You know, diving into Dumpsters ain't all that bad. No kidding. Just head over to Eastern Avenue, anywhere between Sahara and Desert Inn, where in the early morning of any given day you'll find Robert Gowan, with his decrepit shopping cart, deep-trash diving some 2,000 nautical miles below the public's eye. He'll tell you. There's some salable stuff down there. Some furniture, sundry clothes, boxes of CDs, even stereos that couldn't have been used but once or twice. And sometimes, if your stars line up right, you can find something so treasurable that you decide to keep it for yourself. Like Robert's picture of Frank Sinatra, bearing a cryptic note inscribed by the legend's unmistakable hand.
"I dig, I find, I take some of this stuff to the pawn [shop], come out with 50 bucks sometimes," Robert says, resurfacing from a large bin in the Fountains of Villa Cordova apartment complex, where, along with the Lake Sahara apartments and the back of the Food4Less shopping center, he makes his typical rounds. He then uses his homemade metallic probe to investigate another Dumpster with an archeologist's resolve, and adds:
"You'd be surprised at what you find here."
Just ask his friends, fellow Dumpster divers Andy and Steve, or the managers at Villa Cordova, and they'll tell you that garbage bins in Las Vegas can be bottomless pools of recyclable goods, in large part due to the population's unfastened roots: That is, with thousands of people moving out of the city every month, and often in haste, goods that would be sold under more deliberated circumstances are discarded into Dumpsters with great frequency. Left behind are computers and DVDs and women's underwear—often the most furtive kind—and countless liquor bottles, many with a warm shot still dwindling at the bottom.
Or ask former apartment manager John Hoffman, who wrote an instructional manual to this inglorious trade after the multitudes of fans who bought and spread the gospel of his first book, Art and Science of Dumpster Diving, cried out for more. He'll tell you that in these days of eBay and the resurrecting power of technology, Dumpster diving can be a profitable exercise.
"But I don't really find what others do," says Robert, a native of Wyoming with the cracked hands and creased leathern face of a fisherman, who has spent the better part of his 44 years dirtying himself with work, and who now is wiping away the grease blotted on his forehead like a Rorschach test. Phlegm drips from his biker's mustache, hair flows out from his backwards cap in oily gray waves, and he says: "It's cuz I'm down on my luck now."
The truth, he'll tell you, is that he has been drowning in his own misfortune for quite some time, and if he weren't, then he would not be diving in dumpsters or bearing the constant worry of having no place to sleep except the cold ground between those Dumpsters in which he scavenges for at least enough cans to fill his cart.
"Well, I guess it ain't actually that fun," he says of Dumpster diving. "It's dirty; it's not good work; and really, on average, I just make enough to keep me from starving each day."
Plus there are the "No Trespassing" signs, which give every business owner and apartment manager the right to make a citizen's arrest on rummaging violators. (And for this reason, though in its implicit form, divers tend to abstain from private residences.) Now, Robert and Alex and Steve say that no one has ever really had a problem with them, but on occasion authorities will threaten to haul them off. Because they can. The city of Las Vegas, weary of its history with identity theft and mindless divers crushed in trash compactors, is one of the few municipalities in the nation with ordinances directly addressing the act of Dumpster diving.
Then there are the germs, and the diseases, and the bloodied sheets and used needles and suspicious pipes—all of which the Dumpster divers say they encounter on a regular basis in this town. But above all there is the ignominy of digging through garbage as a means to supplement your income, which is such a sharp subcutaneous pain to Alex and Steve that they wished not for their last names to be a part of their story.
Well, okay: In the end this business of diving in Dumpsters ain't too desirable. Not in this town, anyway. Just ask Tom Kacmrk, a Dumpster diver who one day came across the subservient eyes of a child, naked and vulnerable, staring at him from the irreducible distance of a photograph. Or ask Merlon White, a diver who one day encountered a dog not yet dead but no longer alive either. It was in a state of ghastly suffering. Or—if you can find him (and word is, you can't, for to no one's surprise he has skipped town)—ask the diver who on one day, January 12, discovered the body of a little girl, dead and utterly abandoned, who even to this day remains unidentified.