The Post-Graduate Life, Day 6: No Deposit, No Return

Life is hell but death is worse.

~Donald Hall

There is a kind of noble pursuit in returning bottles.  Since resettling back home, I’ve become more acute to the perverse yet dire and necessary accumulation of money. So I’ve resolved to scrape what honor I can out of this often dishonorable activity. Turns out, it’s not so hard. Every time I have returned home from college on break, I am greeted by a small mountain of bulging white trash bags slumped up against the wall of the garage. See, my family drinks. But not alcohol, really. (Though every time I return cans, I inevitably discover -mixed within the countless Diet Cokes and Mountain Dews- some of the alcoholic drinks my not-of-age younger brother has sneaked and buried deep amid the others. This never fails to amuse, because in time I’ve been compelled to infer that his taste in alcohol is either adorably feminine or shamefully undeveloped, what with every variation of flavored Mike’s Hard Lemonade turning up.)

As is often the case, it’s a noble activity, but not glorious one: the bags are stretched and sticky from their unwashed contents, and that’s only the view of the outside. Inside can only be described as an experiment in new life. The sugary pool that collects at the bottom of each bag emits a sharp and piercing stench that’s been fermenting for weeks, one that’s been primed to punch me in the face the moment I un-knot the drawstrings. As a seasoned pro, I’ve found that wearing a light pair of winter gloves saves one’s hands from the grime that comes with handling something near 400-500 cans, which is what tends to be the average for a big trip (and correspondingly big payload: $20-30!)

And that’s what I’m working for: $20-30. During the whole process, robotic and gross, I’m watching these adults push by with their rattling shopping carts, and I’m wondering if they think that this one young man regularly drinks 6 hulking trash bags worth of diet soda and brightly colored alcohol. Occasionally someone will pull up beside me at the return machines and there’s always this inkling of camaraderie. We the sullied penny-pinchers! We the eco-friendly tight-wads! Today a man strode up next to me with a small bag of beer cans- couldn’t have been worth more than 50 cents for the whole lot. During our brief moment of shared mechanical action, amid the great hot roaring and belching from the automatic organs of the bottle return machines, I couldn’t help but feel that one of us was about to make some small quip or pleasantry. Some cheery note about the cans and bottles of beer and “a fun time last night, huh?” or just a simple but earnest Hello.

I’m not trying to make bottle return into some kind of poetry. Whether or not I approach the task begrudging or with the eagerness for a quick buck, I have discovered that there’s all these pockets of beauty and meaning hidden behind the slime and aluminum and robotic motions. Sometimes you just won’t notice they exist until you decide to write a blog post about it.

(And if you’re wondering, there’s no real tie-in with the quote written above. It’s a line from poet Donald Hall’s poem “No Deposit,” itself a puzzling and haunting piece.)