“Fuckin’ dirty-ass cans,” I say when the greasy cans slip out of my hands.
“You expected them to be spic and span?” a black girl with a sweet, childish face says. She must have had polio as a kid, because she walks with spastic movements and her torso is bent over at a ninety-degree angle, so I can see her tiny décolleté under a much-too-big T-shirt.
With a magnificent gesture, Tony pulls a handful of quarters and dimes out of his pocket and pays the poor girl one dollar for her forty cans. “One hundred for you, honey,” he says affably and winks at the girl who immediately hands the money over to her friend, a big black guy who smells of alcohol.
Tony in the meantime has ordered me to count a new bag of cans. When I am finished, I talk to another black couple, Bobby and Lisa. He is a big guy with a shopping cart filled with cans, she is a little girl that hops behind him with a baby stroller. I’ve seen them working a few times while canning with Bernard. Bobby and Lisa know I am the reporter from the tunnel, and have heard from Julio that once in a while I give a modest fee to the tunnel people for their help.
Wouldn’t I be interested in making a story about them? For only thirty bucks a day, I can follow them around in their daily life. I am too busy in the tunnel, I explain, and have to disappoint them. Bobby tries to convince me I could score very well with their unique life story. He gives me a short synopsis. Bobby lived in a hotel and fell in love with Lisa, who was wandering on the streets. She moved in with him. Another hotel occupant made sexual overtures; Bobby beat the guy up, sending him to the hospital. Bobby and Lisa were kicked out of the hotel. Now every night they sleep in a tender embrace on the steps of a church on the corner of Central Park West and 96th Street. “A true homeless love story,” Bobby stresses, “Hard to find.” I thank them for their touching story and promise them that if I meet a film crew looking for a story, I will send them over.
In the meantime, Tony is totally absorbed in his new role as successful entrepreneur. He has just bought a portable TV for seven dollars, and the pile of bags with empty cans around him is getting bigger all the time. Too much to drag by hand to the tunnel, that’s why he pays Lisa four bucks to get his shopping cart that is parked outside a tunnel entrance. “You see,” Tony says proudly while waving his dwindling wad of dollar bills. “The money is going fast.”
It disappears quickly, I remark carefully, but will he make any money back? Tony laughs confidently. “Wait and see. Tomorrow I will double my capital.” When I have counted and sorted out another bag of cans, I go get coffee for us at the Dunkin’ Donuts. An unwashed can man walks up to me while I am paying at the counter. “You are mister Anthony? “he asks politely. I nod. “Tony requested me to ask you to come back as soon as possible,” the messenger relays. Together we rush back with the coffee.
“I am running out of money,” Tony says. “Go to the bank and withdraw twenty dollars. In singles. Tomorrow you will get it back.”
When I return with the money, Tony is busy talking to a few black kids in a shiny dark BMW that is blocked by another car in front of the supermarket. They have big golden chains around their necks, black lights illuminate their car. Rap music turned all the way up makes the car tremble. Tony can fix it. The store manager owns the car that blocks the rapper’s BMW. Tony will get him.
“Get the manager,” Tony says to the messenger and gives him seventy-five cents. Tony beams with pride when the manager appears and drives his car away. The kids pull away with screeching tires while Tony waves them a friendly goodbye.
It is now 10:30 PM and Bernard shows up, walking unsteadily on his feet. Today I leant him the hundred dollars for his canning business, but obviously, he has first treated himself to a couple of hits. “Tonight I am not in the mood to work,” he apologizes with a soft voice. Tomorrow he will start seriously with Pier John. He leans against a parking meter and watches Tony telling the highlights in his career as a street scavenger to a breathless audience of Bobby, Lisa and some other can people.
Once, someone came running out of a cab, all gasping and panting. Tony emphasizes his story with dramatic gestures. He had a big suitcase with the JFK airport tags still on. Tony paid twenty bucks for the stolen suitcase, without even having inspected the contents. The man took off and Tony opened the suitcase. He found two Colt 45s. Within a few minutes, he had sold the guns for three hundred dollars. Tony doesn’t mention that he probably lost that money the next day betting on the horses.
“You’re a crazy motherfucker,” Bobby shakes his head, full of admiration. “Yes,” Tony confirms confidently and straightens out his big, red suspenders. The store manager has listened to the story with a broad smile and gives me a wink. Tony now pays two other can people a dollar each to clean up the mess on the pavement, empty bags and boxes left behind by his clients. “Unbelievable. What a theater…” Bernard sighs as he watches Tony doing his thing. “He thinks he is some big shot. But it’s only chaos.”
Bernard explains why Tony’s approach is wrong. “It’s so simple,” he says. “You let them throw the cans in your shopping cart, and put on every corner one empty bag. And while you are counting the cans, you put them in the right bags. The golden rule for a two-for-oner,” Bernard says. “You sort when you count. And ready you are. And never get personal with your clients. Not because you look down on them, but because it doesn’t bring you anywhere. You buy their cans, you give them their money, and bye-bye, see you! Most friendships here are only based on who is getting high with who, who buys the next hit. If the money’s gone, the friendship is over.”
Bernard knows most people hanging out in front of the supermarket. “All of them losers and hardcore crackheads,” he says with disdain. Tony is ready to leave, and the supermarket is about to close, when Jeff walks up. Tony introduces him to the other can people as his son. Jeff bums ten bucks, and disappears into the night. “The kid is taxing Tony heavily,” Bernard mutters and shakes his head. Jeff is back again from his rehab upstate, but upon arrival in New York immediately took up his bad habits. “Everybody that returns from a rehab in the city hits the stem again in a few days,” Bernard says. “Jeff is no exception. Only six feet under will he say bye bye to crack.”
Jeff still spends some time with Tony in the tunnel now and then, but most of the time he stays over with another sugar daddy—a dirty old man who lives in a hotel on Broadway, according to Bernard. This man tried to have Tony put in jail for the rest of his life by making Jeff file false declarations with the police. Jeff declared that Tony had tied him up, forced him to smoke crack, and raped him. At first, Tony was really concerned and had shown Bernard the court papers to ask him for advice. It never made the courts, because the story was so obviously a set up. The prosecutor refused to handle it.
When I help Tony to bring back all his cans in the tunnel, he confirms the story. If Tony were not on life-long probation, he would have strangled his rival a long time ago. He has forgiven Jeff. “Sometimes the kid doesn’t know what he is doing,” he says. Even so, Tony decided to lower Jeff’s stipend. Now he only gets ten dollars a day, instead of the twenty-five he used to extract from Tony.