Simon Paré-Poupart begins Trash!, a memoir of his years as a garbage collector, by explaining why he started swearing again. He had promised religious friends he would stop taking the Lord’s name in vain. Then one day, he jumped off the truck and found eighteen overloaded contractor bags wedged between two badly parked cars. They were stuffed with construction debris and nails. If he hurt himself carrying them, that would be his fault. If he scratched either car squeezing back through the gap, that would also be his fault. The homeowner, meanwhile, watched from behind the curtains.
“It’s then,” Paré-Poupart writes, “at that very moment, that the urge overcomes you and you let out a cry of rage: ‘Jesus f — ing Christ!!! . . . I mean, swearing is all you’ve got left.”
The homeowner quickly becomes “the good middle-class” aquarium owner, while the garbageman is reduced to “the piddly creature that keeps the tank glass clean.” Within a few more pages, Paré-Poupart has invoked Sisyphus, Georges Bataille, Victor Hugo, and René Descartes; described garbage juice as “the holy water of your baptism”; and explained that “it’s the swearing that makes you a real garbageman.”