Journal of a Dumpster-Diving Sufi

By Michael Muhammad Knight

First stop: the University of Buffalo’s Amherst campus, with hopes that the school store threw away some unsold textbooks.

“Is this legal?” I asked.

“Man,” said Tundy, “it’s Buffalo—they have more going on than this.” On FX a few weeks ago they showed the Buffalo episode of Cops, and I couldn’t argue.

Of course, that all changes when you venture onto a college campus, which is like smuggling yourself into a country under tight military rule. UB has its own police force with little more to do than write parking tickets and smell around dorm hallways for weed. We found some dumpsters that might have belonged to the bookstore and Tundy kept a look-out while I dove.

“Just old newspapers,” I told him. “Maybe Borders’ll have something.”

Borders Books by the Galleria Mall had a bin full of magazines which we dug through to find a secret layer of books underneath. It was all trash paperbacks until I found an Oliver Twist, the cover torn off as per store policy.

Borders stood right next to a Krispy Kreme but Tundy said that they poured bleach on left-over doughnuts before tossing them. “To keep homeless people from going through their dumpsters,” he said.

We then went across the street to Media Play, which had a high dumpster that required some climbing to enter. I stood outside while Tundy dove. Every now and then he’d push up the lid to throw something my way—some Cat in the Hat dolls, a couple of book-bags with Tool patches, a pair of Good Charlotte wallets, a soft-porn mag and a computer game based on a Tom Clancy novel. We threw it all in the car and peeled out, only to learn upon closer examination that the Tool bookbags were torn and cut so that you couldn’t zip them, the Cat in the Hat dolls had long scissor-slits up their backs and Tundy’s Good Charlotte wallet had been cut so that he couldn’t attach the chain to his belt-loop (though mine had been left intact).

“I don’t see how they could do this,” I said, tossing a book-bag to the I-90.

“Just goes to show,” Tundy replied, “that all this shit costs like ninety-nine cents to make.”

It wasn’t a complete failure. The Tom Clancy computer game was still in unopened mint condition and they hadn’t crossed out the nipples in our soft porn.

My new plastic wallet had a price-tag of $12.99. It wasn’t a bad wallet, for being free. All I’d have to do was find a decent band’s sticker to put over the Good Charlotte logo.

From there we went to Talking Leaves on Elmwood, which had a long row of blue plastic garbage cans filled mostly with refuse from the coffee-part. We parked the car at Wilson Farms and walked behind Blockbuster while Blockbuster girls gave us dirty looks through the window, lifted their dumpster lid and found a big weird face staring back at us. “That is some creepy shit,” Tundy noted. It was a poster but everything except the face had been buried in garbage bags. We just stood there for a dumb minute trying to figure out who it was. After about a minute Tundy blurted “CUBA GOODING, JR!” like he’d win a prize for getting the answer first. He hopped up and climbed onto the dumpster, at which point I slammed the lid down and sent him crashing inside. When he climbed back out we had a new Radio poster.

As Tundy played his Metallica CD on the ride home I tried coming up with a Sufi virtue to dumpster-diving. Rumi said something about being the dirt on the Prophet’s road, right? Did he? For all I know he did. Could we be the stench in the Prophet’s dumpster? Tundy got on my ass about always trying to make things big and mystical; we were only garbage-pickers, he said, and we might as well have fun with it now because at least we’re young.

Then he added that we should come back on Wednesday, “because Thursday is Garbage Night and they’ll have more stuff out.” And with that we gave up. What now? Tundy asked if I was up for crossing the border but since moving to Buffalo, I had never gone to Canada for anything but the sex-industry and I was over it. Hadn’t seen the inside of a strip club in at least six months, and it’s been well over a year since the last massage parlor. Sooner or later you realize that it’s a waste of money, or maybe you outgrow it, or you went because something was inside you that isn’t there anymore. Whatever. It stops being fun.

*

My last time at a massage parlor, Savannah asked if I played any sports and I knew she was only looking for a way to talk about her kid—these girls always mentioned their kids because it’d make you tip more, or maybe just so you’d show them some manners. I said I liked to grapple and in high school I played lacrosse. She said her son played T-ball and she’d be coaching at his game the next day.

When I was a little kid playing T-ball I’d have my batting helmet just barely on so that when I ran, it’d fly off behind me. At six or seven I thought it looked more dramatic that way, I thought it’d genuinely thrill all these people that were only there to see their own kids. At any rate it’d thrill my mom, who used to coach.

Odd to have that memory sparked by a naked masseuse.

*

Back to Buffalo and the postscript on a failed night of dumpster-diving: I sat in bed with Oliver Twist trying to figure out why Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala had brought it my way—if the world is full of signs and Allah’s Face is everywhere you look, then maybe there was something here. All I knew of Dickens was that they paid him by the word and he had some nice things to say about Imam Husayn. Ashura was coming up; soon I’d be slapping my back with a bundle of chains.

First I turned the title page to find an interesting note: “If you have purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as ‘unsold and destroyed’ to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this ‘stripped book.’” So there’s that. I flipped through the pages. On page 460 I found something: “The boom of every iron bell came laden with the one, deep, hollow sound—Death.”

I reached for a yellow highlighter and read on. “The day passed off. Day? There was no day; it was gone as soon as come—and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short; long in its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours.” If you’re in the right frame of mind, and you’re by yourself in a little room after goofing off in dumpsters all night, this kind of thing can hit hard. The fear came like a bowling ball to the stomach.

I turned off the light but kept my eyes open, the darkness between myself and the ceiling becoming a stage for random ayats to jump across—by the Time, man is in loss—by the even and odd, see how your Lord dealt with the ‘Ad—by the Morning Hours and by the Night when it is still—say I seek refuge with the Rabb of the Dawn, from the mischief of created things—

My mental Quran archive wasn’t so good anymore but I remembered some more lines and heavy pictures—mountains like carded wool, oceans bursting forth, the contents of graves poured out, mankind scattered like moths, or something.

I remembered a debate between a Muslim scholar and an atheist, and the atheist asked whether Allah would judge disbelievers who had never been exposed to Islam—say, an Eskimo way up in the Arctic. The Muslim replied that if the Eskimo looked up at the stars just once and felt a wonderful kind of fear, if for only a moment, perhaps that’d be Islam enough. Insha’Allah.

From the stench of the Prophet’s dumpster, Hazrat Dickens had me scared. It’s not so bad, sometimes, to just lie in the dark and be afraid—even if you don’t know what you’re afraid of.

The moment escaped as I closed my eyes and found Tundy’s dumb Metallica creeping back in my head. Musha ring dum a doo dum a da.

Michael Muhammad Knight is author of The Taqwacores, a novel available through the legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles.