We ROAR.

  We all ROARRRRRR-RE.

  After they put on the wheels and the lamps and all that stuff that everybody has, they install the ROAR that nobody has except us. It’s a process that is done in great secret in the place where we are born. Every country has a garbage truck garden y’know – for example, in Germany it is called the Vercrushing Zrowouts Fabreeeeeeeeeeek, and the only real difference is the accent of the ROARRR. You can tell where a garbage truck was born by its accent. Some of us ROARRR in a respectable cultured manner. But American garbage trucks? They RARRRRRRR and its half a snarl.

  I am a “dust” truck (I am English and in England we do not have anything as unrefined as “garbage”. We have “dust”). Actually, to be more refined, we pronounce it “durst” so if you want to politically correct, you need to address me as Mr. Durst Lorry, because in England, trucks are lorries, obviously. Same wheel, different pronunciation. Since I like to think I am broadly cultured, judging from the garbage I get these days, a lot of which has a Chinese flavor, I have changed by name to Durst (the English bit) and “Truck” as in American, so you can address me as Mr. Durst Truck, OK “bud”?

  We are all born with a wonderful big mouth – nobody, but nobody has a mouth like us, (it takes hundreds of households to properly feed just one of us), and we want to eat lots, we have hydraulic compactors which can take a mouthful of stuff the size of your car, and compress it into a pinhead with the density of the stuff that made the big bang, which is why pretty well everything gravitates to us sooner or later. At least, whatever the sewage system doesn’t get, we get. Those guys get on my nerves. They don’t even ROARRRR. They just slurp. No manners at all. They live under ground. Lowlife.

  In our world, we are top. Nobody ROARRRs like us. A New York bus tries to pretend it is a garbage truck and attempts to ROARRR too. But you can tell they are faking it and they don’t have our perfume either. No’wheel, but no’wheel goes radiator to radiator with us! Any Ford or what have you that tries such a stunt comes away with a very flat radiator and if we are really pissed, then it comes away like an empty coke can somebody stepped on. If we get really super-pissed then we step on it after flattening it and leave tire prints all over it. Now double-decker buses might be another story as they were born flat-nosed and they put their whirly bits where no-one can get at them, which is sensible considering who they cart around sometimes. But they are working wheels, just like us and working wheels respect one another and let one another go first when that’s best. But anyone else? Well mostly, if we step on their tires, they go crinkle and that’s the end of it. Sometimes, when we annoy them they use their horn at us. The go sort of “beep”. Or “beep beep” in that sort of soppy soprano voice they have. Now if someone gets up my air intake, a let them have it and I go “BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” for about an hour and a half and I only shut up when I am quite certain they are deaf now and won’t be able to a hear a thing for at least a mile. Mess with me at your peril.

  No, we are top truck – alright yes I know there are bigger trucks. There are those Australian trucks that that look like a cross between Schwarzenegger and a railway train, but they are mutant trucks that just happened when some Aussie trucks collided and one of them happened to be carrying superglue and now they have no choice but to go through life like that. And there are mutant trucks in those open cast mines but they are just mongrels – their mamma got mixed up and spent too many nights in bed fooling around with a ship and look at what happened. Awful! Yes, all right! I agree there are long-distance freight hauling trucks but they don’t even know how to ROARRR. All they do is go Rumble Rumble Rumble Rumble night and day for weeks on end. How completely boring and anti-social can you get? We stop and chat to everyone, but not them they just go around with their radiator cap in the air – Rumble, Rumble, Rumble is all they know how to do. I think they were born without all their ball bearings. And the American trucks! They - in addition to all else - they are such show offs! First of all they put on an exhaust pipe that would be large even for the Queen Mary, and not satisfied with that, they stick the damn thing up in the air like the Eifel Tower wrapped in great sheets of chromed metal with holes in it. I mean really! Would YOU stick YOUR exhaust pipe in the air so everyone can admire it? And then make it so flashy you’d have to have your windscreen in a tire to miss it? Would you be that, that, that…..Pornographic? Why can’t they tuck their exhaust pipe modestly between their wheels like everybody else?

