Hauling Secrets

What do haulers do when our trucks break down?

Haul them to the scrapyard with another truck, of course.

Usually having to use elevators is a pain for a hauler. Sure, they make things easier, but they also slow things down. But the other day was different. Handyman and I were entrusted with unsupervised operation of the oldest working elevator in the state. You know, the kind you can get to stop between floors. I took this video with my cell phone, to share the experience with you, Dear Readers:

[Apologies for the recent lack of posts - I got really busy with other work and have gone down to one day a week of hauling.  It’ll pick back up again soon, though.]

I often find myself backing the truck into the MRF and stepping out into what we call “MRF sludge”. It’s the leachate that the city trucks empty out onto the floor after they’ve emptied their trucks of residential trash. The collective drippings of thirty to forty compacted cubic yards of municipal solid waste. And it gets slippery.

The other day I spied this sad teddy bear lying in a pool of MRF sludge:

And I had to take a picture after I almost slipped and fell into this bag filled with deer carcass:

To make it as a hauler, you have to be able to just ignore what’s always being ground into your shoes/gloves/soul.  And some people just can’t.

[This post is an update to demolishing a dying woman’s piano. If you haven’t already read that, I suggest you follow the link and do so first.]

When I parked the truck at the end of the day we demolished the dying woman’s piano, I just couldn’t get the cute little lady out of my head. How sad she was to see her piano go to waste. So I took another look in the back of the truck to see if maybe there were some salvageable pieces. There were. So I carried them home, got out some screws and wood glue, and fashioned this little table:

A hectic schedule made me wait almost exactly two weeks, so when I finally drove back to the lady’s apartment, with the table I made from her piano in the back of my pickup, I wasn’t sure if she’d still be there. The first thing I noticed was that her balcony was still full of potted plants. A good sign. But her name was no longer on the mail slot. I buzzed up, hoping she was still alive.

After a long minute I saw a figure peeping out at me from the balcony. It was her. I called up, awkwardly, “Remember, I hauled away your piano a couple weeks ago…Well I found a way to recycle some of it….” She said of course she remembered, that she’d be down in a minute.

As soon as she saw the table, before I could lift it down, she scrambled up into the bed of my truck to inspect the workmanship and generally fondle it. I remember thinking how limber she seemed, for someone who’s supposed to be so near death.

It turned out, I soon discovered, that she actually had up to a few months to live, and that she had only recently been told this by the doctors when we removed the piano. And by then, when I returned with the table, she had told her family. “Wait till I tell my family about this,” she said. She kept looking at me and saying “Oh…” the way a grandparent does right before they grab a baby’s cheek. Until finally she broke down and started crying. We had one more overlong hug. I didn’t know what to say, but she pretty much summed it up:

“This is the sweetest send-off,” she said.

I wasn’t really trying to do something “sweet” per se. I didn’t know what I was doing there, but I felt compelled to do it. Maybe I felt guilty about wasting the thing. Or demolishing it right on the other side of her apartment door. I know it’s sick, but maybe part of me wanted proof, two weeks later, that she was actually dying. I don’t know.

When she was done thanking me, I said goodbye pretty quickly and pulled away in my truck. It was awkward for both of us. I felt like I already overstepped some boundary, and I didn’t want to linger.

Again, I’m not that good at telling stories because I try too hard to relate things exactly the way they happened. And sometimes I give away the kicker right in the title. But I think all the little details are important, and they’re what I use this blog to try to remember….

It was the Friday before last. Last day of the week for me, since I don’t work Saturdays like others. 6:30pm, almost 12 hours from a 7:15am start. Me and Handyman and Pancakes are wrapping up for the day, putting our trucks back in their parking spots and finishing up the paperwork, when an add-on comes through on my phone. (An add-on is when a client books an appointment onto our schedule for the same day when they call.) Usually we get add-ons with enough time to call client’s in advance and let them know exactly what time we’ll be arriving. But today our phones haven’t been working right, so we’re only just now getting notice of this job, which was scheduled for an appointment window of 5-7pm, the latest possible window. It’s 2 hours late when I make the call to tell the client we’ll be there shortly.

A woman answers the phone. I start to apologize for calling so late, “We’re usually better at…at….” I fumble my words. “Communicating with people?” she says for me. “Yes, communicating.” I tell her we’ll be there soon and she says not to worry, that she’ll be there waiting.

