My dad had to “pull a lot of strings” to get me a spot in the sanitation trainee program. He “put it all on the line” for me. But even though I passed the course, I eventually showed him that I “didn’t have what it took”.
He devoted his life to sanitation work. He didn’t expect the same of me. He just expected me to honor the job when I asked him to hook me up. His expectations weren’t met.
Those days, I was drinking around the clock and betting my salary on horses. I lost a lot on California Chrome in 2016. More than I had in the bank. I asked my dad for help, and he laughed.
Maybe because I was drinking, I thought about buying a gun to get the bookie, Travis, off my back.
It was more than a passing thought. I met with these two gangsters, Conlin and Scott, who offered to sell me one. A Browning Hi-Power, untraceable. They said they scooped it up from the river while going “magnet fishing”.
We were making small talk while we waited for the gun (one of their guys was grabbing it from the stash house “offsite”). That’s how they found out I was a sanitation worker. They perked up.
“Sanitation? Like, garbage?”
“Just like garbage.”
I thought Conlin and Scott were going to ask me to help them get rid of a body. I’d already thought about how I could feed Travis to the truck, so I guess that’s why my mind went there. But that’s not what they were interested in. They wanted the leachate.
“Leachate? Like, garbage juice?” I asked.
“Yeah, garbage juice,” Conlin said.
I really wish that’s as weird as it got.
I said, “What the fuck do you want garbage juice for?”
“The fuck is it to you if I’m offering to pay?” said Scott.
We talked numbers, and they brought out a bottle of E&J. We got drunk, and they told me they’d pay fifty bucks a liter. A garbage truck can fill a two-hundred liter tank in one day, so that would be $10,000 per drop, if I could find a way to get the juice out of the truck and into the gangsters’ hands.
Finally, their guy called from the stash house and said that the Browning had already been sold. By that point, I’d taken a Xanax bar and had drunk quite a bit of E&J, so I was pretty out of it. I got out of there, and figured I’d dreamt the whole conversation about the garbage juice.
But Conlin and Scott kept badgering me. They really wanted that juice. Texting me and texting me. They’d say things like, “Hey, you still got that juice plug? Will pay $$$”
These guys, man. I was desperate, though. And Travis was still all over me, taking my whole paycheck. So I said fuck it. They want juice, I’ll give them juice. I started plotting a way.
I got the hook-up on a truck with a vacuum tank for cleaning porta-potties. There was the first guy I’d have to cut into the deal. I’d have to work fast during my shift, to leave time to transfer the juice from the garbage truck to the porta-potty truck without holding up my route. And then there was the other sanitation worker on my route, Moses, who I’d have to kiss into the deal, just for staying quiet.
Everyone wanted to know what I was scheming. Not that I had a good answer.
While I was plotting, I was still drinking of course, because a drinking problem doesn’t just disappear. I crossed paths with my dad in the locker room, and he could smell it on me. I can’t prove it, but I think he snitched on me to the manager.
I was fired for drinking on the job, and I was drunk when they fired me. My fucking dad, man.
Now I was an unemployed, gambling-addicted alcoholic with a debt to a bookie who wasn’t going to be happy to find out my monthly installments had vanished.
Thankfully I’d put the wheels in motion on the juice plug before I was fired.
All I had to do was sweeten the deal a bit more for Moses, the guy on my old route. I’d drive the tanker. I’d vacuum the juice. All Moses had to do was be at the meet-up spot at the right time and place.
Next thing I knew, I had ten grand in cold, hard tender. Un-taxable. Those gangsters paid up. I was as astonished as you probably are reading this.
I made a lot of money selling leachate. Everyone thought I was crazy, of course, but no one cared when they got their cut.
I started regretting that I’d dished out such sweet deals all around. I was pocketing a third of the cash after Moses told another sanitation guy what was going on and demanded to be cut in.
I’d paid off Travis, but I was still feeling greedy.
At one drop, Conlin and Scott brought along this hippie named Joseph. The gangsters said Joseph, who was apparently their juice-buyer, thought I was diluting the juice. It wasn’t having the same “effect”. Effect? What effect? That was none of my business, apparently. The two gangsters threatened to cut my head off. Joseph the hippie said, “Hey, hey, calm down, calm down.”
I swore I wasn’t diluting the garbage juice, because why the fuck would I dilute garbage juice? I just suctioned it up and dropped it off.
