Go Dumpster Diving
I’m fixing to go dumpster diving.
I remind everyone that this was all happening back in 1994. And as far as you slackers are concerned, those who have been unrelenting prey to activities which rendered you from reading the newspaper, y’all will have to get caught up on your own.
For those at the head of my readers, as well as for the rest of y’all, we continue the story from when that forty million dollar winning lotto ticket, which I had carelessly tossed into the trash can in mine and my Cousin Elroy’s motel room on the beach, that wasn’t in that trash can when I had raced back to the room to retrieve it after discovering it was a winner, and also having discovered that it was 90 days old and it expired at five o’clock today.
The room had been cleaned while I was at breakfast. The maid! I had to find the maid! I raced out front of the motel and looked hard in both directions, downstairs and upstairs, and there wasn’t a maid’s cart in sight.
I dashed back inside of my room and listened painfully to eight rings before housekeeping answered my phone call and a voice said, “Housekeeping, how may I help you?”
I was breathing hard when I gasped, “My room was cleaned earlier this morning and an important document I had thrown into my trash can by mistake is gone! How can I get it back?”
“Just go outside and locate Miss Gilmore’s cart. If she ain’t at it, she’ll be in a room close by. I’m sure she can assist you in retrieving your document.”
“I already tried that! Ain’t no cart or no maid anywhere around.”
“Then she must have finished in Section B and gone on to C. You can probably find her over there, but you better hurry, because she only had three rooms to clean over there. She drives a blue Toyota, which she parks in the big parking lot. If it’s gone, then she’ll be g—–”
As soon as I stumbled to the ground floor I saw that aforementioned vehicle exiting the parking lot. I had to run like a deer to get in front of the blue Toyota and flag it down before it could exit the parking lot onto the boulevard and be gone.
After a lot of arm waving and jumping up and down in front of the little car it ground to a halt. I dashed around to the driver’s side window, and from a little crack in it a voice said, “What you want?”
“Are you Miss Gilmore?”
“I might be. Who wants to know?”
“I’m a guest in room 211. Early this morning I threw an important paper in the trash can and someone in the housekeeping department told me you might be able to tell me where to find that trash bag.”
About that time a giant garbage truck, the kind that picked whole dumpster’s and took them away, came rumbling by.
“Just follow that truck,” Miss Gilmore said through the crack in her window.
“Huh?”
“Follow it to that dumpster over yonder between Sections B and C. And you better hurry ‘cause it don’t take him long to get gone.”
“What do I look for?” I asked as I began backing away from her car window.
“There’s a week’s worth of trash in there, but it’s all bagged. Today’s will be piled on the top.” As she was pulling away she rolled her window down and called out, “Yours will be the bag that’s full of empty beer cans and cigarette butts!”
It was a good one hundred yards to that dumpster and the truck was already backing up to it when I started running again. I was about halfway there when I heard the grinding of gears and saw that those big mechanical arms on the back of the truck began to rise and my heart just about jumped out of my chest when I saw the dumpster clear the ground.
Uh oh! I’m out of space again. I’ll be fixing to continue next week.