The BEAST: Buffalo's Best Fiend

PICK OF THE LITTER

Climbing to the “top of the heap” with an ambitious bottom-feeder

By Pat Ragpicker

It's 4am on a winter night, and I'm parked on a dead end street near Kaisertown. It’s a secluded corner of the city I found by driving around aimlessly. I'm new to town, and penniless after buying my van with $700 I squirreled away the last time I got a paycheck. That was 7 months ago. Over those months, I managed to live off a few hundred bucks while sleeping in a warehouse closet and helping some friends make a TV show to try selling to a network.

Now I'm sleeping in the van. I'm wearing all my clothes, gloves and hat, piled under a sleeping bag and an army surplus parka, plus 3 mildewed, cold-stiff leather jackets and a dog-hair covered blanket that I scavenged off a curb. Without those, the cold would be intolerable. There’s a snot-sicle on my nose because it's sticking out of the pile. Otherwise, I'm comfortable enough, after lots of shivering and squirming around to cover cold parts, and tensing up at faraway traffic sounds, expecting someone to knock on the window. Trying to rest with no privacy makes you nervous, but after a few days of bad sleep, even a nap can be refreshing.

I’m startled awake by a car door slamming outside. Before I can move, a painful light blasts through the frosty, fogged-up windows and my sleepy eyelids. Two female cops are aiming flashlights in the window and staring at me like I'm a neon-colored turd. Dammit, I should have parked near other cars. I stumble outside feeling groggy and fucked up, and mumble something about getting kicked out.

The girl cops look even younger than me, more like hall monitors than public protectors with badges and guns. They act like immature assholes, too. After a bunch of nasty questions, they can’t find anything wrong, so they let me go. As they leave, they mock my tired mumbling as if I were stupid or on drugs. It’s very fucking mean. It’s also counterproductive, like when a mother with seven kids slaps them all because one shit on the rug.

I’m not going to get any more sleep, so I find a Tim Horton's open down the road. I go in for a coffee and check the classifieds for a crappy room for rent. I'll have to pay with the last bit of overdraft protection credit on my empty bank account. I had already gone looking for welfare the day before, but I found out that New York State doesn't provide any immediate rent help, not even once. It’s discouraging. Luckily, after I leave Timmy Ho's, I find a place that takes my check, and move right in.

Being broke and sleeping in a van sounds desperate, but I only got a small sample of what can be a constant screw for people without good education, jobs, insurance, or health. I'm lucky enough to have advantages- college, energy like a caffienated roach, and the ability to make something from nothing. I get material goods without buying them, in ways most people would never consider.

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I started scavenging from dumpsters at college in Canada. I got the idea it might be a good place to look for useful things from a friend at home, a restorationist who sold trash-picked antiques to silly people for hundreds. In class, I met a hippie who helped run his family’s farm with crafty do-it-yourself skills, and he showed me a bunch of TVs that came out of the dumpster. Then I got a tour. I found an electric heater that worked after hooking up a loose wire, perfect for the drafty school studio. After that, the dumpster was a regular stop between classes. When I found hundreds of photography portfolios from 1980, I set them up as a spontaneous exhibit around the school. There were also books, furniture, electronics, and much more. As a teacher explained, sometimes the school dumped good stuff and replaced it, just to keep spending money so they would get the same budget next year.

After I graduated, Bush was in, and there were no jobs left in my field except those that paid in rupees. So I hooked up with my friend and helped get his TV show on cable, on a budget scraped out of the couch. It was pretty cool in that he had supportive parents and a big farm. He wrangled free studio space in an empty office, and the crew moved in, forming a sort of commune. I slept in a concrete furnace room, and a warehouse closet with a few sheets of drywall separating it from the forklifts. Dumpsters provided many useful things to help us keep working for free. I read The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving by John Hoffman, and learned an amazing fact: edible groceries can be found in dumpsters, in amounts that could feed a TV crew.

Alas, the show didn't get picked up. For lack of anywhere better to go, I ended up in Buffalo with a relative. (Let's skip the part about getting kicked out of Canada as an illegal immigrant.) It didn't work very well, so I got the van and left.

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8 months since then, another winter is coming, and I’m newly relocated from the first place I had in a rooming house. Now I have a real apartment. It’s not a mansion, but it’s pretty cool—you don’t get panhandled on the way to the kitchen. The place needs some furnishings. It's garbage night, and I'm out cruising curbs on a bike, picking through trash piles with a flashlight, hoping to find something good. Heat is going to cost a lot this winter, so I want window drapes to keep out the cold air. The curbs are generous tonight. Someone threw out 3 sets in good condition in a plastic case. They’re Martha Stewart collection. It’s extra nice to recycle the products of deprived sweatshop workers and not support Wal-mart. I hope someone leaves behind 8 more sets to cover the rest of the windows. It’s a big request from the garbage gods, but on trash night it's rare not to find something really useful like that.

