SEAN NISHI / I PICK UP TRASH, DO YOU?
Riblet said she wanted to go to the Burnville Music Festival for our anniversary, but rapper Triple S.E.X. poured malt liquor all over his onstage equipment and started an electrical fire, which destroyed all of Burnville and two state parks, along with the extinction of a dozen different species of birds. So we stayed home instead. And come Monday morning, the entire city is covered in a shroud the color of Orange Wang!® energy drink. And as we Unemployables don’t have access to showers, clean Jordans, or twenty-five hundred square foot condominiums, we wake up in a parklet to see it snowing, which is actually a layer of soot falling from the sky like Vesuvius exploding.
And before we know it, a paddy wagon pulls up and two cops pop out to oversee a Temporary Relocation Project. They say what good sports we are, admiring our gusto, our scrappiness, our willingness to comply with city ordinances concerning Unemployables. They even give us a warning before turning the fire hoses on.
So off we go to see Auntie at the unemployment office for towels and brunch. Auntie is a 300 pound drag queen who used to turn tricks for the Philadelphia Eagles. She bought the office after the city defunded all of its social services. Now it’s a brothel. As kids we used to go there after state-mandated Narcam® training, where she’d have a pot of gumbo simmering on the stovetop and the rentboys would help us with our arithmetic. Today, however, Auntie says we can’t stay anymore.
“But we’re your cute little street urchins,” says Skunk. “You love us.”
“When you were eleven,” says Auntie. “Not when you’re twenty-three.”
I’ve known Skunk since childhood. He’s always been bald except for this little tuft that sticks out the back like clingy cat poo. His right earlobe disintegrated from a combination of cheap piercing and nickel allergy. Sometimes he goes on these full-blown psychosis episodes where he’s convinced Ben & Jerry®’s is spying on him via small hidden cameras in flea antennae so they can steal his ideas for new flavors that he whispers in his sleep, like “Bourbon Youth in Financial Crisis.”
What happens next is we head over to Sacagawea Park and Casino, and somehow we totally forget that the Marx March is in town. Everywhere we go these bridge and tunnel kids wearing Che Guevara hats are shouting for the workers of the world to unite, while booths sell communist bath towels and t-shirts that say Revolutions Are the Tesla’s of History. Some guy in a Fred Perry shirt with a fake beard and an electric longboard asks me if I want to ride his board, which he clarifies is his face. So Riblet smashes his ankles with a broken roulette wheel. We have a good laugh seeing a big man topple over to a petite girl who, let’s face it, looks like a shaved raccoon if you left just the black outline of the eyes, and plus, we’re pretty much monogamous at this point. Riblet stubs his belly with a spike sticking out of her Doc Marten boot and tells him to say he’s sorry, which he does, and you can see now why I’m madly in love with her.
***
A while ago they uprooted all the trees in the park and replaced them with synthetic ones that turn carbon dioxide into gaseous ketamine to sedate tourists and rowdy raccoons. So around four in the morning I start feeling lightheaded and ask Riblet if she would watch over me while I sleep. Riblet is a tough gal and I tend to shake violently like a curdled blender when I’m unconscious. But just as I rest my head on a sedated raccoon, I hear Riblet yelling “Pookie! Pookie!” (Pookie isn’t my real name, it’s Susie, but Pookie was a make-believe friend I would impersonate as a youngster, a wild and rustlin’ cowgirl with a snake in her back and an itch in her boot). We spot Skunk pulling the shoelaces off a Joseph Stalin lookalike’s Keds because he’s convinced they’re his very own gastrointestinal tract. Stalin lets him have them and bolts for it barefoot to the Coddling Booth. We have to play tug-o-war with Skunk to get the shoelaces out of his mouth, and then we hear the sirens again, meaning someone called the cops.
