Trashed

The matter of dates niggled at me while reading Trashed. The book grew out of stories that were initially based on Derf Backderf’s stint as a garbageman in 1979-1980 and which were first published in 2002. He then turned the material into two web comics that ran in 2010 and 2011. And finally the stories were fictionalized and turned into this book in 2015.

So the question that bothered me was just when the events being described were happening. One thing I noted is that the story is about a year in the life of garbageman J.B., who along with his pal Mike rides along on the back of a garbage truck, tossing the garbage in. That’s two men hanging on the back of one garbage truck, which is something I have never seen. Not even decades ago. Today, and this goes back at least twenty years now in my hometown, the trucks all have claws that extend from the side of the truck that grab the bins to empty them, so the driver does everything. And even if there is someone riding with the truck, it’s only one person, never two.

This all made me figure the events described were reflective of Backderf’s experiences circa. 1980, and in his endnotes he mentions how he started doing the job six months after the events in My Friend Dahmer, and that Jeffrey Dahmer had cut up the remains of his first victim and put them out with the trash only a few months earlier. This is one timestamp then. But in the book there are also references to online shopping, iPods, and we even see someone using a tablet. None of this is a big issue, but like I say it niggled at me. When is this story taking place?

This question didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book too much though. Backderf actually packs a lot of information into a fun story arc that actually had me laughing out loud a couple of times (I knew nothing of “yellow torpedoes”). The art is suitably cluttered, with the whole world, indoors and outdoors, turned into a dumping ground right from the first page and the chaos of J.B.’s bedroom. I spent a few minutes reading that. There’s also a realistic presentation of what such a job means to people in J.B.’s position, from his showering after work and sighing “I don’t think I can ever be truly clean again” to his conversations with Mike about their doing such labour (“The irony is, we are both too good for, and also totally incompetent at, this kind of work”). It’s remarkable how much exposition Backderf can drop in, alongside political commentary, without making the book feel like a heavy polemic. Maybe it’s just the subject matter. When J. B. says at one point “Think of the economy as a giant digestive tract. And we’re here at the rectum of the free market to clean it all up.” it doesn’t seem like a lecture point so much as a simple statement of fact.

I really liked My Friend Dahmer and went into this thinking it would probably be a bit of a letdown. It wasn’t, and that’s high praise. What’s more, without serial killers Trashed is a book I can recommend to anyone.

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