  There is no question at all that in our world, we’re top wheel – I mean, everywheel, but e.v.e.r.y.wheel knows it and gets out of our way. I mean, that includes Rolls Rices, rhyming with “nice” (that is if you pronounce them correctly, only a snobbo yobbo calls them Rolls rOYce”. Though in the garidge, we call them “Rowlas” as in “Cor blimy! Didu see that pink Rowla?”). Anyway, Rolls Rice’s are definitely down the social register. In our world, its how many people you own that counts, and most Rolls Rice’s can’t afford more than one and at the outside they own two. Every durst truck owns several as you know – at least three. But these Rolls Rices, not only are they pretty disgusting petrol-eaters – give them a dinner of wholesome diesel and they get sick and go in a corner and puke and have to have a people clean the puke out of their injectors – but their consumption! They use more gallons of yucko-petrol in an hour to drag their overstuffed carcasses down to Harrods than I do of diesel in a whole afternoon of hauling toms of delicious garbage. That is probably because today you really ought to call them Von Rolls Rices as they’re now German, basically just a Volkswagen with a bigger label and more chrome on their teeth. Now us! A lot of US are German too and not hiding it behind a misleading label trying to pretend we are British when we are not. Personally, I’m a Mercedes (cough). Oh, where was I? Yes, even Rolls Rices get out of our way, which is as it should be. I mean the other day I ROARRRRRRRd (extra “R” just to be pissy) at a Rolls Rice and you should have seen him jump out of the way! Maybe, now I come to think of it, it was a her, as she was pink and who but a poufta would want to be seen in pink? And the Rolls Rice didn’t look like a poufta to me (not enough exhaust pipes). Jumped like a girl anyway, all wiggly and got its braking all in a twist and almost collapsed on a lamp post for support.

  Of course we are top. I mean, besides our ROARRR, that nobody else has - we ALSO own at least two attendants AND a driver, and do you think for a moment that the PURLease would allow YOU to weld a couple of platforms on the rear fender of your Rolls Rice or your Furd or your everyday Chevylay and allow you to have not one but TWO uniformed attendants hanging on for dear life as you ROARRR around the corner (which you can’t anyway as they did an operation to take your voice out after you were born so you

  can’t even speak let alone ROARRR)? You might have been able to have attendants at your back wheels in 1790 with your horse and carriages, but today, we are the only ones that are allowed to have attendants on our rear fenders. If you tried that stunt, you’d get arrested. And to top it off, you even have to open your own doors! Now that’s pretty low. I almost – almost – feel sorry for you. By the way, you do know about Rolls Rices don’t you? They’re the ones where the hubcap labels don’t go round and round but always stay the right way up so you can read them without bending over. They have to label the hubcaps just in case you can’t recognize the Rolls Rice any other way, for example by the false teeth it uses to hide its radiator or by the doors that open hinge-backwards. We were discussing this the other day at the garage where we sleep, because one of us had heard that they do it that way because of the females it owns.

  These females apparently, are all compulsive label- readers, and the richer you are the more labels you have to have, and no female with money would be seen dead in anything without a label so they can PROVE to everyone else that aren’t wearing a stitch that has exceeded its wear-by date. So just like you or I have a radiator that says, “Mercedes” or (even more discreet, just a star in a ring as I do) they wear a belt with CHANEL written on it or c
arry a bag with KENZO written on it in letters you could read from South America if you were half blind and drunk from an exceptionally tasty load of garbage – you know, like that occasion last year, it was bitterly chilly, my tires were jammed with snow, and we went to a vintners which I HATE – nothing but tasteless pulped dried wood with the occasional bit of real wood, and I had three mouthfulls of that, when suddenly I felt it. A dozen bottles of 10 year old scotch – the silly farts had left them inside the box – just popping away as I crushed them. DE-licious. I went through the rest of the day in a happy fog. Side swiped a bus – just playful you know – for the fun of it, but Driver was pissed. Said I did it on purpose, which, of course, I did, not that I admitted it to him. Wodja think I am then? Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes They love these labels the females do, because I guess that way everybody knows who manufactured them (the people I mean) and knows where they were made, or maybe the brand holders pay them lots of money to run their wheels around Fifth Avenue advertising their brand like a taxicab - like a sort of upscale walking billboard. “Look at my CHANEL tires”. See my HERMES diesel tank” “I drink Shell!” “Get your axel grease at L’Oreal” “Get your hubcaps at Cartier!” . These females have the habit of throwing cords of something called “joolry” round their headlamp holders. (“Joolry” is said to be strings of metal that

