I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

In the early eighties I lived in Europe for a few years. One of the peculiarities of European truck drivers, at least at that time, was that many of them decorated their trucks (lorries) with stuffed animals. Most commonly, they would be lashed to the bumper or grill, sometimes fixed to the antennae, often on the dashboard, and once in a while on the rear bumper.

Why? you ask. I am not sure, but I feel compelled to do the same thing.

Yes, he is hanging by a clamp on his ear. But he doesn't appear to be unhappy about it.

It's not only a European thing. I came across a New York Times article titled: "They're Soft and Cuddly, So Why Lash Them to the Front of a Truck?" On November 13, 2005, writer Andy Newman asked truckers the "big question: Why?" The answers he received not only cast light on the human predicament, but, even more importantly, could tell you something about me.

(From the article): Like all adornments, of course, the grille pet advertises something about its owner. The very act of decorating a truck indicates an openness on the driver's part, according to Dan DiVittorio, owner of D & N Services, a carting company in Queens, and of a garbage truck with a squishy red skull on the front.
"It has to do something with their character," said Mr. DiVittorio, 27. "I don't see anybody that wouldn't be a halfway decent person putting something on their truck."

 I totally agree. It's about character. Only a decent person would put a squishy skull on their garbage truck. And only an even more decent person would put a green stuffed space alien at the power take-off control of his garbage truck.

But there apparently is a somewhat more Freudian explanation out there among garbage haulers:


One prevalent theory among truckers is that chicks dig them.
Robert Marbury, an artist who photographed dozens of Manhattan bumper fauna for a project in 2000 (see urbanbeast.com/faq/strapped.html), said he had once asked a trash hauler why he had a family of three mismatched bears strapped to his rig.
"He said: 'Yo, man, I drive a garbage truck. How am I going to get the ladies to look at me?' " Mr. Marbury recalled. 

I know. I have found, just like this gentleman, that once you affix a cuddly animal to your garbage truck, the ladies find you almost irresistible. I need to lock the doors so they don't try to climb into the cab.

Be that as it may, it's not for the babes alone that we do it. We are part of an ancient tradition reaching back to the very dawn of civilization.

Monroe Denton, a lecturer in art history at the School of Visual Arts, traced the phenomenon's roots back to the figureheads that have animated bows of ships since the time of the pharaohs.
"There was some sort of heraldic device to deny the fact of this gigantic machine," he said. "You would have these humanizing forms, anthropomorphic forms - a device that both proclaims the identity of the machine and conceals it."

This is clearly true. There is no question that we garbage haulers roll along city streets in our titanic machines whose unconcealed power would otherwise strike terror into the hearts of all who see us. Therefore, like Pharoahs and Vikings, we anthropomorphize and mask the raw power we wield.

Given the obvious fact that garbage haulers are deep and mysterious repositories of the collective psyche, whose work manifests historical, anthropological, psychological and philosophical phenomena, it is both refreshing and (frankly) about freaking time that somebody decided sanitation departments need an artist in residence.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the artist in residence at New York City's Department of Sanitation, said that when she noticed the animals on garbagemen's trucks in the late 1970's, she "felt they were like these spirit creatures that were accompanying them on this endless journey in flux."

So we are artists. Our spirit creatures accompany us on our endless journeys in flux. Pretty much. But wait, there is more.

"I always felt," Ms. Ukeles said, "with these creatures that they withdrew from the garbage and refused to let go of, that there was an act of rescue involved."
That is certainly true for Julio Hernandez, a laborer for Aspen Tree Specialists in Brooklyn.
The GMC chipper-truck he rides in is graced with 11 figurines, each defective in one way or another - Hulk Hogan with both hands missing, a Frankenstein monster with a hole in his head, a nearly disintegrated black rubber rat. "People throw them out because they're broken," Mr. Hernandez, 38, said in Spanish. "They catch my attention." 

That's it, we are rescuers, saviors of a sort. Our compassion cannot let these little ones be utterly destroyed. No wonder we pull them out of the trash and bond with them. But then we strap them onto our trucks where they are tortured by the elements, not to mention the stench of the spoiling slurry of the trash...

This is the true mystery of the grille-mounted stuffed animal, and it is here that the terrain gets heavily psychological and a bit murky.
Ms. Ukeles, who claims to understand sanitation workers fairly well, having shaken hands with 8,500 of them during a three-year performance project, said they identified on some level with their mascots.
"There's a transference in this," she said. "There's this soft, flesh-and-bone sanitation worker, who knows very well they could be crushed against this truck. The creature could be the sanitation worker in a very dangerous position, so the animal could be a stand-in."
(Stuffed animals, sadly, are verboten on city garbage trucks and nearly impossible to find these days; they were against department regulations even in the 1970's, but perhaps sanitation men are not the free spirits now that they were back then.)
At the same time, Ms. Ukeles said, the trucker, perhaps uncomfortable with his soft side, may feel compelled to punish it.
"Binding a soft thing to a very powerful truck - there's a kind of macho thing about that," she said.
That double identification with both victim and agent of violence may reflect the driver's frustrating position in society. Stuffed animals are found mostly on the trucks of men who perform hard, messy labor, which, despite the strength and bravery it demands, places them on the lower rungs of the ladder of occupational prestige.
The motley animal, then, can function as a badge of outsider status, a thumbed nose to the squares and suits. In that case, the cuter the mascot, the more meaningful its disintegration.