Since Handyman and Flapjack are across town parking a truck, I - at this point the solo man on today’s three-person crew - am the first to arrive to the jobsite. It’s a bi-level apartment complex. I ring the buzzer to the woman’s apartment and she lets me up. The door opens to the world’s cutest little old lady. About 5 feet tall, no more than 100 pounds, with little round glasses. As she walks me around the apartment to show me a couch and some chairs she wants removed, I notice there’s something a little strange about her, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Then, at the end of the apartment tour, she stops at a giant old upright piano. “And I was wondering if you guys could take this…” I tell her we just took a similar looking piano the week before. “Are you sure you can get this?” she asks. “I mean it’s really heavy.” As we discuss how it might be done, she repeats things like this, as if she wants to convince me we can’t take it. Like most haulers, I hate to admit there’s something we can’t handle. But this time I’m not so sure.

She tells me she tried to donate the piano, but no one will take it. I tell her that when we tried to recycle a similar old upright a week ago, our piano guy swung open the door to his shop and instantly, from some 40 feet across the parking lot, took one look at the thing and said “No way.” I could’ve lied (as many haulers do) and told her it would be recycled. But I don’t like to lie about hauling, especially to such a cute little lady.

So when Handyman and Flapjack show up, I’ve had a few minutes to size up this giant piano. It takes us all a few more minutes to muster up the courage to do it and to decide how. Meanwhile, the little old lady is pacing around the apartment, trying not to listen to us. She fumbles and fidgets more than most of our clients who are having a hard time seeing something go. At one point she even says something like “I shouldn’t be here for this” and goes and hides in another room.

We decide to take the thing out in one piece. I leave the apartment to make a call for reinforcements, but no one else on our staff is available. We’ll have to do it ourselves. When I come back, Flapjack and the little old lady are playing a duet on the piano, some sort of Chopsticks number or something. The piano is tuned perfectly and sounds great, and it’s apparent that the little old lady is a good player. As they finish what would be the lady’s last song on the piano, Handyman and I position ourselves at both ends to start the lifting. We hear the lady console herself as she walks away again, muttering “I only have two weeks left to live here anyway.” It’s cute the way she’s struggling with the situation. She’s managed to charmed all three of us, and we hate to make the old lady sad. But the job must be done.

The piano ends up being the heaviest upright I’ve ever lifted. We have to take the apartment door off just to get it out. And after a difficult job of getting it through the doorway and around a railing to the top of the stairs, we’re forced to reconsider taking it down the stairs all in one piece. For safety’s sake, demolition is the only way to go. But I know that the sounds of her piano being demolished will not be easy for the little old lady, so I go in and give her some warning. I tell her that it’s the only safe way to get the job done, and that it may be a little bit emotional for her. She says it’s okay, that she needs it done, and to go ahead.

So I leave the apartment again to get sledgehammers and crowbars from our trucks, and when I return this time, Flapjack is talking with the little old lady inside the apartment. So Handyman and I start the two-person job of putting the door back on (so at least we can close it while doing the demo work), leaving Flapjack still in there talking to the old lady. After a few minutes with the stubborn door, Flapjack joins us out in the hallway and asks us if we heard what the lady said. We didn’t. Flapjack is whispering now. “She’s dying. That lady is dying.” Apparently, we had misheard the lady earlier. What she actually said was, “I only have two weeks to live,” period. Suddenly her behavior up to this point all makes sense.

So here we are outside the doorway of a dying woman’s apartment about to demolish her beloved piano with sledgehammers and crowbars. Any courage we had mustered earlier to tackle this job has spiraled back down into our stomachs. We feel awful. But again, the job must be done.

Handyman makes the first strike. The sledgehammer drives the crowbar in between the mahogany panels. You know what it sounds like when you smack your hand across the bottom register of a piano, that eery death-thud sound? Well hitting a piano with a sledgehammer sounds like that. Demolishing a piano sounds like that for ten minutes. We can only imagine what the little old lady is feeling on the other side of the wall. That ten minutes passes like some weird dream, none of us entirely conscious of what we’re doing. When we finally get the entire thing into manageable pieces, we solemnly carry them down the stairs to the truck, like paul-bearers.

When the last piece is in the truck, we’re all eager to get back in there and see if the little old lady is alright. Flapjack grabs the clipboard and heads upstairs while Handyman and I close up the truck doors and put away the tools. Normally it wouldn’t be necessary for all three of us to go back up to a client’s apartment, but this time is different. When Handyman and I get up there, Flapjack is sitting at the kitchen table with the little old lady. Both of them have been crying. Among the details she’s revealed to Flapjack, a hauler - someone who no one expects to ever see again, is that she hasn’t even told her family yet.