Conlin and Scott called me a liar. When Joseph tried to chill them out again, the gangsters told him that he didn’t understand how guys like me operate. After some back and forth, me swearing I wasn’t diluting the juice, Conlin and Scott calling me a liar and threatening me, and Joseph trying to chill the whole situation out, the gangsters finally came off it.
Joseph guessed it was some inconsistency in the quality of juice. Maybe extra precipitation had diluted it. We went our separate ways. Status quo.
But I had a new idea.
I still had no idea what anyone wanted juice for, but I did now know that I was selling juice to the gangsters and the gangsters were selling it to the hippie. So I thought I’d cut out the middle man.
I paid Moses to tail the gangsters after the drop. See where the juice went. Moses reported back that they brought the tanker into this fenced-off warehouse out in Jurupa Valley.
Moses gave me the address and I staked it out. I eventually saw Joseph the hippie leave in a shitty pick-up and tailed him to his home in Yucaipa.
When I flagged down Joseph in his front yard, he pulled a gun on me. Told me to get off his property or he’d shoot. I told him to be easy. I backed away. I finally got my question out. I asked how much he was paying those gangsters for the juice.
“What’s it to you?” said Joseph.
“Just trying to see if I can get you a better deal,” I said.
Turns out Conlin and Scott were flipping the juice for sixty gs!
“You wanna save twenty thousand a drop?” I said. Wouldn’t make any difference to me to just drive the juice straight to the warehouse. Win-win.
Joseph was hesitant. He didn’t know me. Didn’t know if he could trust me, he said. But he came around over our little chat on his front lawn. Apparently he liked money as much as I did.
I told Conlin and Scott what I told Joseph I’d tell them. That I’d gotten caught and the jig was up. While Conlin and Scott went around trying to find another sanitation guy, I was delivering the juice straight to the nerve center.
Business was good after that. Really good. But I wasn’t saving much. I just had more to play with. Bookies will let things slide at bigger numbers. Travis now let me bet over what I had on-hand by a factor of three.
So I dug myself another hole. Eight Rings ran into Storm the Court. That fucked me.
I got the idea that I’d cut out the middle man again. Repeat my business plan. See what the hippie was doing with the juice once and for all and suss out the next opportunity down the supply chain.
In the past, what I did was drive onto the lot in Jurupa Valley in my porta-potty vacuum tanker (which I owned outright at this point), hook the hose up to this giant tank that was partially buried in the ground, and drain the juice. Then I’d get my money and leave.
One night after a drop, I snuck in.
The lot was rigged with some pretty high-tech security, but it wasn’t too hard to breach. I guess it was deep enough in the boonies that they weren’t too worried about trespassers. I watched Joseph smoking a cigarette outside of the warehouse in full, hazmat-like coveralls. When he went back inside, I grabbed the door and slid inside.
Inside the warehouse, the first thing I noticed were the hoses running through the place. They crawled up the walls and hung from the ceiling, fastened in a maze of spirals.
The warehouse was huge. It could probably hold a plane.
But the only actual structure inside there was a circular fence of plastic sheeting. I gathered quickly enough that the maze of hoses was pumping the juice, carrying it to the center of the warehouse, right above the fenced-off circle of plastic sheeting, and raining juice down on whatever was inside. The leachate came down in a steady, unending drizzle. Hovering around the plastic fencing were other people in hazmat coveralls. I couldn’t tell which one was Joseph any longer. I couldn’t tell what any of them were doing. But they looked busy, carrying clipboards and writing things down.
You couldn’t fathom the smell inside that place. The literal scent of hundreds upon thousands of liters of garbage juice raining from the ceiling, spiraling down drains built into the warehouse floor. I saw why they wore coveralls.
My approach into the warehouse made it difficult for me to maneuver much further. I’d found a nice hiding spot behind what I assumed was another tank of leachate. I realized I was lucky I didn’t get spotted immediately when I entered, because the hazmats came and went constantly. I thought I’d wait it out until their shift was up and then sneak back out, until I discovered there was a night shift tagging them out.
At that point, I thought I was truly fucked. Where was I going to go?
Then, there was a commotion of activity. Something was happening on the inside of the plastic sheeting. Some chaos. The hazmats shouted. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Even though I couldn’t see inside the circle of plastic sheeting, I could tell there was something inside. Something moving.
I heard one of the hazmats shout, “Watch out!”
A person was then thrown from inside the sheeting. The guy went shooting across the room like he was hit with the force of a moving bus. The guy hit the wall and collapsed. His fellow hazmats came to his side and removed his mask. The guy’s face was a bloody pulp from the impact.