Not so much compassion, then, as sadism. We transfer our vulnerability and trampled egos onto these critters and attempt to recover our dignity by trashing theirs. Where are the fawning ladies now? But wait, it gets worse.

"That is part of the abject," he said, "this toy that is loved to death quite literally."
The externalization of an indoor object is another abject trope, Mr. Denton said. "An important aspect of the abject is the informe, the lack of boundaries," he said, using the French critical theory term, "the insides oozing out."

Turns out, I am the stuff (with my stuffed animals) of a French-critical-theoretical trope. No question. Let us therefore not romanticize being in garbage, however cute and cuddly we try to make it.

Still, there is love. Each time I go out to haul trash, my ten year old daughter asks me to bring something home from the garbage. All the animals on the dashboard came home and went in the wash. Now they are on her bed with her 300 other animals. Cherished just as much. The white bear stayed on the dash. I needed to keep one there so that my frail sense of dignity, compassion, heroism, machismo, French sadism--and whatever else--might remain intact...


 

A Garbageman’s Christmas Tale

On a bitter-cold Thursday afternoon near Christmastime last year, I pulled up to a stop in Roseville; a modest rambler with a yard full of Christmas lights and figurines (aka "gaak"). I was training in my friend Mark, another underemployed Lutheran pastor who, like me, thought there was something oddly fitting about “men of the cloth” hauling trash.

I flipped the lid on that first can of the wintery morning, and looking back at us was the cherubic face of a plastic figure of the baby Jesus. Mark and I looked at each other and broke into laughter, wondering at the odds that the first stop together of two pastors in a garbage truck would involve Jesus in the trash. We also mused at what moved people to throw it out: Was it broken? Light no longer worked? Faded from exposure? Or just time for a new cresh…perhaps one where Jesus does not have pale skin and blue eyes?

Anyway, I showed Mark how to tip the can with the hydraulic lift and we moved on. By the end of the day we had all but forgotten about baby Jesus until we got to the dump. Because first in is last out, the last item to fall atop the pile of garbage we had collected that day was the figurine of Jesus, only now smeared with the garbage in which he had been compressed.

I simply had to snap the picture. And, like so many of the images that present themselves in trash, this got me thinking. I thought about the extent to which it is a startling image of our disposable culture. Use it and toss it, the turning of natural resources into mountains of trash, but also the way in which people, workers, are increasingly viewed as disposable. This Jesus was disposable too. Is not that the way the story goes in the Gospel as well? He is disposed of at Golgatha, the site where it is said garbage from the city was tossed.

But it is Christmas, and not time to contemplate such unpleasantness, right? A time for hearth and home, warm welcome and good cheer, tidings of comfort and joy, except…

The story is that Jesus was born into poverty and dirt, his family was homeless that cold night. They took shelter in a stable, most likely a dank cave full of animals and manure. From birth to death, the Gospels speak of Jesus as a person of lowly means and estate who lived with the “unwashed” and the out-cast, whom the powerful refused... and treated as refuse.

The more I think of it, the more “The Little Lord Jesus Asleep in the Dump,” as my daughter gleefully sang when she saw the picture, is a truer and more powerful image to contemplate at Christmas than the shiny, happy, pretty ones we would rather imagine and place in our yards.

Back Alley Prophet

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls..."
                      - P. Simon

And also on old Toyota pickup trucks parked in the alley! The first time I passed this truck in St. Paul it brought a smile to my face and moved me to thought. That's what prophets and poets do; their words disturb.

The words stenciled on the side of the truck are: "DARE TO DISTURB THE UNIVERSE."

It's a line from T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" (ok, I had to look it up). In the poem it is in the form of a question: "Do I dare disturb the universe?"

Do I? Eliot calls this the "overwhelming question." This is also the poem with the famous line: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." The poem muses that there is time for a hundred indecisions before tea. Do I dare? Do I dare?

The poem and the Toyota (and its owner) point to the need we have to live out loud, to create, to choose and to act, to do express what is in us to the world. But it also speaks of the hesitancy, the fear, the worry over exposing ourselves, standing out, making mistakes, being wrong and looking foolish. The aging Prufrock (with a bald spot like me) is caught between desires: to express or to repress. The choice is by no means easy.

The prophet who owns the Toyota speaks to this Prufrock in a Garbage Truck: I dare you...
 

Your Garbageman, Your Confessor

Having worked both as a pastor and as a garbage collector, I think I can safely say that I know more personal secrets of the average trash-customer than I have of the average church-goer.

