ranzware
I’m a small-time drug dealer from the south, says the hypnagogic text hovering before me as I start Schedule 1. It says I’ve arrived in town with no cash, no product, and no contacts. I only know one way to make money, the text implores, and it’s time to get to work. Stuff that.
It’s time to turn over a new, cannabinoid-free leaf. I’m going to begin again as a productive member of society, earning an honest living, fully cooperating with any esteemed law-enforcement officers who decide to detain me in the course of their duties. What could possibly go wrong?
I awake in my RV from a past life, and to a text from my incarcerated uncle. I sprint straight past the grow tents, out the door and into the clean air I’ll be breathing from now on. My uncle wants to talk over a payphone, and I decide I’ll indulge him just this once. He’s family, I suppose.
Uncle’s straight to business. He used to deal here, so there’s a supplier ready to go and some start-up cash hidden around town. The line goes dead before I can even say goodbye.
Better this way. I head into a nearby gas station, buy a banana and ask the attendant if she knows where I might find work – or I try to. Somehow, the only question I can think to ask is whether she’d like a free sample. Old habits die hard, I guess. I leave the store without saying anything, now with 98 dollars to my name and a banana in my pocket.
The streets are littered with a comical amount of drug paraphernalia. Bongs and beer cans crunch underfoot, along with the occasional crack pipe. I pick one up, turning it over in my hands as I weigh up just how easy it would be to set up shop here. It’s as if the entire universe has been built for one thing. Except!
Cash for Trash, says the machine in front of me. $3 for a glass bottle, $2 for plastic, $2 for a can and $1 for anything else. I press the start button and watch the crack pipe turn into the first honest buck of my new life. The front of the machine, optimistically inscribed, reads “Keep Hyland Point beautiful!”. I shall, Cash for Trash machine. I shall.
Soon enough, I’ve turned every syringe and cigarette stub in the vicinity into a cool $20. I stroll along the coast then pick my way through the streets, leaving a pristine landscape behind me. To save time I start chucking debris into the machines from increasingly ambitious distances, whooping whenever I land a lucky shot. Every now and then I try to strike up a conversation with someone I walk past, but still, the only conversational gambit I can come up with is to offer people free samples of weed. I don’t even have any! Why am I like this?
I start avoiding the red-eyed gaze of passers by as I transform their hometown into something livable. So many of them seem off their faces that it’s a wonder the town has any kind of functioning infrastructure, but the bloke at the hardware store seems sober enough. He even asks me what I’m up to, and I garble out something about agriculture. Close enough. Apart from the conversation, he sells more treasure: a trash grabber, for only 25 bucks!
The afternoon’s work had already netted me a hundred dollars or so, but the grabber is transformative. It comes with a hand-held bin I can now fill up before depositing in the trash-o-matics, rather than painstakingly hauling over one discarded marujana leaf at a time. I merrily work my way through the streets, losing all track of time. This life isn’t so bad, I think. Then I realise I’m past curfew.
I’d seen the signs, but paid them little heed. Surely the law wouldn’t mistake me for some street tough? They sprint over the moment they see me, though, paying no heed to my complaints. Before I know it I’ve been arrested, fined $100, and marched back to my…RV. Good job they didn’t look inside, but the injustice of it shakes my newfound serenity. And they think they’re the ones keeping the streets clean.
I can’t sleep next to the plants, so I sneak back out, now surreptitiously slipping trash into the machines while keeping an eye out for officers. I’m spotted, but this time I run, eventually losing them by ducking into a dumpster. Is this what it’s come to? Am I the self-same trash I’ve dedicated myself to taking out? They go, and I slink over to a motel I ran past earlier. I knock on the door to the manager’s office, but when she comes out… again. I can offer a free sample, but I can’t ask for a room.
I head back out, back to picking, back to dodging the cops. I’m lucky there’s only a minimal police presence. Eventually I notice my phone has been stuck at 4am for the past several hours. It’s more than my phone that’s wrong, though, it’s the world. Again, text appears before my eyes, this time reading “go to sleep to progress to tomorrow”. I am cursed, cursed to live in a world where I’ll never get to see a sunrise. There’s nothing for it. I grit my teeth and head back to the RV, wincing at the UV grow lights as I tuck myself into bed.
I wake up at 7, and discover that in the three hours I’ve slept the streets are once again awash with trash. That means money, but also despair. Hyland Point will never be beautiful.
I drag myself back to picking, but the morning trash tide has rubbed my face in the syphian nature of the struggle. If I do this for a week I’ll be able to afford the room above a Chinese takeout place I’ve seen advertised, but then what? Does anyone even care?
I realise my rounds have brought me to the door of a church, so I knock on the door for answers. The priest comes out, patient and expectant, waiting for me to unload my soul. I ask him if wants a free sample. He goes back inside.
My mind turns to those dead drops, of the hundreds of dollars just sitting around town. Why not, I think? The money’s already been made. Better I take it than let it lie there. I’m stealing from the drug dealers, that’s it. Like Robin Hood, or something.
This town has one last legal way to make money. Between the dead drops and my trash cash, I’ve got 1,000 dollars, so I head to the casino. I bet every last dollar on a blackjack hand, hit on my 17, and go bust.
Fuck. Back to drugs, then.
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Kurt Indovina
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