Seven Red

Today we were invited over to the next door neighbors yard, where they were having a barbecue, cooking up skirt steak and chicken, and heating up corn tortillas on the grill. It was an interesting experience to say the least, largely because they don’t speak all that much English, and we don’t speak any Spanish beyond what I remember from 7th and 8th grade, and whatever I managed to pick up growing up in Queens (which, given the segregation prevalent at that time, is not all that much). My English is not so very, he kept saying. He referred to Ellie as “your son,” and each time his wife, who speaks less English than he does, would say “daughter,” and he’d say “Oh yeah! Daughter!” Hio, hia. One can see why. Nevertheless, we managed to get on reasonably well, and the carne asada was very good. We all drank beer.

The guy next door is one of those guys who drive around collecting steel and other metal that people throw out – basically a scrap metal operation. He loads up a beat up old pick-up truck that’s been rigged with some additional fencing and a few cross bars and drives the alleys (for New York people, the north side of Chicago, unlike most places in New York, has back alleys on most blocks where the garages are, and where you put your garbage). He then comes back and sections out the daily haul. It’s amazing, really: refrigerators, exercise machines, microwaves, barbells, all manner of tools and vices and scaffolding, air conditioners, fans, and humidity machines, shelving units, lamps, faucet hardware, frames, futon bases, whatever – metal piled up in big chunks, and then he spends some afternoons back there with a hammer and some tools chipping out the steel and metal bits from the smaller or more seemingly plastic trash, like the inner frame of a computer case and similar small things that you really have to work on to get some salvageable metal out of. There are hundreds of guys who do this, mostly recent immigrants from Mexico and various Central American countries. At the old place, I used to see them come on up the alley because that’s where I smoked. They’d stop, inspect various garbage areas, pull what they could sell, and move on. I have a sense of what this guy’s day is like. About a month ago, we had Work Colleague over for dinner, and my neighbor came back with his truck being towed; we helped him push it back into his driveway, no small task given the fact that the driveway opens on to a fairly narrow alley. I was glad Work Colleague could speak Spanish, or that little operation wouldn’t have run so smoothly, I suspect. And that truck’s his whole livelihood. He had it up and running again in two days. So, this guy, my neighbor, basically sweeps up shitloads of metal that people have put to trash, collects it, pulls the scrap from it, all day driving the alleys and lifting heavy shit, then coming back and banging it with hammers: the underground economy next door. Busting his hump, and probably helping the environment in the process, turning bourgeois detritus into carne asada, and then offering some to us.

Comments RSS |