We trudge on, finding a nice little overpass home to a family of feral cats. Skunk is still peckish and suggests we eat a kitten, but Riblet stomps her foot down on that. Riblet used to be a live-in nanny for a family of fashion designers until the father tried getting her to model for him in the basement with his fashion school buddies, so she stole all his cancer medication and took off. At night we huddle together under an IKEA bag and squeeze the cats for warmth. This used to be a nice neighborhood. Now it’s three square miles of dumpster fires, tent cities, and roving packs of youth gangs who steal windows and smash hubcaps and say hurtful things. The only produce market has a waiting list of six months for an avocado. The free clinic only offers euthanasia.
The rest of the country isn’t doing much better. Six states have already legalized autocannibalism, and a senator in Alabama has a controversial new bill to reduce the state’s incarcerated population. A company in Detroit says they can manufacture something that looks and tastes like the human liver. Children as young as six can donate their kidneys for LEGO® blocks.
When I was six my dad and I moved to the city so he could be a teacher at a last-chance high school bought by Japanese investors who sold advertising space in our textbooks. We read the new edition of Tom Sawyer sponsored by Chick-Fil-A, where Tom and Becky get lost in a cave and only survive after finding Huck’s hidden cache of chicken sandwiches. At night dad would come home with welts on his knees after latchkey kids ganged up on him in the parking lot with a tetherball rope. On Christmas morning I found out he’d been arrested for selling bath-salts to the high school track team so he could get that Pony Palace Playset® I’d been ranting about. He was sentenced to life at a work camp in Fresno, digging for ground water with a plastic trowel. I haven’t seen him since.
They put me in a foster home in section 8 housing across from a strip club called Bazoombas. The building was made out of decommissioned city buses welded together and infested with fire ants. That’s where I met Skunk, who was one of thirty-three other foster kids living in a two-bedroom apartment. He was such a good older brother to me. On birthdays we stayed up all night in the stairwell chugging NyQuil® to drown out the sounds of infected pigeons fighting on the rooftop. Our foster parents blew our monthly stipends on quaalude vitamins, so we hawked day-old croissants outside the 7/11 while they rolled over each on the living room carpet.
When we turned eighteen our foster parents abandoned us outside a gastroenterologist’s office. We spent the next few years busking at bowling alleys, until one day I was given a Sympathy Scholarship from The New Academy of Art School. An admissions officer picked up a dirty diaphragm I threw on the sidewalk and thought it was the most impressive piece she’d ever seen. Four years later I graduated and found out I learned nothing profitable and went back to busking. Thankfully the city generously offers us Unemployables positions as Waste Handling Associates. And while it doesn’t offer much in the way of upward mobility, it at least offers sideways mobility, meaning we’re free to jump from one hovel to another with minimal harassment from the police.
***
In the morning we collect hypodermic syringes alongside the highway embankment so we can trade them at the Nickelodeon Needle Exchange for Not-Tarts®, which are gluten-free and vegan and sometimes contain a small parasitic flatworm that infects your urine. While there we run into the Keith Herrings, art-school dropouts who still get tuition money from their parents. Among them is Echo, a Patty Smith-doppelganger wearing a vinyl trench coat. We used to sit next to each other in class. I had a crush on her and dreamed of the day I’d get invited to one of her underground parties, where people took MDMA and signed up ironically for missionary service in the Philippines. Then one day in Boondoggling Workshop she complimented me on my dreadlocks and invited me to take part in a show she was putting on. I was so thrilled to help pad out her portfolio a bit. When I showed up the theme was “I Pick Up Trash, Do You?” In front of her entire thesis committee she grilled me with questions: Why don’t you apply for public housing? Were you molested as a kid? How much OxyContin® can you boof in one sitting? It took me a while to figure out that I was the trash.
What I’m saying is, we go way back.
“How lucky are we to have disadvantaged youths such as yourself to keep our streets neat and clean,” says Echo.
“Are you still doing handies in the dark room for Adderall?” I say.
“My mother found me a paid internship as an influencer for Street-Scenez,” says Echo. “My first is called ‘Ennui of the Bourgeois.’ I hope to explore hypocrisy, boba, and biscotti.”
