Waste Management: Confessions of a New York Garbageman

You don’t know me and you probably don’t give two shits about me, but I see it all in the trash. I’m that guy that makes your garbage disappear every morning. But whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to respect me. You try picking up 12 tons of trash a night, every day, for 20 years, tell me this ain’t the hardest work out there. I’ve seen guys crush their backs on this job; I mean their vertebrates just turn to powder. Guys get cancer on this job. Guys get burned by acid on this job. I’ve been caught in the middle of gunfire picking up trash. I was once stuck in the stomach with a hypodermic needle that someone left in a taped up coffee can, all just to get the shit off the streets. If it weren’t for me, this city would come to a halt, buried in its own trash. Everything you own will one day pass through my hands. But you know what? After 20 years of picking up garbage in this dirty-ass-city, you can take this job and kiss my big fat New York fucking ass.

I remember the first time I sat in a garbage truck; I was 5 years old. My family and I lived in Canarsie, it was the  Little Italy of Brooklyn. This truck pulled up outside, and man it could’ve been 100 miles long, I’d never seen anything so big. My father, Salvatore Campo, the truest of New York city workers, jumped out of the truck in full uniform. It was like watching General Patton leaping down from his tank. He was in his late-20s and had already been on the job for a couple of years. “C’mon Johnny, get in the truck, I’ll give you a ride.”

He threw me in the cab right next to his partner Goomba Sammy. We cruised down the streets in that tank, watching the world pass us by. Not too long into the ride, this foreman pulls up behind us and motions for my dad to pull over. They told me to lay down on the seat and threw a bunch of coats on me. They told me not to move. My dad walked over to deal with the boss while I sat there holding my breath. The foreman was asking them a bunch of questions, just busting their balls, and I heard my dad throwing it right back at him. “We’re just finishing up our lunch break, what’s your problem?” he said. When my dad came back he and Goomba Sammy were laughing their asses off. “Foreman never saw you. You did good, Johnny, you did good. You wasn’t a rat!” That was my dad, Sally the Stitch. I had no idea that 25 years later I would be watching the world pass me by through the same windows that my dad sat behind. I always wanted to go to college. I had ambitions; I wanted to be a writer. But I came from a working class family and my father just couldn’t afford it. Plus, everyone around me was shooting up and eating sheets of acid, and even though I smoke pot to this day, I sure as hell wasn’t getting mixed up in no chemicals. I didn’t have too many choices, stay in my neighborhood and die or get the fuck out. So I stumbled from a bar to the recruitment office and eight days later I was in the Navy, traveling the world. I smoked hash in Pakistan, hung out with the PLO in Jordan, got shot at on the coast of Vietnam; sometimes you don’t know where life is going to take you. There I was, on this spy ship with the highest tech equipment, and the crew was high as shit the whole time. I was playing harmonica when I met my friend Steve, who would become my bro for life. He and I became like blood, and no matter what happened before or since then, he’s been there for me. We grew up real quick on that boat. I became a real human being.

When I finally came back to New York, I couldn’t find a job to make me happy. I had stints as a cook, a taxi driver, a factory worker, a construction worker, you name it. One morning my dad threw me out of bed and made me take the civil service exam. “Ain’t no better job for the working man than the sanitation,” was his logic. And he was right, city jobs offer the best benefits in the world. Full pension, dental, medical; you put in your 20 years and you’re set for the rest of your life. But picking up garbage? That was the last thing I wanted to do with my life. I was a musician. I was happy playing my harmonica in the village, working as a cook, blowing up the street for money. But none of that had a future in it. City job was a career.  So I started working for the man.

Garbagemen, in a way, they’ve got it better than other civil servants. Cops get shot at. Firemen gotta run into burning buildings every day. Sanitation was the only civil service job where you could get the benefits without putting your life at risk every time you go to the office. But I learned pretty quickly that when you’re working for the city you cease to be a person. You become just a number to them. As a sanitation worker, the city has one objective for you: get the garbage off the streets. It doesn’t matter if there is 20 in. of snow or 100 degrees of heat. You maybe have to battle your way through an army of rats, or pick up a 2000 lbs. dead horse, but whatever it takes, just get it off the streets. Period. If you told me I was going to see half the shit I ended up getting involved in on that truck, I would have told you, “Fuck no, no thanks.” The dirt comes with the territory. When you’re working with the garbage you see all the people’s trash.

I remember this one time, when I was a foreman, I was listening to the radio one day and I heard the story of this guy that drove a small truck to drop off some plastic barrels at the dump. The foreman on the other end of the radio had opened the barrels up and saw that this guy had killed his wife and cut her in half, one half in each barrel. Over the radio waves this foreman was yelling, “Oh shit, get cops over here! This guys running! He’s running!” Nothing like a police hunt through the trash heaps at Fresh Kills.

