The homeless man who sifts through the Dumpsters outside my apartment found a pile this morning of records someone threw out.
Someone in one of the apartment buildings in my neighborhood, apparently expecting he might be by soon, left a couple of bags of clothes next to the container, on the ground. One of the bags had a Macy’s logo, and both seemed to be filled mostly with old blue jeans. Some were black.
After the man, who was wearing blue jeans with a very fashionable white belt , combed through the bag, holding every pair up to his waist to see if it was long enough and separating them by size, began busting open trash bags to see what was inside. Not satisfied, he went to the neighboring trash bin, which put him out of my sight, and found the LPs.
Since I moved into this apartment last July, I’ve noticed a handful of vagrants sifting through the containers, seemingly on their way from somewhere, to somewhere else, making their normal rounds. It all seems very routine, and I have to wonder if there are any territorial squabbles that erupt if one man digs around in another’s Dumpster. All of the men seem to take their time and do a thorough job, so I doubt they are on the look-out for competition. And they seem to have no shame about it.
The man I saw this morning, is white, about 45-ish, with very grayed but full curly hair. He’s always carrying a backpack and this morning he had a second bag, a black duffel like the kind people carry to the gym.
When he found the records, he brought them back over to the side of the first Dumpster where he’d laid his bags. His back was to my kitchen window, which is on the second floor of my building, on the end. From this vantage point I’ve watched the homeless men for the past six months as they rifle through the trash. The curly-haired man put the stack of albums down near the jeans he’d gone through and went back to the other trash bin.
After a few minutes, he reappeared and packed up the jeans he wanted and picked up his bags before noticing the pile of records. I’ll probably never know why, but he began pulling each vinyl disc from its paper sleeve in the cardboard album cover and inspecting both sides, I assume looking for scratches. I couldn’t tell what the first record was, but under it in the pile were two Doors albums, “L.A. Woman” and “The Doors.”
I watched for a long time as the man eye-balled each record and put it down in a not-at-all-neat pile. After a while, a brunette woman walking a large brown dog approached him and they had a little chat about something or other before she walked off with her dog. The man continued inspecting the records. One of them looked like the Rolling Stones’ greatest-hits record “Hot Rocks” but when I got a clearer view, it wasn’t.
When the man finished looking at the records, he picked up a pile and made room for them in his duffel bag, picked up his things and walked off leaving another pile of records behind on the ground.
Several things occurred to me as the man walked away, probably on his way to the next trash bin on his route. It can be assumed that he will do one of two things with the records he took: sell or barter them, or, if he’s not quite as homeless as his foraging would suggest, go home and listen to them.
If he plans to sell them, the discards are probably damaged and of little value. This, of course, means that someone in my neighborhood threw out all of their records, some damaged, some not. I don’t buy that. If you have a collection of LPs, you don’t toss out the good with the bad. Perhaps you toss out the bad ones, but not the good ones too. That is, unless you are getting rid of all your records. And who would do that? This leads me to wonder why someone would keep damaged records around. Perhaps they were all scratched.
Whether that’s the case, or whether the man is going to listen the ones he left with, it means he simply does not like The Doors.
As I stand at my kitchen window, I can see the unmistakable red and yellow cover of “L.A. Woman” on top of but only partially obscuring the group’s first album. There are other records scattered around next to the Dumpster, but I can’t make out what they are.
I’m struck by this subtle expression of preference, of taste. And I wonder, if the man doesn’t consider two records by one of the 1960s most defining rock groups worth pilfering out of a trash heap, just what the hell was it he did walk off with.
