The Skunk

I am an absurd procrastinator. That is what lazy people say instead of saying they are lazy. At least I am self-aware. When it comes to taking out the trash, I am at my worst. No other household duty do I neglect more. When my kids are of a reasonable age, I will pass it off onto one of them. The boy, likely. Trash is a boy thing. 

"Five is too young for Charlie to take the trash out," my wife says. 

"What about Gigi?" I ask. 

"Jim, she's 2!" she snaps.  

Already I am working on conditioning Charlie to take out the trash. To take up the mantle for his pop. I invented a superhero and drew crappy illustrations of Trash Man, who is far better than any other superhero. He looks like a young Al Gore with golden hair. Or I tell him bedtime stories about knights who take out the king's trash and save the kingdom from rats and subsequently, the black death. I have him convinced that if the trash doesn't get taken out, we are all going to die of the bubonic plague. Now he frantically reminds me to take it out and will cry if I don't. He even sometimes tries to take it out himself, but the trash pail is nearly bigger than he is. He is neurotic. 

I could argue that I am not lazy and I simply get my money's worth when it comes to garbage bags. Inflation has driven them up to nearly ten bucks a roll, even the cheap ones. This is not a Hefty house, by any means. I am a penny pincher of the highest order. A skinflint, my wife would say. I drive on bald tires. My phone is twelve years old. 

By the time I take them out, they are filled to the brim and my son is practically having an anxiety attack. Banana peels, coffee grinds and dirty diapers overflowing having been pushed down as far as they can go to the deepest circles of that hellish Rubbermaid pail. Broken egg shells. The wife's tampons neatly wrapped up like litte Christmas packages for good little boys and girls who live in the garbage dump, I suppose. Brown waxy cue-tips. Snotty tissues. Scraps of last week's dinner. Fish bones, lobster shells, gristle and fat. The usual fare. 

It was warm tonight. September and it is 88 degrees at 11pm. Global warming, they say. That nagging autistic teen Swede. Those like her. I think about these things when I walk from the backdoor to the giant plastic garbage can that the city provided us. It is one of those that they can pick up with their new trucks so they cut down on workers. The two apes on the back of the truck I remember from my childhood no longer exist except for in faint memories of Mulberry  Street. The mechanical arm of the new truck which is controlled by the driver, extends and grabs the can about the waist like a slutty prom date, and without a thought of what it is consuming, swallows the contents of the can whole with a pleasurable mechanical groan. One sloppy kiss. Then it goes on and does the neighbors. And their neighbors. And then theirs. I don't know why I think so poorly of garbage trucks. Like they're women of ill repute in my mind - consuming, consuming, consuming and then orgying at the landfill with all the other trucks. The greasy drivers, spent, smoking Marlboros in the idling cab that stink like a potpourri of various rotten things and sweat.   

Charlie loves garbage trucks. He thinks they are saving the world from rats and fleas and the bubonic plague thanks to my stories. My brainwashing. He draws pictures of them. Giant white squares on two black circle wheels. Rats as big as Volkswagens chasing them. Say what you will, he is probably right in his overindulgent fear. I don't want my kid to be naive - one of those suckers who thinks everything is sunshine and roses until he is laid up with leukemia or suffers his first broken heart. For the last three months he has said that when he grows up he is going to be a garbage truck driver and my wife says that it is a curious thing, meaning she doesn't approve but she will not tell him it is wrong and stifle his independence. But I don't pay any attention when she says that she wonders where he got that from, which is usually at night in bed when we talk about our life. Why not a firefighter, a police man, or an EMT, she will ponder herself to death as I lie sleeping. Or I just say, well, it is a really important job after all, and she cannot disagree. No one can disagree. It pays well, too, they say. 

You'll know the world is about to end when they stop picking up the garbage. That will be the very first sign. But I schlepped out the backdoor through an armpit of a humid night and made my way to the city's big blue plastic garbage can that awaited me as though it were expecting me. Like I was overdue. It always had something smart to say as though I was doing something wrong to it. "Just one bag this week, Jim? Hmmm." "You know I can handle 250 gallons, or up to 500 pounds, right?" "You could put the wife and kids in me, Jim, two times over," it mentions creepily. "Jesus," I reply. "What?" It pretends not to know, but it knows. 

