City Load

10:33. Jesus Christ, it was only 10 fucking 33.

It seemed like I'd been out there for ten hours. I was already filthy - picking from mountains of newspaper all of the plastic bags, aluminum foil, soiled baby diapers and other items the fine citizens of Forest Oaks, Oak Glen and Glen Hills had mistaken for recyclable news stock.

It was another blistering day. There was no breeze, so the sun simply beat down on Refuse Solutions Inc.'s Recycle America with a relentless, withering apathy. The paper pit or "east pit," as the site manager called it, was basking in every ray. The heaped bundles of newspapers seemed to absorb the heat and belch it right back at us. Everything threw-off a dull, washed-out glare - the sea of faded papers, the pebbled dirt yard between the pit and the sorting building, the blistered gray boxes that framed the sprawling broken concrete floor of the pit, even my bronzed, glistening forearms as they delved in and out of the piles of papers and trash. Looking out across the compound (as I had come to call it) was no different than looking into the wan photos on the covers of the newspapers I sifted through. Dry. Beige. Faded. And flat.

Against this parchment-like landscape moved the figure of our foreman, Mike. He had parked his loader and was walking over to me and my partner, Rigoberto. I had spent the whole morning thinking of how I was going to tell him I was quitting. Not at he end of the week. Not at the end of the day. But right there. At that very moment. Why the fuck not? I could get the same money working landscaping or painting houses. Or for a pay cut, I could go back to the mall, where I might be useful again. Or maybe just get a second job on campus once classes started up. Either way, I had to get out of there. Wading through garbage every day had already drained me of my self-esteem. My sanity was next. But I couldn't think of any reason that wouldn't make me look like a total pussy. I guess there was no running from the truth.

"There's a city load coming in," Mike said to us gruffly, before I could open my mouth. He tried hise his glee, but a small grin skirted the corners of his mouth. "So nobody fuckin' touch a thing or do anything when it gets here. You know how these loads are. I'll have to take a look at it and see if it's worth salvaging, alright?"

I nodded. Rigaberto did nothing.

"Alright?" Mike repeated to Rigaberto, annoyed. Rigaberto frowned and went back to the loader. Wearily shaking his head, Mike pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He dragged deep and long, holding in the precious smoke for almost 15 seconds before letting it stream slowly out of his nostrils. "These fuckin' Mexicans, man, I tell yuh'" said to me in a confiding tone. "You gotta say shit to 'em fifteen fuckin' times before they even acknowledge yuh," he said, still shaking his head. "And watch, when that load comes in, that little motherfucker will be crawlin' around all over it, just like I said not to. Jesus."

Mike's eyes narrowed as he took another life-giving drag and surveyed the compound. At 5'9 and 160 pounds, he wasn't much to look at. Ten years ago you might have called him scrappy, but now he was just plain scrap - human scrap. He was the kind of guy that wore work uniform every day of the week. You could just see him on Sundays, proudly displaying the red and gray of RS at the corner bar, drinking domestic beers and shots of well bourbon with what passed for his friends, and hitting on the middle-aged, bleached-out waitress, before driving home alone pissed drunk on his revoked drivers' license in his two-tone hubcap-less '82 Cutlass. In a way he was much like the materials he processed - recyclable. He started as a blue-collar man in the 1950s, trying to raise a family, believing in "American suburban" values and trying to maintain his personal dignity. But like all recycled materials, each incarnation became weaker, more flawed, cut with more impurities, so that in the end,the present product was a sad substitute for the original, which was now barely recognizable.

His hair was always combed, but never clean, and his ruddy red nose betrayed the "special ingredients" in the thermos he drank from all day (it never left his side). He made love to every cigarette he ever smoked. In fact, you could see the love in his face. Despite being weathered and weary, its most prominent feature was a series of gaping pores that ran along the ridges of his cheekbones and down into the drapes of his jowls. They weren't the kind of pockmarks you get from years of acne. They were just very large pores, as if his whole face was gasping for air. After watching him smoke the first few days, I figured that they had slowly opened up over time to help draw in some of the oxygen that his tar-soaked lungs could no longer accommodate. In reality, he was probably using them to capture second hand smoke from his own cigarettes to supplement the main stream.

"I'll let you know when the load comes in," Mike said, concluding our conversation, and walked back to his loader. I watched him climb in, take a swig from his thermos, and fire the engine to life. I looked down at my plastic digital watch. 10:36. Fuck.

