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A Story of Cans
Or, Why I Hate the Middle Class
My father and I picked up aluminum cans all over town one summer. He had a ’72 Mercury that looked worse than
anything Robert Blake ever drove in Beretta—we drove around in this heap of a car all day until the back seat was to the roof,
overstuffed with aluminum cans.
I was twelve years old and was not embarrassed about picking up the cans, even though I was constantly running into people
I knew who looked astounded to see me doing such a thing. I knew my reputation at school, where I was considered a kind of child
scholar, would eventually be damaged if the word spread I was harvesting other peoples’ throwaways, picking up aluminum cans on
the shoulders of highways and roads, in national and state parks, in garbage bins of all colors and sizes, in bar rooms and demi-whore
houses, at car washes and seafood restaurants, etc. But I was with my father and he didn’t see any shame in what we were doing,
so I didn’t either.
When I returned to school that August, everyone knew about the cans and I was shunned by my peers as well as my teachers,
who were the very ones who fostered the notion that I was a child genius, un nouveau počt extraordinaire, and all the rest.
Apparently, everybody had seen me picking up cans with my bearded and tattered father, both of us working the lots of the
worst places imaginable, at least to their narrow bourgeois minds.
The social denunciation by the community—this gross inequity, for what money we got selling the cans to
the recycling plant to help me and my father stay alive that summer since he had just been “laid off”
from his job of eight years—maimed me for life. I admit it, I gave in to society and became genuinely
embarrassed about the whole thing and embarrassed by my father, even if it wasn’t his fault that he had
to sell cans to help pay the rent and buy food. I wasn’t old enough at the time to hold my own and stick
by my working class ethics. Yes, I was humiliated by the fact that I had stooped so low as to pick up other people’s
garbage for money, so much so that I have yet to fully recover even by the age of thirty-five, so that I’m still planning
my revenge against the very middle class that caused me so much unnecessary shame.
I’m fully convinced I will prevail in the end.
Louis E. Bourgeois
Email: Louis E. Bourgeois
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