climbed from toaster to trash bag, rusted cans to rotting meat. Crust, must, and dust. Pops cringed his face into spaghetti once more. The cleaning man he once was died in that murky bathing pool days ago.
Far he climbed, shielded from needles and tetanus by only tape and divorce papers. He wheezed, not giving a damn about airborne diseases. Little rats followed him as he went further and further up, curious as to what this human-rat was doing, cheering him on with their tiny squeaks. Pops gritted his teeth as the cold wind blew against him. The sky turned darker - soon it would storm.
Stretching his arms, he grabbed an aged ragged bible. It gave way, flying from his hand. Pops held onto the arm of an old baby stroller, watching the bible fall thousands of feet all the way to the bottom. As he realized how far he had climbed, he became lightheaded and his heart beat like eggs in a processor.
“God, don’t people recycle in this city?!?” he cried to himself.
Pops turned his head to the left where he spotted another massive mountain, that of recyclables, just one mile away. It sparkled with relative cleanliness.
“Why?! Why couldn’t I have been chosen by the Green King?!?”
Cringing hard, Pops looked to the right where, to his heart-splitting surprise, the afroed man/woman stared at him with bloodshot eyes, less than a foot away from his face.
“The TRASH KING has chosen YOU, Pops!” the toothless, dog-breath mouth spoke.
“Why me?! And I thought you dissolved two days ago?!”
“No one has EVER climbed HIS mountain until YOU, Pops!”
“I’m just climbing it to kick his ass!”
“That’s not ALL you want, Pops!”
“Yeah, I want some freakin’ answers too! Damn! Then I’m gonna kick his ass!”
Pops knuckled up his free hand and punched it into the man or woman’s face, shoving him or her off of the mountain. He or she plummeted down, past the clouds below, wailing, “ONE MOOOORE FOR THE TRAAAASH KING!!!”
Pops looked at his punching fist, grimy as could be.
“Hm. I hope that was just a hallucination.”
His rat friends backed away in fear. He wiped the grime from his knuckles and continued climbing.
The storm clouds grew darker, and droplets of dihydrogen monoxide splattered onto his face from above. First it pattered, then it poured. It was the first shower the man had taken in days – only by the kindness of Mother Nature or the wrath of the Trash King, Pops mused. He blinked upwards. The peak of the garbage pile was in sight. And the outline of an angry, shaking fist hung over the edge.
Pops shook his fist back.
“Is that you, Trash King?!”
An indiscernible garble of dehydrated tongues answered him, like a cross between a grumbling grandpa and a pressure cooker, masked by the falling raindrops and earth-shattering thunder.
“Fuck you too then, Trash King!”
Pops scrambled closer to the edge of the peak. He gripped his nails into the last nasty bag of trash with all his strength. It popped open, caking his face in kitty litter. Pops coughed it out and pulled himself up. Wiping the stank litter from his eyes, he blinked in an altitude-induced haze. As his vision clarified, he saw the Trash King. The Trash King. The Trash King. The Trash King.
Nothing but a sludge-crusted, half-inflated, life-size, blow-up Santa Claus held upright with a sandbag base, its Christmas fist blowing around vigorously in the wind, the movement triggering a garbled, broken-circuit “Ho Ho Ho”. Pops tackled the Santa in rage.
“AHHHHHHHHHHH!!”, he screamed, deflating the Santa Claus further as he tumbled around with it.
Pops jumped up to his feet, grabbed the Santa’s hand, swung as hard as he could, and flung the inflatable off of the mountain.
“Hoo, hooooo, hoooo…” the Santa garbled as it plummeted through the wet air.
Then lighting stuck down on the Santa, vaporizing it entirely. In tears, face wretched, Pops looked around himself. Nothing but a pile of wasted consumables, worthless products, tossed memories, and broken dreams.
“There is no Trash King…” he mumbled sadly.
A piece of crumpled paper detached from his leg and fluttered down, landing at his feet. Curious, he picked it up. It read in streaking, stained letters:
YOU ARE THE TRASH KING
He tossed it aside, grumbling to himself. Pops walked through the pouring rain all the way to the edge of Trash Mountain. He stared down. Past the rainy haze below, ten thousand feet to the ground, hundreds of torches were lit. Trash men and trash women, all followers of the Trash King.
Pops shook his fist angrily at them, shouting with all his rage.
Thank you for reading.
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