Hidden America Page 28

  Reptilian?

  “You know, a guy gets his first BMW, expects to be happy,” he says. “Then he’s off skiing with Bob, who has a better BMW. Damn. He was supposed to be happy! It didn’t work. So now he needs a four-thousand-square-foot house. You know the story.”

  I tell him I don’t see Bob and his buddy slowing down anytime soon. We are a nation of consumers. We can’t seem to stop ourselves. We don’t seem to even want to stop ourselves.

  He does not see this as a uniquely American or even a modern phenomenon. “We’re not smart enough yet,” he says. “We’re young. You can argue how long Homo sapiens have been around, but the guess is something like 150,000 years. We are amateurs at this. We have just barely gotten here in terms of the clock of the earth.” The elevator stops and he holds the door open, so I go first.

  “We have our physics way ahead of our psyche,” he says when we reach the first floor. We head down a hallway so clean, our shoes squeak. “Like, we know how to make a lot of stuff,” he says. “But the notion of responsibility? We’re slower on that. The idea that you’re supposed to leave the world better than the way it was when you showed up? We’re onto it, but we’re not nearly there. We need to be able to take the next step and realize that the world’s ideas are bigger than just a bunch of stuff.”

  The more he talks like this, the more optimistic he becomes: people will get smarter, more conscientious, more in tune with the needs of the next generation; chivalry will spread throughout the world!

  I apologize for not seeing it. I confess that I don’t see this recycling thing really kicking in where I come from, where many people regard recycling as a quaint, retro 1990s fad. Rumor has it that there’s a paper glut, that no one knows what to do with all those plastic soda bottles other than make some silly belts out of them, that all this stuff just ends up in landfills in the end, so why bother?

  “In the early days of recycling, maybe,” he says. “Paper goods were mixed at probably a pretty low grade where the guy had it for six months in his yard, it got wet and turned into a huge spitwad. But the higher the cost of disposal goes, the more inventive people become.”

  We stop in the workers’ locker room and Joe finds us both a hard hat and a pair of safety goggles.

  It costs $29 a ton to dump here at Puente Hills. It will cost $60 a ton to haul trash by rail out of the Los Angeles basin. “People get really creative at $60 a ton,” he says. We talk about thriving markets in China: wastepaper is America’s number one export by volume to China. The ships that bring all those toys and TVs in from China now return full of our old paper, which they use to pack more goods made in China. And as for making new paper, 36 percent of the fiber that goes into new paper now comes from recycled sources.

  “And now there are rug companies that will actually lease you a rug,” Joe says. “If someone spills on the little square, they pop up the square. The company takes the square back, they shave the fuzz off, they melt the plastic, make new fuzz, put it back on. Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? And it’s being done because of the disposal costs. It pushes backward.”

  I ask him if there is any squashing his optimism.

  “People are basically good-hearted until put in a very bad corner,” he says. “We just have to keep giving them reasons to be good-hearted—the opportunity to be good-hearted. You know, their inclination is to be good folks until it’s gone bad on them. Then they get defensive. What’s Churchill’s line? If you’re young and not liberal, you have no heart. If you’re old and not conservative, you have no brains.

  “Look, environmental consciousness is not a religious thing. It doesn’t have holy precepts that say you can’t touch a plastic bag or you’re a horrible person. It’s more: Get a grip and find a balance. Life’s organic. It’s smelly and gooey. Get past it. It’s just science. I think as we get more people reconnected to science through recycling, we get them to understand the magic of this planet. They’ve forgotten the magic. The truth is, it doesn’t take that much connecting to go WOW! It’s like lying on your back in the mountains, looking at the stars. Being able to go WOW! And holy mackerel! It really doesn’t take a lot of study to appreciate this place.”

  All geared up for our tour through the floor of the MRF, Joe pushes a door and we head in. It definitely has the feel of two airplane hangars—a massive space with a sky-high ceiling. The sorting area with its clanking conveyor belts takes up a tiny corner of the building. Trash falls into it from a hopper above and goes marching along the belts while the women watch and grab and pull at it. I stand behind a pregnant Hispanic woman snatching dirty empty soda bottles out of a heap of garbage rolling by so fast, she nearly misses a perfectly good twenty-ounce Sierra Mist.

  She catches my eye and I don’t quite know what to do with my shame, and so, stupidly, I smile and give her a thumbs-up.

  —

  JOE INVITES ME OUT TO DINNER. First we have to stop home and pick up Shelly, his wife. We crawl on the crowded 605 in his old Cadillac and he looks tired, spent, and I have to think by now he is talked out.

  “I just don’t know about God,” he says, apropos of nothing, and because he is not, and probably never will be, talked out. “I don’t know about an afterlife,” he says.

