Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash Read Online Free PDF Page B

Murphy—twenty-year veterans of the Department of Sanitation, each approaching the age of fifty—had, as they always did.
    I’d met the team at 6:00 a.m. roll call at the local DSNY (for Department of Sanitation, New York) garage, a low brick structure on the farthest fringe of the neighborhood. It was still dark when I locked up my bike and walked hesitantly into a large, dimly lit room filled with garbage trucks: eleven for household refuse and nine for recycling. I made my way down a cinder-block corridor lined with smoking san men and into the fluorescent-lit office. Like many a high school principal’s redoubt, it had a window overlooking a hallway filled with loiterers and humming with paranoia. There were even lockers and a lunchroom down the way.
    Waiting for Jerry Terlizzi, the district supervisor, to appear, I took a look around. Every stick of furniture—desks, cabinets, footlockers—appeared to have been plucked from the street and coated with the same brown paint. The walls were crammed with yellowed memoranda and notices but held not a scrap of decoration. A dark roan dog and a dull black cat padded around the building, former strays, but even their names seemed impermanent.
    “The dog, the dog. Oh yeah, that’s Lupo,” said an officer uncertainly when I inquired. And the cat?
    “Her name is Meow,” answered a clerk.
    “No, it’s Mami,” corrected another.
    While I waited for Terlizzi to get off the phone and call roll, I listened to the men.
    “It’s gonna rain the next three days.”
    “Oh, man, that garbage is gonna be heavy. You’re gonna lose five pounds on Friday alone.”
    “I hate rain. That’s a drag.”
    “Yeah, well, you’re a garbageman.”
    Behind me, someone said in a mincing tone, “Can I fill out a job application?” That was for my benefit, so I chuckled along with everyone else. Then two men came in from the street, jostling and punching each other’s shoulders. One said, “Somebody just stole the wheels off a bike out there!” I sprang for the door, and the guys laughed.
    “Just kidding, but I wouldn’t leave it there. Some bum from the park is gonna steal it. Bring it in here.” He said it “he-yeh.” I went out to get my bicycle and when I got back briefly pretended someone had stolen the seat, prompting instant outrage, though it was actually in my backpack.
    I looked at the worker cards stuck into a bar on the Plexiglas window. The rectangles of cardboard were soft with handling, inscribed mostly with Italian and Irish names, and coupled with trucks identified with an alphanumeric. As senior men, Sullivan and Murphy had exclusive day use of truck CN191 (another team would use it at night). The junior men took whatever they were handed. By now, about thirty men were standing around smoking and chatting in their dark green DSNY sweatshirts. The garage had one female sanitation worker, but she wasn’t in today. When I’d meet her later, she’d invite me to use her private bathroom, which was decorated with cute animal posters.
    New to this scene, I was struck by the way the men spoke to one another. They were loud and harsh, in one another’s faces. They seemed quick to anger. Maybe there was too much testosterone in a small place. Or maybe just too many men who didn’t like to have a boss breathing down their neck, a factor that had lured some of them to the job. Inside, the complaints never ceased. So-and-so was an idiot. The night crew never did its job right. The boss could go to hell. I’d be crushed by such contempt, but no one here seemed to mind.
    Terlizzi was parked behind a small desk. He was tall and thin, with wavy silver hair, high cheekbones, and a bemused manner. “I’m missing a truck,” he told a clerk, irritated. Its collection ticket, which would state how much weight the truck had tipped at the transfer station, hadn’t shown up in his paper or electronic records. The clerk opened a program on the ancient computer and scrolled down.