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Rotting

By Shannon Dugan Iverson

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 “I'm sleeping with Tim,” she said when she got in the door. Plain as that.

 I punched her, hard, right fist to the jaw. Plain as that.

 I heard something pop.

 She called the police.

 The police called an ambulance.

***

 The cops came by to tell me that she had agreed to drop the charges if I would pack up everything and leave within two days. What else could I do? Everything that I owned I put into storage at the U-Store-It, and I put myself in a motel outside of town.

***

 I called her the next week, tipsy, crying a little. “I want to come back home.”

 “You're a bastard.” She sounded funny, like she was chewing her words.

“I know I am.”

 “So stop calling.” She hung up.

***

 I stopped eating meat after that. We are what we eat, and I wasn't going to go on being a predator. The questions were as obvious as their answers: What kind of man hits his wife? (A violent bastard.) Who is more peaceful than a vegetarian? (No one.) They watch the world spin around with its missiles and car bombs and respond by saving the rabbits with their politically correct consumer choices, and when they hear of war they picket and chant at reasonable volumes for the world wake-up. I wasn't sure how much this was going to change, but I figured it was worth a shot. It was difficult living in the motel and only having the Denny's nearby, so I looked through the papers for some sort of vegetarian support-club. Later I learned that vegetarians don't generally feel that they need emotional support simply because they've given up meat, though they do sometimes have cooking clubs and the like. I joined up with an organization of kids that made food for bums out of discarded vegetables and waited for my predator-tainted bloodstream to adjust to bananas and burnt leeks.

***

 I must have been at least twenty-five years older than the oldest kid in the V-Spot. They were all wild-eyed little peace-loving Punk Rock fanatics, and they were going to change the world. They were sure of it. Anything that you said to the contrary was met with an annoyed look and a segue into the newest adorably creative plan to create a skating rink out of the abandoned grocery store down the street or carpooling information to get down to Washington, D.C. to protest the newest atrocities. They were brave, in their way, brave enough to be prey and not strike back, even though they could have. They would stare a cop in the face as he sprayed them with tear gas or beat them with his bully club; like a cornered possum they would go limp and pretend to die. Never would they fight back, of course—you didn't want to become what you hated. When I was a kid myself they had peace and flowers and all that shit, but what I remembered the most were the bombs and the shootouts. They even got the president, for god's sake. But that kind of behavior wasn't really hip anymore, I learned. You fell down, you got thrown in jail, you sang and you screamed, but you didn't bomb anyone. “We're not terrorists,” a kid named Big Mac said to me when I asked him why they didn't just try to dynamite the pentagon or something. ”We're not about to sink to their level. Now, who's coming to the inauguration of the community garden tomorrow?”

 The very fact that they would never 'sink' was, I realized, the reason that I got to be there at all. I was no martyr, and other than my newly adopted diet I had 'Normal' written all over me. If they had been like the Cops, or like the Yuppies, or like the Corporations, I would have been just another sorry bourgeois schmuck. But they, being the gentle creatures that they were, were Open to Other Points of View, and that meant that my presence had to be tolerated, and that they were forced by some unwritten code both to enlighten me and to learn something from me. I wasn't sure how much there was for them to learn from a guy like me, but it was nice the way they tried.

 Connie (short for Constellation, she said) was the one I liked best. She was tiny, with giant dots tattooed across her face in some sort of tribal-looking pattern. I thought that she might be pretty without all of those dots all over her face, but mostly I liked her because she was also the only one who could cook. Every Saturday morning, when we surveyed the vast amount of vegetables and stale bagels and bread that were the overripe harvest of dumpsters and donations, she would stand at the table and take it in. Everyone else set in immediately, offering suggestions of yet another curried stew. But Connie would stand there staring at the rotting vegetables until something in her mind clicked, and then she would just announce whatever idea had come into her mind, and everyone would bustle around asking her what vegetables to chop or what spices to get out. It was like watching a Zen master meditate, I thought, though I had never seen a Zen master meditate. She would just be perfectly calm, orchestrating the stove and the chopping and her punk rock minions, and at the end there would be a gorgeous, delicious ratatouille made from garbage, ready for distribution on the street corners to whoever cared to eat it.

 We were the only ones who ate the food, really. Every once in awhile, after seeing the giant sign reading “FREE FOOD!” that we hung up on whatever corner we happened to park ourselves on, a person who looked more or less down-and-out would drop by and have a plate or two of fried rice or cream-of-carrot soup. Sometimes even a 'normal' sort of person would dare to come by and have a bite, but the questions always came. The problem was that the kids were too eager to let on the source of all of their food. “And can you imagine, all of this from stuff that people threw away!” someone would always say to the normal-ish person, usually halfway through a spoonful of his soup. 

