Dopecentury XXXII --- Streetsweepah!
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The street-sweeper shift begins deep in the overnight hours, when the city is as quiet as it will ever be, and one can stand in middle of the street and look all the way down between the lines of buildings and see maybe a single vehicle moving: a delivery truck doing their rounds or maybe a night nurse doing their commute.
On the truly perfect nights in the late summer, the street sweepers designate some parking lot near a 24-hour convenience store to meet at before the shift begins; there they park their machines in a circle facing outward, and shoot the shit while sipping at the coffee that has been sitting on the convenience store burner since the prior afternoon, or suck at newly-purchased cigarettes; Every cigarette smoked, every coffee cup drained, every candy bar wrapper and empty potato chip bag, gets tossed on the ground in front of the machines; The driver of a street sweeper has no use for municipal trash bins.
Someone points out the time and the last drags are taken on the cigarettes, the last sips poured out from the coffee cups (at least by those who didn’t choose to bring the remains of their extra-large coffees into the cab with them); The drivers mount up their beasts, and the diesels roar to life, flame chasing black smoke from the stacks above; clutches go in-and-out-and-in and the big wheels jolt into movement; up the in the cabs, drivers grab the suicide knobs and roll the wheels around with one hand while letting out the drive lever that engages the sweepers with the other; The spinning brushes suck up the cigarette butts and coffee cups and chip bags from the parking lot before the sweepers move out into the street in a line that breaks into smaller bits at each intersection.
The driver pulls the brush-engagement lever back in, floors the accelerator, and shifts up as the sweeper moves quickly down the arterial street on its way to the start of its cleaning route; the yellow light circles above flashing over the empty street and reflecting back off the dark windows of the buildings.
The residential neighborhood comes up quickly, and the driver swirls the wheel hard to the right to enter the starting block of the cleaning route; out goes the brush lever and the diesel roars under the strain of the full power of the many electric motors driving the brushes; The driver lets down the brush-height control lever and the rushing-water sound of the spring-steel brushes engaging the asphalt fills the neighborhood; The driver keeps one hand on the wheel and leans out over the side, inching the brushes right up against the curb.
The machine passes a bunch of teenagers dressed in black, sitting on the stoop of a townhouse, smoking cigarettes and killing the endless time of the darkest hours of the night; while most municipal services hold no concern for them, the street sweeper — their late-night compatriots — is a kind of mascot: “Streetsweepah!” they shout at it, and toss their cigarettes butts in its path; the driver gives a pull on the air-horn and a blast that wakes the neighbors and sets the teenagers cheering and pumping their fists in the air.
One teenager comes down and walks in the street slowly along the path the machine had cleared, scanning the ground; she stops, bends down, and comes up with a thin piece of rusted spring steel — broken sharp on one end, and worn smooth on the other — between her fingers; She holds it up to her friends: “A tooth! A tooth of the streetsweepah!”
The parking lane on this side of the street is empty, cleared hours early of the vehicles stored there to make way for the passing of the beast in the night; except for the one car that wasn’t cleared, tickets stacked up on its windshield; The machine bears down on it, the driver eases back the throttle not at all, charging right up to the bumper of the parked car before wildly spinning the wheel to take advantage of the very-tight turning radius the streetsweeper has been endowed with; the forces of gravity are not to be trifled with though, and the whole towering sweeper leans over dramatically as it comes around the stationary car; The driver spins the wheel back the other way and glances at the side mirror to see the car’s mirror snapped off by the too-close passage of the metal monster; “Serves the bastard right!” The driver spits out the open side door.
Into the hopper goes the refuse of the street, sucked up by the swirling steel brushes and shot deep into the bowels of the beast: dried and ground up leaf matter, small sticks, crushed paper and plastic cups, blood and grease and oil, bits of rubber and plastic broken off of cars, broken glass from bottles smashed by exuberant drunks in the street earlier in the night, candy wrappers, condom wrappers, sandwich wrappers, cigarette wrappers and cigarette butts, loose change, dog shit, wet newspaper, a pink rubber ball, a flattened digital watch, plastic cutlery, styrofoam containers still half full of take-out Chinese, and dirt — just pounds and pounds of powdery stuff that was just dirt, though certainly no plant no matter how hardy could ever grow in it.
Inexplicably, about halfway down the block, a giant plastic cup of soda stood fully erect and proud in the center of the street, the straw still poking out above, bent at a jaunty angle; the driver saw it, gave the machine a little jolt to one side and aligned the cup dead center between the brushes; ZOOP! sucked up and over and disappeared into it’s belly; the driver looked in the mirror and saw the satisfyingly empty street receding behind.
The beast passes in the night, and the city is made clean in its wake.