his partner leads himaway and I put it behind me.
"But then a couple nights later, I go back and there's someone in thedumpster, up to his nipples in hockey cards."
"The cop," Alan said.
"The cop," Kurt said. "Right."
"That's the story about the cop in the dumpster, huh?" Alan said.
"That's the story. The moral is: We're all only a c-hair away fromjumping in the dumpster and getting down in it."
"C-hair? I thought you were trying not to be sexist?"
"*C* stands for *cock*, okay?"
Alan grinned. He and Kurt hadn't had an evening chatting together insome time. When Kurt suggested that they go for a ride, Alan had beenreluctant: too much on his mind those days, too much *Danny* on hismind. But this was just what he needed. What they both needed.
"Okay," Alan said. "We going to eat?"
"We're going to eat," Kurt said. "The Vietnamese place is just upahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. Itwas amazing -- it was like he was a tourist even at home, an uglyfucked-up tourist. People suck."
"Do they?" Alan said. "I quite like them. You know, there's pretty goodVietnamese in Chinatown."
"This is good Vietnamese."
"Better than Chinatown?"
"Better situated," Kurt said. "If you're going dumpster divingafterward. I'm gonna take your cherry, buddy." He clapped a hand onAlan's shoulder. Real people didn't touch Alan much. He didn't know ifhe liked it.
"God," Alan said. "This is so sudden." But he was happy about it. He'dtried to picture what Kurt actually *did* any number of times, but hewas never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jumpin and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it,picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willingto sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he'd bought one day afterthe shirt he'd worn to the store -- the wind-up toy store? -- got soakedin a cloudburst.
The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran therestaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling withcops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab asalad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. "Cops always know where toeat fast and cheap and good," Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of porkchop and fried rice. "That's how I found this place, all the cop cars inthe parking lot."
Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunksof rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce beforepopping them in his mouth. "Where are we going?" he asked.
Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. "Whereverthe fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull intoa parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There's enough dumpsters out thisway, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I'vegot to be selective. I know how each company's trash has been running --lots of good stuff or mostly crap -- lately, and I trust my intuition totake me to the right places. I'd love to go to the Sega or Nintendodumpsters, but they're like Stalag Thirteen -- razorwire andmotion-sensors and armed guards. They're the only companies that takesecrecy seriously." Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the drivewayof an industrial complex.
"Spidey-sense is tingling," he said, as he killed his lights and creptforward to the dumpster. "Ready to lose your virginity?" he said,lighting a cigarette.
"I wish you'd stop using that metaphor," Alan said. "Ick."
But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car,pulling open Alan's door.
"That dumpster is full of cardboard," he said, gesturing. "It'srecycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. Thisone," he said, *oof*ing as he levered himself over it, talking aroundthe maglight he'd clenched between his teeth, "is where they put thegood stuff. Looky here."
Alan tried to climb the dumpster's sticky walls, but couldn't get apurchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled,reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. Hescrambled over the dumpster's transom and fell into it, expecting a washof sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead,amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes.
"What's this?" he asked.
Kurt was picking up the boxes and shaking them, listening for therattle. "This place is an import/export wholesaler. They throw out a lotof defective product, since it's cheaper than shipping it all back toTaiwan for service. But my kids will fix it and sell it on eBay. Here,"he said, opening a box and shaking something out, handing it to him. Hepassed his light over to Alan, who took it, unmindful of the drool onthe handle.
It was a rubber duckie. Alan turned it over and saw it had a hard chunkof metal growing out of its ass.
"More of these, huh?" Kurt said. "I found about a thousand of these lastmonth. They're USB keychain drives, low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug themin and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They lightup in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they've all got amanufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color -- whatevershade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.
"I've got a couple thousand of these back home, but they're sellingbriskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there andwe'll snag a couple hundred more."
Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few incheson a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in thedumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, hewent off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash andassembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down tohim from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that hewas grinding underfoot.
Once they'd finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so thateverything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. "We don't wantthem to know that we've been here or they'll start hitting the duckieswith a hammer before they pitch 'em out."
He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner andsome paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and thehandle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into hispalms, passing it to Alan when he was done.
Alan didn't bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he'dtransferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again adozen times -- he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurtassuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummiesand other garbage pickers.
As if reading his mind, Kurt said, "You see those old rum-dums pushing ashopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking *morons* --they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for tenbucks a pop, but instead they're rooting around like raccoons in thetrash, chasing after nickel deposits."
"But then what would you pick?"
Kurt stared at him. "You kidding me? Didn't you *see*? There's a hundredtimes more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them hada squint of ambition, we could *double* the amount we save from thetrash."
"You're an extraordinary person," Alan said. He wasn't sure he meant itas a compliment. After all, wasn't *he* an extraordinary person, too?
#
Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up andrevealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed withconfidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptopthat Kurt kept under the passenger seat.
He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshibalaptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, andonly one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner inits LCD.
He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightlyused office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year'ssoftware. The smells were largely inoffensive -- Kurt mentioned that thepicking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, butAlan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an olddumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.
They took a break at the Vietnamese p
lace for coconut ice and glasses ofsweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alanwondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies butso hostile to the law in Kensington Market.
"How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?" Kurt said. "Imean, all this work, and we've hardly gotten four or five square blockscovered."
"Buck up," Alan said. "We could spend another two years just helpingpeople in the Market use what we've installed, and it would still