The trash has already provided window blinds for my place. There's also couches, chairs, dressers, tables, lamps, rugs, blankets, microwaves, pots & pans, appliances, electronics, TVs, computers, phones, tools, hardware, books, DVDs, and many more things, found in useful shape or even brand new. The fridge is stuffed with bread, produce, and other perishables found unsold, maybe past the sell-by date, but not the use-by date. There’s plenty of food in sealed boxes, bags, and cans too. The walls are lined with a vanload of modular metal shelving from the dumpster of a store that shut down, and the shelves hold $15,000 worth of goods being sold for self-employment (some found, most bought used to turn around on the internet.)

Hanging by the door is a jacket used for a blanket in the van last winter, which looks nice after a cleaning. Then there's a few pairs of steel-toe boots, recovered from the trash in great shape, except the store slashed them to make sure they were wasted (bastards). They're sewn up and fit great. Boots come in handy for avoiding broken glass in dumpsters. Even my jeans and shirts came from the trash—nice ones, too. Me, I like this stuff. It shows how much stupid waste there is in this country, and how the work of recovering it can pay off.

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Scavengers benefit from their finds in different ways. Most often, they save money on things that would otherwise be bought. It’s awful nice to erase your grocery bill. Fact: the book Grocery Revolution says that almost a penny of every dollar in yearly U.S. packaged goods sales is lost on products that can’t be sold after handling mistakes. (That might mean a stained label, a dented can, or a bulk unit where one package is broken but the rest aren’t.) That’s a potential $2.5 billion of food in American dumpsters, and it doesn’t even account for the hyper-cautious expiration dates they put on everything from day-old bread to bottled water (not because they care, but to increase disposal so they can sell more).

Dumpster groceries might sound gross, but I feel safer eating food that’s factory-sealed by happy robots than restaurant food touched by filthy humans. As a teenage wage slave at Der Burgher Fuhrer, I got minor intestinal plagues from their food almost every week. Years after going on a vegetarian dumpster diet, that’s a thing of the past.

It can be pretty tough to make hard cash from trash, but I did once find a $10 bag of quarters. I hear that a great cash source is “scrapping”- selling junk metal to scrapyards, especially copper. Even cutting cords off old appliances for the copper wire can make lots of money. Ebay is also a lucrative way to sell. My restorationist friend made well over a hundred just from an old wood door from the curb outside an architecturally important house. My biggest legally cash-convertible find was worth nearly $1,000. A net connection, a credit card, lots of storage, and a roomy vehicle are helpful for this type of endeavor.

I often curb cruise on a bike, because it’s great for weaving around in dense neighborhoods. It’s free and healthy, too. On trash night, I bike for a few hours using a big army backpack and trash bags, and carry small things home, fanning out from there. Large items are marked by address and picked up by van. I don't find too much wealthy people's trash here, but Buffalo sure is good for the trash of people who moved out.

Legally, scavenging could be a grey area, but garbage is abandoned property, and cops don’t need a search warrant to look in there. Shredding documents is the answer to identity theft. Some people might get mad about trespassing, but they can go jump in a compactor, because recycling is the right thing to do.

Property may not be theft, but guarded garbage is. I like how scavenging instead of buying undermines profit for people who waste what other people can use. Sharing excess is good. It’s not for everybody, nor could it last forever, but as long as rampant, unmitigated capitalism shows no signs of abating and poor people get screwed harder and more forcefully, the more scavenging the better. Doesn’t everybody like getting something for nothing?

I love the social behavior of scavenging. It can be intense and obsessive. It helps you survive with serendipity and ingenuity, instead of conforming to a pre-planned economic mold. Shopping is for drones—humans evolved by hunting and gathering. It sharpens your mind and makes you creative. Many artists do it. In Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, author Susan Strasser writes about "Bricolage," an age-old skill for cobbling together odds and ends to fit your needs. You might have a rag-bag or a scrap heap, patch clothes, cook from scratch, repair your own house and car, and make your own bike. It helps you learn how things work, instead of how much they cost. Lots of things get thrown out because they just need a minute of work, like wiring on a new plug, or just replacing a fuse.

I used to consider feigning Tourette's syndrome while taking orders at Der Burgher Fuhrer, just to rile people up. It’s a stupid prank, but that kind of attitude can make it fun to trash-pick. People are ashamed to look at you, or they make fun of you. Then you sell and feed them stuff from their own garbage, and they enjoy it in ignorance. An even better revenge is to share with your friends, and exist without working for a boss while other people kiss ass from 9 to 5. Yes, garbage people can be eccentric. They can be crazy. The Manson Family existed on dumpster food. Charlie sang a song that went like this: "Garbage dump, my little garbage dump, I could feed the world with my garbage dump..." On another extreme, Madonna dumpster-dived on her way to being a zillionaire. It’s not just a survival skill; it’s an evolutionary advantage. We garbage people are hardy like roaches, and often smarter. When the oil runs out, terrorists drop the bomb, Antarctica melts, and the robots take over, we’re going to outlast everybody.