If you watched WWE Monday Night Raw all the way to the end this week, you saw Braun Strowman emerge from a bright red Baltimore garbage truck to attack the Miz and the Miztourage. This was a follow-up, of course, to TLC, where the Miz, the Bar, and Kane put Braun into a completely different-looking white garbage truck in Minneapolis and seemingly “compacted” him.
Despite the compacting aspect, he wasn’t any smaller when he got out (although putting a fake caveman beard and mini-Braun gear on The Brian Kendrick would’ve been a pretty good gag). This raised the question of whether he was actually pushed into some kind of cosmic trash wormhole that connects the waste system of Minneapolis with that of Baltimore.
Or maybe Braun himself has a mutant power enabling him to teleport by jumping into a pile of garbage and emerging from any other pile of garbage in the world. Let’s be honest, that seems like more of a Randy Orton superpower (and it would explain how the Viper got back to the arena from Bray Wyatt’s House of Horrors last spring), but mutant abilities are often strange and surprising. I mean, nobody ever talks about Dean Ambrose’s trash-related superpowers, but we all know he has them.
However, it was a Reddit user named ChrisHighwind who noticed that the red Baltimore garbage truck looked familiar. It turns out to be because that truck is identical to the one Sting threw Seth Rollins’ statue into way back in 2015.
Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve watched HBO’s The Wire at least four times, which means I know a lot of true facts about the city of Baltimore and how corrupt it is. So I just assumed you could call up the city’s waste management department and say “Hi, I’m a derivative ’90s vigilante and I need a truck in which to crush this statue I illegally stole from some bad people,” or “I’m a gentleman of size, and I’m looking for a large truck to hide in while I wait to kill some people. Ideally one that will remind them of the truck they used to try to kill me,” and the city officials would just ask for a cash payment and that would be that.
But it turns out those trucks are owned by a private company that’s based not in Baltimore (although they have offices there), but Kearneysville, West Virginia. Kearneysville’s closer to Baltimore than you might think, because it’s in the Eastern Panhandle, that little part of West Virginia that’s smushed between Maryland and Virginia like Nikki Cross between two Authors of Pain at Takeover Brooklyn III.
Apple Valley Waste advertises themselves as “Local service with old fashioned values,” and let’s face it, an enormous man from North Carolina emerging from a garbage truck to beat up a cowardly rich heel champion in a suit is the very definition of “old fashioned values” in professional wrestling. The only thing that’s more ’80s NWA than that… is Sting. So it’s really no surprise that Apple Valley was more than happy to help out in both situations. Of course, none of this explains how Braun Strowman escaped from that original garbage truck in Minneapolis. But personally, I suspect local politician Jesse Ventura was involved somehow.
