Garbage Day

Or, Who Will Help Me Eat This Bread?

My boyfriend has suggested I go to therapy twice since we started dating but what he doesn’t know is that not going is better for me. Inevitably there would come a day when I bring up this afternoon I had in August where my spirit was irreparably broken and then I would hear from a highly trained mental health expert whose job it is to help me orient my wills and ways to the wills and ways of the world that that’s too bad so sad here’s how we live with it, and it would confirm once and for all that the world is ending. Not only that, but no one cares.

I’ve been through therapy several times. I say “through” as if I’ve graduated from therapy, perhaps because I feel that I have, despite what my boyfriend has said; many more times, he’s remarked how emotionally competent I am—even his therapist has said so!—but that’s not the point. The point is that we need to accept breakups and breakdowns and other kinds of deaths, thank you, therapy, and most of us do need help learning how/that we need to forgive our parents and others who hurt us, because, as we learn, excluding Hitler and his fellow sociopaths, people don’t, as Boy George once speculated, want to hurt you.

But then there’s this afternoon in August.

I work as an environmental sustainability rep on film and tv sets, which is a glorified way of saying I’m boots-on-the-ground overseeing waste creation and disposal to minimize carbon footprint. I set up receptacles and teach people about composting, pack up leftovers and get them donated, I gather spent batteries and retired set pieces to get e-recycled and rehomed and I sort the bins and I sort the bins with my little green gloves on I sort the bins and then I haul out the bags, I heave bags sagging with pulpy paper plates and dripping with oatmeal to a pick-up point for our vendor to collect in the middle of the night and pray people will do the right thing, with my whole body I ache for people to respect the system, honor thy waste, and I count how many generators are running today, dig deep within myself to forgive the carpenter who throws a compostable cup in the landfill bin, caterer who’s brought out a surprise store of verboten plastic utensils at second meal, confusing everyone and everything, they are busy, it is a foreign language you must teach them, over and over, and at the end of the day, my hands sterilized to dry and cracking and garnished with little cuts, I dash from setup to setup wresting the bags from their drums and lugging them to the pickup point, emptying their accompanying buckets of abandoned sludge into toilets and drainage grates, cleaning stacking cleaning stacking towing buckets bins racks lids to my van parked out of the way, past the camera trucks the lighting trucks the passenger vans and line of sight. I must be discrete. No one wants to see the trash. No one wants to think about it. No one minds when set dressing cans with their matte black exteriors and sloppy yellow spray paint chug through set wobbly-wheeled, tens of them, at least one of which I’m bound to find in a dark corner at the end of the day as I’m screaming through wrap tasks, I’m never done early enough for anyone, but my color-coded system is an eye-sore, the banana peels smell, and it is easier for them to have me fish the aluminum out later, glass cold brew jugs, bamboo bowls, they prefer I dig the banana peels out from the pit of gum and candy wrappers where they create pockets of heat in my little green gloves, it must look like magic. Black cans are shadow-colored, camouflaged, they are portals to an island in a vast blue beyond where trash sparkles upon the sea, portals to paradise.

On a very good day, I have a helper. On a very, very good day, the helper helps. Most of the time, I am lucky production let me be there at all.

On this day in August, I drove our van an hour and change to the location upstate, an hour before crew call, alone. I had asked for a helper and been denied, there was only one set and no food allowed inside, so it was just catering, craft services and holding. These were three different locations basically next to each other, I was told, and I had the van, paid for by production, who also covered gas and tolls and time spent driving, and I could hitch a ride in the pass vans, too, if I wanted, plus people will help you, there are more than enough people with not enough to do.

When I arrive at breakfast, the caterers have run out of green bags and are using black ones. Black, for landfill. I’ve been told by other reps I needn’t bother with the black bags, don’t break your back, what’s a few pounds of lost recycling and compost, production monitors nothing, but I wouldn’t do this job if I didn’t care to the point of physical pain and ego-sacrifice about the earth and my responsibility, so I start the day with my head in the sweaty black bags scooping up egg shells and fruit pulp to move into a green bag with both of my hands as the crew shuffles through the breakfast buffet, stopping to ask months into production where the coffee cups go. One grazes my face while I am sorting. As I finish, I find a pile of tied up black bags in the grass behind the catering truck, lumpy, leaking, clearly filled with food, and hide them. I’ll sort them later.

