GETTING RID OF IT ALL BEFORE GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

It’s amazing that in this consumer society[1] that you can build a pretty decent business out of being the guy who’s there to catch when people are throwing things away.

I mean this in several ways.

First: There’s the guy who runs the company that rents dumpsters.

Second: There’s the guy who crawls into that dumpster and pulls things out so he can sell them.[2]

I couldn’t believe the crap that built up over the years. Part of the problem is that it’s actually hard to throw stuff out or give things away in Los Angeles.

Seriously. When did Goodwill and the Salvation Army get so picky? No computers more than two years old. No books. No videotapes, especially those recorded yourself off television[3]. Each piece of furniture was carefully scrutinized for imperfections and many were rejected.

Really? Didn’t they know that we were GIVING them this stuff? Oh, and what about those ads about providing jobs for people who would fix these things and thereby learn valuable and marketable skills?[4]

So a lot of stuff had to go. I called the city for a manual pick up, which meant someone – um – manually picked stuff off the curb and put it in a truck.[5]

The big thing that worried me was an old automatic garage door opener that had been taken off when the original garage door had been replaced. The original had been a cantilevered wood beauty with an old Sears opener that could be operated from a remote, or from a button inside the house. But it had been replaced because of dry rot. The new door was personality-free aluminum and the garage door opener had to be scrapped because it wasn’t up to current code with an electric eye that stopped the door should a kid, small animal or playground ball roll under it. Never mind that a NON-automatic door can come crashing down uncontrollably and who’s putting the electric eyes on those?

Have you ever tried to get rid of something like that? It’s huge. It’s heavy. It’s got a winch and a motor on it. When I called the city for the manual pick up…

“We can’t take anything over six feet.”

“What?”

“A refrigerator is the biggest thing we can take.”

“Well, if we’re going by volume…”

“Is it more than six feet long?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can’t take it. Our trucks are only six feet long.”
“Excuse me? Were they made by Tonka?”

“We can’t take anything bigger than a refrigerator.”

“Then what am I supposed to do with this?”[6]

“You can leave it out by the curb. People come by and pick up stuff like that.”

“People?”

“You know. People.”

“So you’re telling me to just take junk and put it out by the street and hope that some scavenger comes and picks it up? Because what happens if they don’t come and pick it up and you’ve given me advice that leaves garbage out on the street? I ask because people used to dump TV’s in the field across the street[7] and not only was that unsightly, not only was the broken glass dangerous, but no one ever came to pick it up. When I called the DWP…”

She hung up before I got to “…they asked me why I was letting people bust things up and not calling the cops when I saw it, even though I would call the cops and they’d ask if I owned the property.”

So we decided to get the dumpster.

And the crap just kept coming.

Not only was there the garage door opener, but also there was a patio table, four chairs and two chaises all missing pieces that head been left by the previous owner. We’d made use of them[8] but we weren’t taking them anywhere.

There’d been an article in the L.A. Times a few years before we moved about dumpsters. About how when you get a dumpster for your house it becomes the neighborhood dumpster and that at two AM you can find the old lady from down the street reliving herself of her multiple cat-transfer boxes or that building debris from a demo job will be there in the morning where the night before it was empty.

What they don’t tell you about is the people who come to take things OUT of the dumpster. Several times I’d hear a truck pull up[9] and someone would hop in and start rooting around. I asked one of them what they were doing.

“I look for metal.”

“How do you know I haven’t made a deal with someone to take it already?”

He stared at me blankly.

“I take metal.”

What he wouldn’t take was the dog shit one of the local dog runners tossed in the dumpster every day while we had it in the driveway.

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[1] Of which I am a card-carrying member and, perhaps, poster boy.

[2] I guess.

[3] It seems VHS tapes are now some kind of hazardous waster and it apparently has nothing to do with what’s recorded on them.

[4] But I haven’t seen one of those ads in a long time and I guess those marketable skills are now only marketable in Canton and Sonora.

[5] As opposed to the automated trucks with the tongs on the side that picked up the trash cans and shook them into the truck. These Michael Crichton things so fascinated me the first time I saw them that I called Patricia and work and asked her if she’s seen the garbage truck.

[6] A question I should have had answered ten years earlier, but I had things to do.

[7] Which they did. In fact, for a while there was a group who would come by in a pickup every two-three weeks and throw a TV off a pickup and then they would attack it with baseball bats. I’ve only thought about doing that

[8] Because I’m a cheap bastard.

[9] Blocking the street, the sidewalk and my driveway.