We stand there awkwardly for a minute before remembering to grab the vacuum we saw in the closet to clean up the debris in the hallway. When we finish vacuuming, Flapjack is still sitting there. We watch as the lady struggles to write the check. She keeps making mistakes and has to void two of them. When she finally gets it right the third time, she hands it to Flapjack and the two of them start to get up from the table. They exchange the usual post-job niceties before giving in and embracing. Then I step forward for my turn. The little old lady squeezes me for a good twenty seconds. “This really means a lot to me,” she says. I’m crying now too. Then she lets go and it’s Handyman’s turn. All in all, the hugging and crying session takes a couple minutes. Even Handyman sheds a tear or two.

We leave, dazed. Another job done.

Two firsts this week:

1. Wonderboy and I got tipped in bacon.  The smell of it cooking while we worked was torture.  So imagine our delight when we finished and she sent us on our way with a  plateful.  It was quite possibly the  best bacon I’ve ever tasted.
2. One client recognized the previous client’s trash in the back of our truck.  She saw something familiar and said, “Oh, have you just been cleaning out the Johnson’s? They’re good friends of mine….”

Just when you start to think you’ve seen it all, this job presents you with something new.  Something small and insignificant, but still - something new.

Gus is the mechanic at the MRF. 6 foot 1, 250 pounds, white, perma-stubble, earings, a few crude navy-style tattoos. And a uniform that says ‘Gus’, though once he referred to himself as “the Gusmeister” and it stuck.

After we weigh in at the MRF, we have to pull around the building to get to the unloading area, and sometimes Gus will be there in the yard working on a loader or some other piece of equipment that’s been broken. When I’m not in a hurry, I roll down the window to talk to Gus for a minute. Sometimes he flags me down. Or sometimes when he sees I’m coming he just raises his arms to his sides as if to ask “What do you have for me today?”

See, once I asked Gus if he was looking for anything and he said a snowblower. I got a junky one the very next week and set it aside for him while I was dumping my load. Gus took it home and fixed it with his mechanical savvy, and ever since then, he always asks or holds up his hands like that. It’s the joke we can always rely on when I’m driving by in a hurry.

Once when I pulled up, Gus was standing there talking to another MRF worker, this tall skinny black man who I’ve never met, and he turned around to the man and said something like “Didn’t I hear that a monkey escaped from the zoo? They’re looking for you….” and so on. The black man laughed and muttered something back. I didn’t quite know how to react besides to shake my head in combination disbelief and disapproval. Somehow there’s something less insidious about this playful, direct form of racism, coming from a person who works with Black and Hispanic people all day, than the kind of racism that hides in academic discourse or middle-class pleasantries.

Anyway, that’s Gus for you. This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts introducing the people I come into contact with regularly while hauling. If there are any readers left here after my shameful absence, I hope you enjoy. Names have been changed, of course, so if you were ever a partner of mine, please try not to use anyone’s real name in the comments. Thanks.

I’ve dreamed about it for years.  I’ve probably joked about it with all of my hauling partners.  In our darkest hours, in the middle of the hardest jobs, we’ve all longed for it.  And finally, last week, it came…

That is a picture taken from the top of a truck loaded entirely with styrofoam.  The lightest full load I’ve ever hauled.

I didn’t say the easiest.  We had to throw off some of the wood that had been anchoring the pile of 8 x 4 foot sheets to the ground.  And I got stung in the cheek by one of the bees that had been nesting in it.  In my dreams it was always a single cube of styrofoam cut to the exact dimensions of our trucks, so I could just lift it and load the truck full in one fell swoop.  But this was close enough.  Now I can say that I’ve done it.

The other day we did a job in a woman’s basement. She was clearing it out in order to make room for the stuff from the rest of the house, which she planned to rent. Only thing is, the piles of stuff in the rest of the house were pretty much indistinguishable from the piles in the basement. All junk, broken and dusty. And even in the basement, she had some things tagged with stickers to go, right next to identically worthless things she wanted to stay.

This kind of thing happens all the time. A person’s selectivity seems arbitrary to us, since we cannot know what meanings they give to certain objects. Sometimes we come back later and end up taking everything in stages that are more comfortable for the person to deal with. But usually we just come and go wondering why the hell we took some things and not others.

