Remember Garbage Pail Kids?

Remember Garbage Pail Kids?

I do.

In the beginning there were the Cabbage Patch Kids. Cabbage Patch Kids were dolls made to resemble human babies with fat faces and small eyes that stared straight out into the void. The dolls were immensely popular. Parents lined up for miles in an often vain attempt to secure one of these wonderful dolls for their wonderful child. I would not have been caught dead playing with them and I secretly wished for a way to explode the commercial hypocrisy that these dolls represented.

One day in elementary school a group of classmates were huddled and making noise. I did not like to be disturbed when I was coloring and went over to give them a lesson in decorum. And then I saw what they were so excited about. They were looking at cards, kind of like baseball cards but with artwork on the face instead of photographs. The cards were called “Garbage Pail Kids” and the artwork was of a character that looked very similar to a Cabbage Patch Kid, but in a compromising situation.

For example, the first card i saw was of a character that was dressed as Uncle Sam and sticking a finger in his nose. At the bottom was the character’s name: Snooty Sam. Another Garbage Pail Kid was Babbling Brooke, who appeared to be a young lady, speaking on the telephone while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and getting most of the peanut butter and jelly on the receiver with a lot of what I presumed to be saliva.  Various membranes, bodily refuse and physical violence were the prevailing themes to these cards.

Every Garbage Pail Kid had an identical twin. Snooty Sam’s identical twin was U.S. Arnie. Finding the twin to a Garbage Pail Kid was like glimpsing an alternate universe. But this was nothing compared to seeing a Garbage Pail Kid character drawing for the first time. Even now when I search on Google images, I get a trace of that magical feeling when I see those cards.

Like snap bracelets and Beavis and Butthead,  the Garbage Pail Kids eventually found themselves at odds with parents and educators.  I imagine it was because of the cards’ heavy emphasis on scatological humor and flippant attitude towards death. But the cards were not completely bad. You have to remember that there were hundreds of these cards, each with a clever name. To accomplish this, the creators harnessed the lyricism of the English language and in so doing introduced us to words and concepts we would not have encountered while coloring and singing Bingo Was His Name-O. These were some of the names: Glandular Angela. Marty Gras. Adam Bomb. Frigid Bridget (who was a girl encased in an ice cube – such was the cleverness of these cards aimed at pre-adolescents).

The cards were released as a series. When I came under their spell, they were up to the second or third series. I was positively rabid during the fifth, sixth, and seventh series. As soon as each new series came out I could think of little else until I had every card of the series in my possession. At last I could show the world how the Cabbage Patch Kids were nothing more than a gimmick to get children to beg their parents to spend precious dollars or pounds or yen on these fat faced dolls with adoption papers. I was so dedicated to this message that I begged my parents to buy me more Garbage Pail Kids.

But at some point after I became disillusioned and figured it was time to focus on a career.

Years later, I followed up on the Garbage Pail Kids to see what had befallen them. Evidently the Cabbage Patch Kids – or a parent or guardian on their behalf – sued the Garbage Pail Kids for trademark infringement. The deposition testimony makes for interesting reading.

Attorney for plaintiffs: So were you aware of the Cabbage Patch Kids when you began marketing your own cards?
The witness: I do not recall.
Attorney:  Did you do any research as to whether there was something called the Cabbage Patch Kids?
Witness: I do not recall.
Attorney: You do not recall whether or not you researched whether there were Cabbage Patch Kids or not?
Defendants’ attorney: Objection. Asked and answered. Don’t answer that.
Plaintiffs’ attorney:  You can’t direct him not to answer that.
Defendants’ attorney:  I think I just did.
(The witness picks his nose.)
Plaintiffs’ attorney:  The court reporter is taking down everything you do. So you may want to refrain from doing that. Now I just have a few more questions – wait, are you going to throw up – no…not the exhibits!
(Whereupon a short recess was taken.)

The parties reached an out of court settlement which was sealed to the public. I noticed, however, that the appearance of the “new” Garbage Pail Kids was markedly different from the ones I knew and loved and negligently let my mother throw away. The eyes are much bigger, and so the characters have lost the fat face look of the Cabbage Patch Kids. They are in the same compromising situations – expectoration, regurgitation, excretion, death – but when it was just ordinary kids in those situations instead of kids that bore a startling resemblance to the Cabbage Patch Kids the magic was no longer there for me. Lawyers ruin everything.

Remember When Garbage Was Garbage?