 “What do you mean?” He would say, trying hard to swallow what he had already put into their mouth and quickly abandoning the rest.

 “It's all from dumpsters!” the V-Spot representative would inevitably cry triumphantly. “Just think of what we could do if we started to give all of this away instead of throwing it away! We could literally end hunger!”

 “Yes, well, really great what you guys are doing... really great... well, I really should be going... thanks for everything....” Then he'd split, walking too quickly in the opposite direction of where he'd been headed before.

 “Are you sure you don't want to stay for dessert?” One of them would call after him, usually Big Mac. “We've got apple pie!” Big Mac was especially fond of baiting the 'Normal' people and watching them enjoy a plateful of their own garbage. I knew how he felt. There was something in every bite of their food that was like their own non-violent version of revenge. Connie didn't see it that way; she just liked to cook and felt good about feeding people. But for Big Mac every time that a 'Normal' guy took a bite of our food and said “Mmmmm” it was a small personal victory, and every time that they vomited after hearing about the origin of the food it was a huge personal victory. We were pigs, all of us who demanded fresh bagels when there were old ones to be eaten, and the little bit of vengeance that the V-spot garnered from feeding the city's garbage back to them tasted sweeter to Mac than his vegan apple pie. 

***

 I picked up a donation-drive shift on Friday nights, where I would drive around to the local co-ops and sympathetic groceries and take away their old produce. I was happy to help, even if I knew that I had gotten the assignment because I was the only one out of the group who had a car. The vegetables were starting to make my car stink to high hell, a smell that no amount of sprays or cleansers would get out. I resigned myself to it- it felt good to be doing something, and it turned me into something other than just the old quiet guy in the corner.

 I saw my wife one of those Fridays when I was out making my rounds. I was carrying out a crate of old cabbage to my car in the parking lot of the U-Sav-It when I saw her fumbling for her keys under the lamplight. I nearly dropped the crate when I saw her. 

 Tim, the cowardly son of a bitch, was nowhere to be seen. Apparently he wasn't willing to pick up all of the husbandly duties. 

 I wasn't sure whether to look away or to just pretend that I didn't see her or what. We were almost the last people there, only a few cars scattered here and there in the parking lot, probably the last few employees that were closing the place up. I decided to just go about business as usual. I opened my trunk, put in the crate of cabbage, and slammed it shut. Maybe, I thought with a little bit of hope, maybe she would notice me and ask me what I was doing here, and I would tell her about making food for the poor and being a vegetarian and everything, and she would see what a saint I had become since she left me. Since she kicked me out.

 I slammed the door of the trunk and she screamed, searching more rapidly for her keys in her purse and coming up with a can of pepper spray. To my great surprise, she pointed the thing at me.

 “So, you're fucking following me now?” She sounded the same as she had on the phone, funny, mumbling. I realized that her jaw had been wired shut. “Don't you dare take a step closer! I swear to god I will empty this can in your fucking eyes!” 

 ”No! No, really I'm not!” I had my hands up in the air, stupidly, as if I were under arrest or something. 

 “Shut up! Now get on the ground...”

 “Are you serious?”

 “Yes, I'm fucking serious! Get on the ground! I'm going to look for my keys and you are going to stay right there, on the ground, and you're not going to get up until I drive away, got it? You don't have a gun, do you?”

 I got on the ground, on all fours. What else could I do?

 She emptied her purse onto the pavement, all the while keeping the can pointed at me while her lipsticks and tissues went rolling off in all directions. She picked up her keys, stuffed everything back into her purse with one hand and kept the spray can steadily pointed at me with the other. She backed around the front of her car, slowly, feeling with her free hand for the contours of the car like some stupid police movie. Then she got into the driver's seat fast, screeched into reverse, and was gone.

 She had left her groceries sitting there on the pavement. I sat back against my car and looked up at the sky.

 I felt like shit.

***

 I didn't go in to cook until the following Saturday morning. Connie wasn't there, a girl named Sara B. told me. “Probably the same bug you had,” she said. I, of course, hadn't let on that I didn't chop vegetables with them the previous week because I had wanted to stay in my motel drinking Bud Light and feeling like a sorry asshole. I was sick, all right, but not in a way that I was going to explain in any great detail.

 With Connie gone, the kitchen was chaos. We were lucky that we didn't all accidentally stab each other. The power vacuum was enormous, and everyone was chopping and frying and baking in a frenzy to fill up the void that Connie had left behind her. I just wanted someone to tell me what to cut up, and everyone did, contradicting themselves and fighting over the choice ingredients. 

