It began innocently enough. A flyer in our letterbox, a rumour in the street.

Hard Garbage day was coming, and it was time to delve into long-forgotten cupboards and to go in search of the overgrown shed that Old Grandpappy Midnight claims was built somewhere in the backyard back in ‘Nought Six [1].

***

In case you’re not familiar with the term, ‘Hard Garbage’ is not the working title of the latest action flick from Vin Diesel – no, it’s a term that refers to the kind of garbage that you would normally take to the rubbish dump [2]; i.e. couches, old bricks, the bodies of annoying neighbours who play their stereos too loud, that sort of thing.

We tend to use the non-technical term of ‘all that useless crap stored in the spare room for the last decade-and-a-half’ to describe these things, but apparently ‘hard garbage’ is how our local council likes to think of it.

So, a few days ago – spurred by the mountains of rubbish that magically appeared in front of other houses in our street – we began dutifully dragging things out onto our sidewalk.

We don’t have a lot of hard garbage to get rid of this year, but you have to participate in these community events, or your neighbours become suspicious and start muttering weird things like, ‘T’aint natural for a body to not have anything to throw away’; and it’s only a short distance from there to an outright mob scene in which people are running through your streets brandishing burning torches, and accusing you of being in league with various Dark Forces, such as the local council and its garbage contractors.

And so, there’s a faded mattress out on our sidewalk now. Some old chairs. A rusted barbeque. An ancient television. And half of an Inflatable Bismark [3], which has seen better years, if not better decades.

At least, there used to be…

***

This is where the fun part of hard garbage pickup lies.

Not in the backbreaking work of wrestling a wild mattress into submission, and then dragging it, kicking and screaming [4], out into the front yard. No, the fun is in watching other people go through the things you have abandoned on your sidewalk, one by one, looking for discarded treasures.

***

There’s a special type of person lurking out there in suburbia. A special type of person, who only comes out just when daylight is turning to dusk. A special type of person, who always seems to own a trailer, or a ute, or one of those half-truck thingies with the cage on the back. A special type of person, whose nose begins to twitch, whose hands begin to sweat, whose heart begins to race and who generally appears to be experiencing several other alarming symptoms of a major seizure at the merest suggestion of a hint that there may be a bargain to be had somewhere within a 3-day driving radius.

I know this type of person exists [5], because I have watched him (or her) driving slowly up and down my street, casting an experienced and weathered eye over the items abandoned on the sidewalk, considering the relative merits of this obviously-broken-but-maybe-repairable-dishwasher versus that deceptively-complete-looking-outdoor-furniture-set.

They always go for the dishwasher, the fools – it’s bright and shiny (except for the rusty bits, which aren’t), and looks like it might be worth more money, but isn’t.

***

“How long did the television last?”

“Not long, not long at all.”

“Seriously? Someone wanted that old thing?”

“Wanted it? Wanted it? Huh. I’d only just put it out there, when I heard a car screeching to a halt and someone yelling, ‘Get the tv! Get the tv! Get the freaking tv!’ and then there were all these car doors slamming, and the sound of gunfire – which, sure, might have just been a car backfiring – and when I whipped around, the damn thing was gone!”

“Wow. Well, at least you got rid of it.”

“Aha ahahahaha. You’d think so, right? But you know what happened? What happened was, I came back out the next morning and someone else had dropped off a couple more television sets on our sidewalk, and now there’s open warfare on the street as two different camps are trying to send forward scouting parties to claim them.”

***

The other interesting thing about hard garbage pickup is that people who live in other suburbs will drive their unwanted items into your suburb and will discard them on your sidewalk. I guess this must be easier than driving it to a rubbish dump? Or, who knows, maybe it’s cheaper?

Either way, it means you end up with broken things on your sidewalk that you never owned; the discarded remnants of the lives of other people.

***

I pull up to the driveway and let the engine idle. A trailer is blocking it, so I can’t get the car off the road right at that moment. I wait a minute or two and then toot the horn [6] and a guy leans out of the driver’s window of the car to which the trailer is attached and gives me this, “I will move when I am damn good and ready, pal,” look.

Eventually he edges forward just enough so that I can get the car into the driveway. I hop out and then realise why the man with the trailer hadn’t simply moved on to greener garbage when I had arrived back home. His wife – a short, muscular, unfriendly-ish woman with a cigarette clamped between mean-looking lips – is rifling through the bits and pieces in front of the house.

She doesn’t look happy – she’s obviously seen better quality garbage elsewhere – and the look she keeps shooting me clearly indicate that I should have tried harder this year, and that there’s still a few minutes left for me to go inside and drag out the couch and maybe the entertainment system if I’d care to salvage what little remains of my hard garbage reputation.

I decline this unspoken opportunity, so she finally grabs the grubby, leaf-stained lawn chairs and throws them into the back of the trailer, where they bounce off 3 broken dishwashers, and then she climbs into the car.

With a roar, a screech of tires, and a dangerous sway of an overloaded trailer, the car disappears up the street – the hunt for hard garbage continuing in other streets, and in other neighborhoods.

***

Note: to the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as an Inflatable Bismarck, but I wish one did exist, so I could use it to Impress My Friends.