Fly-Tipping In NYC

I am guilty of a crime with no name. At least, it’s nameless in New York City. I’ve been caught several times, usually in some dark Manhattan alley after midnight. The cop writes down a complicated term to describe my misdeed. In Britain, my crime is called fly-tipping: dumping garbage on the sly and on the fly in someone else’s rubbish tip, or any place where dumping is illegal.

I’m too busy or too impatient or (OK, fine) too lazy to deal with New York’s recycling laws, which mandate that plastic is thrown out in blue bags on Tuesday, paper is thrown out in clear bags on Thursday and metal in green bags on Futtbuckday. It’s easier to put all the trash in one bag, wait until midnight and dump it on some other poor bastard’s property.

I live in an apartment house. I dumped my trash in the basement’s designated trash area, bagged but unsorted, until my landlord notified me that the building’s management could be fined for my actions. I had to, as a New Yorker, sort my trash by category, weekday and bag color. Screw that.

Ever notice how much of your trash has your ID on it? Unsolicited credit-card applications with my name on them, prescription drugs with my address on the bottles, the list goes on. Preparing for a midnight fly-tip, I shred my mail and check my garbage for clues to my identity … taking more time and trouble than if I’d sorted the garbage lawfully. I always fly-tip at least 10 blocks from my residence, never hitting the same building twice in three months.

One morning, I found a bag of trash on my doormat. My own garbage boomeranging back to me? No; the bag contained the leavings of Chinese food. Not Chinese take-away, which every ethnic group in New York City eats, but the wrappings and remnants of food sold by Chinese grocers: peppered pork jerky and shredded squid. The family in the apartment above mine are Chinese. The parents barely speak English and their son is autistic, so I asked the teenage daughter if the garbage was theirs. She denied it.

My guilty conscience had a theory: some homeowner or building superintendent had seen me dumping on his turf. He’d followed me or found some clue to my address in my trash. This bag of shredded squid was the fly-tippee’s vengeance. Squid pro quo.

I would either have to start obeying the recycling laws, or find a new fly-tipping route. I found a new fly-tipping route. But every few days, another bag of trash lurked on my threshold—sometimes twice or three times the same week, sometimes two days in a row.

I would have to stake out my own doormat, catch the dumper and offer to lay off his place if he’d lay off mine. I work at home, near a window with a view of the street. Whenever someone unfamiliar entered the building, I waited by my front door’s peephole. Trash kept materializing on my doorstep, but never in synch with the movements of visitors. Finally my doormat got hit three days in a row, always soon after 8:30 in the morning. The guy was getting lazy, falling into a pattern. Would he be stupid enough (or ballsy enough) to fly-tip me four days running? If so, I’d be ready. The next morning, I left my front door unlocked, camera in hand at the peep-hole. At 8:37 a shadow crossed my threshold. I yanked open the door and popped the camera flash.

The culprit was my Chinese neighbors’ autistic teen son. His parents had given him the job of taking their trash to the basement. The basement frightened him, so he left the trash on my mat. Autistic or not, he understood he’d been busted: he never fly-tipped me again. I never told his family. My guilt had gotten the better of me and I’d become paranoid, but the garbage left on my doormat was completely unrelated to my own bad behavior. I can continue fly-tipping with a clear conscience. And I will.

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