 Big Mac stepped in after someone spilled flour all over the kitchen floor.

 “All right, people, what are we making?”

 Everyone calmed down a little bit after that, as if the simple action of just asking them what they were doing was enough to make them actually think about it and get it done in some sort of orderly fashion. By the mid-afternoon we had a giant pot of curried bananas, an unappetizing pot full of stewed spinach, and ten loaves of banana bread. We had a lot of bananas.

 We headed out with all of our food to the nearest corner. Connie would usually suggest hiking a dozen blocks or so, so that different parts of the neighborhood could enjoy the food. Today, though, we were tired, and lugging around all of the pots and dishes and silverware was not something that the collective mood would allow for. We hung up our sign, served ourselves some food, and sat on the curb to eat and to talk.

 No one came, not even the bums. Not even any friends. It was a good thing, too, because all of it was utterly inedible. Even the banana bread, which had come to be my favorite part of almost every meal that we had, was on this Saturday morning burnt on the top and sides. That could have been all right, but I was pretty sure that someone had mistaken the salt for sugar. We all just sort of sat there on the curb, picking at our food and trying to avoid the subject of how bad it was. Wasting wasted food was almost as bad, I could tell, as wasting perfectly good food. I thought about my wife's bag of abandoned groceries sitting in the parking lot of the U-Sav-It. 

 Big Mac and a smaller guy called L.J. got bored and got up. “We're gonna go check out that dumpster on the corner,” Mac said. “Anybody wanna come?”

 “I'll go,” I said, putting my dishes in the big plastic restaurant bin that we kept near the food. I had never been in a dumpster before, and these guys seemed like they could build a house and furnish it with surround sound and antique chairs, from the things they talked about finding in them.

 We walked halfway down the block. The dumpster was in an alleyway between two apartment buildings. The two of them swung the top of the dumpster wide open and just hopped right in. “Are you coming, old man?” Big Mac asked me.

 “All right...” I struggled to swing myself over the side of the thing. It was bigger than it looked and they had to pull me over so that I didn't fall back onto the concrete. For the most part, it seemed to be filled with old pieces of torn-up wood from someone's remodeling project. I just stood there while the boys sifted through the junk, unsure of what I was supposed to be looking for.

 “Nothing too great in here, huh?” said L.J.

 “Naw, not really,” said Mac, on his knees on top of a pile of wood. “I guess we can take the wood for Dan. He's got a wood-burning stove,” he said to me by way of explanation. I started to help them to throw the wood out into a pile next to the dumpster.

 When I reached the bottom of the pile of wood I found an enormous, ancient television set, its glass face still intact. It looked just like the one that my parents had bought in the seventies and placed proudly in their living room. “Hey, look at this!” I called the boys over. “I wonder if it still works.”

 “Even the ones that work don't work, man,” said L.J. “The best thing to do with those old TVs is to just smash them to smithereens.”

 “Don't be rude, L.J.,” Big Mac said. ”Maybe the old man wants to try it out.”

 “No, honestly, I think I like L.J.'s idea,” I said, making them both look at me with kind of a strange expression.

 “Okay.” The two of them smiled. “Well, all right, old man, death to the Tube, right? Let's go!” Big Mac lifted the thing out of the rubble and threw it onto the concrete next to the dumpster. Part of its glass face cracked but didn't come off. We all climbed out of the dumpster.

 L.J. handed me one of the larger pieces of wood that we had thrown out- a big sturdy piece that looked like it had been part of a railing. ”You do the honors,” he said. I picked up the wood like a baseball bat and readied myself for the swing.

 “Aaannnddd... GO!” L.J. cried. The wood smashed against the glass of the T.V., forming a little circle where the impact had been, like a windshield that's been hit by a bullet. 

 “Come on, old man, is that all you've got?”

 I swung again, this time breaking the glass. Next I went for the cheap faux wood on the sides of the screen. It didn't give as easily as the glass. I swung again and again. When the T.V. was smashed to pieces, I paused to catch my breath.

 “Well done, old man!” said Mac, trying to lead me away from it, back to the corner and the food. ”Are you gonna be on cleanup crew today?”

 “Yeah, sure,” I said, panting.

 “Thanks. You're a fucking saint, man.”

 “You two go ahead,” I said, “I'm gonna have a few more whacks at this thing. It's good exercise, you know?” I did my best to smile. The boys shrugged and took off for the corner. I breathed in hard and picked up my piece of wood again. The T.V. was smashed; I wanted it to be unrecognizable. I swung again. Mac's words played themselves in my ears as I bashed again and again through the plastic and the glass.

 you.

 are.

 a fucking.

 saint.

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