Piggleyland

1.

     I did not realize that a garbagetruck could be so nimble. It was only because the front tire of my bike hit a pothole and skidded unexpectedly to the right on some wet leaves that I escaped the clutch of the giant mechanical claw. The metal pincer clashed in the air, four inches left of my shoulder.

     I shot a look forward at the big side rear-view mirror on the cab of the truck and caught a glimpse of the furious face of the garbageman, adeptly manipulating the controls of the claw and, less adeptly, the steering wheel. The truck’s engine shrieked in the wrong gear for the speed we were traveling, downhill. I bore down hard on the pedals and managed to pull slightly ahead of the truck in the bike lane as he repositioned the claw, now held low at and cocked back with pincers reopening. The bike lane was full of wet leaves, big square plastic city-issued LIFTI-KLAW garbagecans, and smaller containers of recyclables, and it was a difficult slalom while pedaling hard. I wanted to get out of the street and onto the sidewalk, but the curb was too high to pop over at that speed.

     The garbagetruck roared up beside me again, gaining momentum on the downhill. My right pedal cracked into a container full of liquor and liniment bottles, then the front wheel plowed into a pile of leaves that had something like a roll of carpet concealed inside it. I jerked my front wheel up and the bike was airborne, as below my spinning wheels I saw the claw shoot forward from behind, snapping closed inches below my rear tire.

     The hill’s gradient was steep, and my rear tire made brief, bouncy contact with the lid of the next LIFTI-KLAW garbagecan. Somehow I managed to finesse the bounce over to the right, to land extremely hard on the strip of grass above the curb. The ground was uneven, and the handlebars were like a jackhammer in my hands. I cut over onto the sidewalk and bent low over the front wheel for reduced wind resistance, still pedaling hard. I would have just stopped, but my bike was not equipped with brakes. I had intended to reattach the brakes after I changed to my knobbly winter tires, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

     As I was now out of the claw’s reach, the garbagetruck roared into the bike lane where the massive front bumper launched consecutive LIFTI-KLAW garbagecans, whole and particulate, up over the curb in my direction. I was instantly surrounded by a whirling asteroid belt of garbage and industrial-grade heavy plastic.  A slurry of chickenbones and disposable razors pattered against the back of my jacket, and half a teapot hit me hard in the calf. A discarded Smith-Corona Typewriter tapped lightly against one of the earrings in my left ear as it sailed by my head to smash into a lot of pieces on the sidewalk.

     Ducking lower yet, I now rode at an angle off the sidewalk to the right, up a steep grassy berm, sparsely planted with equidistant undernourished pine trees to conceal the wire fence around the low-income housing projects. I was now out of the range of the flying garbage, but looking over at the speeding truck, I was disturbed to note that somehow even at our considerable speed the deft claw of the garbagetruck had snatched up a full LIFTI-KLAW garbagecan. With a sudden circular slingshot motion, it hurled it with remarkable force up into the air, in a graceful parabola that intersected precisely with the path of my brakeless bike. I dropped off the seat of the bike, digging my left boot into the grass and pulling the bike sharply to the left, riding back down toward the road again. The LIFTI-KLAW garbagecan exploded on the berm right next to me, annihilating a puny pine tree and showering me with various rinds, pottery bits and 1300 inkless pens. I flew over the sidewalk and shot off the curb just as the garbagetruck’s garbagejuice-dripping rear bumper cleared my path.

     As I crossed the road toward the other curb, I looked quickly back over my right shoulder at the angry face of the downhill-speeding garbageman, also looking back at me from his garbagetruck as he hit his brakes. I could see, though he could not, the shiny chrome tanker truck that had pulled across the road at the bottom of the hill, not expecting a runaway garbagetruck. The garbageman was still looking at me, not the tanker truck, and must have been surprised as he t-boned the chrome tank square in the center. The tank folded around the front of the garbagetruck with a jarring crunk sound, and a geyser of garbage shot fifty feet straight up into the air and filled the nearby trees with diapers, shoes and packing peanuts.

     I popped up the opposite curb and continued down the sidewalk past the wreckage at the intersection, hoping there wouldn’t be a huge fireball. Fortunately, the tanker truck was not full of gasoline or other flammables. Rich pork gravy flowed generously from multiple holes in the breached tank, and the garbageman and the driver of the tanker truck both were knee-deep in gravy and garbage as they extricated themselves from their twisted vehicles. I could hear inarticulate screaming from both men as I cleared the area and turned into an alley to cut through downtown. It was quiet in the alley until a hobo swore at me from a dumpster, for no reason that I could see.

     After I was seven blocks away from the crash scene I stopped and dragged my bike into a donut shop to calm down and assess the damage. I had a chickenbone stuck in an epaulet of my leather jacket, a painful bruise on my calf and, as the waitress helpfully pointed out, an enormous pair of pink panties stuck in the spokes of my front wheel. I sat at the Formica counter and drank coffee with cream and like nine sugar packets and I felt better.

     The waitress was about ten years older than me, and I’m not young.  Too old to fight garbagetrucks. She looked terrific in her mustard-colored vinyl waitress uniform and white apron.  Her hair was blackish red, like her eyes, and in complete disregard for food service health codes she was smoking a D’Elegance Ultra-Light Superlong Menthol ‘n’ Cream cigarette, with evident relish. “I had to quit smoking for a week, because of my lung,” she rasped, “It sucked like hell.” I sidestepped the issue of her singular lung and said her cigarette looked very refreshing.  She gave me more coffee. I looked at the clock and was just about late for work, so I ordered a piece of peach pie. The filling was kind of glutinous, but it was not without redeeming qualities of crust and flavor (peach).