I’m down in downtown Chinatown with Jimmy Downs, owner of Downs Downtown Municipal Waste Company (The double dee-em-dubya-see) to get his point of view on the issue pressuring every American. What do we do with our waste? Jimmy Downs is young, but also an expert on everything wastewise, coming from a dynasty of refuse processors that could trace its roots all the way back to 1885. I plunge my hand into a bag of garbage on the street and hold it up for him to inspect.
“Yep, that’s a mix of domestic and light industrial.” He says, laughing like Popeye.
“You mean I’m holding industrial waste?” I say, examining the cluster in my hand. Past the plastic food wrappers, wet tissues, hair and a mouldy burger, there was cement pouring from something in my hand.
“People throw all sorts of stuff away. We recycle what we can. Furniture, wood, metal, there’s gold in other people’s trash. Literally, mmhmm.” He says. I throw the stuff on the floor and we walk on. As I wipe my hand on my jeans, I start to get excited. I had been e-mailing Downs for the last couple of weeks, trying to pull off something I had always wanted to do. Working alongside the Mayor’s office, my agent and a faceless array of administrators, we were doing a form of archaeology that traced the urban history of the city, exploring it from the angle of waste. Jimmy Downs drove a garbage truck up to the Puente Hills Landfill and stopped, looking up at the device.
Inside the support structure there was a large, hollow
drill. It had the diameter of a bus, with the engine driving it mounted on the
side along with a control room. The drill would go down whilst piercing the
centre with a stainless-steel holding pin. As the drill and pin descended, they
would be added to, extending the total possible length of the drill to five hundred feet. The teeth of the drill were made of titanium, able to tear through the
garbage beneath, though the sound it made as it went down was horrendous. The
stench of ancient garbage began to fill the air, creating a thick cloud around
the site as the drill screamed downwards and the engine blasted again and again.
Everybody was wearing breathing apparatus, the clothes we were wearing would
need to be burned later. Drilling was slow, taking hours until it reached the
bottom. Jimmy Downs signalled for the drill to stop, then to a crane that began
to pull at the steel pin in the centre. As the core ascended, two rollers
circled the garbage so it would be held in place, twisting chickenwire around
and around. The device clicked open like a handcuff, reversing away to leave
the five-hundred-foot monolith of trash standing near the peak of the landfill.
Everybody gazed at it. Though the sun was behind it, the layers and layers of trash were discernible even at a distance. The structure also seemed to hold, although bits of plastic and rags caught the wind, fluttering like flags across the huge thing.
“Cylinder is holding at 97% stability.” One of the engineers says, standing by a control panel. A few cheer.
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions. There may be inner nodules of liquefication we can’t see.” Downs says.
“Come on Jimmy, its holding steadier than a wisdom tooth.”
“The sunlight will be heating up the garbage juices.” He says, holding a hand up. He’s right. A jet of black goo erupts from a side, causing trash to cascade down.
“Cylinder is at 95% stability! 94!”
“Tighten ‘er up, tighten ‘er up!” Downs says. I look down at the control panel and begin to twist a knob. Motors at the top of the chicken wire begin to tighten, causing the huge cylinder to become constricted, elongated. This also has the effect similar to wringing out a towel, causing more of the juices to begin exploding from the cylinder.
“Stability increasing…” says the refuse engineer, leaning close to his monitor. I carefully twist the knob, not wanting to wring the cylinder dry, compact.
“That was a close one.” I say, sighing relief.
“Get ready for stage two.” Downs says.
We watch the crane lower the top of the cylinder to the ground. The steel pin at the centre of the foul column also expands, creating a latticed tunnel running through the core. This strange tunnel seems to beckon us. Heat haze from it makes the air curl like oil on water. Jimmy Downs and me begin walking towards it.
“What do you think we’ll find, Jimmy?”
“Old trash.” He says. As we walk his hand shoots in front of me.
“Easy there.” Downs says to me. I look down, seeing the hole where the core had been extracted from. A five-hundred-foot drop inside the old landfill, the sunlight only illuminating near its lip. We continue walking.
The tunnel lies ahead of us. The Puente Hills Landfill opened in 1957 to handle waste from east L.A., and one of the biggest landfills in the United States. A mountain of waste had been built in what had been a canyon, building up and up over the years until finally closing in 2013. The mound had since become a nature reserve, joining the wider area across the Puente Hills among the California floristic province. Ahead of us was the tunnel in the middle of the core, a space only big enough to crawl through. We played rock, paper, scissors to see who went first. I assumed that Jimmy Downs would play rock due to the shape of his hands, I played paper, it was over before we got to three. I saluted him, then began to crawl through the tunnel.