And I must always say, "Yes, I know how much you can handle" in order for it to open its mouth and accept my meager offerings. And his plastic tongue will depress as the roof of his giant mouth opens wide and he will take immediate inventory of the contents therein. "Lobster this week? Hmmm." "The kids still not eating their brussel sprouts, Jim? Tsk. Tsk." Same old production. Maybe he is part of the reason I don't like taking the trash out. I don't like the conversation. I can certainly do without it. 12737 is his name. Pronounced appropriately like so: twelve seven thirty-seven. No other way. And as I'm leaving, always the same snide comment. "Don't forget trash day is Tuesday, Jim." 

But the way he says Tuesday ... Toosdy! Toosdy! ... sticks in my craw. And come Monday night when I am wheeling him to the curb through the backyard, he gives me an earful. How I should recycle this, or bag that. How I should not throw lawn clippings in the regular trash. Such and such is against city sanitary code and regulations. Or he crows about how the sanitation workers (don't ever call them garbage men) don't get paid enough like he is their union president bargaining for a new contract one taxpayer at a time. And if I forget to wheel him out on Monday night, I am racing Tuesday morning to beat the garbage truck before work and he is going on and on about I told you trash day was Toosdy, Jim. Toosdy morning at 7:45, except on holiday Mondays when it gets pushed back a day and is on Winsdy. Winsdy. Few people I despise more than that fucking garage can. 

But this night I didn't make it to 12737 with that near-bursting bag of four or five days of the unwanted byproducts of daily life. There was a skunk in between me and the garbage can and I stopped so not to get sprayed. He just stood there looking at me in the darkness, the street light bathing on his back. It was as though he were waiting for me, as though he had watched my routine and this was his moment. Weeks, maybe months of planning. And I was helpless there holding that shitty white trash back, in my sandals and gym shorts, not even a t-shirt. The bag was heavy and I thought to sit it down but I was afraid I would startle him so I held it where it was and stood still as a statue never losing eye contact, chastising myself internally for becoming so complacent. For not expecting this. I had smelled skunks around before but I had not seen one. Then I imagined this is the sort of way that people in Montana get eaten by bears. Carelessly taking their trash out. 

Then he moved his lopsided head and seemed to relax a little. His erect tail flattened out and telepathically he said to me, "Just put the trash on the lawn and step away," as casually yet as rigidly as someone holding up a Brink's armored truck driver with an Uzi machine gun in each hand. I hadn't been robbed before. Hadn't been pickpocketted or had anything stolen from me that I was aware of. You don't know how you are going to react until it actually happens to you. And so rather than risking being sprayed, I complied and with my other hand outstretched as passively as possible, I gently sat the trash bag on the grass and backpedaled slowly toward the backdoor. 12737 witnessed the entire incident and perhaps for a fear of being sprayed, and for the first time in his life, said nothing at all. 

I couldn't see the skunk from the kitchen window. I turned off the kitchen light so he wouldn't see me looking out. That is how scared I was. My wife came in the room and asked what I was doing and I told her there was a skunk outside and I was trying to see what it was up to. 

"Awe! Skunks are so cute!" she cooed. "I always think of Flower from Bambi. He's probably just hungry, Jim. Maybe we should put out some carrots." 

I didn't set her straight. I didn't tell that her precious Flower was a hardened criminal who robbed me of our trash. I only said I saw a skunk. Nothing more. My son interrupted us, coming in the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. "Did you take trash out, daddy?"

"Yes, Charlie. I took the trash out. Now go back to bed."

"I've never known anyone more obsessed with the trash than our son," my wife mentioned again. I gave up looking for the skunk and we went to bed. But I had dreams. I had wild dreams. 

The next day the backyard was littered with what the skunk didn't want. He wasn't fond of my wife's tampons, apparently, but seemed to enjoy my daughter's dirty diapers. He nibbled at banana peels, ate any meat that was left down to the bone and gorged himself on a half-eaten rotten watermelon. But it was hard to take inventory in that who really remembers what they throw away? I picked up the remnants, tossed them in a new bag and into 12737. It took me a half hour. When my wife asked me what happened, in my shame of being shook down by a skunk, I told her something got into the trash can and left it at that. Little Charlie was in fits. He thought the plague was upon us. He said it was rats. 

