ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9608300015
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
Charles Paxton loves to talk trash.
``Hey dummy!'' he shouted in mock annoyance as his driver, Walter Warner, pulled their truck forward without warning. ``Yo, where you going? I didn't ask you to move.''
Warner just grinned and backed up.
``We argue like this all the time,'' Warner said. ``It makes the day go by faster.''
So does finding stuff.
A satchel of Italian coins.
A brand new Electronic Putting Partner.
An unopened record cleaner.
Junk to the people who threw them away. But to Warner, Paxton and John Moore, the third man on the crew, these are the treasures of their otherwise tedious trade. They are the small rewards for doing one of the nastiest, stinking, thankless jobs on the planet - collecting garbage.
G-Men they like to call themselves.
And this is a day on their truck.
Truck No. 516.
In the ripening heat of late August.
Take a deep breath and enjoy.
One man's trash
Truck No. 516 and its crew are much like the 13 other residential garbage trucks and the crews that take to the streets and alleyways of Roanoke's neighborhoods every morning, five days a week, at an hour when most of us are just stepping out of a nice, clean shower.
For 18 years, Paxton, 49, has been working the back of a truck and talking trash - most of it directed toward Warner and the other drivers whom he described like this:
``Some of them are dumber than other other ones, but they're all dumb.''
Or at least they can never seem to back up or pull forward to his complete satisfaction.
``He messes with everybody,'' Warner said. ``That's just his nature.''
Besides, it's all just talk.
Paxton and Warner are friends. They have fished together and Paxton has helped Warner paint the church, Greater Life Ministries, where Warner serves as a part-time pastor.
``He'll do anything for you,'' Warner said.
Also, for the most part, Paxton is dead wrong. Warner and his fellow G-Men drivers are some of the most talented men behind the wheel of an oversized truck that you will ever meet in the middle of an undersized alley.
Somehow, they are able to take their trucks, which measure 9 feet, 6 inches from side mirror to side mirror, through alleys that are only 10 feet wide. Not only that, but they are able to navigate through these tight places going backward, while getting battered by a hostile ambush of overgrown brush and tree limbs all along the way.
Warner is 43 and has been hauling garbage in Roanoke for 12 years, the first seven years as a worker and the past five years as a driver. Before then, he was a custodian at William Byrd High School.
On his wrist, Warner wears an old Casio watch, which he said he found four years ago in somebody's trash, still ticking and keeping perfect time.
Above him, dangling from the truck's sun visor, hangs another little treasure, a medallion engraved with a pair of hands folded together in prayer. It has been dangling there for about three years.
``Gives me something to look up to,'' Warner said, meaning in both the practical and spiritual sense.
He also has a fishing lure, found the day before, hooked onto the visor, and laying across the dashboard is an old cracked mop handle.
It serves a dual purpose. First, as a tool that allows Warner to reach over and adjust the mirror on the passenger door every time it gets jarred by an attacking tree branch. Second, as protection against big dogs.
In fact, that's how the mop handle earned its crack, Warner said.
Rounding out the crew is Moore, 42, who has collected trash in Roanoke for almost eight years. He is the quiet one, leaving the trash talk to Paxton, whom he has been teamed with for two years.
Moore said the best thing he ever found on a pickup was a stereo. He was proud to report the stereo still works.
On this day, however, he found something more unusual, a satchel of Italian coins, which of course got his partner talking about his most unusual find over the years.
It was a certain kind of rubber sex toy that you can't write about in a family newspaper.
``I gave it to one of the guys who used to drive,'' Paxton said, not missing a beat. ``He was a freak anyway.''
Moore laughed and reached for a cigarette from the pack of Newports he keeps in his hard hat. He keeps them there because in his shirt pocket they would get soaked in sweat and garbage juice.
He didn't always smoke.
A former high school football player, Moore once had dreams of being a sports star, a Chicago Bear maybe. The cigarette habit came along after he found a load of cigarette sample packs that somebody had tossed out. Word soon spread that he had found them, and it seemed like everyone he knew started bugging him for smokes. He said he grew tired of the harassment.
``So, I just started smoking them myself.''
12 tons a day
Paxton's find for the day wasn't anything as exotic as a satchel of Italian coins or as coveted as a supply of cigarettes. Still, he came away with three items all found under the lid of one trash can: an unopened record cleaner, a golf club cleaning kit and an Electronic Putting Partner, which he gave away at the end of the day to Jim McClung, the city's manager over solid waste disposal and a well-known golf nut.
But everything else Paxton and Moore found on their route they fed into the truck's compactor - a microwave oven, a kitchen table and chairs, an Oriental rug, a portable Walkman radio, a full-sized charcoal grill, a used skateboard.
Remarkably, their truck took in all of this stuff and an astonishing amount more. You just can't believe how much one garbage truck can hold.
Twelve tons in all.
That breaks down to six tons apiece that Paxton and Moore lift in the course of a typical August day.
Or, looked at another way, that adds up to a mountain of waste when you add their 12 tons with the full loads brought in by the other 13 residential crews, plus the four commercial trucks that serve the city's business district.
In 1995, according to McClung, Roanoke's sanitation workers, as he likes to call them, hauled a total of 46,838 tons of garbage from the city's trash cans. And of that total, 36,180 tons came from residential pickups.
That works out to about one ton per household, McClung said.
