Travels with Lizbeth Read online

  Nonetheless, Tim drew a deep breath and said we would try to make a go of it.

  From the first I noticed many peculiarities in Tim’s behavior. For example, Tim had a poor relationship with inanimate objects. I once witnessed Tim’s throwing a spoon across the room and cursing at it steadily for five minutes only because he had picked it up with its bowl facedown. Things were much worse with more complicated devices such as can openers.

  That Tim had beaten Harley regularly was obvious from Harley’s behavior. Even when I was present, Tim would summon Harley in an angry voice. Harley would cower in a corner, but he would be beaten nonetheless for not coming when he was called. I never left Lizbeth alone with Tim, but he was always very kind to her. Sometimes I thought he was kind to Lizbeth in order to humiliate and torture Harley.

  Tim’s moods fluctuated wildly and rapidly. He was always at one extreme or another. He could not be accommodating, but at times he was servile. He was never firm, but sometimes was dictatorial. He could not be irritated, but was often enraged. He had joyous times, but never merely pleasant ones.

  Tim professed to have found from the first some mysterious attractive quality in me. But it was always, “Come hither,” and then “Drop dead.” He attempted to tease me by going around naked and displaying an erection. Perhaps my indifference drove him to persist in this behavior. Although he was an attractive young man, I was indifferent because of his off-and-on attitude. We masturbated together fairly often, but he sometimes changed his mind about this activity just as one or both of us reached a state of high arousal, and this more than any health concern put me off the idea of any more intimate sexual involvement with Tim. Once he discovered I was a writer, he was affectionate almost to the point of undressing us when we went to Sleazy Sue’s and told anyone in earshot that I was a famous author and he was my lover. But at his apartment again, his passion evaporated.

  I attributed all of this to the stress of his having recently lost his companion. I supposed he had felt some affection for him. Beyond that, when his companion died, Tim had lost a comfortable situation in society and whatever expectations he had. Moreover, although he continued to test negative for HIV, and in fact sold blood plasma regularly to supplement his income, he might have contracted the virus from his companion—who had kept the diagnosis secret until the very last—and the virus could still manifest itself in Tim any day. Given his circumstances I could not be sure that I would have behaved any better.

  I was never sure whether Tim was truly psychotic. For example, he claimed to be a Jew. I did not discount this immediately because I knew some blond Jews, but when I discovered he did not know a seder from a bris, I questioned him more closely. Eventually I understood that he professed to be a Seventh-Day Adventist and their dogma held that they were the spiritual heirs of the Hebrew tradition.

  He said he could read my mind. Sometimes when he made that claim he clearly meant no more than that he could infer what was behind some action or word of mine. Other times he seemed to think he really could read my mind. He seemed to be arguing with himself sometimes, although I only heard one side of it, as if I were listening to Tim place a telephone call. When I questioned him about this, he said he was not arguing with himself but with me, although of course I had said nothing throughout the argument.

  Tim went to his job for only a week or two after I moved in. I do not know what he had done with the money he had been making at the job. He had not spent it on food. He worked in the banquet department of a large hotel and whenever he went to work he had brought back stacks of plastic-foam boxes containing dinners that had not been served. That was what he ate. His companion’s family had paid several months’ rent in advance for his apartment, but he had not paid rent after that and was a month in arrears when I moved in. He smoked cigarettes and rarely pot, and he drank a quart of beer in the evening. But that should have absorbed only a small fraction of his income. At any rate he claimed to be supporting me, while the contrary was the case. A few days after I moved in, one of the checks for work I had done before I left Austin caught up with me and I received a surprisingly swift positive response to one of the stories I had typed up when I first stayed at Billy’s. As Tim had heard I was a writer, when the check arrived he seemed to think that it was the first of many that would arrive in rapid succession. Indeed, I tried to do a little work at Tim’s until he lost his job. But when he was home, as he was always once he became unemployed, he demanded to be the center of attention and could not bear for me to ignore him for as long as it took me to type a single line. He never appreciated the connection between the arrival of the check and my work.

  Aside from cigarette and beer money, which Tim provided himself by selling his dubious blood plasma, we had almost no cash the last few weeks I was with him. But Dan Archer gave me—or rather sold me with little expectation of ever collecting the price—an old, junky three-speed bicycle that he had got for his wife so that they might bicycle together. Dan had finally realized the bicycle was never going to be used.

  But with the bicycle I could get around to a number of Dumpsters. Many college students were then leaving town for the summer and I could feed us from the Dumpsters without having to bring home table scraps or leftovers. I brought home more canned goods than Tim’s shelves could hold, and I often passed by excess frozen foods because Tim’s little refrigerator could hold no more.

  Tim accused me of stealing what I came by and demanded to be cut in on the action. I told him it came from Dumpsters and he had only to open a can to have his share. Tim did not believe me. One day he undertook to shadow me, thinking I was unaware of him. When he saw I had been telling the truth he began to dive in Dumpsters himself.

