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

6. Scrunge City

161 This book’s Wrst chapter argued that urban scrounging is a social activity shaped by ambiguity and uncertainty—that scrounging, both in its historical evolution and contemporary practice, embodies dynamics of meaning constantly in motion. My months and years of daily scrounging conWrmed this. Day after day, I and other scroungers negotiated the porous boundaries between private property and discarded public resource. We read and misread transitory signs that suggested scrounging opportunities, and in doing so wandered back and forth between legality and illegality. As we dug in Dumpsters and accumulated scrap and reinvented what we found, we watched the status of everyday objects drift between wished-for possession and forgotten waste, useless castoV and usefully reconstructed tool, trash pile discard and outsider art. And rightly so, by the way—the ambiguities of urban scrounging, conWrmed in my own experience, seem essential to its very viability, and to the ongoing viability of the urban environment in which scrounging occurs. Scrunge City c e ce c e c e c e 6 Yet for all its ambiguities, I did discover in the empire of scrounge one straightforward problem, as troubling as it was pervasive. It certainly didn’t come from the scroungers themselves, in whose ragged company I mostly found moments of common purpose and outlaw community. It didn’t originate with the owners of the trash bins and Dumpsters, either. Though I certainly ran into harsh words and hard looks, I more often encountered home owners who encouraged me to take what I needed, who brought out more of their discards for my perusal, who even sorted and arranged their trash for the sake of better curbside shopping. And it didn’t come from the street cops and security guards, whom I mostly avoided, and who mostly rolled by with little more than a glance when I didn’t. No, the trouble materialized elsewhere. Everyday Economy and Social Change The trouble was there each time I opened some big black garbage bag to Wnd inside the course of a life—baby shoes, diaries, framed diplomas, fancy wedding albums, birth announcements, employee awards—now discarded with the death of a loved one, a divorce, or the sale of a house. Even more, it was there during that episode I described in the Wrst chapter, when on the street behind a big West Fort Worth mansion I found all those thick black trash bags full of baby shower party favors and baby gifts, still new in their packages. It was certainly there the day I was scrounging a trash pile nearby, close to the exclusive River Crest Country Club, and found not only a working sewing machine thrown away, but a framed poster, “Poverty Sucks,” a blonde model posed next to a Rolls Royce. It was there over and over again, with me day after day, as I found in one trash pile after another new clothes, shoes without a scuV, appliances in working order, golf clubs, televisions, antiques, jewelry. The problem I kept discovering in the streets and alleys, the trouble I kept encountering in the Dumpsters and trash piles, was unambiguous: an American culture of endless consumption and growing inequality, a global economy mass producing the culture’s material foundations, and a world of waste and indulgence in consequence. Certainly consumer culture is predicated on programmed insatiability, on the constant construction of needs and desires that can never quite be met, and so remain ready for the next new commodity. In this sense, consumer culture creates and sustains among its adherents a sort of existential vacancy—a personal void, a material longing promoted by the same corporate advertisers whose products promise its resolution. But in the same way that consumer culture empties individuals of their identity, it Wlls their trash bins and Dumpsters with its waste. We can interrogate consumer culture by viewing its advertisements, visiting its engorged shopping malls, even investigating our own closets. We can interrogate it just as well in its aftermath, peering 162 Scrunge City into its packed Dumpsters, digging in its trash piles, touring its landWlls. Thorstein Veblen saw this trouble coming a century ago. He understood it decades before I ever noticed it, understood the rhythms of what he called “conspicuous consumption”—rhythms that roll, always, toward the next new commodity. As Veblen argued famously (and, always, acerbically), consumption functions not only as a mechanism for acquiring necessary goods, but as...