``It makes you realize we're a very wasteful society.''
It also can help you appreciate just how hard a crew like Paxton, Moore and Warner works.
Statistics don't tell the whole story, though.
They don't show the teamwork. Paxton's trash talk aside, the three of them all seem to instinctively know what the others are going to do. It's almost scientific, but it's also graceful, like a well-choreographed ballet.
Albeit a ballet with an awful, foul stench, which Paxton, Moore and Warner all characteristically shrug off.
``I guess you get used to it,'' Warner said.
Just like you get used to the maggots, they said.
The rats. ``We've had to beat them with pitchforks and stuff like that,'' Warner said.
The packing blades that can rip a man's toes out of their sockets in a careless instant.
The cars that whiz past them way too fast. The poison ivy lurking around every alley corner and hiding sometimes in the piles of brush they have to pick up
The weather. Warner said this has been a mild summer, but last year he recorded temperatures inside the cab of his truck that pushed 140 degrees. On one particularly hot day, Moore had to be taken to the hospital for dehydration.
Picking up trash in freezing rain is no picnic, either.
Then there is their biggest hazard and fear: used hypodermic needles.
And the other intangibles.
The big news on this day among the G-Men was about the crew the day before that found waiting for them at the bottom of one trash can a live, unhappy skunk.
``There ain't no worse job than this,'' Paxton said.
End of an era
G-Men in Roanoke start out at $7.43 an hour, according to McClung. Drivers start at $8.61 an hour.
Plus, they can keep any tips they can get.
Many residents tip their crews, usually during the holidays. Paxton said he typically earns about $50 or $60 in tips a year.
And legend has it that the late Roanoke heiress, Marion Via, used to tip her crew between $800 and $1,000 each.
There are other nice things that people along their routes do as well. There are people who every week have a cold or hot drink and a little snack waiting for the crew as a gesture of appreciation. In the summer, they also get more free vegetables from people's gardens than they know what to do with sometimes.
``It makes you feel like you're doing something worthwhile,'' Warner said.
Generally, they said the more working-class neighborhoods are friendlier and treat them better than the upscale parts of town. On the other hand, they said, the upscale neighborhoods usually are less messy with their garbage.
There are other perks to the job, too. The benefits are pretty good, and the typical work day end in the early afternoon, the crew said.
In the old days, when trucks carried three workers, and before that, four workers, they used to clock out of work even earlier, sometimes as early as 10 a.m., Paxton said.
Now, there is a plan to bring in more mechanization and the one-arm bandit trucks that only require a driver and no workers riding on the back. There also has been talk of bidding out garbage collection to a private contractor.
Either way, it's clear that the traditional city trash truck crew is facing the end of an era - and an uncertain future.
All of the workers have been promised other jobs elsewhere in the city, McClung said.
But where?
Paxton hopes for anywhere except the water department. ``I don't want to be messing with no cold water up to my waist in the middle of winter,'' he said.
Moore doesn't really care. ``As long as they find a job for me somewhere,'' he said.
Warner just wants to know what's going to happen one way or another. ``There are people's livings,'' he said. ``The guys just want to know how it's going to leave everybody, you know.''
Strangely, it seemed like the residents along their route were more concerned about privatization and mechanization than the crew was. Several people stopped them to offer their support.
People like the individual service they get from real people who take the care at every set of cans to replace their lids back where they found them.
``They're gentlemen and they should be treated as such,'' said Larry Redden, a former policeman who lives in Raleigh Court. ``But I'm worried about them. At the end of the line, they'll be the ones who will get the shaft.''
But such issues are moot when you're holding a bag stuffed with garbage and your driver has pulled a little too far forward for your satisfaction.
``Hey dummy!'' Paxton barked. ``Bring that thing back.''
He shook his head once again in disgust and offered no apologies.
``We're in trash. That's all we mess with is trash. So, what do you expect?''
LENGTH: Long : 229 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PHILIP HOLMAN/Staff. 1. Each day, Roanoke city trashby CNBcollectors John Moore (left) and Charles Paxton dispose of between 6
and 12 tons of garbage. 2. Paxton (left) and Moore have been a team
for two years and have honed their job into a model of efficiency.
3. Paxton hangs off the back of the truck at the end of a shift. At
the beginning of the run the bag over his shoulder contains gloves
and raingear, but by shift's end it often is filled with a trash
collector's booty. 4. Warner has to negotiate the
9-and-a-half-foot-wide truck through traffic-clogged streets and
10-foot-wide alleys. 5. The cab of the trash truck is hot and
cramped during the summer, which does not make completing paper work
any easier for driver Walter Warner. 6. John Moore pushes the levers
that activate the truck's compactor. 7. On any given day the crew
visits a variety of neighborhoods, from rich to poor. 8. G-Men deal
with a variety of refuse, from doors to yard waste and even dead
pets. One morning a crew pulled the lid off a garbage can to find a
live and startled skunk inside. They put the lid back on and called
animal control. 9. Albert MacMacklin (above) stops John Moore to
tell him what a fine job he thinks the city trash collectors do and
to share his negative opinion of privatized garbage-removal
services, which he experienced when he lived in Georgia. 10. Trash
from all over Roanoke is brought to the transfer station and dumped.
From there it is pushed, shoved and compressed into rail cars
(center of this photograph) that haul the refuse to the landfill.
color.