  got stones stuck in it and often looks like a short and thin metal garbage can tie-down rope). Sometimes they seem to get it stuck on other parts of their bodywork . Apparently, this “joolry” makes them better (somehow) than the females who do not store decorations on their headlamp holders. Does anyone know why that is? Is it their equivalent of the trim round my windshield? Can’t be. Though I notice they do put removable trim with dark glass in it over their windshields - to keep the sun out of their driver’s cabin, I suppose.

  So the word goes, the trouble used to be that when females with stuff strung on their headlamp-holders bent over sideways or even upside down to read the hubcap labels on Rolls Rices which had stopped with the hubcap label upside-down (or anyway, not read-side up), (which was before they did stuff to keep them always the right way up) then the joolry sometimes fell off their headlamp holder into the street where some passing truck would pick it up in its tire treads and roll off with it, never to be seen again and laughing all the way to the bank, no doubt. This made the person owned by the Rolls Rice mad and so (who wants to own a mad person) they made it that the hub cap does not go round and round, but stays the right way up, so the females they own (and females owned by other Wheels) can always read the hub cap label so they can tell other females what label it was they saw in Bond Street the other day, as in, “Cynthi-ah was riding in the most GOR-JUS powda bloo ROLLS RICE in Bond Stweet / Fwifth Havenue yethterday” (This, I think, is said so that the listener knows the speaker was in Bond Thtweet/Fwifth Havenue yethterday). The people I own (and I do own several as I did mention) don’t clutter up their headlamps holders with garbage can tie downs which they rename as “joolry” so I don’t have to go to the extra expense of alwaysup hubcap labels to keep them happy. Which is a blessing. I know you have to pamper your people but its ridiculous when you have to rebuild yourself to stop them losing worthless stuff they are so attached to off their own head-lamp holders. Crazy lot, they are.

  So you get the picture as to why I ROARRRR (Extra R) at them don’t you? They get up my filler caps and make me feel like “accidentally” setting off my windscreen washers which are set to spray right over my back so as to fog up the windscreen of any wheels driving too close behind me. (By “too close” I mean anything closer than half a mile or so).

  Of course, Rolls Rices used to be OK. My papa told me about the days when the manual the cars wrote for their owners read, “IN ORDER TO CHANGE THE SPARKLY PLUGGINGS, HAVE YOUR MAN TAKE OFF THE RIGHT FRONT WHEEL….” But some years later they lost it completely when they got rid of the man. Up to then, they really had class. I mean, everyone owns a people, but who (except us) could afford to own an extra people just to change your sparkly pluggings when you’re feeling low and there’s just no zing in life anymore? They had real class, I tell you. Buses had real class too (and trains) as they used to

  own two people each but even that is going out of style. Soon, we will be the only ones left, I fear.

  So today’s WEDNESDAY!!!!!, not like Tuesday which is mostly cardboard and paper day. I HATE TUESDAYS. TERRIBLE days. Completely tasteless! No flavor at all. WHY would you want to feed us that???. I mean, as a female (it is mostly females that gives us stuff I notice), as a female, would you feed YOUR husband dried, pulped tree? You wouldn’t dare! Would you? SO! SO! So don’t feed it to us either! What do you think re-cycling is for? That stuff just dulls my taste buds. Pulped Tree. They ought to be ashamed. I think the next time I get that stuff, I will be sick all over their front doorstep. THAT will teach them not to re-cycle.

  Now today is Wednesday, which is Yummy Supermarket (and restaurant!) Day. I just LOVE Wednesdays! You go to the supermarket and you get steak and eggs, lots of veggies, and cans off all sorts of interesting stuff , though often you have to squeeze those real hard before they pop and you can get the goodies out of them. The flavors! De-licious.

  Every coupla days, they throw enough stuff away to feed a small town. Though I never did understand why they give it to us, rather than organizing to give it to those people who aren’t owned by any wheels and just sleep in the street and look hungry.

  Lazy I guess.

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