Feature

Secrets of the San Man

Sullivan talked about the seasonal changes in garbage. “In the springtime, there’s a lot of yard waste and a lot of construction, because of tax returns. You get more household junk in the spring. You can always tell when an old-timer dies. There’s 30 bags and a lot of clothes.” Sullivan continued. “And you can always tell when there’s a sale on washing machines, usually around Columbus Day.”

“People eat different up top,” Murphy said, meaning the blocks closer to Prospect Park. “A lot of organic people, fresh stuff. They’re more health-conscious.” 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,” Joey Calvacca, a san man from the Brooklyn North 5 Garage, said to me. “They throw out a VCR when it needs a $2 belt. We throw it in the side of the truck to bring home.” Officially, mongo didn’t exist. San men weren’t allowed to keep stuff they’d found. But everyone did, and no one complained.

The truck was about two-thirds full now. Rounding the corner onto Seventh Avenue, Sullivan and Murphy pulled over to gulp from water bottles and wipe the sweat from their foreheads. Their cotton shirts had bibs of sweat. On 95-degree days, Sullivan said, he went through three dry T-shirts in one shift. 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 can’t go home when their job is done; they have to stay in the garage until their shift ends, at 2 P.M. The men pass the time eating lunch, watching videos or TV in the break room, playing cards, napping on white leather couches, and working out on exercise equipment rescued from the jaws of the hopper. Break-room décor varies 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” results in a clean sweep, and all the bad paintings, ceramic kitsch, macramé wall hangings, tin signs, plastic flowers, hula hoops, and velvet Elvises go 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.”

To be a san man is to be a denizen of a hidden world. “People think there’s a garbage fairy,” one worker told me. “You put your trash on the curb, and then pffft, it’s gone. They don’t have a clue.”

“We get no respect,” said Calvacca. “Only when it snows and we keep the city open. We are just like garbage—we’re maggots.”

I asked Calvacca if he thought we had a garbage problem. “We’ve got room for it now,” he said, but someday we were going to run out. The world would someday be overrun with its own waste. And what was Calvacca’s solution? “We should blast it into outer space on rockets,” he said. It was an option put forth by a surprising number of san men.

When their truck was full, at around 10:30, Murphy dropped Sullivan at the garage, then rumbled over the Gowanus Canal and pulled into the IESI transfer station, a white-painted brick building at the corner of Bush and Court Streets, in Red Hook. The drill here was simple: Weigh the truck, then pull around to the tipping floor, back in, and pull the lever to dump. If they had loaded their truck properly, the ejected garbage would extend six to eight feet in a super-compressed bolus before dropping to the ground.

The quality of the dump was known as “the turd factor.” According to one designer of packer trucks, “The driver can learn from experience by observing the turd factor and know just how much trash he can put in the truck per trip. If he gets a good turd on every trip to the landfill, that’s a good day.” Judging by the conformation of today’s load, Murphy and Sullivan had done well. The morning’s labors—20,000 pounds collected in less than four hours—now lay in a heap, indistinguishable from the heaps dumped before or after. My trash was there, too, somewhere. From the earth all of this stuff had come, and to the earth it would return. Some of it, for sure, would be a problem for the environment, but not for Sullivan and Murphy. Without a backward glance, Murphy put the truck in forward gear.

Adapted from Garbage Land, by Elizabeth Royte, to be published in July by Little, Brown.