behind the scenes

Smokers spend a lot of time near garbage cans.  That much is true.  Mostly, they’re servers from restaurants, these people, and they really don’t seem to mind.

One young girl, she braces against the cold winter, pulling her bulky winter coat close around her.  Her fur-rimmed hood is up, and straw hair streams out into the wind.  Poking out from the bottom of her padded coat are thin yoga pant covered legs on which she teeters back and forth, shifting her slight weight from one foot to the other.  Unable to tolerate another free meal from the restaurant, she ate a muffin for lunch from a coffee shop down the street and can still kind of taste the cranberries.  In between truncated puffs on her cigaret, she picks at her teeth with what she believes is her cleanest finger.  She’s on a scheduled break, out behind a family restaurant, keeping company with a large graffiti scrawled dumpster.

Just down the alley, a young man, college-aged, actually leans with one hand on a large plastic garbage can.  At his feet are stuffed black garbage bags, the extras that wouldn’t fit in the can.  One is torn open, likely by animals, and battered takeaway containers spill out into the alley.  The young man leans on the black plastic bin like it’s an old friend, his short-sleeved shirt revealing the chilled flesh of his arms, stretched taut over gym-worked muscles.  He pretends he doesn’t feel the cold, but goosebumps betray him.  There’s a nearly imperceptible shiver.  He puffs on his cigaret with defiance, his head held high, his black hair slicked back as if to invite the wind.  He’s standing behind a Chinese food restaurant, and not one of his coworkers knows where he is.

Just two of many, these servers don’t even seem to realize they’re part of a greater group.  They could start a club really.  Only a block away, there’s an old guy with a mashed potato face sitting on a crumbling concrete step behind a Greek restaurant, puffing away, a cluster of those dented, silvery garbage cans beside him.  Behind the café right next door, a large middle-aged woman purposefully steps out, unlit cigaret in mouth.  She lights a match in the shelter of a recycling bin.  A teenager behind a pizzeria eight blocks away flicks an extinguished cigaret across the alley and promptly lights another one.  The garbage can he’s leaning on used to belong to the pasta place three buildings down, but things got mixed up in a windstorm last year.