On March 9, 1947, Langley Collyer suffocated under a pile of garbage. Inside a man-made maze of junk and curios, inside a delightful Harlem brownstone, inside a crowded, disgusting flesh-pit of a city, Langley suffocated under a pile of garbage. Garbage that he, as the breadwinner of his family — his family consisting of him and his older brother, Homer — had meticulously collected for the past 20 years. Nearly every night, he would escape from his apartment and walk miles around the city, picking up whatever looked interesting to him. Bits and pieces of broken things, esoteric law journals (Homer, his brother, would surely like those since he had been a lawyer himself before he went blind), old beaten-up, out-of-tune instruments to fiddle around with (he gravitated toward pianos, of course, but those would be difficult to just find laying about the streets of Manhattan) and maybe some food if he left early enough to catch one of the stores before they closed. Anything he could get his hands on, he kept.
I’ll be the first to say there isn’t nearly enough data on how many people eat roadkill. In my not-so-thorough search, I could only find one singular survey online on this subject. Of the 2,156 people who responded to a YouGov poll on Aug. 6, only 6 percent openly admitted to picking up dead animals from the side of the road and repurposing them culinarily. Eighty-nine percent answered no, while a minority of 5 percent said that they weren’t sure (I guess you can’t ever really be completely sure that you haven’t eaten roadkill if you don’t slaughter all your food yourself). This disappointed me greatly. I truly hoped that I’d discover a vibrant and colorful community of American scavengers, but instead, all I’m left with is a disparate group of cheapskates, new-age meat hippies and carnivore wack-jobs.
Dumpster diving, on the other hand, is much more common. Twenty-one percent of Americans admit to having dug through someone else’s trash at least once. Unlike eating roadkill, which is much more whimsical and idiotic, dumpster diving can be a financial necessity for some. If you can’t afford something to eat, digging around for bottles to recycle or scraps to sell may just be how you get by. Some people like to say, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” For the most part, I disagree. In America, one man’s trash is another man’s livelihood.
Homer Collyer is waiting for his oranges. Ever since the stroke had taken his sight and the rheumatism had taken his legs, Langley had been responsible for all his meals. In hopes of curing him of his blindness, Homer was kept on a diet of 100 oranges a week, along with some occasional black bread and peanut butter. This meal plan was not thought up by any doctor — it was the sole invention of Langley, who had been a concert pianist before his exit from public life. Every night, without fail, Langley would bring Homer his meals and do his best to keep his spirits up. He would read him a passage from William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens or just sit with him for a while, enjoying his company. He kept a huge stack of newspapers around just for Homer so he could catch up on the world once he had been cured of his blindness. Homer had been blind for a long time now, but not too long to forget what his brother used to look like.
Before the Great Depression hit, and bread lines had wrapped and coiled around Harlem blocks like cotton string, before their parents had died and they started to shelter themselves from the rest of the world before they became folk legends in Harlem, they were urban cryptids for young adventurers to hunt down. Before all the break-ins and before Langley built his system of booby traps and maze works to defend them, Homer could see his brother, right in front of him, playing the piano. Bright and youthful and eccentric, Homer could see him clear as day. Now, he could only hear him. He heard him come in through the window and work his way to Homer’s room. He heard him trip one of the booby traps he had carefully made. He heard him struggle. He heard him suffocate slowly, just a few feet away from him, trapped underneath a pile of garbage. He felt himself starve, slowly, to death. He was still waiting for his oranges.
The next time you toss a book or a bottle or a couch out, spare a thought for its next owner, its next user. Even the oldest piece of garbage in the quietest of landfills will still be recycled one day, same as you. Corpses, roadkill, trash, waste. It’s all just atoms, shuffled around and rearranged.
Dennis Molnoski is a sophomore majoring in cinema.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.