Wednesday and Saturdays are the garbage days for my house.

Tuesday and Friday nights used to be my favorite times of the week. I would help my mother tie up the bags, heavy with empty containers, bits of dried rice, spoiled kimchi, empty wrappers.

“Pee-yoo,” I used to say, “It’s really smelly this time.” My mother would always agree.

We moved from room to room lifting the plastic bags from each trash can as we swept our one floor home from left to right, dropping them by the hallway door, one by one. My mother would always yell instructions from the other room, her Korean more natural than my responses until we came together in the kitchen. We put the smaller bags into the biggest, stomping our feet down to make more room, the plastic stretching, warping, sticking to our fingers as we pulled and tied.

We would pad down the stairs to the front door, struggling with the remnants of the last few days. We walked into the night air, a strange sense of adrenaline always making me bristle with excitement. The streetlight made us look like orange bandits up to no good as my mother carried and I dragged the bags to the street.

“Good job, Mommy,” I’d say.

She’d tell me the same.

 

Queens is often cited as an example of poor urban planning, deemed disorganized. This description is often accompanied with a photo of an empty lot, littered with trash and junk, in the middle of buildings and homes crammed in every which way. Once, while flipping through one of these books in Barnes & Noble, I found a picture taken by the abandoned LIRR bridge in Elmhurst. The small lot was shot in black and white, a mesh of bushes and trash, the bridge in the background. I knew the large Fish Market supermarket that rested across the street from the lot, the family owned restaurants and hair salons that were situated down the block. I remember being surprised at seeing the picture, at this lot being described as an urban mistake. I had always silently thought of its ragged borders as a little oasis, greenery and vegetation amongst the busy steel and brick.

 

New York City issued its first zoning law in 1916 in response to increased immigration, subsequent subpar housing conditions where bodies pressed into tight spaces; and the encroachment of commercial buildings on residential living, casting long shadows over houses.

This law was constantly being amended and revised as the city grew beyond previously imagined limits. As immigration laws were reformed and the economy boomed, the influx of new residents and businesses forced a revision of the old zoning law in 1961 with a renewed emphasis on open spaces, designating certain areas for residential life only.

The 7 train is the only train that runs above ground at the Roosevelt Avenue station. The tracks lay across the legs of grey looming steel, towering above the people who live here, nestled between the apartment buildings where they live. The bridge insulates the street, provides shade during the summer, a giant umbrella when it rains. The noise of passing trains drown out the rumble of car engines, the timbre of human voices, shaking the ground. It flares Roosevelt to life about ten times an hour.

A recent report on the city government’s website conceded that these zoning laws have often resulted in overwhelmed living areas paired with open spaces that are not always “attractive.”

 

I used to wake up early to watch the garbage get taken away. Usually around seven o’clock, I would hear their voices, the distant rumble coming down the street and I would stand by the window, boosted by a chair I would drag from the dinner table and wait.

Three men in brown uniforms would drive up our block, one man dangling off the side of the back. They would yell and laugh, their gray truck beeping, turning on and off. They would fling my heavy bags into the back of their vehicle, press a button to bring the smasher down to smash, the sun just beginning to peak around the rooftop of the house across the street. I thought of my garbage squashing with other peoples’ garbage, mixing, becoming undistinguishable.

I wondered if the garbage men noticed the smell anymore; if it all smelled more the same or more distinctive, day after day.

Rumbling truck, engine fire.

Gears turning, fitting against each other, moving and crushing.

 

The sidewalk width in west Queens may vary from yard to yard.

Neighborhoods overlap, streets zigzag and cut each other off, lacking the order of the Manhattan grid. It’s as if no one could bear to plan more than a few smattering of buildings at a time; allowing things to fall where they may. Handfuls of brick apartment buildings from the 70s mismatched among small townhouses from the 50s, their square foot yards fenced in with barbed wire, stoops spilling into the street, abandoned factories trundling nothing throughout the night.

 

The garbage in Queens isn’t collected by the block or neighborhood, but by sectors. Garbage sectors run between confused neighborhoods, cutting blocks in to quarters. It has always seemed arbitrary to me how these sectors were assigned, blocks randomly demarcated between the days, the garbage truck passing houses by only to stop and collect at the end of the block. Thursday and Sunday mornings are the only times the sidewalk clears in front of my home. Cement with the occasional green prying between its cracks, free of building wrappers, discarded bottles, plastic bags. The sidewalk in front of my house is filled again by the time the house down the block is free. It’s a constant ebb and flow, houses jutting out, their garbage filling the street. Everything seems mismatched, perpetually random and uneven.

 

Queens is New York City’s most diverse borough, often called the “borough of immigrants.” Forty-eight percent of borough residents are immigrants and fifty-five percent of households speak a language other than English. An estimated 150 different languages are spoken within the borough limits.

The Elmhurst/Jackson Heights section of Queens is considered one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the United States. By the early 1980s, it was estimated that there were people from over 112 different national backgrounds living within the confines of these two neighborhoods. From kindergarten through the eighth grade, almost all of my classmates were second generation, their parents immigrants from various nations of South and Central America, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean. They all spoke the language of their parents at home, most intermixed English, jokingly calling these hybrid tongues, Spanglish, Konglish, Chinglish. Over seventy percent of Elmhurst/Jackson Heights residents are foreign born. We all knew how it worked, how our languages bled, mixed easily in our mouths. We never thought anything of it; we never knew it wasn’t always like this. I’ve always assumed that the other thirty percent or so are their kids.

 

City housing advocates estimate that there are 100,000 illegal apartments in New York City. The majority of these illegal housing situations are found in Queens, sometimes up to six families living in two family homes, or several single apartment rooms rented out of single family homes. At one point, eight of my family members were living on our floor, three bedrooms to share. I knew the family above us had five people and a baby, a couple living in the apartment below us, and single man living in the basement. Seventeen people in a three family house.