Background actors are already trickling into the holding location when I arrive, a fairly colorless although ornate manor that is further away than they said, and so are their makeup and wardrobe teams, all eating breakfast and drinking coffee and tracking in any matter of trash, styrofoam, hangers, mascara wands, tiny yogurt tubs and mini Poland Springs. One-sip water bottles. What greater offense is there. There are so many uneaten halves of breakfast sandwiches smashed into aluminum foil balls back in the compostable clamshells they came in, two Tapatio packets each, untampered, on the side. I shake the eggs out of their foil and into the compost, inspect the aluminum, recycle if clean. The hot sauce goes two-by-two into my pockets until I can’t fit anymore. Toward the bottom of the bin rests a full-sized bottle of water, still sealed, like a dumbbell. It takes fifteen seconds to drain. Pure, clean drinking water, dead weight into the liquid bucket, before the day has even begun. I pray the water will go on to dance down a wild river in Colorado in its next life and curse the onlookers. May their esophagi shrivel. I introduce myself to the manager of the building who is lively and distractible and floored by my job, how commendable, how necessary. She hands me her business card and casts her eyes down as she asks about getting her daughter onto set, she’s in film school, y’see, never seen how it works, and I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m not that important.

I can’t park in the driveway of the shooting location, which is further from holding than they said it was, to set up, namely because I’m not needed there at all. No food allowed. There’s a neighboring grass-covered lot where everyone’s personal cars are parked, as well as crafty and the honey wagons, so I should tend to that first and if I insist carry however many bins and bags and buckets I think we need to outside areas only, knock yourself out. The parking PA is a real human being and lets me take the first spot as I pull in when I explain what I’ve come to do. I scan crafty whose truck is parked in what would be a perfectly lovely campsite, the three-stream rack we gave them set up just outside, landfill recycling compost, but the bags are mixed up, black green clear. I don’t have time to sort before servicing set but I am, still, convinced that living by example is effective, and if people see a mess of plastic cups with the wavy green stripe on the side in the compost bin, they, too, will put their plastic cup with the wavy green stripe on the side in the compost bin. It will save me more work later. It will lead to a feeling of satisfaction among all who choose correctly and snowball into a desire to feel that feeling all the time, at home even, and when I tell them New York now mandates composting, actually, and even supplies you with the brown bin, they will complete the 15-second online form and become local heroes with a global influence.

Somehow, I’ve been here almost two hours already. I ask the soft-smiled parking PA if he can order me breakfast from catering, I’m only part time here, I don’t know anybody and they’re going to stop serving soon, and how sweetly he hops to, he’s on the horn, veggie breakfast burrito with hot sauce inside, please, for my friend Mitzi, and then he says to hurry over, they’re moving onto lunch prep in twenty minutes. Fantastic. I’ll run a setup to the house they’re shooting in next door and be on my way. No food allowed, right? No big deal?

The stretch between driveways is long and inclined and cordoned off to make space for cars to pass, leaving foot travelers the fat pebbled drain strip every other step. I arrive at the foot of the driveway to what is indisputably a mansion and sidle past truck after truck, dude after chronic-limped dude, my metal rack clanging against arched plastic lid clomping against mylar bag of bag rolls swooshing against my thigh, a one-man band, to find black brute bins in every open space, bulging black bags clogging one half of a four-car garage. Around the back is a sprawling yard with a fire pit and swimming pool and tables everywhere someone might settle littered with Starbucks cups and soggy call sheets. I sort the one mixed bag in the highest traffic area until it looks evident, this is how we do things here, and take pictures of everything else. I need a burrito.

The breakfast truck is gone. The black bags I hid have moved and multiplied. No one’s around to talk to, so I look up my new parking PA friend on the call sheet, he will help me. But his number’s not there. I text a unit PA I was put into a thread with the last time I worked on this show, we work in tandem with them, I move their black bins and they pretend not to notice, and he says the truck has gone to holding, which, on the circuit I’m on, is my next stop anyway, so I go. Ten minutes left straight straight left right right curve left park, I’m in the big room where the background PAs are now set up at their big table, laptops open and blocking their mouths. “Hey, do you know anything about breakfast?” I see the girl has an open clamshell container next to her with hints of having just eaten on it. “Breakfast ended.” “Right, I know, but I didn’t have time to eat so I called it in, or the parking PA called it in, and when I went the food truck was gone so I came here, I think it moved here?” She thought with her upper lip, it seemed, her right upper lip curled up and flared her little nostril, just barely, nothing on her face shifting but the top edge of her upper lip, like she was like, gross, like she was grossed out. “Do you know where it is?” … “The unit PA said the truck was here. Have you seen it?” … I looked at her clamshell. Back at her. Her eyes changed while I was looking away. Fuck off, they said. Can’t you see I’m busy and important at my desk? First thing you see when you enter the room? Lord of the extras? I have a walkie. Hah. Hahahahaha. It’s sitting just here, so close to my hand. All I have to do is pick it up and you could have your burrito. But I am on this side of the desk. You are on that side. Goodbye.