  “Yeah, me neither,” I say. The ride is smooth and the leather seats stick to my legs. This was a damn fancy car in its day.

  “I’m more about that Marxist thinking that religion is the opiate of the masses,” he says. “Calm the people down so that the kings can get away with murder.”

  “Yeah—”

  “But nature certainly seems to be hinting at an afterlife,” he says. “As much as I can be cynical about that sort of thing. Nature says, ‘Wait a minute, now, it’s all cycles.’ Nature does not seem to be telling us that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and then we all go boop.”

  The sun is falling appropriately onto the horizon. We both flip our visors down. Even so, it’s blinding, and we’re not moving, and this is going to be a long ride home.

  “The spiritual world could be just a part of the cycle that we don’t yet understand,” he says, opening his window to get some air, which is probably technically smog. We sit and stare into traffic.

  “Of course, my wife swears that she was here before as a Spanish guy,” he says. “She remembers water coming in through the portholes, the whole bit. But she’s odd, anyway.”

  The description turns out to be an apt setup. When we finally get to the house, Shelly won’t let us in because it’s too messy for company, and so we sit in the backyard and sip pinot grigio, and I marvel at the odd assortment of stuff in the yard and on the porch, a crooked little fake Christmas tree, an empty pond, little ceramic dwarfs, and a fat black cat. Shelly is as tall as Olive Oyl, with a handsome face and a jet-black mane, and she chain-smokes and speaks the same crazily observant language as her husband. The two get tangled in notions, in thinking about what it would be like if there were no more people on earth, in trying to remember the names of types of frogs, or the names of saints, until one of them has to run inside and get a book to look it up.

  At one point, when Joe is inside trying to find his encyclopedia of movie actors, Shelly turns to me and holds her glass up to offer a toast. “To landfill people!” she says.

  I raise my glass politely.

  “Aren’t they the most ethical bunch?” she says. “It’s weird. So many of them were Jesuit-trained, so maybe it goes back to that, where doing your best for the common good is a paramount principle.” She takes a final drag of her cigarette, smashes the butt in an awaiting seashell. “But they approach their jobs in the most principled way. They’re taking the worst two things we have—trash and sewage—and turning them into golf courses and wonderful things.

  “Isn’t that weird?” she says. “Seriously, it’s like a cause for these people. I’ve noticed it from the beginning, having
to go to all these dreadful conferences and things. I used to think, ‘These should be our politicians. We should only elect people trained in landfill maintenance.’”

  Joe comes back out. He didn’t find the encyclopedia. Instead, he’s carrying a journal article that reminded him of something funny. “No one knows where water came from,” he announces. “Some people think it came in as dirty snowballs. Asteroids. They’re not positive water started here. It may have come from space.”

  “Oh, he loves this one,” Shelly says to me, as if to provide warning. “He is now going to tell you where molecules came from.”

  “All the molecules came from space,” he says. “Ask any nuclear scientist about the origins of the bigger molecules: carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and all the stuff that makes up life—they were all hydrogen to begin with. They came out of the fusion process that takes place in the center of suns.”

  “Wait for it—” Shelly says to me.

  “So we’re stardust, literally,” he says. “We are atomic waste!” He slaps the table, more satisfied with that one than he has been with anything all day.

  —

  Click here for more books by this author.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is a collaboration of many hands and minds, and I offer my thanks to Andy Ward for making me do it, and Jim Nelson at GQ for hatching the idea and providing immeasurable support. To my editor Neil Nyren for championing the project and Andrew Blauner for protecting it. To the University of Pittsburgh Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for the patronage. To the numerous labor, management, and government organizations that permitted me such extraordinary access to their operations. To all the editors who pored over early versions—Raha Naddaf, Tom Frail, Sarah Goldstein—and the research department at GQ for the inexhaustible fact-finding energy. To Elaine Vitone for the searching, arranging, transcribing, and scheming, and to Amy Whipple for entering the endgame. To my girls, Anna and Sasha, for laughing and twirling and pretending to like all the airport trinkets. To Alex, my husband, for holding down the ever-expanding fort and for his unrelenting faith in me. To my parents, who didn’t live long enough to read this book but who continue to inspire me to keep this gig going. Finally, to the people of Hidden America, who offered such generous entry into their worlds and entrusted me with the stories I hope I have rendered honorably. (I’m looking at you: Foot, Sputter, Joe Haworth, Juan, Pedro, Brian, Adrienne, Donnell Brown, Richard Sprague, and TooDogs, may you rest in peace.)

  jml

  ALSO BY JEANNE MARIE LASKAS

  The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know

  We Remember: Women Born at the Turn of the Century Tell the Stories of Their Lives in Words and Pictures

  Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm

  The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family

  Growing Girls: The Mother of All Adventures