According to the Chhaya Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group, “Illegal apartments are so interwoven with the fabric of life in Queens that the blatant signs go ignored. . .multiple mailboxes, trash cans.” I do remember the large pile of garbage that would accumulate for the garbage men to take at our curb, the occasional passerby adding an empty pack of cigarettes or potato chip bag to our trash. I wonder if it ever gave us away, the extra stink or bulks of mass; if anyone thought that something extraordinary was happening inside our doors.

 

I like to look into the kitchen garbage sometimes. I don’t pick through it or anything, but just look. I would be throwing away eggshells after making breakfast or tossing orange peels when the things already inside would stop my motions. Dirty saran wrap balled up, empty cookie sleeves, old food losing its color, the roots of green onions, the tops of carrots, meat packages crunched to fit. The garbage in the kitchen always looks a little different every time I know to pay enough attention. Sometimes I wonder how other kitchen’s garbage would look, if it would just be more of the same, if I would be surprised by what I saw.

Once my father caught me in one of these odd moments and asked me what I was doing.

“It’s weird, isn’t it? What you see in trash sometimes, I mean,” I said placing my garbage into the bin and releasing the foot pedal to drop the lid.

He seemed to consider me for a moment, slowly pouring coffee into his mug.

“I don’t really think so,” he said slowly.

 

Roosevelt Avenue technically separates Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, zones 3 and 4, respectively. The subway station serves as line of demarcation and allows for six different trains to pass through. We pause our conversations as the 7 rumbles above us, the doors opening and closing, the pounding of passengers audible overhead until the train gears to life once more.

A few blocks north of Roosevelt Avenue has been dubbed ‘Little India,’ although in fact, it is a dense concentration of mostly Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants, their families, and their businesses. It is always bustling, bright lights and incense thick, pungent at all hours of the day.

After a few blocks west, the stores advertising eyebrow threading and top of the line saris give way to bright yellows, blues, and reds, Colombian record stores, small restaurants inviting passerbys to try Ecuadorian cuisine, Empanadas, Mexican style.

South is a cluster of Asian video and translation book stores with signs ordering pedestrians to Learn English!, Spanish!, Korean!, Tagalog!, Mandarin!, or Cantonese!, Korean tofu soup huts, Chinese fish markets, Pad Thai specialty restaurants. Large trucks drop off deliveries of fresh produce, frozen meats, yelling in their native languages.

Friends call up to family, heads sticking out the windows from the street. The streets merge and twist, car exhaust, honks, language chatter undulate ceaselessly.

It takes thirty minutes to circle the section that hugs Roosevelt Avenue. I’ve counted.

 

The New York Community Media Alliance ran an article that attempted to call attention to overgrown neighborhoods in Queens and how this overgrowth manifests through trash, stating, “Paper on the ground, newspaper, plastic cups, discarded potato chip bags, soda and water bottles, flyers, and even pieces of bread, meat and leftover tacos are just some of the things you will find on the streets.” The article ruminates on booming restaurants and other businesses, booming populations, and the need for the Sanitation Department to compensate for this growth, citing the Roosevelt area as one of the problem areas. Many residents are quoted, all saying to some extent that their neighborhoods look dirty. Trash roams the streets, bustling between feet, up and down the block.

On the other hand, Good Eats named Roosevelt Avenue one of “America’s Tastiest Streets” in 2008. I’ve been sure of this for years.

 

Once in the second grade, I tangled my foot on the corner of one of the large black bags that lined the street in front of the school. My feet disappeared from below me for a moment and I landed in the pile of trash that lay out for the next day. I remember the soft impact, the feeling of Styrofoam trays and cups from the cafeteria giving way below me, crunching and swallowing me whole. I knew there were old chicken patties, half eaten tacos from Wednesday, milk spilling out of their cartons in those bags. My head fell backwards, black plastic filling my vision, muffling my classmates’ laughter from my ears. The smell was the same from home. The sour smell of things resting together in the same place filled my nostrils, the familiarity of it shocking me, prickling my nose hairs. I reveled in the sameness for a minute until my teacher yanked me up, the fresh air disorienting me.

“That is filthy!” Mrs. Sosa said, spinning me back into line.

The garbage from New York City used to be transported to Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island. Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world up until it reached capacity and closed in early 2001. A few months before its closure, I went on a group retreat to Staten Island for three days. I remember the brick house we stayed in, the green grass that pervaded the retreat center grounds. I remember that when the wind blew a certain way, the stench would be almost unbearable in its familiarity. I scrunched my face, the smell was acrid, pulling on a million memories.

Since 2001, most of the city’s trash is transferred to landfills in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia. For some reason, this fact stirs something in my chest, some tightening, irrationally moving. It just means something to me, the thought of my garbage, the garbage that collects here, scrambling to these separate places, pieces of us scattered here and there, resting.

 

The summers are the worst. The ever-present staggering of garbage along the street stenches and sticks to the humidity, wafting in the air, stagnant. Every day has different garbage clusters, the pick-up zones cutting through the neighborhood, seemingly arbitrary, ignoring the boundaries that have fallen naturally when left to chance.

“Think of all the different combinations of trash,” I once said to my mother, “there’s so much garbage.”

Human hair, various ingredients to different dinner dishes, take-out containers with remnants of fried oil, fish sauce, ashes from smoked cigarettes and used incense holders, morning coffee grounds, old dolls missing their heads, outgrown clothes.

The black plastic bags crowded together every couple of streets, people buzzing around them, around each other. The 7 rolled over us, drowning out honking cars, music, and the voices around us.

“Garbage is garbage,” my mother said in her native tongue, as the train trundled away, “there’s nothing different about that.”