This is a photo from the job from hell. One week on Long Island during a February snowstorm, to and from Brooklyn in an electric van whose battery got sapped in the cold. No plug-in on set, I had to send my helper to a charging station to sit in the van for 6+ hours so we could get home at the end of the night while I worked alone, and back in New York, we would charge it again to drive the next day. I lost my late dad’s scarf in this restaurant. When I called later that day, no one had found it.

I cry as soon as I step outside. The unit PA who said the catering truck was here is parked conveniently next to my car, feet on his dash, phone in his face. I’ll let him think I have a blood sugar issue, but how many hours is five hours, really, to wake up and go five hours without eating, big deal, people are eating crickets somewhere, crickets for breakfast lunch and dinner, you’ll find your burrito, try over there, he says, behind the building, and I do. I thank him and walk to the rear of the building where, yes, it’s the catering truck. I’m not crying anymore and I smile, ask about my burrito. I become very specific when I have to, blah-blah-blah called it in, I went to blah and then came here and blah and now blah. “Sorry, no burrito.” I push only as hard as I feel I can knowing it’s a burrito and the privilege I have to demand a burrito over a walkie talkie I didn’t even have to use, with the hot sauce inside, it’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed. I cry again as I walk back to my car and don’t let the unit PA, still scrolling, see my face. I just let him hear me.

What’m I gonna do. There’s a burrito out there waiting for me, hot sauce on the inside, no one else can eat it. Or it could be thrown away, in a garbage can somewhere, and it would be my fault. I was late. I jammed the system. I know how these things run, efficiency the priority, a sad sodden clamshell isn’t going to make it. No one knows who “Mitzi” is. They know me as the garbage Nazi, tattle-tale, they know my butt in the air, bent over trash, slime in my hair. I want to empty an entire landfill into this parking lot. No one escapes.

The unit PA stops scrolling to call my parking PA friend for me. “I’m glad you called,” he says, “I didn’t have your number.” My burrito is safe. A locations PA has it, he’s on firewatch at basecamp, where breakfast was. But not parked where breakfast was, he’s off to the side, furthest from the hospital. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how I will find him and I doubt that I will, but I know I must go and just hope.

I drive around the entire boundary of the parking lot like I’m casing the cars for quick money. When I pass the former site of the breakfast truck, now just a constellation of oil spots and scrambled eggs, I start to panic. There’s only one row of cars left where my burrito might be, and I’m no fool. No one’s job here is to take care of me. I don’t have a boss. I don’t have a team. I am the head of a department and they won’t even give me a walkie. We are a tax break, a pawn in a greenwashing scheme.

On my way out, I see two men leaning against a rusty sedan, a deflated clamshell on the roof. I roll down my window and yell “hi.” “Mitzi!” he chirps, like he knows me. He is a body on the verge of a smile, large and round but light, and he's relieved I’ve come, I must be hungry. I’m confused. Why does he care about me? I struggle to speak beyond thank you, which comes out heavily, seemingly dropping to the ground as it leaves my mouth, and then I drive with my clammy little breakfast box to the closest non-parking spot out of view of my locations PA hero, overlooking an overmown field.

The burrito is tepid and missing its hot sauce, but I am rich in Tapatio. I blanket every bite until I can’t see the food and am full before I even finish half of it. I feel guilty sitting here, eating, so far away from everywhere trash is being created. Through the windshield I see the store of black bags catering left behind and am grateful for the hour I will get to spend with them, alone, invisible, a gargoyle rescuing the casualties of breakfast from eternity in a landfill.

Twelve XL black bags become three, five more to compost, three to recycle. No one here to see it, but it will be in the final report: on this day, hundreds of pounds of trash diverted. My hips ache from flexing, nail beds throb from rending staples from produce boxes, but the sun is dressing my shoulders and from a low enough angle the field seems to explode with grass and is happy to drink up the undrunk water and coffee.