Our trash betrays us. Last spring the police stopped my colleague, Wes, and commandeered the garbage of a residence under investigation. They put the trash in the trunk of their squad and sped away. We learned later they found evidence that led to arrests. I told Wes they should make a TV series out of us. We heroically clean up the streets and alleys of the city every day, sometimes with the cops.

There is one stop on my regular route where the trash is predictable. Next to the trash can is the small recycling basket. It is always full with three collapsed Miller Lite boxes, and crushed Miller Lite cans. When I flip the lid of the garbage can, I always find another four cases of empties, uncrushed and neatly replaced in their boxes. Those four boxes neatly fit, stacked in the 35 gallon can. On the bottom of the can are several frozen pizza and TV dinner boxes. The gent is older and evidently lives alone. He seems a kind soul when I greet him. And he is medicating--a case of beer each day.

When I pull the lever on the truck that lifts and crushes the trash, invariably one or two items fall back down into the bay, as happened at the "Squirrel Ranch" in a previous blog. These items capture my attention, like the chipmunk that leaped straight at my face in panic to get away. One day an unopened gold envelope slipped down. I noticed that it was from a college where I had applied for a chaplain position just that week, addressed to an alum, no doubt. I further noticed it was a fundraising letter and I casually picked it up to inspect it. On the back was a hand written note: "I have tried it all and but I can't stop the pain." A song lyric? A suicide note thought better of? Written by the addressee, or by someone else? Whatever the case, definitely someone acquainted with pain.

But for sure someone who had thrown the note away, and my job is to get rid of it for him. I offered a prayer for a fellow suffering soul, without knowing the particulars of his pain...

Maggots! Read at own risk...

I'm not sure what is worse; picking up trash in the extreme cold or the extreme heat. Freezing fingers are no fun, but this summer the heat index has been over 100 degrees a few times.  In this heat, garbage cans become little birthing centers for... yes, maggots.

Like so many things in life, maggots are both really dirty and really clean. They are fly larvae. They spread microbial infections, but they are also used to sterilize wounds in hospitals. Think, hospitals are also the most clean and the most contaminated places around. The sick go there to heal, and the infections also breed there.

My sanitation truck is a traveling infection. I think about this when I come home and take off my gloves.


What these hands have touched; all the normal human by-products of living. The positive spin on me is that I am a "sanitation engineer." I am a "clean maker." But I get really dirty to make others clean... must be some kind of parable in that.

There is an absolute balance in the universe. There is no clean without making something else dirty. And there is no dirty without cleansing. Pick your poison; religion, politics, housekeeping. It all goes. I am a sanitizer by picking up your garbage. I am a garbageman who sanitizes your space. We call "sane" those who are mentally well. But to be "well" what is discarded?

Back to maggots. They are the perfect balance that live and dwell in garbage. They heal wounds by taking to themselves the infection. These are hospital maggots cleansing a small wound:







Now here are the unscientifically grown maggots in my truck. I initially thought this was a bunch of rice discarded from a kitchen, but in reality they were my own wild sanitation engineers, nature's little recycling agents. Cute little guys...

To Recycle or Not to Recycle...

Among other things, we Americans are really good at producing trash. We collectively produce a third of the world’s garbage. 4.5 pounds of garbage, per person, per day. Economists find the amount of garbage we produce to be one of the best indicators of our economic “health.” More garbage production = a healthier economy. Beautiful. What do you think, Charlie?

But there is better news. While our per-person trash production is up roughly one pound per day since 1980, the percentage of that waste that gets recycled instead of dumped in the pile behind Charlie has climbed from roughly 10% in 1980 to roughly 35% today. If you do the math, you will realize that the increase in recycling has not reduced our waste, but only offset the increase. But still...


In the areas I haul, curbside recycling is paid for by the municipality. Yet my observation is that more than half of what we haul to the dump (i.e. to be burned or sent to landfill) is still recyclable. Here's a favorite image. I don't know how many of these I saw in the trash. Guides to recycling, printed on recycled and recyclable paper, sent out by the recycling company. What do you do with it? Why, throw it in the trash, of course!

(Statistics from the U.S. EPA. http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/index.htm )
 

Squirrels End Ranch

The first time down a particular alley I noticed a wooden arch over a doorway through a fence to a yard. On it was written, “Squirrels End Ranch.” I imagined the people who would give that name to their property. 

“This must be the gathering place for neighborhood fun and mayhem,” I thought. I imagined youngish adults, maybe pre-kids or with little ones staying up late on crisp fall nights with a bonfire, beer and smores. I smiled inwardly at the image that formed in my mind. Fun loving, “squirrelly” people. This is the story I wanted to imagine.

Then I tipped their can and out fell this:

I guess the sign was meant a bit more literally than I thought. 

In Greek mythology, the God associated with interpretation was Hermes, the trickster (from his name comes the word in theology and philosophy for interpretation: hermeneutics). Whether interpreting words, people, or events, interpretation is tricky…or perhaps I should say, squirrelly.