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The Mad Mouths

(Portland Oregon)

In high school, when that final bell rang, the majority of the students at my high school would rush off to practice for whichever sport they were doing, go home, or more likely, wander off in a group to go hang out. Such was not the case for myself and two other members of the Madison Mad Mouth Speech and Debate Team, we spend a good bit of our after school time in a closet that affectionately became known as, the dungeon.

The dungeon was on the second floor of my high-school in a hallway that was all but abandoned, except for the occasional couple who had snuck off to make out, and those of us who called the dungeon home. It was a tiny closed with a sloping roof due to the auditorium, and one had to stoop to get into the farthest reaches of the room, but it was what our recycling team called home.

In order to raise money for our speech team (which is one of the largest and most successful in the state) our coach had initiated a can and bottle recycling program that worked like this: A gray tub, bearing the screaming face logo of our team, was numbered and placed in each class room in the school. Theoretically the eight hundred and sixty students at the school would then place their cans and bottles into these receptacles, the Recycling Captains would go get them, sort them, bag them, and load them into volunteer vehicles so that they could be redeemed, and we could compete.


In practice, however, the recycling program worked a little differently. Every tub we collected was a Pandora's Box, filled with vile, disgusting, and unmentionable horrors. Kids put used tissues, milk cartons, those little plastic orange juice cartons you get from school, and whatever else would fit in the can sized hole in the lid. Not only that, but the actual cans and bottles were never actually empty. Thus, the Yucky Bucket was born.

The Yucky Bucket was just that. A five-gallon bucket with the word YUCKY spray painted across it that was a collection vessel for all of the stale, rotten, and foul-smelling liquids that we discovered. After emptying the bottles, and sorting them, we would then wash out the bins, return them to the classroom, and take care of our bags. But that still left the Yucky Bucket, which, when it was not accidentally dumped on my feet (which only happened once) was disposed of in a urinal.

But, it was this disgusting recycling program that I helped run my junior and senior year that helped myself, and the seventy other kids on my speech team compete at the state level (and take second place overall in the state competition) so, it was a worthwhile effort. Even if I did see things that I will never be able to purge from my brain.