Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging

2. Street Life

As suggested in the previous chapter, the situations and experiences recorded in this chapter emerged out of something closer to survival than to traditional social research. Resigned from a tenured professorship, Xoating day to day without job, book contract, or professorial prospects, I was outside the academic orbit— and moreover not at all certain that I planned to return to it. In part because of this, I was also not at all sure that my life as an urban scrounger would lead to some future project of writing about that life; mostly I recorded Weld notes on the chance that it might, and out of habit as a longtime Weld researcher. In this ambiguous context I also made a conscious decision, and one unusual for someone trained in Weld research: I would not seek out nor stage interviews with those I met in the streets, instead allowing interactions and conversations to emerge as they might or might not. In fact, since my existence was as much that of scrounger as researcher, I often actively avoided interactions with others. Sometimes this seemed necessary for physical survival, as I ducked what I Street Life 31 Street Life c e ce c e c e c e 2 perceived to be dangerous situations or threatening individuals in back alleys or behind Dumpsters. More often this was a matter of practical survival. Living oV what I scrounged, I couldn’t aVord to be run oV by an angry shopkeeper whom I had alerted to my presence, or ticketed by a vigilant police oYcer. In this sense, eYcient scrounging often made for ineYcient social research—and so what follows is as much autoethnography as a conventional ethnography of others. The following accounts also take shape more often than not as vignettes, as a series of moments and situations. This, it seems to me, is a matter of homology, an attempt to write in a way that keeps faith with the subject matter and my experiences of it. Riding the city’s streets and alleys alone day after day, intersecting on occasion with other scroungers and scrap haulers, the empire of scrounge unfolded for me as an itinerancy of unexpected arrivals at alley Dumpsters, chance encounters with homeowners, and ephemeral situations of one sort or another. To the extent that the empire was organized at all, this was how it was organized—as a meandering series of scattered situations. There were, it’s true, ongoing institutions and organizations: the scrap yards, for example, or a city-sponsored bottles-for-cash campaign. But for me and other urban scroungers, I found, even these were made up mostly of comings and goings—a pickup truck load of scrap traded for cash, a shopping cart unloaded and left behind. In all of this, the archaeology of everyday life became something more than metaphor. Certainly I intended in my urban wanderings to unearth the meaning of waste and reclamation, to expose and reassemble the epistemic frameworks and buried assumptions that constituted the empire of scrounge. Yet doing so required the traditional on-the-ground methods of archaeology: careful and intentional digging amid the detritus of the existing order. As suggested in the previous chapter, and as explicated in this and following chapters, the two were not unrelated. Grounded theories of urban scrounging emerged out of the practical necessity of sorting among the city’s trash, and in more than one case, speciWcities of usable information—books and magazines and manuals that oVered insights into material culture and its contradictions—were pulled from the trash piles as well. Each day for eight months, and most every day in the two years that followed, I scoured the city in this way with a vigor born both of practical necessity and intellectual interest. As a result I uncovered, hauled home, and cataloged an astounding amount of cast-oV material—and as a result, many of the following accounts are themselves saturated with an astounding, though I hope not annoying, amount of detail in their description of objects lost and found. Rest assured that I have omitted far more than I’ve included; yet I’ve included as much as I have because, again, this inclusion keeps faith with the subject at hand. The amount of the city’s daily material waste, I 32 Street Life discovered, was overwhelming—and therefore profoundly revealing—in its sheer size and scope. For every object...