Garbage Person

My lifelong obsession with trash

pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste. the transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man.

—Patti Smith, “25th Floor”

I kind of like throwing things in the garbage.

My lifelong love affair with the garbage began as a toddler, when my mother would let me watch the garbage men toss our bags into the gaping maw of the garbage truck, and chomp them up. First, I watched from the window; then outside from our stoop. Step by step, I approached closer each morning, until I was standing on the curb and smiling up at the big men.

So close, in fact, that one of them picked me up like a sack of garbage and jokingly put me in the truck!

Or so I’m told. My mother likes telling this story; I wish I remembered it. She says my squinty eyes went wide.

I was too young to go for ride-a-longs, but I was good friends with the crew after that. And I still like to watch them work.

from “Men at Work,” starring Keith David, Emilio Estevez, and Charlie Sheen as trash men. A funny flick from 1990.

The huge blade in the back of the truck that crushes the garbage is called the claw. Most garbage trucks are the Mack Granite model, a dump truck with a custom rear container. I learned this for the section of Bad Boy Boogie where Jay Desmarteaux works on the back of a garbage truck after prison. Which is a cherry job for someone with a record; he gets it from a mob captain. In places like New York City, these jobs are now not as lucrative, as unions lose hold and corporations demand robotic timelines for picking up the trash, which is not composed of widgets. As you can see from any curb on garbage day, it can consist of anything from a discarded mattress to a pile of junk. Towns try to make you drop that at the dump, but most people depend on their trash hauler.

And we sure do depend on them. They came late last week, and I was concerned, because after having guests over, our trash can was full. I didn’t want to have to keep rotting garbage for another week. But they came that afternoon, after navigating the labyrinthine warrens of our ‘70s-era suburban development.

And I breathed easy.

For my family, it was always “the garbage,” not the trash; perhaps because being working-class Italian-Americans, we were only a paper-thin slice of prosciutto away from being called white trash, having only become white in the ‘60s.¹

And I like throwing things in the garbage. I’m a good consumer. I consume and dispose. I dutifully sort my recycling, and keep my batteries for disposal at the town facility. Unless something is beyond repair, I put it aside to bring to Goodwill for donation, even if most of our fast-fashion clothes end up in incinerators and landfills overseas.²

It broke my heart when I learned that most of our recycling in the United States is in vain, as it is badly sorted, dirty, or mixed with plastic bags and other unrecyclable stuff. And because we are so lazy, and so beholden to corporations, that we mostly use “single stream” recycling, which means we dump it all together, contaminating the washed stuff, and depending on hand-sorting at the other end.

We use so much more packaging now, our garbage has multiplied. And the packaging industry has driven the garbage narrative since the very beginning. I bet you know that the worst kind of person is a litterbug, right? I bet you didn’t know that some Don Draper type invented that term, to absolve the packaging industry of responsibility for their trash.

“Give a Hoot! Don’t Pollute!”

Of course, people don’t pollute. Corporations do. People litter, and dump their trash. For example, I spent a few hours this Saturday with the MtnRoo Tri-State Subaru group, cleaning up dumped trash from the Turkey Swamp wildlife area in the Pine Barrens. We lugged out 2500 pounds of construction material and tires, and several bags of small trash, bottles, and cans from bonfires. But most of the junk was automobile tires, because instead of charging tire manufacturers to clean up the mess, we impose a disposal fee on the buyer of the tires, which means someone saved $160 by dumping all these tires in the woods instead of bringing them to a reclamation facility. (This is one load of several.)

Ain’t that a nice Subaru Baja? I’ve always wanted a Brat, personally.

Capitalism requires mass consumption to survive, and we can’t keep up with the waste. We just ship it overseas, thanks to artificially low shipping rates, because cargo ships aren’t regulated for the immense diesel pollution they emit, and oil is kept cheap. And while we’re all going electric, one container ship emits the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars. All so you can get a 69-cent bag of pasta made in Italy from American wheat.

Speaking of which, I would so enjoy folding the cardboard box the pasta came in, peeling off the cellophane, and putting one in the garbage and the other in the recycling bin. Not as much as I would enjoy eating the leftover pasta the next day, reheated in a pan with a little olive oil, but old habits die hard. I’d feel like I was a hard-working cog in the machine, consuming and properly organizing my waste, blissfully unaware that it was all going to the same landfill or trash barge to be someone else’s problem.

How else could you have hot dog eating contests? Can you imaging the dumps Joey Chestnuts takes after a contest? Taking a crap is a capitalist sacrament. You’re doing your duty. I call this subsect of the capitalist religion “Crapitalism.” Please put your trash in the collection plate. “25th Floor” by Patti Smith is our hymn. Sing it:

(We should have another hymn by The Trashmen, I guess.) I saw Patti Smith sing at a church in Montclair in 2018, and while she didn’t sing “25th Floor,” she did sing “Because the Night,” and hearing her sing in a church is as close as I get to a religious experience. Enjoy my low-quality video of it below; the sound is much better than the video.

1. Imagine my surprise, when watching 12 Angry Men, that the “lost cause” teenager they were assuming had done something worthy of a death sentence if he hadn’t murdered anyone, was an Italian-American kid!

2. Mea culpa. For ten years, I worked for a fast fashion retailer, adding to this mess.