  Around the first of June I discovered that the rent was in arrears. It was beyond my capacity to pay it. I also discovered why Tim was not worried about it. He and his companion had often met in bars in the afternoon and Tim had been in the habit of riding his motorcycle home afterward. His route home took him past the courthouse and before long the officers there were on the lookout for him. Tim was erotically fixated on police officers and said he always enjoyed being arrested. Thus he had acquired three drunk-driving charges. All three charges were to come before the same judge on the same day. As Tim had a previous record of drunk driving, he was bound, even in Texas, to receive a jail sentence.

  He rather hoped I would make the money to keep his apartment and his dog until he got out of jail. At any rate he had not given the future much thought.

  Once he discovered how to feed himself from Dumpsters and that I would not make enough money to pay the arrears and the current rent, Tim became even more abusive than usual and his mood swings became more pronounced. At last I felt I had to move out for the sake of my own sanity. I was getting no work done and I was hardly resting better at Tim’s apartment than I had been on the streets.

  I packed my things and bagged up some of the canned goods I had collected. I loaded up the bicycle, which I used as something of a two-wheeled cart, and Lizbeth and I left.

  * * *

  ALL THE TIME I was on the streets I managed, with only one exception, to maintain my policy of not panhandling and not stealing. I know people who doubt that claim, but those people do not know the Dumpsters. While I had the bicycle I could range far—I had to pedal fairly fast to keep Lizbeth from towing me. While the end-of-school harvest lasted I could load up the bicycle with canned goods in less than an hour. I would find so much I would have to dismount the bike to make room on it for the goods, and then I would let Lizbeth tow—indeed, I could not walk fast enough to prevent her from towing.

  The Dumpster harvest continued for a week or two more. I found more canned goods than I could use or store and I formed the habit of taking the food that was perfectly safe to the drop point for the AIDS food bank at Sleazy Sue’s. I often wished I had a little dog cart, for Lizbeth seemed to very much enjoy towing the loaded bicycle as we carried things to Sue’s. Perhaps it is not too much to sup
pose a dog knows when it is doing something useful. And perhaps it was not much different for me.

  We were now truly on the streets, where we would be for what seemed to me a long time. But those first few days I dulled my feelings of hopelessness by striving to collect canned goods for the food bank—and whether it was or was not, I convinced myself it was something useful.

  SEVEN

  On Dumpster Diving

  This chapter was composed while the author was homeless. The present tense has been preserved.

  Long before I began Dumpster diving I was impressed with Dumpsters, enough so that I wrote the Merriam-Webster research service to discover what I could about the word Dumpster. I learned from them that it is a proprietary word belonging to the Dempster Dumpster company. Since then I have dutifully capitalized the word, although it was lowercased in almost all the citations Merriam-Webster photocopied for me. Dempster’s word is too apt. I have never heard these things called anything but Dumpsters. I do not know anyone who knows the generic name for these objects. From time to time I have heard a wino or hobo give some corrupted credit to the original and call them Dipsy Dumpsters.

  I began Dumpster diving about a year before I became homeless.

  I prefer the word scavenging and use the word scrounging when I mean to be obscure. I have heard people, evidently meaning to be polite, use the word foraging, but I prefer to reserve that word for gathering nuts and berries and such, which I do also according to the season and the opportunity. Dumpster diving seems to me to be a little too cute and, in my case, inaccurate because I lack the athletic ability to lower myself into the Dumpsters as the true divers do, much to their increased profit.

  I like the frankness of the word scavenging, which I can hardly think of without picturing a big black snail on an aquarium wall. I live from the refuse of others. I am a scavenger. I think it a sound and honorable niche, although if I could I would naturally prefer to live the comfortable consumer life, perhaps—and only perhaps—as a slightly less wasteful consumer, owing to what I have learned as a scavenger.

  While Lizbeth and I were still living in the shack on Avenue B as my savings ran out, I put almost all my sporadic income into rent. The necessities of daily life I began to extract from Dumpsters. Yes, we ate from them. Except for jeans, all my clothes came from Dumpsters. Boom boxes, candles, bedding, toilet paper, a virgin male love doll, medicine, books, a typewriter, dishes, furnishings, and change, sometimes amounting to many dollars—I acquired many things from the Dumpsters.

  I have learned much as a scavenger. I mean to put some of what I have learned down here, beginning with the practical art of Dumpster diving and proceeding to the abstract.

  * * *

  WHAT IS SAFE to eat?

  After all, the finding of objects is becoming something of an urban art. Even respectable employed people will sometimes find something tempting sticking out of a Dumpster or standing beside one. Quite a number of people, not all of them of the bohemian type, are willing to brag that they found this or that piece in the trash. But eating from Dumpsters is what separates the dilettanti from the professionals. Eating safely from the Dumpsters involves three principles: using the senses and common sense to evaluate the condition of the found materials, knowing the Dumpsters of a given area and checking them regularly, and seeking always to answer the question “Why was this discarded?”

  Perhaps everyone who has a kitchen and a regular supply of groceries has, at one time or another, made a sandwich and eaten half of it before discovering mold on the bread or got a mouthful of milk before realizing the milk had turned. Nothing of the sort is likely to happen to a Dumpster diver because he is constantly reminded that most food is discarded for a reason. Yet a lot of perfectly good food can be found in Dumpsters.

