Trash!

A Life in Garbage

Overview

A man confesses he has spent two decades hauling nearly seventy thousand tons of trash. He is a garbageman, and he knows you probably look down on him for it. But he invites you to see his work differently: as essential, as cleansing, as the unsung labor that keeps our consumer civilization from suffocating in its own waste. His love for the job runs deep, and he wants you to understand that passion. More than that, he wants you to stop pretending your garbage vanishes by magic. That fantasy, he insists, is for children. The real world is beautiful and dirty, and so are the people who handle your trash.

Key Takeaways

• His identity is inseparable from his work: twenty years of hauling trash have shaped his worldview.
• He challenges the stigma attached to garbage work, insisting on the dignity and importance of the job.
• A central plea of the chapter: reject the illusion of magical disappearance and face the reality of waste.
• This opening establishes a personal, prideful, and unflinching tone that will carry through his story.

Baptism by Swearing

Overview

The chapter opens with a hard scene: the author, already exhausted from a day of hauling trash, confronts a pile of illegally dumped construction waste—fifty-pound bags bristling with nails, left by a homeowner who clearly expects him to clean up the mess. The physical strain, the risk of injury, the looming threat of a complaint if he refuses—all of it collides in a single moment: “Jesus fucking Christ!!!” That curse isn’t just venting. It’s a kind of ritual, a baptism by swearing that marks the moment a garbageman truly accepts his place in the world.

The homeowner watches from behind his flowered curtains, smug and invisible, a perfect symbol of the indifference garbage workers face daily. He’s the one who shirked responsibility, yet he gets to judge. The author feels like a “cleaner fish” in an aquarium—essential for keeping the glass spotless, but utterly invisible to the middle-class families admiring their exotic fish. That lack of consideration stings more than the physical pain. And there’s no time to dwell: another pile waits just down the street, then another, then a frantic neighbor chasing after the truck. This is the never-ending cycle.

The garbageman, he reflects, is stuck in an endless loop. He rolls his load of refuse from house to house, day after day, endlessly. If he stopped, everything would rot. He quotes Georges Bataille to drive home the point: excess is the unwanted burden of abundance, and someone has to be stuck with it. That someone is the garbageman. His yoke is destruction, his wages paid in sweat and pain. Garbage juice may be the holy water of his baptism, but it’s the swearing that makes him a real garbageman.

The Freedom and the Trap of the Bottom Rung

There’s a strange reassurance in hitting rock bottom. When you’re nothing in the eyes of others, you have nothing left to prove. The author draws a line between the romanticized “working-class heroes” of novels and films and the reality of his job: nobody writes novels about garbagemen. That invisibility offers a kind of freedom—the freedom of the margins, the pleasure of physical labor, the absence of pretense. Some of his colleagues lean into this outsider status with a fierce pride: “Only real men can hack it.”

But beneath that bravado, he sees deep wounds. The men are former bikers, dopers, athletes who didn’t make it, kids scarred by tough childhoods. Violence is in their blood, and the job itself is a form of self-violence—a pace that would have fit the first industrial revolution. He’s heard that the average garbageman lasts less than ten years. The human body was never meant to compete with machines. And yet the system demands it.

The Civilization of Waste

The author connects his daily grind to the larger machinery of modern society. Factories churn out new things at breakneck speed, designed to fail quickly, so we keep consuming. Ads and notifications prod us to desire ever more. The ultimate goal is obsolescence—of goods and of people—a clean, happy, compliant cycle. The man behind the flowered curtains is just a decent-enough person who doesn’t want to see that the real face of his world is us, the garbagemen. The very people who make his neat little life possible are the ones he refuses to look at.

Key Takeaways

• Swearing is not just profanity; it’s a ritual of acceptance, marking the moment a garbageman fully owns his marginalized role.
• The invisibility of garbage workers mirrors society’s refusal to confront its own waste and consumption.
• Physical exhaustion and the threat of injury are constant, yet the lack of basic consideration from others hurts more than the labor itself.
• There’s a dark pride in being at the absolute bottom—nothing left to lose—but it often masks deep personal wounds and a culture of violence.
• The garbageman’s work exposes the truth about modern consumerism: we manufacture abundance only to create waste, and someone has to bear the unwanted burden.

Be a Man!

Overview

Simon begins by confessing his teenage confusion—a familiar feeling, but uniquely tangled in his case. His father’s alcoholism shattered the family, leaving him worthless in his dad’s eyes and overly close to his protective mother. He was a “mama’s boy” who loved Dungeons & Dragons and dreamed of being an intellectual, which in his working-class Quebec world was anything but admirable. When his stepfather arrived, the mantra became relentless: “Be a man!” The gym, protein shakes, and Schwarzenegger muscles were the ideal; school, politeness, and role-playing games were not. Simon’s first defense was mockery—he’d prance around imitating a flamboyant TV character. But the act soon backfired, planting seeds of doubt. His stepfather’s macho persona attracted girls; his own effete image didn’t. The insult “Jesus, Simon, make a man of yourself!” echoed daily. Finally, he decided to take up the challenge. When he asked his stepfather for advice, the answer came: “Try doing a run behind a garbage truck.”

The Garbage World

Getting into the garbage business then meant either knowing someone or walking up to a truck and asking. Simon chose the latter. He typed a résumé on fancy paper, dressed in interview clothes, and drove to Services Sanitaires Gauthier in Saint-Eustache. The yard felt like a foreign planet: gutted trucks like beached whales, a mechanic with grease-blackened skin, clouds of flies over garbage heaps. He handed his résumé to a driver named Daniel, who barely glanced at it. No interview, no questions. The real test, Simon would learn, comes on the truck. He later understood that fewer than ten percent of new hires make it. Hiring was lawless—first shifts worked for free or under the table, and if you couldn’t hack it, you simply disappeared. The managers lived by the jungle: survivors work another day, everyone else vanishes.