Rigoberto was already scooping the "clean" portion of the load into the tractor bucket and dumping it into the box on the north side of the pit. That's how it worked. The curbside recycling trucks of Refuse Solutions hit the suburban streets in the pre-dawn hours, collected the allegedly sorted recyclables from the meticulously manicured parkways of the aforementioned suburbs and brought them to Recycle America. There, the plastic bottles, aluminum cans and various varieties of glass were dumped in the west pit, while the newspapers were dumped in the east pit. My partner and I then dug and crawled through the piles and removed all of the non-recyclable materials (most often plastic bags that residents had gone through the extra trouble of putting the newspapers in). After each load had been sufficiently sorted, or cleansed, my partner would use the loader to scoop up the papers and dump them into the north box. Garbage went in the south box. When either was full, a semi truck would come, hitch the box to its back, and drive it out of our lives forever. This event was neither sad nor significant, as it repeated for 10-12 hours a day, five days a week.

Breaks in this Sisyphean monotony were few and far between, but the few that came were precious indeed. And city loads certainly qualified. In fact, the arrival of a city load was just about the closest god damned thing to an event that we had at Recycle America. There was simply no sense in quitting now that a city load was on the way.

That's because city loads were exciting. They always contained odd things - plywood, furniture, car parts - one time even a body, I was told. But they were always dirty - sometimes too dirty to clean. The eco-spirit had not quite caught fire in the city like it had in the burbs. This was largely due to the fact that Refuse Solutions' territories in the city were blighted, and that most of the residents could give a fuck about putting an aluminum can in the proper color-coded bin when the abandoned lot next door was doing its own brisk trash business at no charge. Give one of these neighborhoods a box, and chances are, the only shit you're going to find in it is the shit that people don't even want in the lot next door.

For this reason, city loads were always points of contention. Rich, our site manager, hated taking them, mostly because their notorious dirtiness necessitated a decision as to whether we were going to take responsibility for cleaning it. He hated any deviation from the usual order of the day, so he mostly left the decision to Mike. But if Mike decided to have us clean it, and the load was, despite our efforts, still contaminated when it arrived at the weigh station, Rich would get the complaint. This he dreaded, so just about every load got tossed. The whole process infuriated the Mexicans, who took offense to the idea that there was any load they couldn't clean, and considered it a waste of time and effort to bring the load in, dump it, inspect it, and then scoop it right back up into the trash.

But Mike was adamant about carrying out the inspection each time. And anyone caught rummaging through a city load before Mike had the chance to check it out would catch infernal hell. Even an eager step toward it would bring an icy glare (which I found out on my first day). This vigilance was due not to any special dedication on Mike's part to his responsibilities, or even to any desire to exert his authority over the Mexicans, almost all of whom had been working at the compound much longer than he. No, Mike's only motivation lay in the mining of any city load's most precious mineral - porn.

In almost every city load, one could find porn - reefs of it, actually - running through like a ribbon of fudge in a scoop of marble ice cream. We're not talking about candy-assed tits and ass mags either. No, we're talking about the hard stuff - stuff you didn't find in the fake plastic barn-house mailboxes of Forest Oaks or the bricked-in post fortresses of Glen Hills. Mike loved the hard stuff, plain and simple.

Yes, now we had something to look forward to. Something, perhaps, to distinguish today from yesterday, or today from tomorrow, or any god damned day from another, or that matter.

This prospect did nothing to blunt the assault of the building mid-day heat, though. I took off my plastic gray helmet and double reinforced rubber gloves, ran my sweaty hand over the stubble on my head, and slowly rubbed the tops of my ears with my fingers and thumb. They were getting crispy in the sun again, and I had forgotten to stop for sunscreen for the fourth consecutive day. I began to wonder if, on a stifling day like today, I wouldn't be better off inside the garage, working the line. I stared enviously into its dark cavernous mouth, but then remembered the putrid smell of the milk cartons and the millions of frenzied little fruit flies swarming around the soda can bricks. Hmmmm. Did I want my shit sandwich on wheat or rye?