A week later, he was waiting for me again. And in my cowardice, I laid the trash bag down and went back inside. It went on for months. And everytime I saw the skunk he changed. Each time he got bigger, and then he began to stand on his hind legs. Then he stood completely upright like something that never crawled at all. And then his legs became longer and out of proportion to his arms and his fur began to shed. Not before my eyes, but between the days that I would see him until only the hair on his head remained. A fine head of black hair with a white streak through it. It looked styled. What a monster into which he had fantastically morphed. Like something that broke out of a laboratory of some kind where they test on animals because their lives are expendable, in the predominance of man's view anyway. His pink eyes began to soften to an eggshell hue of white and looked very much human. It was as though the more trash he ate, the more human he became and every time I took out the trash, I shuddered at the prospective thought of what he would be this week. "He," no longer an it, who would certainly be waiting for me.

Two months passed and he spoke broken English. He sounded much like a marble-mouthed deaf Indian chief, but his speech was indeed audible. I could certainly make out what broken words he was saying. I caught him looking into the kitchen window longingly. "Not. Been. House." He muttered. Then he smiled and exposed a row of pointy skunk teeth in an ever evolving human mouth. I suppose that was his way of asking me to let him inside. Despite everything he lost in his transition to human form, he still had the tail and the glands that I presumed would allow him to spray me for I could smell the faint scent of his rancid batch. 

I dropped the trash and I ran back inside like a coward. But the next morning the trash bag was undisturbed on the lawn, just as I had dropped it. Coffee grounds, greasy rotten banana peels, pork chop bones and all, safely stowed away in the cheap plastic bag. I suppose in his transition, his appetite was also affected. He may have been collecting change on the corner and getting drive-thru or takeout. And I supposed it would be the end of him in the backyard since he no longer ate the trash and I would be safe to take it out. 

The heavy hand of fate curtailed the inevitable answer to my assumptions. I was in a car accident and broke a leg which meant I could no longer take the trash out. So it was my wife who assumed the duties, naturally. And as I lay there doped up on painkillers, she took out the trash. When I asked her if anything usual happened as she did, she laughed and asked what unusual thing could possibly happen between the backdoor and the trash can, and I smiled and excused my bizarre question on the drugs. 

My wife was much better taking the trash out than me. She never let the can get full and before bed every other night she did what I only did once a week at best. As I nodded off in my recliner watching football, she took trash out. As I slept in bed, trying to get comfortable and find relief from the pain, she took trash out. And everytime she went it seemed that she spent a little longer each time. Then one night I woke up in bed and opened my eyes and the alarm clock read "1:30am" and she was missing. Imagine my alarm. And so when I mustered the strength to retrieve my crutches from the closet and make my way to the back door, she came in, giggling, startled at the sight of my large bony frame in the kitchen, hobbled on two crutches that were shoved up under my armpits that stunk of two days of sweat because however reluctant I was to take out the trash, I was even more so to shower due to the cast on my leg and the terribly tedious process of wrapping it in a garbage bag so not to get it wet. And then somehow standing in the shower and bathing with soap and shampoo. I was lazy. There's no other way to say it. 

"Where were you?" I interrogated her. She giggled, then panicked, and in her panic overcompensated a much more serious demeanor and replied with a shaky and shallow, "Nowhere." But it was in such a way that I knew her nowhere was a somewhere that a wife should not be. It was much like my titty bar nowheres before the kids were born, 5 years ago. I am sure that Pakistani or Indian towel man is still in that strip club bathroom squirting soap in the palms of men after they piss, hoping they drop him a dollar in his little wicker basket which sits between sinks and in front of an armada of colognes which are his and which I can imagine him unpacking and packing up every day before and after a shift. For 8 hours or so he stands there in that bathroom with a bottle of soap in his hands waiting with all his colognes. I always felt obligated to give him a dollar everytime and one time when I came home smelling like a foreign cologne, my wife knew there was something rotten in Denmark, as she said it. Strange in that she had never read Shakespeare. And after I confessed, I spent most of my time telling her about the little Indian man and the zen of a strip club bathroom, his wicker basket, and all his fancy colognes. She was not amused.

