The Garbage People Have Arrived

Newport, RI, once home to the summering elite from the mid-nineteenth century to about the 1930s, has again been found by the Garbage People. Don't get me wrong - I don't have any room in my heart for mansion dwellers or real estate magnates, but at least when the move around in their weekend-khakis and tucked seersuckers, they do so with some semblance of grace and dignity. But not the Garbage People.

The Garbage People move from bar to bar in a jerky fashion like the dice in a Pop-O-Matic bubble. If seen from above they would come off as frenzied ants under a cruel child's magnifying glass, scrambling away from something unseen, probably their past, but who knows. These are Jimmy Buffett's people whether they like it or not, lost in the world and invasive, like some choking vine. But here they are ignorant of the aloha shirts and kitschy pseudo island music that allows the general population - good, wholesome folks such as myself - to identify them at a distance. No, for the Garbage People, the music is a more personal decision. Perhaps it's the Eagles, Hall and Oats, or maybe the Rolling Stones.

These are not people of conventional trappings. They might own a boat. They may, at times, drive around in a forest green Jeep Wrangler with deployed airbags draping lifelessly into their laps as they avoid pedestrians. Perhaps they buzz around on a rattly old scooter (for legal or other reasons). But when the sun goes down and they head out on the town, they will get stinking drunk on a mix of cleverly named cocktails, and proceed to crash about in restaurant bathrooms and dance haphazardly in the delightful breeze of the electric hand-dryer, squealing in delight. The are, after all, Garbage People. They have to ruin everything.

A dramatization of a Garbage Person in real life, as portrayed
here by this particularly haggard looking lost doll.