My exercise in rationalization was broken by the arrival of a truck at the weigh dock. This could be it, I thought. I looked over at Mike's loader, but it continued its methodical scooping and dumping routine in the west pit. Mike's job was to dump the materials into a mechanical shaker housed inside the main garage. The shaker then spit them out on to a conveyor belt ("the line"). Our guys would then sort all of the different kinds of plastic and glass by plucking them from the belt as they chugged by and tossing them into separate metal bins. The hideous mechanical din of the shaker and the constant cacophony of shattering glass were audible from the farthest reaches of the facility and provided a demoralizing soundtrack to every hour of the workday. In fact, the first time I had ever heard it, I half expected to see some sub-human, humpbacked wretch shoveling human bones into its voracious mouth. At the end of each day, the silence following that sinister symphony's final chord was often as unsettling as it was soothing.

The truck eased off the scale and headed for the cardboard garage. False alarm. As it did, though, I noticed that some of the other guys in the yard had also stopped to check it out. The anticipation was clearly building on everyone's part.

I was certainly excited. The hard-core porn was like currency in some ways. It was pretty expensive, and no man - regardless of how depraved - actually enjoyed the act of buying it. In fact, my friend Jim and I had begun to give the stuff that Mike left behind to Jim's brother Tom, in case we needed a beer run out of him. He loved the cheap ones from Russia in which they didn't even bother to wax the girls, so they'd be super slutty-looking. "Will, you know I like those dirty bitches!" he would say, appreciatively.

I had actually started my own little collection of Playboy magazines - pulled from the occasional loads from Forest Oaks. There was never any time to read them at RA, not even at lunch, so I had to pick 'em out and set them aside until the end of the day. Then I'd just take them over to Jim's, give them a good once-over and stash them under Tom's bed with his pile. My mom would die if she ever found them in our house, but Tom had already laid down a reputation as a real reprobate, so the shock value would be negligible if Jim's mom found them.

The Playboys were worthless to Tom, though. Because Tom was a Penthouse man. You see, there are basically two kinds of men in this world: Playboy men and Penthouse men. Regardless of whether he's ever cracked the pages of a pornographic magazine in his life, every guy can be classified as either one or the other. Beatles or Stones. Boxers or Briefs. Playboy or Penthouse.

To the uninitiated, the two publications look almost indistinguishable, shrink-wrapped and peeking out from behind the counter of the local convenience store. But their differences run long and deep. After a few weeks at RA, I felt that I could write a doctoral thesis on them. However, these differences between the two (and the men they appeal to) can be grasped quite simply and completely by merely looking at the marquee attractions, or products, of each.

Playboy proudly offers its readers the "Playmate," a young, energetic buddy to share adventures with - sexual and otherwise. She looks college-educated, and is just as at home in a pair of hiking boots and a jeep as she is in a satin teddy and the honeymoon suite. She likes sunny days, challenges and confident people like you. She's your partner in mischief. She shows you her silicon-swollen tits and her powdered, air-brushed ass with a look that says "Sure, we can be a little naughty, as long as my daddy doesn't find out."

Penthouse, on the other hand, offers its readers the "Pet." The very term implies ownership, subordination and ultimately submission. Your Pet is the ultimate sexual accessory - there to do whatever you want her to do. She's at home in a smoky tavern, wearing a tank top with no bra, jeans and high heels or suede boots, drinking a Jack Daniels and Diet Coke while waiting for you to finish your game of pool. She likes hot showers, "real" men and getting together with a few of her girlfriends and a couple quarts of motor oil. She shows you everything she's got with an eye toward the anatomical and a look that says either "let's go to the washroom and screw" or "you did bring the cocaine, right?"

Yeah, Mike was a Penthouse man, too. But for Penthouse men, that's never where it ends. Because in a strange but very real way, consumption of pornography is a lot like substance abuse. For its part, Playboy is like the alcohol of porn dependency. Sure, it causes its share of problems, but it's usually self-contained. Addiction is measured in quantity consumed. Penthouse, however, is more like pot: it's a gateway to harder stuff. You start off (not-so) innocently enough with Penthouse, but little by little, you start to need more. More pictorials. More Props. Skankier girls. Dirtier captions. Wider orifices. So you move on to Hustler. And then Cheri or Swank. Not long after, you start looking for specialization - the kind you find at the back in the ad section. Perhaps you order an issue of Shaved, or even buy a video or two. Then you've got yourself a little habit. And some lifestyle changes.

Mike had a habit. And he was about to score, because perched on the weigh scale was a maroon city truck about to take the first steps toward delivering its precious cargo. It must have just come in. I whirled around to confirm with Mark, but the loader was parked and empty. Mark was already walking briskly over to the driver's open window - partly to get the details on what neighborhood the box had been retrieved from; party to scan the cab to make sure the driver hadn't already pinched some of the booty for himself.

