Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte Read Free Book Online Page A

season.
    The way residents treated their garbage said a lot about them, in the san man’s world. “In the neighborhood where I live, the garbage is boxed and gift-wrapped,” Joey Calvacca had bragged to me. For the last seventeen years, Calvacca had been working in the Brooklyn North 5, in East New York. Though he’d long ago moved from the city to Long Island’s North Shore, he still spoke in the dialect of
The Sopranos,
eliding all
r
’s. “But where I work, it’s a mess. People don’t use bags. There’s maggots, rats, roaches. The smell will make you sick. I’ve gotten stuck with needles.”
    “And what about your garbage?” I asked.
    “It’s normal garbage,” he said, shrugging.
    Good
and
bad
referred to garbage content as well as garbage style. Good garbage, the san men taught me, was garbage worth saving. They called it mongo. The sanitation garage was brimming with it: a microwave, a television, chairs, tables. “Some neighborhoods in Queens, the lawn mower is out of gas and they throw it out,” Calvacca said. “They throw out a VCR when it needs a two-dollar belt. We throw it in the side of the truck to bring home.” Silk blouses and designer skirts billowed from the trash of upscale buildings. Tools and toys, books and bric-a-brac were there for the taking. Officially, mongo didn’t exist. Sanitation workers weren’t allowed to keep stuff they found on the curb. But everyone did, and no one complained.
    The truck was about two-thirds full now. Inside, brown gunk dripped off the packing blade into a nest of ratty clothing. Rounding the corner onto Seventh Avenue, Sullivan and Murphy pulled over to gulp from water bottles and wipe the sweat from their foreheads. I felt chilly in a rain jacket over a fleece pullover. Their cotton shirts had bibs of sweat. On 95-degree days, Sullivan said, he went through three T-shirts in one shift. In the rain, he didn’t even bother with a slicker. “You’re soaked from the inside anyway, water running down your neck,” said Sullivan. “It’s awful.”
    I asked how close they were to finishing today. “We’ll do it all in three and a half hours,” said Sullivan. “That’s without a coffee break or lunch.”
    “Why do you work so fast?”
    “To get it over with,” said Murphy.
    That didn’t exactly explain the panic to finish early. San men couldn’t go home when their job was done; they had to stay in the garage until their shift ended, at 2:00 p.m. The men would pass the time eating lunch, watching videos or TV in the break room, playing cards, and working out on exercise equipment rescued from the jaws of the hopper. “We used to have a pool table, but it wore out,” Sullivan said. Now the men napped on white leather couches, relics from another era. (From garage to garage, break room decor varied enormously, constrained by the availability of local mongo, the super’s aesthetic sensibilities, and the culture of the particular garage. Now and then, a call from “downtown” resulted in a clean sweep, and all the bad paintings, ceramic kitsch, macramé wall hangings, tin signs, plastic flowers, hula hoops, and velvet Elvises went into the garbageman’s garbage pail.)
    “The time passes quickly,” said Sullivan. “You’re coming down from a big high afterward. It’s like an athletic event.” He screwed the cap onto his water bottle. “I figure it’s the length of a marathon, every day. You just try to get through it. You can’t think about it. It’s a state of mind.”
    In 1993, Italo Calvino published an essay about his daily transfer of trash from the kitchen’s small container to a larger container, called a
poubelle,
on the street. “[T]hrough this daily gesture I confirm the need to separate myself from a part of what was once mine, the slough or chrysalis or squeezed lemon of living, so that its substance might remain, so that tomorrow I can identify completely (without residues) with what I am and have.” He equated his