tin man

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. I looked again at the ludicrous red lettering slathered across the sideboards. Waves of heat rose from the tar beneath my feet, dust blowing through the razor wire; I moved toward the warning sign, beguiled.

Trucks and wagons limped and lurched around me as I ventured from the sidewalk and entered the scrap yard situated a quarter mile from Sacred Heart. Conveyances held together by rope and wire, these clown cars came bearing their cargo from throughout the city. I stepped cautiously over dirt and gravel and broken asphalt until I came to what had summoned me, seeing the child-script clearly for the first time. In sloppy red: If it’s made of metal we pick-up free.

Lifting a broken computer monitor from his truck to the cart and wincing from atop his soiled t-shirt, Ed looked up at me. And for the next 15 minutes I was schooled in the vagaries of the tin trade. “A minute ago, scrap—like water heaters an’ such—were $250 a ton.” I glanced down at the dolly he had finished loading. “Now it’s at ought $50.”

“What about the copper there?” I asked, seeing a bent pipe, twisted and gleaming in the beaming of the sun.

“That there is at a dollar …” he rubbed a tooth as he thought, “a dollar thirty per pound. That’s down from $3.60.” He had about two pounds of copper pipe on his pile.

“Is this what you do for a living?” I assumed it was, but the calculations I was running in my head belied the term, living.

“Yup.” And as he said this, a woman appeared from behind his contraption—I know not whether from the bed or cab—“We been doing this for about six years now. Since I was 40.”

Ed proceeded to tell me that he and Michelle, his wife of 20 years, made enough to cover their rent. “If you don’t mind me asking, How much do you make in a month?”

After explaining that the amount fluctuates with the whims of the market, he came out with “$2000 or $1500 a month. Sometimes less. It’s enough to pay our rent and get our food and gas.”

On the pile of detritus that earned him his living there were three computer monitors. These took up 75% of the scrap on his dolly, so I asked how much he collected for them. “Five cents a piece.” Five cents a piece. I am reasonably certain that he cannot even replenish the calories required to load and unload these things for what he earns by recycling them.

Ed and Michelle eventually shared with me that they currently rented a room in someone else’s home, that their teenager was expecting a child any day now, and that they were hoping to move in with her and her husband.

When I told them about the services offered by Sacred Heart, they told me that we did good work for the poor, but that they were fine.