Uncle Jim (3:53)
I'm riding in the garbage truck with my Uncle Jim up 8th Avenue when we suddenly stop and my Uncle Jim says, holy fucking Christ. I think the garbage truck has broke down because my grandfather's garbage trucks are beat up and the doors stay shut with bungee cords. My uncle gets out of the cab of the truck, runs across the street and I shout after him, but he doesn't hear me and all I can hear are the horns of the cars coming on the right and left of me. I'm stuck in the middle of traffic in a garbage truck I can't drive. My Uncle Jim has stopped a woman on the corner. She's about a foot taller than him, dressed in a red dress, long brown hair. He is gesticulating wildly, she's laughing, and then he pleads with her and holds his hands in prayer and she shakes her head and continues walking and he shouts something after and then comes back into the cab and says to me, did you see her? I said, who? That was Cindy Crawford. I was livid. You left me here. You didn't say anything. You stopped traffic to harass Cindy Crawford. My uncle looked at me, incredulous. Are you fucking kidding me? I would stop my own wedding to harass Cindy Crawford. And then he slapped me on the side of the head lovingly and said, as bad as I need you right now, Terrence, you need me? Boy, do you need me. And he was absolutely right. That summer I was at the mercy of my uncle's approval, because I hoped that we together could bridge that gap between my world and his. The summer I graduated college, my uncle invited me into the family business. I was an unlikely candidate for sanitation. I was an English major. I'd started a literary journal. I compulsively washed my hands after I touched doorknobs. And I could never sit on a toilet seat, but I would instead hover above or I would have to mummify it with toilet paper for protection. I was an anxious person. I had literary ambitions, and I should have been banned from sanitation for life. But I have garbage in my blood. Five generations of my family have worked in sanitation. My great, great grandfather started Timothy duffy carting in 1885 with a wooden cart. Trinity Church was an early customer. The piers along the west side were early customers. And Heidi's Candies, the makers of Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. My grandfather had an office and garage on the corner of Hudson and Morton in the West Village. He had a fleet of garbage trucks. He had 40 yard, 30 yard, 20 yard containers. I grew up hearing stories about Dirty Dan McGruff, the driver who wouldn't show up for a week. And when he came back, he said he'd gotten lost in the woods of Newark, N.J. or the story about the woman who was digging a hole to China. She owned a studio apartment, and every Monday she'd order a two yard container, which is large, and by Friday, she'd filled it with dirt, even though she had no backyard courtyard or community garden. And I was completely enthralled with this world, the world of garbage, the world of my family's legacy. But the garbage dynasty was kept at arm's length. My mother wanted her son and her life to have nothing to do with her father and his nefarious business. And she got what she wanted. When I turned 18, I left for college. When my uncle Jim turned 18, he joined my grandfather in the business. But now the stars had aligned. My Uncle Jim had called me and. And of all things, Timothy Duffy. Card and company needed a writer. They needed a PR whiz, and I was just the man for the job. And then he said to me, I don't think you realize, but right now is a real exciting time in garbage, Terrence. And I thought this was one thing that one generation told the next. And I assumed he was lying, but he was telling the truth. The Mafia were going into jail. Joey Cigars, Frankolino, Vincent Ponte. All the Mafia's garbage stops were now up for Grabs and who would pick up the garbage? Who would pick up the Mafia's stops while they rotted in jail? My uncle enterprisingly thought, why not us? And this was my opportunity to bridge that gap, and I accepted his offer. My first day of work, I wore this tweed blazer because I emulated my college professors. And my uncle told me, dress smart by the afternoon. John Larney, a kind of chubby Irish guy who worked for my grandfather, had nicknamed me Willoughby. But as the head of PR for Timothy Duffy company, I had to convince the city that we were an upstanding business, family owned and operated, and one of the oldest carding companies in the city. So after about two weeks of my uncle showing me the ropes, he sent me and John Larney me Willoughby on a bid. John Larney drove us in his red Cadillac. I wore my tweed blazer. John Larney wore a polo shirt with a golf logo, wrinkled khakis and Dockers without any socks. And he was two sheets to the wind. So I said, you should wait outside. I think. I went into the conference room and as my uncle prepared me, it was kind of low level mafiosa who had been, you know, were far enough removed from the indictments and corporate types like Waste Management and bfi. And I kind of pushed our envelope forward of the numbers that my uncle had crunched for our bid. And then unlike the rest, I told the story of my family's history like it was an Arthurian legend. And we waited until they made up their mind. The city the bid was for Tower 7. All of the paper in Tower 7 for the world Trade center, that was what we were bidding on. And when the person came back from the city without ceremony, he just handed me an envelope and said, congratulations. And some smartass in the corner said, ladies and gentlemen, the Doogie Howser of trash. But it. But at that point, I wanted to whip my family crest out of my pocket and say, in your face, motherfuckers. In your face. I was prepared for the celebration. I wanted to walk into my grandfather's office and just share the news. When I walked in, I'd interrupted a fight between my grandfather and my uncle. While my uncle was static about the Mafia's misfortune, my grandfather was skeptical. He knew