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“I checked that already,” Terlizzi barked. The clerk sighed, and Terlizzi stepped out to call roll.
    Two to a truck, the men roared into the twilit streets, and soon the office fell quiet. After asking me to sign a waiver, Terlizzi handed me over to John Burrafato, who worked on Motorized Litter Patrol. A pugnacious man with a small black mustache and a military bearing, Burrafato cruised the district in a department sedan, making lists of bulk items—pallets discarded in an industrial area, a blown tire in the middle of the road—to be collected by truck. He noted problem areas and wrote $25 summonses to residents who didn’t follow the recycling rules and $1,500 summonses (going up to $20,000) for wholesale illegal dumping. Because DSNY spent relatively little on public education, only a minority of city residents seemed to understand all the garbage rules. Being pugnacious, then, was a prerequisite for this job.
    Burrafato was supposed to bring me up to my neighborhood, where Sullivan and Murphy were already at work. But he wasn’t ready to do this quite yet. First, there was paperwork for him to clear, then a mechanic to insult. I sat on a brown footlocker and read the
Daily News
while he flitted in and out of the office. Terlizzi had found his missing truck, but the air was still poisoned with his ill humor. Someone on the telephone was pressuring Terlizzi to sign off on some forms. He said, “I
didn’t
say when I’ll do it, but if you need it right now, I’ll come
back
there and
do
it!” He leaped to his feet and slammed down the phone. “Fuck
you!
” he shouted at the supplicant, who could easily have been me. Just yesterday, I had been pestering him on the phone about getting the waiver. “You make that coffee yet?” he growled at Burrafato now.
    “No, I’m getting these guys straightened out.” Burrafato went out, came in, went out.
    “Okay, the coffee’s done. You want a cup?” Burrafato was talking to me.
    “No, thanks,” I said, wanting only to get out of there. Burrafato went into a small room and poured himself coffee. By now I was reading the sports section. Then I read the ancient memos on the walls and studied the maps, trying to figure out my district, garage, section, and route. New York’s roughly 320 square miles are broken into fifty-nine sanitation districts, where about 7,600 workers clean the streets twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. (In comparison, Los Angeles has about 580 workers tidying up 450 square miles, but its population is less than half of New York’s eight million, and its trucks host just one worker instead of two. Chicago, with a population of 2.9 million spreading over 228 square miles, relies on 3,300 sanitation workers.) Brooklyn’s districts are divided into zones North and South. Here in South, there are eleven other garages besides my own, which is called the Six. The territory covered by the Six is in turn broken into five sections: my street is part of Section 65, which is divided into three routes cleaned by three different trucks. When I was satisfied with my triangulations, I poked my head into the side room to ask Burrafato a question. He was watching TV and sipping a second cup of coffee.
    I retreated to my footlocker. Terlizzi was now on the phone with “the borough,” his bosses at the Brooklyn headquarters, ordering up an FEL, or front-end loader. “Someone just dumped the contents of the first floor of his house onto the street,” he said to me. “Happens all the time.” As soon as he got off, the phone rang. It was the cat lady on Fifth Street, complaining yet again that the san men hadn’t collected her garbage. A clerk named Scooter handled the call, which meant he held the receiver at arm’s length so the entire room could hear the woman’s litany of grief. When it was over, he told her soberly, “I’ll make sure this information gets to the right people.” He hung up, and the assembled burst out laughing. Everyone knew