How it rains only on the hill of the mansion, I don’t know, but it does. As I’m going through everything I’ve missed, the sky opens and sheets of water beat down on us, making the stones sing. Idle crew hands slip into their cars and huddle in the garage, in the little space that remains between prop staging and so many bags of garbage, as I skulk between setups with a recycling bag tied to my head, a trash babushka. I have to stop upon seeing the swimming pool, how the rain brings it to life, the glut of water on water is so satisfying I want to cry.

I have this problem, and I think many people have this problem, where I forget about my body. I disassociate. My last therapist described me as a piece of toast with the butter all lumped in one small corner, see, all of your energy is in one place but you need to spread it, and she mimes this as she does it, a soft pat of butter on a broad piece of toast, you need to spread it across the whole thing, that’s a balanced piece of toast. Your brain is not the totality of you. I get in this mode where I hold my body against me, almost, like my kinks and injuries are a foreign agent, a curse. Getting rid of them is like an exorcism then, get the evil out, wrench it, force it out, shame it into submission. I wonder if it has much to do with growing up an athlete, a gymnast, my body both value and instrument, but I hear a lot of people talk this way. They’re mad at their bodies all the time. There’s something about this work though. I need my body, sure, to a point it is about my physical capacity, but it’s not about my body. It is about something humongous, unfathomably vital and expansive, and it is as close to a religious act as I have. Sublimity is in the trees for me, mighty power in a lake, the legs of a cricket. The imperative of the work is an energy source and I am physically inexhaustible. The men like to point out my brawn and needle my naivety but I am called, of course I serve. It’s the way they look at me, like I’m a Girl Scout, that hurts so much. Nothing I’m doing is special. I eat from the earth and drink its air and water, same as you. Why don’t you want to protect that? Why don’t we all worship this god?

At crafty, there is now a man behind a long table holding a machete. He’s scalping coconuts and doling them out with bamboo straws, scraping the organic detritus into a blue bin with a black bag in it. Without asking, I set to changing out the bag, which weighs as much as twelve mature coconuts, because that is what’s inside. The internet tells me it’s about 60 pounds, and by the end of the day, there are seven of these bags. People are carrying their coconuts to set and panicking at the waste stations, which bag does it go in, and I even find some in the recycling, I can only guess because, for a moment, they functioned as a cup?

I overhear they’re switching to French hours as the coconut man grabs another batch of coconuts from his truck. French hours means we’re so far behind we won’t get a lunch break: ten hours on, and then we eat. It also means a lot of leftover food. No one ever stays for a post-wrap meal. Everyone wants to go home, eat pizza, drink beer with their pizza. Normally I would put feelers out for a taker of food donations and it might be even greater we have so much, a Thanksgiving abundance, but there’s been a clerical error on this show no one’s prioritized fixing so we’re not allowed to donate it. Full trays of pilaf and white fish, glazed carrots, baked ziti, bowls and bowls of salad and their fixings, green-bagged and hauled away. I call the manager of the neo-palatial manner where “lunch” will be knowing they have an industrial kitchen and employees, hoping she sees the direness of our situation here, and it’s an easy yes, she’ll take it all. Just leave it in the fridge. Hallelujah.

As soon as we wrap, which happens abruptly, always, because I don’t have a walkie and no one tells me anything, the first place I go is the basement kitchen of the picture mansion, as they shot a food scene and I left the stylist a compost bin and a handful of backup bags to collect it all afterwards. I want to get it out as expeditiously as possible, as it’s been communicated to me I’m not supposed to be in there at all, but if I must, be discrete about it. When I land, there’s a black bag in my green bin overflowing with hot dogs. The stylist is nowhere to be seen, and someone I’ve never met lets me know she is distraught over the mess. As am I, but I get the feeling she was not trying to bond with me just then. I commandeer a black bin, the magic portal type, and line it with a compost bag to heap up the hot dogs, under which are soft pretzels and ketchup-drenched fries, La Croix cans smeared with mustard, articles of clothing. It is a mystery where my compost bags even went, not one has been used.