Remember when garbage was garbage, and you could throw trash away without sorting it into categories?

I do.

A routine has developed in my kitchen. I finish something contained in something else – a carton of orange juice, a can of soda, a glassine bag of heroin – and I go to throw out the container. I depress the garbage can pedal with my foot, the lid opens, and my hand with the trash is suspended in the air, about to drop its payload.  Then my wife magically appears and says:

“Wait. Recycle.”

I take my foot off the pedal and snort. I enter the frigid garage and toss the carton/can/glassine bag on top of a pile of other containers that I had initially tried to throw in the regular garbage before I was caught.

In the nether-reaches of my mind I recall a simpler time.  A slower time, a time when people had more time for their families.  A time when people polluted more. A time when anything you did not want hanging around any longer could just be thrown away along with the chicken bones and report cards that alleged you were “not working up to potential.”

I credit the environmental movement with helping to save the planet, and making me at least consider not letting the faucet run while I’m brushing my teeth. But when I was a kid we just threw things away. Or we put them in boxes in the basement that my mother would periodically attempt to launch into space. We did not sort garbage. I did not sort my laundry, board games or feelings. Why would I sort my garbage?

And then, one day, a present was left on our doorstep: a beige plastic garbage can bearing a green “Recycle” emblem, illustrating that saving the planet began by arranging three arrows in the shape of a triangle. The new can was accompanied by a notice from the town, proclaiming that all paper garbage, and only paper garbage, had to be put in this special can. Paper garbage found with the regular garbage would be punished by summary execution and a $200 fine.

Separating was complicated.  For “paper” included any paper product, even if it had once held something that was not paper, and had left its non-paper product smeared all over the inside of the otherwise recyclable container. So saving the planet became all about scraping the inside of take-home containers from restaurants.

The plastic can for paper garbage was only the beginning. It was followed by a series of blue bins. One for glass. One for aluminum. One for those tiny plastic round tables that go inside of pizza boxes. All garbage had to be separated into these containers. We became a recycling family.  Kind of like the Partridge Family, except instead of riding around in a bus and singing songs, we stayed at home and classified our trash.

“Dad,” I said on a garbage night, holding up the packaging to an action figure, “is this paper or plastic?”  He got up from his pile of aluminum cans, rubbed his eyes, scratched his head and consulted the Talmud, which was somewhat helpful, but only by analogy. We decided that I had to give up toys. I had more important things to do. Like sorting garbage.

The different classes of garbage got picked up on different days. Glass the third Tuesday of the month. Aluminum every other Wednesday and alternate Fridays. It was like a class schedule. But the greatest challenge was that paper garbage got picked up only once every two weeks. Approximately 97% of my family’s garbage was paper. During those two weeks we drowned in newspapers and magazines and flyers for missing cats.

One episode I will never forget. It was a cold, Thursday morning, and we were all snug in our beds, dreaming of sugar-plum fairies. Suddenly my father was shaking me awake in an obvious panic. I wondered if the house was on fire. “Mark, get up!” he said. “Today’s paper garbage day, and we forgot to put out the paper garbage!”

I wished the house had been on fire. Because then I could have stopped, dropped and rolled myself out the front door and gotten some breakfast or something. But putting out the paper garbage on such short notice – I could already hear the truck – was the suburban equivalent of the four-minute mile.

We scurried around the house in a frenzy, grabbing Pennysavers, junk mail, and cereal boxes each containing a teaspoon of cereal. We were like animals, acting by instinct. Getting that paper garbage out before the truck arrived was the key to our survival.

The truck was getting closer. We were running relays in our pyjamas, stuffing the paper garbage into the overflowing can. At one point I slipped and dropped a stack of unopened credit card offers behind a desk.  I started to reach for them but my father put his hand on my shoulder. “Forget it, boy. We don’t have time.”

The truck was here. It was or now or in two weeks. The sanitation workers started affixing the crane to our can. My mental movie runs in slow motion. I see my father sprinting, his bathrobe flapping in the wind, our coupons flying. “Nooooooooo,” he screams as he dives for the curb, landing on our now empty can in the dust left by the departing truck.

Not that we minded any of this. We were, and are, proud to be stepping up to our responsibility to leave the planet in better shape than we found it.  Or at least try to leave it in better shape than we found it. Or, if nothing else, think about trying to leave it in better shape than we found it. Because without a clean environment, we have nothing. And all we have to do is scrape the inside of a take-home container.