LITERARY | The Dirty Super Resident
By: Shanin Kyle Manuel
It’s a hell of a job for a man to clean off trash without getting his hands dirty. Looking through our window, I was quite surprised about how an old man sweeps dirt and disposes garbage with flair. As someone who wakes up at 7 AM to roam around our street, backyard to backyard, it is unlikely to keep yourself unscathed after that “dirty” duty. While he was busy cleaning our backyard, I sat on our bench just beside him and wondered how he could brave every corner of our town only to dispose of people’s junks.
He told me he has a knack for eliminating junks of all kinds. For him, the easiest to dump are papers and plastics. Hardest ones are scraps buried in soil that he has to do some shoveling. Often he wouldn’t bother digging them into the soil thinking they enrich it or maybe grow into some plant. After his duty, it would usually take time for the old man to wash his hands as if he is bathing himself with some holy water. He sat beside me, ready to entertain all my questions. He went on. Scraps he hated the most are murals or graffiti on walls and a mound of placards and broadsheets. He described them as a nuisance or a “bad trash,” which for him are not very helpful during a pandemic.
His trash categories piqued my interest. How could he distinguish good trash from bad trash? Some people think of junk as a diamond, which are ones they could still recycle or reuse for a better cause. Consider those placards and calls as good trash, or maybe not at all. Regardless of how or which materials they are made: papers, cardboards, fabric and rag; their owners might have taken time and effort crafting them believing those aren’t a one-time call. Well, unless bad trash is completely wiped out, some good trash is better tolerated. And, I’m wondering too about how the worst trash of all is made.
The old man went on telling more about his trash-finding mission. One day, he was assigned to clean the backyard of a crazy rich Chinese. It was messier than expected. Junks such as plastics, tin cans, and even chemical wastes are scattered everywhere. Some went even beyond the owner’s backyard. Yet, he remembered that specific protocol he was given: to dispose of every trash within and beyond the territory. Trespass the neighborhood if necessary. That dirty moment was quite unforgettable for he was only paid loaves of bread and an unlimited visit to the owner’s backyard.
The next day he discovered a huge factory printing and reprinting trashy papers of all kinds. Often people call them The Fort Escape, but regardless of how catchy it sounds, the old man believes it is just a prestigious trash bin. There were newspapers, broadsheets, pamphlets, and posters. And only by the reeks of these trash that he realized how truly they were disgusting. For him, it smells revolutionary. He couldn’t remember the better word for it but it kind of sounds that way. Unexpectedly he brought himself an extra copy of the posters he’d disposed of. The headline was just fine, it says Deepens the fresh free dam.
Another day, he was with his colleague disposing of what they surmised as colossal junk. It was nothing but a billboard perched atop a makeshift house. Thinking that was something only terrorists would make, he quickly demanded his colleagues to fire the billboard with bullets for it to collapse on its own. “That was trashy,” the old man insisted — I don’t know which he was referring to. After that incident, he was mad about how taxing it was to monitor the area for days so as to prevent such billboard-building behavior. But still he was honest when he told me that he didn’t completely understand what it says. In bold letters, the huge signage says: junk & tear the roar bill. I yawned.
It was getting boring so I had to cut our conversation short. And, he too has something else to do. He appears to be moonlighting another job later. Before I bid farewell I told him how pretty hard his job is, ranging from collecting trash to tidying himself up after his shift. As if he was satisfied with our chitchat, finally the old man got off the bench, “I clean off rubbish before they get worse, lest it is necessary to prevent any unrest,” he said. “I also sometimes busy myself creating trash to keep my job. I mound them myself and call my colleagues to clean them later.”
Then, he looked straight into my eyes, “In your eyes I am a street sweeper or a trash man. But, for them…” He was actually showing me the entire neighborhood. “In their eyes, I am still their super resident. Now if you let me, I will be cleaning down the street.”
That, indeed, is a dirty job for a super resident! I sighed.
