The Angry Czeck

When my garage collapsed in a cacophonous din, my first thought was that Mrs. Angry’s clothes closet had finally buckled beneath the tremendous weight of her dresses and jeans and blouses. Since I fully expected this to happen, I barely batted an eye lash. But is wasn’t long before I discovered that it was my garage that had imploded – and not my wife’s clothes closet.

Our bungalow was constructed in 1920, and the garage was about as old. A simple wooden edifice, the garage stood apart from the house in the backyard. It was easy to imagine a bulbous Packard or an enormous Chrysler parked inside of it.  When we purchased the house, the garage wasn’t even included in appraisal. Termites had not only reduced the structure’s value to zero, the insects had also compromised its stability. “I wouldn’t put anything valuable in there,” warned the house inspector.

I took the inspector’s advice, though to my eye the garage seemed sturdy enough. The old-fashioned wooden siding was painted the same crisp yellow color as the bungalow. There was a small room built into it where one might assemble a bird house or work with with lathe. You entered this room through a door on the outside, like you were walking into a private club house. I saw a future version of myself inside this rustic space, carefully piecing together a grandfather clock.

Now my garage had become a splintery heap of ruined building materials. My once tranquil corner of the backyard had become a strange moonscape of torn roofing, broken studs, jagged edges of glass, and twisted spikes of rebar. If tetanus had a Facebook profile picture, this was it. I stood before the mess thoroughly chagrined.

“I guess we knew this was going to happen,” said Mrs. Angry. Maybe. But I expected to be living in a mansion atop a dormant volcano in Aruba when it did. Now it was my problem. I consulted with my neighbor, who was active with the neighborhood association. I pointed to the heap.

“If it were me, I’d hire some Mexicans to dump it all in the river,” he suggested. That sounded illegal, and I hadn’t the faintest idea where or how to hire Mexicans. I considered renting a truck, shoveling in the rubbish and disposing it legitimately at the city dump, but the City charges by weight. My garage looked pretty heavy, even in a reduced state.

“How can I get the City to pick this up for me?” I wondered.

My neighbor shrugged. “Too bad you can’t put it in your garbage bin,” he said. “Anything you put in that, they have to haul.”

(!)

When I told Mrs. Angry my plan, her face became a raincloud of doubt. “That will take forever.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but we wouldn’t have to pay a cent.”

“Mm-hm.”

That wasn’t entirely true. The eight-pound sledge hammer and the heavy-duty gloves I bought at Lowe’s cost me about $20 total. The sledgehammer had a sweet fiberglass handle. It felt like exercise just holding it. Privately, I was already referring to myself as “Thor.”

Like many urban centers, The City of Memphis issues each household a large, hard-plastic garbage bin. It holds about 40 gallons, features a flip-top lid and it rolls on two wheels. In the past, I’ve squeezed into my bin tree branches, paint cans, big plastic toys, and even a couple animal carcasses. Often, I stuffed it with so much over-dimensional material into the bin that the lid cannot close. It’s all good. The City of Memphis will cheerlessly take it away.

Bit by bit, I smashed the remains of my collapsed garage into city-approved chunks. Because the lumber had been weakened by 20 years of hungry termites, the siding and the studs exploded into satisfying clouds of dust with every strike of my godly hammer. Thor! Each Saturday, I’d spend an hour pounding the rubble into even tinier bits of rubble. Then I’d scoop the pieces into my gloved-clad hands and pour them into the bin. Thor! Each blow from my powerful hammer was met with a thunderclap of enchanted metal meeting lesser, earthly matter – the sorrowful language of a defeated foe! Thor!

Pound for pound, the roofing proved to be the densest material. Rolling a garbage bin full of roofing to the curb taxes even Thor’s considerable might. I learned to only quarter-fill my bin with that shit. Then I’d reduce the lesser materials (wood, glass, concrete) to manageable atoms. This was an operation that was not without its elements of danger. Several times, hazardous shrapnel escaped the face of my hammer and whizzed past my head at supersonic speed! Bah! ‘Tis nothing to the Son of Odin! More troubling were the mutant-cricket-spider things that lived in the darkest muck of my deconstruction site. Avoiding those, I filled my bin every Saturday and pushed it to the curb for a Monday morning pick-up. Thor!

Three months after my project was begun, Thor’s hammer finally came to a rest. All that remained was the concrete foundation. Everything else had been pulverized and dispatched to some landfill. I had triumphed. I had brought great honor to Asgard.

“Well, it’s all gone,” said Mrs. Angry. That’s what happens when you call down the thunder, baby.

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