the rules. He'd been in a business for 50 years where there are kind of accidents happened and he didn't have a scratch on him. He didn't want the rules to change and he didn't want change, period. When I presented them with, you know, I realized I was ready for the celebration. But then I realized I had to explain what exactly I'd won and what we were going to have to do. And I looked right at my grandfather because I knew my uncle was already on my side. And I said, we would now have to pick up, you know, we have 10 loads of garbage that we have to pick up at Tower 7 every day and drag them to New Jersey to a recycling plant and sell that paper that we'd pick up from the World Trade Center. We'd have to pay for the paper, but we would make a profit on what we sold in New Jersey. And my grandfather said, let me get this straight. We now pay people to pick up their garbage. And then he added sarcastically, that's an ingenious business model. And my Uncle Jim said, wait, Pop, you don't understand. That paper is worth money. We pick it up, we sell it. Our business has grown a third in one day. Do you see what I'm talking about? That's what's out there for us. And my grandfather kind of got up and he was going to walk into the back of the office and he said, we can't handle that. We can't handle that with what we already have. My Uncle Jim ignored him and said to me, drinks are on me. Come on, we'll go to the bar. And he got me drunk, one congratulatory drink after the other. And then he sat me down in the corner and he said, terrence, I'm going to start my own company. And I thought, no. I thought, no, you're not. You know, the reason that we are here and the reason that we have survived is because we're a family. And this is what I believed in. I said, you can't just start your own company. He wanted to take the World Trade center contract, and he would take a few other stops from my grandfather's, and he wouldn't have to deal with my grandfather anymore and. And his kind of, you know, not wanting to change. No one should have to choose between their uncle and their grandfather. And I couldn't. And so I was culpable because I was silent. And I knew what Jim had planned, and I didn't say anything. It only took about a week. Jim had started a LLC reuse. He opened a separate bank account, and he had written letters to the World Trade sent to the board authority for the World Trade center contract and a few other clients of my grandfather's. And by the end of the week, my grandfather had called the police. And they came, and he knew my uncle knew the police. They were neighborhood people. And they said that your father has put a restraining order on you and you have to leave the office now and you can't return. It happened swiftly, suddenly. Too easy, too final. And the next day, I returned to my grandfather's office because it had been there for 116 years and it was routine. And I expected him to throw me out. I expected him to kind of cast me out as the betrayer. But he just said hello. And I sat down at the desk and I called my uncle in the front office while my grandfather was in the back office. And my uncle was stressed. He didn't know if he'd made the right decision. He was quick on the phone with me. He said that the World Trade center contract wouldn't come over because, you know, he didn't have a reputation yet, and he was a new guy in the block. But he had a few stops. And what he needed now was drivers. He needed some guys to drive trucks. He didn't need a PR whiz, and he didn't need a writer. He needed brute force, someone who could drive a truck. And if you haven't noticed by now, I am not the poster child for brute force. My uncle didn't need me anymore. And then he said, don't worry, you'll be all right. You're a writer. At the end of the day, you'll get your story. And I thought the gap had widened, and I considered his words an accusation. Because here I was, the college boy, the writer, playing garbage, thinking that my family was material, and here he was, trying to make a life for himself. I hung up the phone, and the office was quiet, desperately quiet, waiting for the energy and the storm of my uncle to come in and say what bids needed to be bidded on next and give me orders. My grandfather came out from the back and said, how about lunch? And he ordered what he always tuna fish with light mayo, tomato. And I realized that his life had not changed. He had the stops he had, his business would continue on. He had history behind him. And then my grandfather says, how about an ice cream? It's the end of summer. I haven't had an ice cream yet. So I run across the street and get us lunch and ice cream. And I'm sitting at the window eating lunch with him or looking out the plate glass window, and I realize that I'm not the head of PR for Timothy Duffy company and I'm not the Doogie Howser of trash. I'm his grandson trying to eat my ice cream before it melts. My uncle's business folded after six months and he's now a security guard at nyu and he's a graduate of Stearns Business School. My grandfather lost his business a few years later to the city. They'd shut him down for violations and fines, and my family business that had been running for 116 years had closed its doors. He didn't want change, but change had come. When my grandfather died, I was the one in charge for for cleaning out the office. I was the one who hired the garbage men to take away what we didn't want. And one of the last things that I threw out, or didn't throw out, but was going to put into storage was a tackle box of keys. All the old trucks and some of the cemeteries, the keys to the gates of the cemeteries of Trinity Church that we'd pick up around the city. And I always thought of my uncle's words as an accusation, but they could have easily have been an affirmation as well, because I had done what I was supposed to do. I had witnessed the end of an era and he had pointed me out for who I was, the writer, the observer, the person who would tell the story. Thank you.