Riblet is getting antsy. This is never good. Before I can stop her, she hurls a shopping bag full of hypodermic needles at Echo’s face. Once again we find her random outbursts of savagery hilarious. Rather than get mad, Echo shakes the pricks off her face and makes it clear that she doesn’t judge us for our violent aggression, but rather, society as a whole for enabling our behavior, depriving us of resources to articulate our struggles in a constructive manner. We tell her no, that’s just us being dicks. Then Riblet attempts to drag her face-first into a utility closet until Skunk and I lure her away with promises of going to NostalgiaLand.
“You’re still my muse!” yells Echo. “My Nico, my Edie, my Ultra Violet!”
***
Last week a city train derailed when the tracks crumbled from shoddy prison labor, killing eighteen Hare Krishnas on the platform. So we take the bus. On the way a grad school kid is listening to NPR on his ghetto blaster. We hear about the governor’s plan to convert a flotilla of trash in the ocean into livable land. He says it’s already a thriving environment for plankton and seagulls, so why not people? He’s looking for homeless volunteers to live there, saying our genetic makeup is more adaptable to filth and decay. We briefly consider it, until Skunk reminds us that he’s deathly afraid of water, which is why everything he drinks has to be cut 50/50 with either Listerine or Purell.
When we arrive at NostalgiaLand there’s a huge line of geriatrics outside. Turns out it’s Euthanasia Nite. They ship them in on school buses from old folks homes so they can have a night on the town, where everything is a throwback to bootstraps, family values, and cotton-candy patriotism, before kicking the bucket with novelty log rides that induce fatal heart attacks. But as we are well below the cut-off age for the night, Riblet throws a temper tantrum. She removes all her clothing and jumps into the lap of a disabled war vet who has replaced his legs with plastic sex doll appendages. I pull her aside and promise we’ll hop the fence and get her some peanut butter curds, my treat, and manage to get her clothes back on.
Skunk tips over a Honey Bucket and leans it on a fence so we can climb over like rabid sleuths. Security is a skeleton crew tonight. No one expects these wrinkle-bags to start a fuss. We pass through the Lusinitata dunk tank, Priscilla Pendleton’s Old Timey Polaroids, Davy Crockett’s Racially Segregated Fajita Grill. Skunk takes the opportunity to jimmy a spoke off of Franklin Roosevelt’s Giant Wheelchair which he uses to shish-kabob the animatronic heads of Jack Dorsey, Mark Zucerkberg, and Harry S. Truman on the Historical Plunder Log Ride. While he does that, I notice Riblet crying in an overturned prospector’s cart. I cradle her poor misshaped head, which feels like a potato from so many dents. Riblet spent her childhood years at Missionary Sleep-away Camp, where the nuns had Guard Cards and taught ethical sexual positions. Since Riblet preferred sleeping with other girls in their bunks, the nuns really had it out for her. They invited the boys from Young Republican Farmers to come across the lake and jab her with lacrosse sticks until she improved. She did not. Instead there were fourteen YRF’s at the nurse’s cabin with splinters in their pricks. And though she hardly ever talks about it, I get the sense that this might explain why Riblet is so sour all the time, which is why I feel so dang awful holding her outside the Chinese Exclusion Carts while these old timers get to have all the fun.
At that point a lady on a tandem scooter and her husband stop and gawk at us. The lady’s about two hundred years old and her husband is smoking out of his breathing stoma.
“Why, Blaine, she’s one of our own! That’s Nicolica!” says the lady.
“No Nellie, that’s just a gutter punk,” says her husband.
“She looks hungry,” says the lady. “Do we have any of those cannolis left?”
“Fat chance,” says the husband. “This thing probably gets an allowance from their parents every month. I bet they’ve never worked a day in their life.”
“We’re Waste Handling Associates,” I say.