First Shift

A week later, at dawn, Simon was called to Mirabel. Summer 2003, near a hundred degrees, with weather warnings against strenuous activity. He climbed into the truck and met Yannick, a former farmer turned helper, wiry and impossibly fast—emptying two cans at once into the hopper. The route was interrupted by a small pickup loaded with garbage for a hard-to-reach sector. As the new guy, Simon was handed a shovel and told to climb into the pickup’s bed. He sank into soft, stinking trash as little white worms crawled up his legs. Bags burst open in his hands. The sun hammered down. He was eighteen, starting junior college, reading Zola—and now wading through filth. He had no idea that this job would fund a decade of university, or that he’d keep doing it for years after earning degrees. But that kid had no room for thoughts of the future. The day stretched on, and on, and on. At 12:37 a.m., fifteen hours later, it was still going. Simon leaned against the truck, barely able to stay upright. Yannick, a flickering shadow, was still moving with morning vigor. Simon was nodding off, exhausted. Finally, the shift ended. The driver told him his mother had been calling for hours. As he left, the driver shouted: “Hey kid, we'll pick you up tomorrow. Seven a.m.”

Aftermath and Reflection

At home, Simon was a wreck—physically destroyed, emotionally confused, but strangely excited. He felt part of something monumental. He didn’t want to leave the crew shorthanded. He collapsed into bed, less than five hours to sleep, then woke screaming from a nightmare: the compactor blade grinding him, suffocating in the hopper. “Fucking hell!” he thought. “I'm going to have to learn to sleep like a baby if I want to make a man of myself!” The irony wasn’t lost on him. He was stepping into the very masculinity his stepfather demanded, but it was brutal, absurd, and somehow compelling.

Key Takeaways

• Simon’s teenage crisis was shaped by his father’s absence and stepfather’s pressure to conform to a narrow, macho ideal of manhood.
• Mockery as a defense eventually eroded his own identity, forcing him to prove himself through physical labor.
• The garbage industry’s hiring reflects a law-of-the-jungle mentality: no talk, just action, and most people wash out.
• His first fifteen-hour shift was a brutal trial by fire, yet it sparked a strange excitement and loyalty to the crew.
• The chapter foreshadows how Simon will balance intellectual and physical worlds, using garbage work to fund his education while finding unexpected meaning in the grind.

Nighttime

Overview

Nighttime transforms the garbage collector’s world into something darker, weirder, and oddly liberating. For the men of the night crew, darkness isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a shroud that lets them operate outside the rules society quietly pretends not to notice. Trash cans disappear into compactors without oversight, bags left on the sidewalk go “unseen,” and trucks weave through traffic with a recklessness that borderlines on lawlessness. Fights break out more easily. The streets, at this hour, belong to them. This chapter captures both the lawless freedom and the haunting fatigue that define the graveyard shift of garbage collection.

The Dregs of the Industry

The night crews drawn from companies like Green World (GW) were notorious for hiring the worst of the worst—men who’d washed up at the only outfit that would take them. Frank “The Runner” describes a scene that made journalists turn and flee before the shift even started: guys smoking, sniffing, and otherwise numbing themselves before work. There was Jo, filmed dancing on green bins during a mushroom trip; Racette, cycling through garbage, rehab, and homelessness; Cat, regularly picked up by cops mid-route; Brodeur, throwing compost bins into recycling because “they’re made of plastic”; and Séguin, who slept at the same corner where the truck dropped him off each morning. Missing teeth, jailhouse tattoos, clothes that looked fished from trash—a crew worse than the sum of its parts. Frank himself was a former addict who sold his body for drugs, and though he now speaks with ironic distance, he never judges. He was one of them, and he remembers whole stretches of life he simply can’t recall.

The Show Goes On

Yet nighttime isn’t only lawless. In Montreal’s Plateau district, the dinner and bar crowds spill onto patios, and well-lubricated patrons suddenly discover the garbageman’s existence. A well-known actress shrieks with delight as a bearded collector hurls a can fifteen feet to his partner, who catches it cleanly and slams it against the truck wall—a perfect, ugly ballet. Festivalgoers part for a man carrying twelve bags of trash, weaving through the night like a boulder in a stream. For a fleeting moment, the work becomes spectacle, and the audience appreciates the aesthetic of a job they otherwise ignore.

The Haunting Exhaustion

But the night also carries a deeper, more private cost. When the author started out, he worked the city’s fringes—Mirabel backroads where suburban darkness swallowed everything. He’d ride behind the truck at insane speeds, holding tight, surrounded only by dust, overheated brakes, and the sour smell of trash. The heat of the day gave way to cool dew, but there was no time to be poetic. Sleep came not as rest but as a continuation of the work: sleepwalking, tossing things in his room as if still on the truck. His mother couldn’t understand why he wandered in the dark. One driver admitted he’d stop his car in front of curbside piles, waiting for a phantom worker to load them. The night shift didn’t end when the clock stopped—it kept spooling in your dreams.

Key Takeaways

• Nighttime enables the most dangerous and lawless behaviors among garbagemen, from reckless driving to open drug use.
• The Green World night crew exemplified the industry’s bottom tier—men society had discarded, who found a strange refuge in the dark.
• Despite the grimness, night work occasionally draws an audience that sees the physical skill and artistry in handling trash.
• The physical and psychological toll of nighttime garbage collection bleeds into waking life, causing sleepwalking and a haunting inability to rest.