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the street, about three brownstones at a time, looking for breaks between parked cars. This type of collection was called “house to house.” In Manhattan, where high-rises are the norm, san men did “flats,” and a truck could pack out after clearing just one or two big buildings. A route in Manhattan might have just three short legs (called ITSAs, though no one remembered why), a route in the lowlands of Brooklyn several dozen.
    At last, CN191 parked in front of my building: a brownstone divided into three apartments that shelter six adults, three children, two dogs, two cats, and one fish. (The fish was mine, and it generated very little solid waste: one packet of fish food, I’ve discovered, lasts three years.) I was nervous. Had we put the barrels—three for putrescible waste, one for metal, and one for paper—in a convenient place? Were the lids off? They were supposed to be on, but they were a pain, and the san men didn’t like them. Lids slowed things down. I wondered if someone had dropped a Snapple bottle or a packet of poodle poop into our barrels reserved for paper or metal. Sullivan and Murphy didn’t care, but the guys on recycling weren’t supposed to collect “contaminated” material, and Burrafato, in theory, could scribble a summons for it. I wondered if my trash was too heavy or too smelly or contained anything identifiably mine. Would Sullivan make some crack about the stained napkins and place mats I was tossing? Would Murphy think it coldhearted to throw out a child’s artwork?
    Watching for dog shit along the curb, Sullivan rolled one plastic bin to the street and Murphy grabbed two others. They looked heavy—I knew they were about three-quarters full—but the men hoisted them to the hopper’s edge without apparent effort. A small plastic grocery sack puffed with refuse, possibly mine, tumbled into the street. My heart almost stopped. Murphy swooped down upon it, tossing the tiny package into the hopper with a flick of his gloved hand. It was over. Nothing untoward had happened. Nobody had said a word.
    I suspect that many people feel guilty about the volume of their trash. As I became more educated about garbage, my feelings of shame and guilt grew. There was stuff in my barrel, like those stained linen napkins, for which I’d failed to find further use. When I’d brought this stuff into the house—a new T-shirt, healthful food, a really fun toy—it was live weight, something I was proud to have selected and purchased with my hard-earned money. Now the contents of the bag were dead weight, headed for burial. No wonder we prefer opaque garbage bags. And no wonder that recycling bags, which flaunt our virtue, are often translucent.
    Was I being neurotic? What, after all, could Sullivan and Murphy say about me, based on an average week’s trash, that couldn’t be said about a million others? That I wasted food, made unhealthy snack choices, bought new socks, or had a cold? I knew, after just one day on the job, that san men constantly made judgments about individuals. They determined residents’ wealth or poverty by the artifacts they left behind. They appraised real estate by the height of a discarded Christmas tree, measured education level by the newspapers and magazines stacked on the curb. Glancing at the flotsam and jetsam as it tumbled through their hopper, they parsed health status and sexual practices. They knew who had broken up, who had recently given birth, who was cross-dressing.
    Sometimes the things one rejects are just as revealing as the things that one keeps, but not always. When sixties radical A. J. Weberman sorted through Bob Dylan’s garbage, which he’d snatched from outside Dylan’s Greenwich Village brownstone, he found nothing that helped him interpret his hero’s cryptic lyrics. Unhappy about this invasion of privacy, Dylan chased Weberman through Village streets, smushed his head to the pavement, and eventually sued him. The US Supreme Court ruled in