"You saw him? Didn't you?" I interrogated her further. I was this close to waterboarding her. 

"Who do you mean?"

"That skunk." 

"I saw no skunk!" she defended herself fiercely entrenched in the idea that she was not wrong whilst clever with her semantics as I had been years ago before the children smelling like titties and Lagerfeld. But then she broke down and cried. "I saw no skunk, Jim! I saw a man! More of a man than you have ever been! He gave me attention and affection! Things I haven't known from you in years! And if you must know, he took me! He took me under the apple tree. He takes me everytime I take out the trash." 

I had no words for her callous betrayal. I stood there like a limp penis on crutches. No longer useful or pleasurable to anyone, raw and exposed with no body to protect it. A completely useless and pointless thing I had become slowly over time. I was no longer a man or a him. I was an it. Just as the skunk had become a man, gone from an it to a he before my very eyes and because of my abetting, my fate was the mirrored opposite. It was almost as though he had taken from me what he now possessed and what I was woefully without. 

"I am leaving you, Jim. Randy is moving in. I want you out by the weekend," she declared plainly. 

"Randy?" I snapped incredulously. "His name is Randy? Randy Skunk?"

"No. Randy Saint Louis."

"But he is skunk, Susan! Are you even listening to yourself? He stinks!" I argued forgetting that I stunk, too, from my lack of showering. 

"He doesn't stink! He has a certain musk I find pleasing. He is very debonair."

"Debonair?" 

"I have no more to say about it. What's done is done, Jim."

And so it was. It was the end of the Babbitts. Jim and Susan. Established in 2012, as the wood sign on the porch says. Little Charlie and Gigi were doomed to a broken home with a skunk dad and whatever became of me on alternating weekends. Frozen pizzas and coloring books. 

And so the next day I gathered my things, despite being hobbled, moved in with my mom, showered and went back to the titty bar and the pretty but slightly haggard giraffe at the door cashed my twenty for the five buck door fee and gave me back a fistful of dollars which I scrunched and stuffed into my jeans pocket to be birthed when I was rightly aroused but, stingily, not until then. You have to be prudent at titty bars when you're on a budget so not to appear as some seedy little licentious spendthrift who the women will prey upon and treat as an ATM, and who the doorman will kick out by 10 without a dollar left to his name. You have to drink slower than normal and wait for the right girl to come along. It is the only time you look them in their eyes, when they're offering you a dance because in their eyes you'll know if they are the right girl. You can see their entire life in the blacks of their pupils. You cannot be a simple philistine. You must set yourself apart. Maybe you're a writer or a photographer or a philosopher. Better yet, you're a psychiatrist. You have to know when to be indifferent and know when to show interest. My broken leg and crutches I'd use for sympathy, appealing to their maternalistic instincts that hadn't been ate up by meth, dope and coke. Maybe they'd give me a discount. A free dance. A rub off. Maybe they'd write their name and number on my cast and I'd tell them it was from a skiing accident in Aspen, or it happened while I tried to save a puppy who had fallen into a storm sewer. 

I thought about Charlie whilst tits passed and bounced and thighs blistered down gold poles and asses clapped nearby. He was probably asleep in his bed. I thought about the bedtime stories I told him of rats and the plague and the importance of the trash truck and Trash Man, all to get him prepared for his future of responsibility. He was likely dreaming of it. Now that I wasn't in the house, he was probably worried sick about who would take out the trash. He didn't yet know his soon-to-be new debonair daddy could just eat it. But maybe someday I'd bestow upon Charlie proper titty bar etiquette and commandments. Don't get a lap dance until they are two for one and not until, at least, midnight when carriages turn into pumpkins and the women are all looking for their rube prince until the song ends and it is musical laps once more. Don't buy them drinks. Let the other guys buy them. Those are the saps. The guys who think they actually have a chance to get laid. By midnight they'll be broke and the strippers will be drunk. Or better yet, don't go. Don't ever go, Charlie. No one is worth a dollar and you're much better than all this. 