The headtorch casts a pale glow ahead of me, and as the mask on my breathing gear became steamed up it became difficult to see what was in front of me. I was crawling through the tunnel, through history. At the very beginning, the trash from 2013 was easily visible, not as compressed as later sections would be. Relics from the era stuck out between the black trashbags that had split; a broken selfie stick, a flier celebrating gay marriage, a cellphone had turned itself on and was playing a Harlem Shake video and there was a happy meal toy of Elsa covered in a brown mass. On I went, past posters for Obama’s second term, iPod headphones, the remnants of packaging for an Xbox 360 and Mountain Dew. As I crawled through the trash I kept crawling back in time, seeing old packaging for food, broken toys, discarded and forgotten things illuminated in the dim yellow light from my headtorch. These nostalgic artifacts were also buried amongst clumps of long rotten cardboard, broken bits of wood, the corners of fridges and washing machines, broken glass, twists of wire. On and on I crawled. Past what I estimated to be the early nineties, things began to change shape. The weight of what I had passed before had crushed these layers of trash so they became rings of brown sludge, the things that couldn’t rot or be crushed stuck out more easily, like bones poking up from dead flesh. I feel as if I was crawling through the digestive system of a corpse, with loose flaps of plastic hanging downward between the gaps in the tunnel walls, a thin puddle of slime running along the floor that soaked into my knees and gloves. This putrid intestine continued, the plastic was less and less as I made my way towards the beginning of the landfill, back to 1957. There was not much recognisable by this point, though something glinted in the light from my head. I crawl up close to it, wiping off the sludge so I could get a better look.
“What are you?” I say. I pull, it slides out from the ancient trash easily. It is some kind of stone. I brush at it again, and see it shining in the dim light. Jimmy Downs arrived behind me.
“What is that thing?” he asks. I throw it over to him.
“No way…”
“What is it, Jimmy?”
“It’s a garbage jewel. I didn’t think these existed.”
“What’s that?”
“If you crush garbage for long enough, I heard it can make special gemstones. Similar to how diamonds are formed, the intense pressure over time creates something new. They form underground, but only in very particular circumstances.” He says, holding the garbage jewel up.
“So what you’re saying is, this is concentrated garbage?”
“Precisely. Just as a diamond is pure carbon, this jewel is pure waste. Amazing…” he says, looking around. I could see the look in his eye, even through the respirator.
“Say now Jimmy, don’t do anything crazy.”
“Don’t you get it? All this end of the cylinder might contain more garbage jewels. We’re going to make a fortune! We’re going to be stinking rich!”
“Jimmy, the structural integrity…we need to get out of here.” I say. He ignores me, rifling through the layers of waste like a wet phonebook. From the walls he plucks another jewel, this one smaller.
“Come on, you got to help me.” He says, plunging his arm back in to the filth.
“Jimmy, leave it! We can come back!”
“No, no, no, no, we aren’t sharing these jewels with anyone. You and me, we’re like explorers at El Dorado. Come on, help me.” He says, thrusting his other arm into the wall, searching for the rot stones. The cylindrical wall around us moves, the delicate balance of its archaeology getting ruined by the clumsy fisting of Downs.
“I’m getting out of here.” I say. Downs ignores me. Moving round inside the tunnel is awkward, just as I position myself to crawl the last dozen or so feet there is a groaning all around us. I look back over my shoulder. Downs looks around, up to his elbows in the garbage.
“I got a big one! I can feel it!” he says, starting to throw his body back, trying to dislodge the thing.
“The tunnel’s going to collapse! Leave it!” I call back. He ignores me again, leaning back. The steel lattice running inside the tunnel creaks, twisting and bending as the trash finally gives way. The ceiling collapses, giving birth to the wet skeleton of a horse that bursts downward, the yawning jaws of the old nag split open impossibly wide, falling over Down’s head. An avalanche of decomposed trash and rusted metal follows it. I grab the man’s arm and try to yank him from the pestilent burial, though his visor has become smashed from the horse teeth. More of the ceiling around us begins to collapse, and crawling whilst trying to drag Jimmy Downs was hard, too slow. Only the top half of my body managed to make it before the tunnel collapses completely, trapping my legs and most of Jimmy in the primordial garbage that had lay at the bottom of the excavation. I grab at my walkie talkie, shouting for help.
Ten minutes later we were both free. I was fine, though with Downs’ mask breaking, seventy five year old sludge had come through, almost drowning him in the old refuse. He had also lost his garbage jewels somewhere in the tunnel.
“You could go back and get them.”
“Maybe. They might be broken by now, obliterated amongst the inner trash physics. You’re right, I should have left it behind.” Downs says.
“What happens to the cylinder now?” I say, finding a joint in my pocket and lighting it up.
“We got some guys at the Smithsonian coming tomorrow. It belongs in a museum, they need to conduct a proper post-mortem on it.” He says, accepting the joint and taking a couple of hits.
“Maybe some things are left alone.”
“Mmhmm.”
We watch the star dip below the Pacific, thinking of things
underground, of the garbage jewels that twinkle in the darkness and other things that would be forever unknown.