My bulging meat bags seem to scrape everyone on the way out and I don’t say I’m sorry, they don’t notice, they are yelling at their teammates, working together, camaraderie in motion, and they made no way for me. I am an army of one. I surface and march to my pickup point, unload the bags and take stock. Help is needed. I need help. It’s the kind of overwhelm of playing a survival game when you’re attacking a creature and more appear out of the dark, and you know, if this one doesn’t kill you, the next one will, or the next one, and as you die, still, more materialize, sniffing the air for you. I am playing an unwinnable game. An unwinnable game that is unfortunately, very unfortunately, for everyone, tied to the survival of our entire species. I have interacted, if even only by looking, with every person here, and this is how much waste we have created. Waste that doesn’t just disappear. Waste that would join every diaper your mom pasted to your butt when you were a baby, if I didn’t rend the bags apart and cull.

And we know better. We have all been briefed. On every call sheet, THIS IS A GREEN SET, so bring your reusables, talk to your eco rep, three colors three streams. We have vetted the waste haulers, we pay a lot for our waste haulers, and we promise, stop trying to teach me something about The World Today, about government lies, about what’s one bottle in the dumpster, when here, right here, THIS IS THE MESS WE HAVE MADE. This is how we treat opportunity.

It has stopped raining, the air is chill and my body is a steam-powered train. Second meal came out while I was bobbing for hot dogs downstairs so there’s a fresh coat of soupy pasta in every open bin, coconuts at the bottom. As the trucks are gearing up to leave only the set dressers are still at work, stripping the ram board from the walls and floors of the house. They will reuse it, I’m told, and I’m grateful, but here’s the other unit PA, he says the bags have to go there, throwing his pointer finger toward the base of the driveway. The owners of the house don’t want it on their property. I have sat down only to drive today, I think, as he sets up a camping chair on the perimeter of the house, where he will sit and wait for everyone to finish working so he may lock up the house. My feet feel like rocks as they crunch the gravel driveway, up and down, up and down, past idling trucks and their idle drivers, fist-bumping grips and a cadre of black shirts drinking beer. I am a young woman, I think, and relatively small, dog-tired, grimaced, and not one will help me sow the wheat? Does no one know what it takes to bake bread?

This is, of course, a reference to The Little Red Hen, a nursery classic I read repeatedly as a child but have only come to understand as an adult. I remember the adults around me cautioning that it should be taken with a grain of salt, of course you should share, don’t be like the hen. I don’t know. If all the dogs and pigs and cows of the world sit on their ass while the little red hens work their feathers off to delead the water and unpoison the fields so we don’t get lethally high on our own supply, they should run the fucking world. Free massages for life.

But maybe people don’t want to eat bread. Maybe I don’t understand. Maybe people really do prefer plastic and car exhaust.

I carry all the bags down myself, tidy the catering pile, and when the unit PA tells me they, too, need to move to the street, I tell him I am physically incapable. I know I have put him in a pinch, he is in charge of erasing the evidence for the homeowners, but he gives in easily, he sees how hard I’ve been working. I almost cry (again, I know) realizing there is one person looking out for me—more than one, in fact, as there’s the one who ordered me food, and the one who held onto it for me. The unit PA even gets a beautiful photo of my piles when I tell him I’ve forgotten, we need them for our files and for the vendors to know where to find it in the middle of the night, and once I’ve cleaned up holding, he even carries two bags out for me to load into my van and convey to a third pickup point, my last stop. On my way out, I see him in the front seat of his car eating tacos from a takeout bag, which makes me laugh. It’s kind of cute, but he also, not an hour ago, watched me pack up ten trays of untouched food to leave in a commercial refrigerator for employees who’d all gone home. I text him a thanks from the road and then call my boyfriend, hanging up only when I realize that what I need is to listen to music really loud, and howl along to it.

The two times therapy’s come up, I’ve recognized the source of the turmoil is to be found in this day, this final straw, wit’s end series of small injustices. First-hand evidence that the larger world will not give up their due or disrupt their little joys to serve this cause. They will throw food into the trash while I am in it. They will buy cheap shit on Amazon and call it cute and eat hamburgers until every last cow has nowhere to go home to. I cannot feel the news anymore, which has always been too large to swallow, but could, at one time, be broken off into smaller pieces, community-sized. At last I am convinced I am wasting my time.

I wonder about my tears though. My tears are enraged and devastated, tears of terror, the loneliest heartbreak, betrayal. That they’re there at all tells me at least one person still cares though, even if it’s just me, and very nearby, a person who cares very much about that person. A person who has all but given up meat, in fact. He is a very good helper indeed, even on very bad days. And then there’s you, who’s with me at the end of this story, who has read the words “the end” and everything that led to it, but they’re just words for now, it’s just an idea. There is wheat yet to plant. Lucky us.