In my first few years on the job, a drug gang shot a cop in the head right near Jamaica, Queens. It was big news, all over the papers and stuff; this was the worst part of New York, at that time. My partner and I were working the block when we saw a car pull up. Two dudes just parked it and sat there. When we came back from our nine o’clock break, the car looked like a fucking slaughterhouse. Someone had shot them dead, big splatter all over the windshield. Then it dawned on me, if I wasn’t in a garbage truck with that uniform on I wouldn’t have been allowed in that neighborhood. I would’ve been killed along with those two jerk-offs in the car. But garbagemen, we’re allowed in every neighborhood in the world. That’s one of the only things I loved about this fucking job. You got a free pass into worlds where no one else is allowed. Nobody fucks with you. Cops, drug dealers, crack heads, businessmen; everybody’s happy to see you because you keep the city clean. Everybody loves you, especially on Christmas.

But there are those assholes that hate us. They just don’t have a fucking clue what we do. When I was working on the eastside of Manhattan, there was this dude in a Corvette convertible that pissed me off so bad, to this day I’ve never been so full of rage. I had the truck in the street and this dickhead kept trying to pass me but couldn’t. He was honking his horn, revving the engine, he just fucking couldn’t wait. I was right in the middle of humping the garbage up, and I mean really heaving these bags, it would’ve only taken me another minute  when this guy sticks his head out the window and screamed to his girlfriend “Look at these niggers.” Now I’ve always been a pretty peaceful guy, but in that moment, I wanted to kill him. I wanted to rip his head off and shove it up his ass. C’mon you asshole, c’mon you rich Long Island fuck. Quit showing off in front of your girlfriend and come out here and say that again. I slowed down my movements to a snail’s pace, just hoping that this guy would get out of his car. He felt that just because he was in a Corvette and I was in a garbage truck that he could say what he wanted to me. He felt that he was better than me. I finally understood and connected with anyone who has experienced racism, and it was all because I was wearing that uniform and throwing those bags.

And I haven’t even gotten to the worst part of that job: the smell. That putrid, nasty, gut-wrenching odor that just hits you in the face on a hot, 95 degree day. I would wash and wash and wash to get the smell off me sometimes. One time, after somebody’s nasty ass fish was decomposing in the can, my partner and I had to work eight hours with the most rancid odor I’ve ever smelt in my life following us. I still get chills just thinking about it. I went home that night and threw my uniform away.

I hated that job. Ironically most guys on the job hated me. But fuck them; they were just a bunch of knuckleheads. I was a fucking rebel. They would run, do a good job, get done early, go into the locker room and watch cartoons. My politics are leave me the fuck alone. Johnny Campo never ran, and never will. These guys run and run and never ask no questions why. They’re like trained dogs. I remember these two jackasses were working in Brooklyn when they found 50,000 bucks in an alley way dumpster, and the idiots turned this shit in! I couldn’t believe it. It’s like finding the lottery in a suitcase, all unmarked bills, and handing it back over to the same city that pays them shit and runs them into the ground. Fucking morons.

And that’s why I think all city workers are assholes. They don’t stand up for what they think they deserve. When my dad was working, you could raise a family on city wages. Nowadays the economy says that you gotta have a million bucks just to have an apartment the size of a bathroom in New York City. The police, firemen, and sanitation workers are the heart and soul of the city, the salt of the earth, but can’t even afford to live in the city. We’re like the butlers and maids of the rich. Yes sir, no sir. Whatever you say, boss. A guy who picks up 13 tons of garbage can’t even support his family. There is something fucked up with the American dream when the working man can’t even live in the city that he keeps running.

Just like my dad, I put in my 20 years and retired. When you work for that long and then finally get some time to yourself the transition can be a bit bumpy. I got real depressed, living out of my four-story walkup, cockroach infested apartment. Even though I was born in Manhattan and lived my whole life there, I knew if I stayed in NYC any longer I was gonna die. And at that moment, when I just didn’t care any more, my friend Steve called me and said he had a house on the Pacific Ocean I could stay in. There it is, take it or leave it. It was a God-send.  And the love of my life, Alicia, she’s been with me through thick and thin, she told me I had to go out there. She really made it possible for me to jump off the mountain. In a week’s notice, I left everything behind in New York and hopped on a plane.

Now I’m two minutes to the ocean. This place is like a dream, a painting; it’s so beautiful out here. I went from the darkest hell to the brightest heaven. I spent all those years looking at the garbage and now I got a palm tree in my front yard. And it’s all because of the people I love. It’s not about what you own or material things. All of that shit will one day end up in the garbage. In the end it’s about the people you surround yourself with and the love you have. So as I look at the waves crashing when the sun is going down, I can’t help but smile that I made it this far. I should’ve died 10 times over by now. But here I am telling my story to you. Now go ahead, throw this magazine away too, I’m not going to bring it to the dump for you anyway.