Outside in the park, puddles of rainwater reflect the orange glow of the streetlights. Bernard pulls the hood of his sweatshirt over his baseball cap and marches forward, dragging his rattling shopping cart with a leather belt over the bumpy park roads. He is a fast walker with his long legs, and I have trouble keeping up.
It is 5:30 now and the streets are deserted. There is still no traffic on the West Side High Way. The only sign of life is a dark man with fogged glasses, a shiny black leather cap on his head. He is rummaging through some garbage. That’s Pier John, Bernard tells me, a successful two-for-oner who rose from living on the street to an apartment dweller. He used to work on the piers of Lower Manhattan, hence his nickname. Although Pier John currently only works as an intermediary, he hasn’t forgotten his roots and can’t resist going through the garbage every morning.
I want to ask him some questions about the two-for-one business, but he wants one hundred dollars before he starts to talk. Bernard laughs. Pier John makes thousands of dollars a month, and has better things to do than giving interviews to reporters for free. He is past that stage.
Bernard stops by the first pile of garbage bags he sees. “One man’s garbage is another man’s fortune,” he says dramatically. Like a real connoisseur, he looks at the bags, feels them, and lifts one up. “Nothing. Someone was here before us.” Bernard continues at his brisk pace, we still have twenty blocks to go. His shopping cart rolls smoothly in a straight track behind him. He gives it a periodical tune up, and even greases the wheels. That’s why he gets so mad at Burk, another tunnel dweller, when he uses the cart without asking and loads it full of heavy, empty bottles. “It fucks up the balance of the wheels.”
At six o’clock on the dot we arrive at Bernard’s block, on 84th Street. We are on time; the garbage has not been put out yet. We lean against a building and wait for the supers who will appear at any moment. This is a posh street with a few apartment buildings, and some nice townhouses and brownstones in-between. A lot of Volvos and big shiny jeeps line the street. Bernard peers through a building gate at the giant heap of garbage bags, and makes an estimate of the expected catch. “It looks good today,” he mumbles. The garbage bags come in two colors: black for ordinary waste, and blue for recyclables such as plastic, glass, and metal.
Paper and cardboard need to be tied up separately. We are sitting on a pile of Yellow Pages while Bernard tells me about supers. Some of them crush empties to save space. Super markets, however, do not accept crushed cans. “Ridiculous of course, because they will be crushed anyway during recycling. But some supers are so evil. They get a sadistic pleasure in making our life difficult.”
Behind us, a rusty lock screeches and the gate is opened by an old man with a fur coat. Leather flaps cover his ears and he has a sorrowful expression surrounding his toothless mouth. It is Harvey, one of the supers. Bernard had already told me that most of the supers have a thankless job that hardly offers them a decent living. Harvey shows it. As he stumbles around slightly bent, it looks as though he bears all the misery of this planet on his shoulders. Harvey looks like a poor bum; in comparison Bernard seems a healthy, energetic young man. We start to work. The heaviest job is putting the paper out on the sidewalk.
It is a huge pile, about three cubic meters, everything neatly piled and tied up in packets of about 45 pounds. With the three of us working together, it is done in ten minutes.
Harvey pants and breathes heavily, my arms hurt and I have red imprints on my hands, but Bernard walks around like it is an easy and fun job. He even holds the packets with arms outstretched—a good exercise he explains. Then we proceed with all the garbage bags. Although not so heavy, they are hard to handle because they are bulky and slippery with the rain.
In the meantime, Harvey has understood that, with his old age, he is only slowing us down. It makes more sense if he just tells us what to put where. Soon, the thirty huge garbage bags are out on the street and we can open the blue ones to collect the empties.
It is easy work. Because there is no household waste, the contents are not dirty. It just smells a bit of stale beer with a whiff of old Coca Cola. The blue bags are slowly getting smaller, while our WeCan bags grow every minute. The big one-gallon Coke bottles add up especially fast. It is too bad they also bring in only 5 cents, since they take up so much space. Carefully Bernard ties up the garbage bags after inspection. It is a matter of pride to leave everything behind him as clean as possible. In the park, he even puts his cigarette butts in the wastebaskets. Once he scolded me for throwing orange peels in the scrub.
Bernard checks to make sure I don’t make any mistakes. To reduce the weight, half-full bottles need to be emptied in the gutter. There are also trouble cans, unknown brands that nobody will accept. Some of them originate in states where there is no deposit. Bernard points me to the small print on top of the can. CT, VT, NH, and NY are okay. If there are no letters, it means they are out-of-state cans, and even WeCan won’t take them back. In fifteen minutes, we have sorted out all of Harvey’s bags. The result: two full bags, loaded with approximately three hundred cans and bottles. “Not bad,” Bernard says, “fifteen bucks for a half hour’s work. Better than flipping burgers for three-fifty an hour at McDonalds.”
On the other side of the street a gate opens. It is Pedro, another super. He is a good-natured Latino in his mid-thirties. He jokes with Bernard about Bob. “Most probably, he will make it this year to the morgue,” Bernard laughs while introducing me as his new intern.
Pedro’s building yields the same as Harvey’s, and in another half an hour we are finished, resulting in another fifteen dollars worth of empties.
Meanwhile, on the street women on high heels and men in three-piece suits are rushing off to work. Nannies take kids to school and people take their dogs out for the early morning piss. Bernard greets a few passers-by and strokes the dogs he knows by name. One lady spontaneously strikes up a conversation: she lived in Texas for six months, but saw Bernard on local TV in a documentary. Bernard enjoys his national celebrity status and brags about all the documentaries that have been done about him
It is getting cozy. We are sitting on an old cupboard that has been put out on the sidewalk, and Harvey has gotten us fresh coffee. Somehow, the conversation turns to the Kennedys. Every real true-blooded American seems to have his own theory as to who killed JFK. Bernard, Harvey and Pedro are no exceptions.
The three discuss John F., Jackie O., and Marilyn Monroe. Bernard even brings in the FBI, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Mafia. Inevitably J. Edgar Hoover enters the picture, the former FBI director and ultimate example of the perverted power-obsessed creep who still fuels people’s imagination.
“Oh, man, he was some weird-ass motherfucker! Had steamy tapes of everybody. Can you believe it, that old horny bastard jerking off while watching Martin Luther King’s favorite love positions?” Pedro and Harvey crack up laughing.
Bernard is a good storyteller and has warmed up. “That Hoover himself was a first-class faggot. He has been fucked up the ass by Truman Capote himself!” he screams out, while making obscene copulation movements with his hips. True or not, Pedro and Harvey burst out laughing. People walking by with long faces on their way to work, look up with a mixture of amusement and envy at the strange group of people sitting on a discarded cupboard amidst the garbage, sipping coffee and having all fun in the world.