  Canned goods, for example, turn up fairly often in the Dumpsters I frequent. All except the most phobic people would be willing to eat from a can, even if it came from a Dumpster. Canned goods are among the safest of foods to be found in Dumpsters but are not utterly foolproof.

  Although very rare with modern canning methods, botulism is a possibility. Most other forms of food poisoning seldom do lasting harm to a healthy person, but botulism is almost certainly fatal and often the first symptom is death. Except for carbonated beverages, all canned goods should contain a slight vacuum and suck air when first punctured. Bulging, rusty, and dented cans and cans that spew when punctured should be avoided, especially when the contents are not very acidic or syrupy.

  Heat can break down the botulin, but this requires much more cooking than most people do to canned goods. To the extent that botulism occurs at all, of course, it can occur in cans on pantry shelves as well as in cans from Dumpsters. Need I say that home-canned goods are simply too risky to be recommended.

  From time to time one of my companions, aware of the source of my provisions, will ask, “Do you think these crackers are really safe to eat?” For some reason it is most often the crackers they ask about.

  This question has always made me angry. Of course I would not offer my companion anything I had doubts about. But more than that, I wonder why he cannot evaluate the condition of the crackers for himself. I have no special knowledge and I have been wrong before. Since he knows where the food comes from, it seems to me he ought to assume some of the responsibility for deciding what he will put in his mouth. For myself I have few qualms about dry foods such as crackers, cookies, cereal, chips, and pasta if they are free of visible contaminates and still dry and crisp. Most often such things are found in the original packaging, which is not so much a positive sign as it is the absence of a negative one.

  Raw fruits and vegetables with intact skins seem perfectly safe to me, excluding of course the obviously rotten. Many are discarded for minor imperfections that can be pared away. Leafy vegetables, grapes, cauliflower, broccoli, and similar things may be contaminated by liquids and may be impractical to wash.

  Candy, especially hard candy, is usually safe if it has not drawn ants. Chocolate is often discarded only because it has become discolored as the cocoa butter de-emulsified. Candying, after all, is one method of food preservation because pathogens do not like very sugary substances.

  All of these foods might be found in any Dumpster and can be evaluated with some confidence largely on the basis of appearance. Beyond these are foods that cannot be correctly evaluated without additional information.

  I began scavenging by pulling pizzas out of the Dumpster behind a pizza delivery shop. In general, prepared food requires caution, but in this case I knew when the shop closed and went to the Dumpster as soon as the last of the help left.

  Such shops often get prank orders; both the orders and the products made to fill them are called bogus. Because help seldom stays long at these places, pizzas are often made with the wrong topping, refused on delivery for being cold, or baked incorrectly. The products to be discarded are boxed up because inventory is kept by counting boxes: A boxed pizza can be written off; an unboxed pizza does not exist.

  I never placed a bogus order to increase the supply of pizzas and I believe no one else was scavenging in this Dumpster. But the people in the shop became suspicious and began to retain their garbage in the shop overnight. While it lasted I had a steady supply of fresh, sometimes warm pizza. Because I knew the Dumpster I knew the source of the pizza, and because I visited the Dumpster regularly I knew what was fresh and what was yesterday’s.

  The area I frequent is inhabited by many affluent college students. I am not here by chance; the Dumpsters in this area are very rich. Students throw out many good things, including food. In particular they tend to throw everything out when they move at the end of a semester, before and after breaks, and around midterm, when many of them despair of college. So I find it advantageous to keep an eye on the academic calendar.

  Students throw food away around breaks because they do not know whether it has spoiled or will spoil before they return. A typical discard is a half jar of peanut
butter. In fact, nonorganic peanut butter does not require refrigeration and is unlikely to spoil in any reasonable time. The student does not know that, and since it is Daddy’s money, the student decides not to take a chance. Opened containers require caution and some attention to the question. “Why was this discarded?” But in the case of discards from student apartments, the answer may be that the item was thrown out through carelessness, ignorance, or wastefulness. This can sometimes be deduced when the item is found with many others, including some that are obviously perfectly good.

  Some students, and others, approach defrosting a freezer by chucking out the whole lot. Not only do the circumstances of such a find tell the story, but also the mass of frozen goods stays cold for a long time and items may be found still frozen or freshly thawed.

  Yogurt, cheese, and sour cream are items that are often thrown out while they are still good. Occasionally I find a cheese with a spot of mold, which of course I just pare off, and because it is obvious why such a cheese was discarded, I treat it with less suspicion than an apparently perfect cheese found in similar circumstances. Yogurt is often discarded, still sealed, only because the expiration date on the carton had passed. This is one of my favorite finds because yogurt will keep for several days, even in warm weather.

  Students throw out canned goods and staples at the end of semesters and when they give up college at midterm. Drugs, pornography, spirits, and the like are often discarded when parents are expected—Dad’s Day, for example. And spirits also turn up after big party weekends, presumably discarded by the newly reformed. Wine and spirits, of course, keep perfectly well even once opened, but the same cannot be said of beer.