Within minutes, the shaker went silent and the pops and crashes from the line ceased. The uncharacteristic mid-morning silence seemed to heighten the drama. The guys emerged slowly from the dark shade of the garage, squinting in the brilliant sun and stretching their arms and backs. As usual, the Mexicans looked perturbed that the line had stopped. They knew this drill all too well, and looked disapprovingly at the city truck as it began to back into the paper pit to dump.

We formed a semi-circle about 10 yards from the truck and watched its dirty stool lurch from the box bed. All in all, it didn't look too dirty. There were the customary bags filled exclusively with garbage, along with a few random cinder blocks and the twisted frame of a girl's bicycle (easy mistakes, I guess.) Portions of the load did seem wet, despite the fact that it hadn't rained in the area for over two weeks. My guess was that we could have cleaned it in about 20 minutes. But it wasn't my call.

As the truck cleared, Mike prepared himself for the inspection. Slowly, he took the final drags of the cigarette he had lit, and dropped the butt into the dust. He let out an expectant sigh, like a mother about to step into a luxurious, fragrant bubble bath after a long day with the kids. Impatiently, Rigoberto stepped toward the pile. "Not so dirty this time," he stated. "Twenty minutes. It's gone."

"Hey, what the fuck did I say?" Mike exclaimed. "Just hold it."

And so he began. With a hawk's eyes Mike slowly circled the perimeter of the load, looking for the slightest glimmer of flesh in the pile. It was seven steps to gold. In moments he was taking armfuls of magazines from a pocket he had discovered and piling them to the side. When this reserve was exhausted, he began delving deep into the guts of the load. He found another score, but was more discriminating this time - tossing some back into the pile. To our left, Gerardo had picked-up the bike frame pretended to ride it. "Hey Mike!" he called. "Like a Harley, no?"

"Quit fuckin' around!" Mike yelled. He was moving swiftly now, investigating every lead but wasting no more time than was necessary. His trained eye could ferret out a false lead in no time. He was practicing his true craft, at the top of his game.

After a few minutes, Mike stopped and stood up. He eyed his booty, surveyed the load in its entirety, and with hands on hips and that little grin on his face, he said "Fuck it. Let's toss it." The others grumbled a bit, but he paid them no mind and started toward the paper loader (even after the inspection, he was the only one allowed to clear the load). I was about to swoop in and grab some of the leftovers (we were having a party that weekend and would certainly need Tom's services as beer man), but stopped short. Something had caught the vulture's eye. He stood there a moment, squinting at what appeared to be the corner of an air mattress peeking out of a bag of garbage. "Ho-ly shit," he said slowly, reverently. "You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Mike walked over to the bag and grabbed the corner of the mattress and shook it a bit. Finding the confirmation he was looking for, he tore the bag open and pulled out the true prize of the day. It wasn't an air mattress. It was a blond, anatomically correct, deflated blow-up doll. Mike was simply speechless. He held it in front of him and regarded it with reverence. "Holy shit," he repeated. Everyone stared at him in silence, as if he had unearthed some religious artifact of tremendous archeological significance. This "moment" went on for almost 10 seconds, until Rich's voice crackled over the PA system.

"What's the word, Mike?" he asked. "Should we toss it?"

Mike snapped out of his trance and gave the "toss" signal toward the office building from where Rich was surely watching. Then he turned to me and said "Looks like I've got me a new co-pilot." I chuckled a bit, thinking how funny it all was. Mike started toward the loader.

"Hey, there's a couple Playboys over there if you want to grab them", he added with a sly smile that seemed to involve me.

"No thanks," I replied flatly, and walked over to the regular load that had just been dumped.

Nauseated, I sifted through the new load, re-envisioning Mike rummaging around in the trash for pornos, smoking his cheap cigarette, and drinking God knows what from that beaten-up old thermos, and how I thought it was so amusing just a few short minutes before. He was like a human sponge in a pool of vice, just soaking up every drop he could. And then I thought about the smile. Did he think we were buddies? Could he relate to me? I looked at the twin heads in the glass loader and shuddered.

I found a couple more Playboys in the new load - obviously from Forest Oaks - but left them in the pile. Tom wouldn't want them. And neither did I. I had to get the fuck out of there.

It was 11:04.