Sports Calendar

As for books, I salvage hundreds. My favourite is a first edition of The American Language by H. L. Mencken, scrounged from a junk pile in front of a mansion. He describes a scavenger as “a longshoreman who eats the sailors’ leavings aboard ship”, and Scrounging as a synonym for liberating, a term used by Allied troops in the Second World War as a synonym — or ironic euphemism? — for looting.

Out on a bicycle ride, I can’t resist returning to a kerbside junk heap I worked the previous day; I liked the booze, the coffee-maker and the jewellery that I found. The return trip turns out to be worthwhile. Fifteen minutes in, I’ve already assembled a clock radio, an ornate silver jar, video films (some still sealed in their boxes) and expensive hardcover books, including Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold and Beckett’s Endgame.

Then, sorting through rubbish bags, I’m aware of a car approaching. It rolls into the kerb, its front left wheel bouncing off it. Leaning her head out of the window is a tanned, middle-aged, working-class Texas woman, asking me with a slur: “Shit, are they home?”

“Not that I can tell,” I answer, having already checked, as usual, for any signs of occupation or annoyance in and around the house. So the woman gets out, as does her daughter, maybe 20, pregnant, in a white gauze top and shorts, not nearly as tanned or thin — or drunk — as her mum.

Both jump right in, opening bags, talking to each other and to me. Wanting to be friendly, and with the limited space on my bike already taken, I start handing them items as I pull them out of bags. Each time the mother offers an earnest “Thanks”.

At one point I tip some make-up out of a trash bag, and she’s overjoyed. “F***ing Lancôme!” she yells. I ask if they’re looking for anything else. “Just the good stuff,” the mum tells me, though later she asks if I’m finding any “kids’ stuff”. I hand her some children’s audiotapes. L ater the daughter picks something up and asks her mum: “You want this?” “Yeah, yeah, anything new,” she replies.

Later the mum asks me: “You live around here?” “Yeah, down across the boulevard, where it’s not so nice,” I tell her, laughing. “Well,” she says, “they sure throw out some good stuff in this neighbourhood.”

As I prepare to leave, she eases over to me. “Shit, there’s some paperhangin’ stuff in there . . . cheques and stuff,” she says, using the slang phrase for passing hot cheques. I tell her I found some unsigned cheques the other day: two sets in two rubbish piles, some signed and made out to the local country club. Now that was serious paperhangin’ stuff.

As I sort through a kerbside rubbish pile, I find useful items — brass knobs, a coat hook, anchor bolts, aluminium scrap, a wallet (empty) — but I’m wary. The wasteground sports multiple “No Trespassing” signs, and a hand-lettered sign warning people away from a dilapidated garage.

A guy comes out of the old garage, carrying a rifle. “How ya doin’?” I ask. To my relief, he answers with a friendly “Good”. Apparently he’s just moving the rifle as part of a clean-out of the garage. “OK if I look through this stuff?” I ask. “Sure,” he says, then, walking toward me, the rifle tucked under his arm, he adds: “Just try not to scatter it all around.”

“No problem,” I assure him. “If I’m gonna look through stuff, I try to leave it neater than I found it.” I try to follow the self-imposed protocol by cleaning up rubbish piles as I extract items, hoping to leave some sense of informal neighbourhood solidarity.

Every six weeks or so, when I’ve scrounged enough aluminium, copper and brass, I take it to the scrap dealer. The scrapyards make up their own urban margin, many of them clustering in one deteriorated section of town, flanked by cheap motels and car-repair shops, and backed by rail tracks. Ten hours a day, six days a week, the yards buzz and clang with activity as homeless scroungers bring shopping trolleys full of aluminium cans. Independent scrappers arrive with copper and steel piled in dilapidated pick-ups, and the yards’ forklifts pile the junk into mountains of sorted scrap metal.