“The only waste you’re handling is the tax-payer’s dollars,” says the husband. “In my day I built claymores for the US Army. And if I hadn’t had a triple bypass, glaucoma, two gallbladder removals and a laryngectomy, I’d still be out there busting my knuckles at the bomb factory right now.”
“We’re just about to head over to the How Things Used to Been Show,” says the lady. “Won’t you join?”
Despite her husband’s objections, the lady gives us two tickets. So we follow them to the Memory Dome, where Riblet and I sit in these reclinable dentist chairs that face the ceiling projectors. We watch a movie in E-D, which uses empathy-projectors to tickle the hippocampus, the substantia nigra, the ventral tegmental area, and ventral striatum parts of the brain, thereby inducing nostalgia. The movie shows Martin Luther King Jr. playing miniature golf with Lyndon B. Johnson, discussing how they’ll end racial tensions forever in the United States by designing the Model Minority myth for Asian-Americans. In the background Ronald Reagan punches Lee Harvey Oswald, Eric Clapton is on piano playing an unbearably slow rendition of “Layla,” and Jane Fonda soaks in a fountain with the bodies of twenty dead Vietnamese villagers, swearing it’s all a mistake. The old folks in the audience are mesmerized. Someone has definitely emptied their catheter. Yet this all feels so wrong. I turn to find Riblet’s seat empty. I run outside the Memory Dome where she’s chewing cigarettes and I wrap her in my blood-infused flannel shirt.
“Pookie - Susie,” says Riblet. “Do you ever wonder how long this can last?”
“I bet they’ll all choke on gravy gristle by the morning,” I say.
“No, Susie. I mean us. The world. The universe. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I want the picket white fence. I want the plastic lawn chair, the girl with scraped knees dragging her unicycle, the boy dipping his feet in honey and letting the dog lick it. Is that so crazy?”
“Shh,” I say. “That’s just the nostalgia talking. You’ll see what a load of dookie it is in a few minutes. Promise.”
“Why hasn’t it affected you?” she says.
“I’m immune, silly,” I say. I go into detail about my experiences at a Retrospective Regressive Therapy clinic, where trauma victims were encouraged to identify their triggers and disassociate from it completely. In my case it was the absence of my dad and years of negative-reinforcement from authority figures who promised I’d end up scraping Doritos from the gutter. Now I view memory as objective the same, not better or worse. Riblet asks, “what about the day we met? Isn’t that special to you?”
How could I forget? There I am at nineteen, shoplifting a case of Ambergris Lager from the liquor store. Meanwhile this girl with pink skin like uncooked bacon is in the parking lot busking on a banjo made out of Tupperware® and rubber bands. On the way out I collide into her and drop the whole case, breaking every bottle except one. The neighborhood watch appears with AK-47s and I think I’m done for. But this girl grabs my hand and leads me down a dark alley where we hide beneath a pile of soiled yoga mats. And we spend the rest of the night waltzing through Little Ethiopia, eating scraps of injera with barbecue sauce. Her name is Riblet. She’s twenty and living outside society’s shit. I take her back to the condemned McDonald’s play-place where I’m staying with Skunk, and from then on we become inseparable.
I figure now’s as good as whenever. So I pull that lone bottle out of my pocket, leaking and moldy, but still intact after three years. I pop the cap and make a toast. “To the eyes of the poor,” I say. We each take a swig. It tastes ghastly. Then a wheelchair the size of a monster truck rolls past us and demolishes the Memory Dome, killing everyone inside. Behind is Skunk running wildly, loudly declaring that anti-antifa forces are fast behind him to harvest his testosterone so that they may reverse male-to-female gender transitioning procedures. Smartly we get up and follow him. And while Roosevelt’s Giant Wheelchair knocks down everything in sight, dawn breaks, and the orange haze in the sky retreats enough for the sun to peep out on our soot-covered faces.
Sean Nishi is a Japanese-American writer from Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared in Sierra Nevada Review, Ember Chasms Review, STORGY, TIMBER, Bridge Eight, Sunflower Station, and Streetlight. He lives with his cat Waffles.