By Joshua Glantz
Fall 2012 Kaplan Award Winner
My eyes finally open after what feels like hours, but likely was a matter of seconds stuck in that purgatory between REM and consciousness where you know you’re sleeping but you can’t wake up. The drag of the aluminum on the pavement is as painful as nails on the chalkboard. This angers me and this time I’m going to do something about it. It’s time to get up. I jolt upward and my hangover hits me in the stomach with more force than Ray Lewis. My head throbs; the egg yolk that was my brain, once resting perfectly within my skull, has now slipped over the edge of the shell. Then I hear the sound again
“Thuck…..Thuck…..”. And then that drag on the pavement.
Some asshole is out there at, what is it? A glance at the alarm clock says, 9:34AM. And this isn’t the first time, or even the second! Last Sunday morning, it was the same goddamn racket. I became righteously distracted after stepping in fresh vomit (thanks, roommate), but unable to confront the perpetrator. They call it the “Greek System,” but I don’t know how anyone in their right mind can call it that- there’s nothing systematic about it. It seems like every night, a new form of entertainment is being refined by these fine gentlemen. Between Vuvuzelas, Tour-de-Franzia, and Tuesday-Night-Drunk-Nights, silence is seldom achieved in the land of chaos. In the still of the night, our nation’s college youth opts to refine their drinking skills.
The noise is as constant as it is disgusting. Between the freshman pledge who has been projectile vomiting out of third-story window since the party ended (now he’s just dry heaving), to the garbage-man who is visibly tickled to wake us up at the crack of dawn, when you finally do hear silence, it wakes you up. And then you hear the pavement crawl. Who was that at dinner last night talking about “some Asian dude” they yelled at who was digging in our trash last week? The thought of his return frustrates me, especially at this hour. I try to concentrate on the possibilities but all I can think about is my aching head, and that sound.
“THUCK! THUCK!” Much louder this time.
“…duuuude. What the fuck!” It’s my roommate Ameer. He’s in the bunk above me. His voice sounds as bad as I feel. “That Asian guy is back for our cans again”
“What guy? What are you talking about?”
What he tells me infuriates me. Apparently the noise that has been torturing me for weeks is the sound of some old guy spending his twilight years digging through fraternity trash on an eco-friendly mission to supplement his retirement. He pulls every garbage bag out of both of our brown dumpsters and removes each and every discarded can, crushes them one by one, and then takes them in for money. Just the sheer smell of those dumpsters is enough to keep most people far away, but this guy “don’t care” Ameer tells me.
I have heard enough and head for the door. Fighting back the urge to puke, I make my way down the hallway, through the trash that litters the hallway of the third floor. How exactly I’m going to confront this guy starts running through my head. I can still hear the aluminum dragging on the outside pavement- the sound seems to be able to permeate any wall, regardless of its thickness.
I shove the back door open and descended the stairs. A small man comes into view, but he’s not by the dumpsters at all. I ponder exactly how to approach him when I realize what I’ve overlooked. My feet stop carrying me as I discover the epicenter of the “thuck-thucks”. This middle aged Asian man is bent over a wheelbarrow filled with concrete. Just a few feet away, next to his gigantic garbage bag full of crushed-cans, a three-foot hole that used to be in our parking lot lies in a drying mass of wet concrete. The man smiles at me and nods his head. Something becomes painfully clear: we drink enough beer in the Greek System that we have fully-grown men stalking our dumpsters for the remnants. Something else begins to tickle my brain. Around my freshman year of college, the alley behind my house developed a pothole which quickly eroded and turned into a frightening three foot deep abyss of glass and garbage. The fraternal powers that be were never able to get around to fixing this problem, but nothing gets past this guy.
It occurs to me how profound this is. In a capitalistic world, this man is merely taking advantage of our failure to capitalize on our potential markets; he has turned our trash into a commodity, and a very lucrative one at that. And yet rather than keeping all the profit for himself like any normal person might have, he has opted to help out his fellow man and pay some of it forward. I realized that this blind kindness would forever humble me; “the true gentlemanis than whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety”. In that moment, I knew that this little old man had more class than any of us frat boys ever would.