Anyway, the whole time we were doing this job, a painted portrait was staring at us down in the cobwebby basement:

I can’t say who this person was, but I know for certain that the painting is a genuine attempt by an artist to paint a portrait of an actual person. Not a joke, or a playful rendering. An actual portrait. (I know because I saw other representations of this girl as an adult.)

We were a little bit afraid to ask too forcibly about which things stayed and went. The girl’s eyes followed us around the room to make sure we didn’t take anything we weren’t supposed to. And luckily for the sanity of guests in my living room, the painting itself stayed.

The other day Django and I did a job where the landlord had thrown all of a previous tenant’s possessions into the backyard. When we arrived, the new tenant came out to greet us and asked if we were there to get rid of the trash in the back. We were.

Only it wasn’t all trash. (Though you wouldn’t know it from the way it was all heaped in a pile.) There in a pile of old frames was a typewritten letter from the Air Force Headquarters of the U.S. Army, dated September 22, 1945. The main body of the letter read thusly:

In accordance with Par. 1d, letter Hq USAF CBI, file 200.6 dated 3 June 1944, subject: “War Department Awards Policy”, the following is the citation for the Bronze Star Medal awarded to 1st Lt., Roger McGregor, Signal Corp by Par. 2, General Order 355, this headquarters, dated 13 September 1945:

“For meritorious service from 1 April 1944 to 1 February 1945. This officer established and maintained a series of ground observation posts in forward areas, which were instrumental in preventing enemy aircraft from penetrating allied territory without being detected and reported to intercepting forces. To establish some of these advance air warning stations he frequently pushed deep into uncharted, enemy-held territory, and often narrowly escaped contact with Japanese patrols. His daring, stamina, and superior qualities of leadership enabled this officer to guide and direct his men in their hazardous undertakings. His accomplishments were substantial contributions to the success achieved by his organization.”

In the frame next to the letter was the actual bronze star, hanging by its little ribbon.

Then, in another frame, a handwritten letter:

Dear Mr. & Mrs. McGregor,

This is a belated reply to your reply to your letter concerning your son James. I would have liked to have writted sooner but being hospitalized, I found it difficult to do so.

I know that any poor words of mind can never lighten the burden of your sorrow. Only our Blessed Lord can do that. But in your grief you can be so very proud of James – pround to have been privileged to be the father and mother of one so close to God and his Blessed Mother.

God gave him to you knowing well that in your loving care he would grow and flower into that great Christian gentleman that he was. Now your work is over and God has reclaimed the great gift he gave you. If there is anything that will ease the ache in your hearts it will be the knowledge that God must love you both so very much to have entrusted such a one to you. May God bless you both.

I knew James for more than two years, lived in the same tent with him, slept and ate with him. As a priest I could never have asked for a better companion. He is loved not only be my but also by his men. They will never forget him.

I jumped from James’ plane often. Always immediately after him. It was a rare privilege. Many a laugh we had whether it was he who pulled me out or I who pushed him out. Now it is all over. But my fondest recollection of James is he and his battalion commander, Major Kellem, serving the last Mass we had for taking off for France. (James often served my Mass). The men often talked of it afterwards. The sight of them serving the mass, receiving Holy Communion, the last Blessing, was a sight that filled the men with a calmness and a fearlessness that comes from knowing we are in the presence of God.

James saved my life that night. I was injured on the Jump. He dragged me to safety. A few hours later he was dead. I shall always remember hi at Mass. It is the best way I know how to express my gratitude. I did not bury him, but two days later I blessed his grave.

I know you both are heartbroked at your loss. You always will be. If there is one who can and will ease the ache in your heart, it is the Mother of Sorrows. She also lost her son. May she comfort you in your grief. I shall remember you and yours in my Masses.

Sincerely in Christ,
Chaplain Mark O’Connor

I held on to these two letters for a few days, intending to post them here. Then, on my day off, I got an unexpected call from Bossman telling me he’s got someone on the phone claiming to have lost some valuable family heirlooms in a cleanout his landlord did. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but then Bossman said, passing along the pleas of the person in front of him at the office, “Something about a bronze star?” Apparently this guy was the nephew of the war hero from the letters. I knew that I had to return them.

And when I did, I recieved a third letter:

Smidge,
Thanks for your kindness and consideration! I am (was) the family historian. The barn was loaded with historical family things. My family is devastated by our loss. Your thoughtfulness will be well received by our family.
John McGregor

If I ever feel sketchy about looking through people’s discards and posting about their treasures here, I can think about this and remind myself that a little curiosity mixed with obsessive hoarding/archiving can be a good thing.