Pier John is careful. “Nobody knows my real name. You know, there are a lot of Johns in the city,” he says with a mysterious smile. “And we always clean our mess. If clients start to make problems and scream, I tell them to go somewhere else. I will never fight with them. You can only do this business if you don’t have the neighbors against you.”
He points at all the AC units hanging out of most windows on the street. “You see, these things are buzzing here all summer. Nobody hears me working out here.”
Pier John used to have a good job at an accountant’s office. A quarrel at work got out of hand and became a nasty shouting match. Pier John left his job. He gambled away all his savings and in the end was kicked out of the house by his wife.
First a bit embarrassed and ashamed, later full of confidence and 100 percent dedicated, he picked up canning. “It was a good therapy for me. I was too busy to think about gambling.” Once a successful can man, he started to devote himself to two-for-oneing.
At the moment, he is one of the most successful can brokers in the city. With the money he makes and the welfare check, he can make a decent living and even make a substantial contribution to the maintenance and education of his two daughters, both living with their mother.
Twice a year, Pier John does something in return for his clients: on New Year’s Eve, he gets a few bottles of vodka and treats everybody to a shot. On Labor Day, he always organizes a picnic in Riverside Park. “You are a greedy pig if you never give something back to your clients,” he explains these nice gestures.
The picnic was last week. Pier John bought sesame-seed buns, Swiss cheese, and chorizo sausage, as well as a few cases of soda. “If they want beer, they should get it themselves,” he said strictly, while putting out all the goodies with Bernard on a big blanket. Bobby and Lisa were there along with all of Little Havana, and the polio girl also came for a bite. There were lively discussions about which supermarkets and two-for-oners accepted what kind of cans, when, and how many.
Coincidentally, Do-Gooder Galindez passed by while on a summer stroll with a very beautiful girl. Galindez had heard about the alternative housing program and congratulated Bernard. “How do you feel?” Galindez had asked amicably. “I feel nothing ’cause I still got nothing,” Bernard rudely answered, focusing instead on the big breasts of Galindez’s girlfriend, charming her with his tunnel monologue. “Did you see her wink me?” Bernard asked me when Galindez had left. “The poor girl misses a lot with that faggot.”
It is getting to be midnight when Bernard arrives. A short while later, the first clients also show up. Bernard and Pier John love to chat like two old spinsters, but they also work remarkably smoothly as a team. Bernard counts and puts the cans in the right bag; Pier John watches and pays the client. In only a few moments, every client is helped with no unnecessary fuss, leaving satisfied and happy with their earnings. “Watch us, Duke,” Bernard proudly says when he returns to his chair, “Tony could learn something from this.”
Pier John used to work under the bridge at 96th Street. It was always dark there and a bit sketchy, that’s why he decided to work in front of his hotel. The day after Pier John left, Walter was killed underneath that bridge.
“Walter was an obnoxious motherfucker,” Pier John says. “He got an inheritance of twelve thousand dollars and didn’t know how to spend the money fast enough.”
“Yeah,” Bernard adds. “In a month’s time he had blown everything. Coke, chicks, booze, limos. He wanted to have it all, but time was running out on him.”
“Yeah,” says Pier John, sipping his coffee. “He was a fucking piece of shit.”
31. ADVANCED CANNING III: WECAN
“Our director Guy Polhemus started with the best of intentions,” says Bennet Wellikson, the administrator of WeCan. “Unfortunately, we spend most of our time and energy in prolonged legal battles. We are nearly bankrupt.” For the third time, Polhemus has not showed up for our appointment, so the talkative administrator explains all the ins and outs of the recycling business in general, and WeCan in particular.
Apart from the legal and financial complications, deceit, theft and dishonesty are rife in the world of cans. Basically, WeCan’s biggest problem is its cash flow. Wholesalers, distributors, and breweries refuse to take back the cans from WeCan and pay for them. Legally, they have to do this, but unredeemed cans are a gold mine. That is why the brewers find all kind of loopholes and tricks to circumvent their obligations. Wellikson estimates that in this way, Manhattan’s Coca Cola Company makes extra profits of fifty million a year.
“It is a mega-million mafia,” Wellikson says. “To evade the duties, large quantities of soda are smuggled across state lines. Some supermarket chains even cooperate with the breweries.” One of WeCan’s biggest creditors is Anheuser-Busch, the brewer of Budweiser. Miller Brewing Company, the importer of Heineken, is another nasty client.
From the outset of WeCan, there were problems with Bud. After three months, the bags of empty Buds kept piling up, filling the modest storage space of WeCan to choking point. The distributor of Anheuser-Busch in Queens refused to take back this growing mountain of cans.
Polhemus, however, had to pay the homeless for their cans, and had to advance thousands of dollars out of his own pocket. It took a New York Times article about WeCan’s story, exposing the scandalous behavior of the nation’s biggest brewer, to force Anheuser-Busch to accept the millions of cans. Anheuser-Busch did not show up to reclaim the cans, leaving the transport to WeCan. The Coalition for the Homeless had to provide a truck to bring all the cans to the brewer on the other side of the East River.
“To annoy us, they counted all the cans at a painstakingly slow pace, one by one. It took them a week to count them all,” Wellikson remembers. “Then we had to wait another few months for the check. This way, WeCan went nearly broke a few times. Most of the time, however, payments came in just in time, or a subsidy, donation or grant saved WeCan from bankruptcy.
“In the summer it is always the same thing,” explains Wellikson. “Every idiot puts some water, sugar, and colorants in a can, comes up with a crazy name and introduces with a lot of noise a new drink on the market. And we get stuck with the Snapples, Suckels, or Prickels cans that we can’t get rid off because these businesses no longer exist when the summer is over.”
In the first years, WeCan had secured the cooperation of hundreds of companies that would save up all the cans in their cafeterias. WeCan had purchased a truck and picked up the cans on regular days. It never became profitable, Wellikson explains. Not only did it take too much time to navigate the congested streets of Manhattan, WeCan’s workers, mostly homeless and can people, were not the most reliable and showed great creativity in scamming WeCan.”
Wellikson has to smile. “Along the routes, they had made deals with friends to catch the bags that they were throwing out of the truck. Sometimes the trucks arrived empty. Or they tipped buddies who said they were from WeCan and picked up the bags themselves and shared the profits.”
WeCan is once again going through a difficult period. Wellikson sighs. The bank has been threatening to suspend credit, while WeCan will hear at any moment the outcome of their lawsuit against the distributor of Pepsi Cola. “If you call us in three months and the phone line is disconnected, then you know we are really broke,” Wellikson says dramatically.