I broke my rules. I drank heavily but I didn't spend anything on a dance or a girl on the stage no matter how sinuously they moved, so it evened out. My head spun as the alcohol made love to the painkillers in my bloodstream. I went to the bathroom, eager to see if my old Indian friend was there. He was. He was from Kashmir, he told me. I dropped a dollar in his basket and he squirted soap in my hands and said, "Gawd blase you, sar," as he always did. But I stopped and introduced myself and he said his name was Bill, which he pronounced like Beel. The loud music from the club reverberated through the door and my head spun wildly like a broken carousel. I asked Bill if he wanted a drink and he said he doesn't drink but smiled and nodded in gratitude for the offer. I gave him another dollar and asked if any of his colognes smell like skunk, and he looked at me oddly and laughed, wondering if he understood me correctly or if his English failed him.  

"Skunk? No, no, no, no, no!" he replied pointing at the various bottles. "All good sheet!"

I imagine sheet meant shit, but who's to say besides Bill. I leaned my crutches against the wall and sat down on a stool next to him and told him how my wife left me for a skunk named Randy and he shook his head and listened, not bothered at all by my fantastic story or my tears. He shook his head in empathy and put his arm around my shoulder. "Teeties will not make you better. Go home! Tat make you better. You made own problem when you do not confront skunk first time!" He wagged his brown finger. "Problem always fester! You lay trash out for skunk. You give skunk wife. You go back. Change it. Be happy Jeem Babbitt! Be man!"

"How?"

"Generous man go far!" he smiled. "Cheap man, dime a dozen. They ogle teeties and ass like gorilla. They spray themselves with my cologne, think they get laid. No chance. Maybe if I give chloroform in a handkerchief. Chance. No chance here."

I could see in his eyes that he was wise. The blacks of his pupils. Maybe it was the painkillers and the alcohol that gave me a false assumption of him, but for whatever reason, I trusted him. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the handful of ones I got from the giraffe at the door and put the wad in his wicker basket as my fifteen count offering. He then pointed to a cologne in a tall green bottle in the back row and I slowly retrieved it. I gently took off the cap and gave it a whiff. "Very piney," I noted. 

He smiled and nodded, imploring me to try it. I sprayed myself and he rolled his hands to his face and closed his eyes and breathed deeply, encouraging me to do the same. As I did, I felt as light as a helium balloon, lighter than air, and then I could feel nothing at all. And I saw the fading face of Bill smiling at me, waving goodbye. This is how you lose a kidney, I lectured myself.  

But I didn't lose a kidney. When I awoke I was standing on the back lawn, trash bag in hand and the skunk between me and the trash can. He said drop it and I said fuck off and as I defiantly made my way to put the bag in 12737, he sprayed me. And I laughed, taking his best shot, and he ran away like a coward. "Randy Saint Louis!" I screamed in the dead of night as he ran from me, "You are nothing but a little bitch!" 

12737 started to say something but I dropped the trash in and shut his lid. I didn't want to hear it. He mumbled some sort of objection, but he said no more. Susan came out and there I stood, in just my shorts, back where it all began, no broken leg, still at home, freshly reeking of skunk, which smelled remarkably similar to the degenerate neighbor kid's godawful weed. 

"Are you okay, Jim," Susan cried. "who were you yelling out?" 

"Just a skunk. He tried to get the trash. I didn't let him."

"Oh, no! He sprayed you?" She covered her nose and winced. 

I stood in the yard like a soldier returning home from war. There may as well have been a purple heart pinned to my bare chest. "He did, Susan. He certainly did. It's not too bad of a smell, though. A little musky." 

"Come inside and shower. I hear tomato juice helps."

I stood there still in disbelief that I was back home. Thankful to Bill from the titty bar bathroom which was a portal to my salvation. But rather than acquiesce and go inside and shower, I invited Susan to the backyard for a dance. And we danced under the starlit sky with only the music I hummed into her ear, smelling like skunk. Then I took her under the apple tree like I had never taken her before.