An alarm was switched. They dragged him out. One of the hazmats still near the plastic sheeting was shouting into it, “Bad boy! Bad, bad boy!” Scolding whatever was in there.
This was my window. My chance.
As the hazmats dragged the injured, maybe dead man toward the door I’d entered through, I could only go one direction: deeper into the warehouse.
I hugged the wall and moved quickly. There was too much chaos to notice me, thankfully. I found a door and took it.
I was now inside some type of break room. It was empty. There were lunch tables, a box TV, and a whiteboard. Math equations were drawn across the whiteboard in erasable marker.
I saw an unused set of coveralls. The key to my escape. I quickly put them on. Zipped myself up. And then reentered the warehouse proper.
No one questioned me now. The chaos had subsided a bit. I looked towards the exit, and then back towards the fence of plastic sheeting.
I had to know.
So I approached. I arrived before the plastic fencing and peeled it back to see what was in there.
At first, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. A giant lump, about the size of a garbage truck, getting rained down on by garbage juice. The thing had rough, gray skin with bristling clumps of hair. Then, I noticed the thing had what looked like flippers. And then, sure enough, I realized the thing was alive when a basketball-sized eye fluttered open and looked right at me. The thing flapped its flipper, tossing pooling leachate onto its back. An enormous tongue emerged from what I didn’t even realize was a mouth until it cracked open. The tongue slapped its own back, licking up the juice. And then the tongue reached out towards me and touched my coveralls, almost tenderly.
When I found the ability to move my legs, I backed out of there and made straight for the exit. I shedded the coveralls on my way to the lot’s security fence. I exited, took the alley down to my truck, and drove away.
I tried to return to life as usual after that.
Life as usual being drinking and siphoning off garbage juice and selling the juice to the hippie.
Every time I drove onto the lot, I had a sick feeling having seen a glimpse of what was inside that warehouse. I needed a new gig. I didn’t know what I saw, but I knew there was no more middle men to cut out of whatever the fuck was happening there.
But I didn’t have much time to think about it. Travis was all over me, and there was no chance I’d ever have the money to pay up in full.
Instead of doing his own dirty work, Travis got even with me by tipping off Conlin and Scott, telling them that I was still in the business of garbage juice. I found out the hard way, when they staked me out in front of Joseph’s warehouse.
I was taking the usual route, a few blocks out from the drop, when my tires burst. I’d driven over some caltrops laid in the asphalt. I don’t know how I got away. Call it fight or flight. The gangsters came down on me ready to do good by their threat of cutting my head off. But I escaped. I threw punches and ran and dodged the ensuing gunfire. My porta-potty tanker took several caps to the side and began leaking garbage juice all over the street.
Felt like my days were numbered after that one.
I laid low at Moses’s place until he heard I had a mark on my head and kicked me out.
I had one move left. I drove out to Yucaipa and staked out the hippie’s house again.
When I intercepted him in the front yard, Joseph said, “What happened to you? You fell off.”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “Look,” I said, “I don’t like doing this. But I need money.”
“Money?” said Joseph. “The fuck you talking about, money? No juice, no pay.”
Just as Joseph was about to enter his home, I said, “I know about the thing.”
He looked at me funny. “What thing?” he said.
“In the warehouse,” I said. He looked me up and down. He knew exactly what I was talking about, of course.
“You’re bribing me?” he finally said. I nodded my head, a bit embarrassed.
“I don’t need much,” I told him. “Just enough to get out of town. And then you’ll never hear from me again. I won’t say a word.”
Joseph sized me up. I bet he wished he had his pistol on him. He finally said, “What’re we talking?”
“Fifty gs,” I said.
“Fifty gs!” said Joseph.
“Come on,” I said. “I know you’re good for it.”
Of course he was good for it. Whatever was going on in that warehouse, it was an operation with deep pockets. That much I’d learned in my time delivering leachate.
He sized me up one more time. “And then you’ll go?” he said.
“Poof,” I said.
I guess he could read me, because he knew I was telling the truth. And I was. Joseph gave me the cash and said, “I never want to see you again.” We never did see each other again, and I stayed true to my promise up until this point of putting pen to paper. But before I dipped with my fifty thousand, I did ask him one more question.
“What was that thing?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
I’m not going to say where I live now for obvious reasons, but it’s a long ways from Riverside, far away from that warehouse and whatever the fuck it was housing. But I can tell you this. Whenever I pass a pungent dumpster, all I can think of is a four-foot tongue licking up leachate.