Scrap

I found some old journal entries. This one is probably circa ~2006, just titled "Scrap:" I moved to Pittsburgh at the right time in my life, but at the wrong time of year. Coming from the west coast, I was actually naive enough to be excited about the prospect of winter. I imagined nothing but snowball fights, snow angles, icicles on the eves, and that muffled crunch of loose snow under your feet. I thought I'd be doing nothing but riding sleds and watching snowflakes drift down past the street lights at night. It turns out, however, that winter doesn't quite resemble this fantasy, and that it's also the kind of thing you really want to ease into. The house we moved into didn't have working utilities, much less effective heating, and January wasn't the best time to be standing in the basement with a pipe wrench, doing my best to install gas lines without being able to feel my fingers. There were days when I literally couldn't apply the thread sealant to the black iron, because it had frozen in the tube. So we had this house, and it was a wreck, and it was well below zero. But it was beautiful that we had anything at all. Just like a squat, the first order of business was to get something that approximated a flushing toilet. After that, we started tearing out walls, putting in plumbing, and trying to eek everything that we could out of forgotten pallets and scrap lumber. At one point we pulled a cast-iron bathtub out of a bathroom, and not having any immediate place to put it, temporarily set it outside -- right up against the back of the house. The next morning I stepped out back, and it was gone. Totally vanished. It hadn't even been 24 hours, and somehow a really heavy cast-iron bathtub had disappeared from our back yard. It seemed like such a random theft -- who in their right mind would spontaneously coordinate an operation to move something of that size? I didn't yet realize that where San Francisco has scroungers, Pittsburgh has scrappers. The hunt isn't for kitchy coffee mugs or spare furniture. It's for raw metals. So several months later when we pulled out another cast-iron bathtub, this one with a large hole rusted through the bottom of it, I knew just how to get rid of it. We simply put it in the back yard. The next day I was looking out the window when I saw an old pickup truck drive through the ally. It had all kinds of metal pipes and appliance parts jutting out the plywood sides which had been erected to try and contain as much metal in the bed of the truck as possible. Two guys hopped out, sized up the tub, and wrangled it into the truck. They continued around the block and pulled up next to a dumpster that we'd been steadily filling with moldy carpet out front. I waved. "ALRIGHT IF WE PULL THIS DUCTWORK OUT OF THIS DUMPSTER?!" "No problem at all." Upon closer inspection, these two were quite the team. One bulky, one scrappy, both getting old. They almost reminded you of something out of a Walter Matthou movie, where they'd both gone hard of hearing, so all communication between them was done by yelling -- even if they were standing only inches apart. I gathered that one was named Ron, the other Wade, and that their voices were continually horse. After they'd gotten the ductwork into the truck, one of them looked the house up and down. "SAY, YOU GOT ANYTHING ELSE IN THERE?" "Well," I said, "we do have an old broken gas furance in the basement." Wade looked at Ron. "YOU WANNA GO CHECK IT OUT RON?" "ALRIGHT I'LL GO CHECK IT OUT!" So Ron followed me down into the basement. He jerked the furnace around to get a feel for the weight, nodded to himself, and counted the steps up to the first floor. Back outside, Ron and Wade had a quick conference. "HOW'S IT LOOK RON?" "IT'S HEAVY WADE. REAL HEAVY. 17 STEPS." They mulled it over, before turning to where I was standing two feet away and yelling "ALRIGHT WE'LL DO IT." I went down with them, to supervise, but was quickly roped into the heavy lifting. The first thing I noticed was that moving scrap for a living doesn't make you a very good mover. They didn't even bother trying to tip the furnace down, and instead just knocked the thing straight over with a resounding crash. We sort of carry/dragged it over to the steps, where the real work began. The stairway from the basement back up to the first floor is just wide enough for the furnace. There are 13 steps up, then a small landing for a 180degree turn, then the remaining 4 steps to the first floor. Our original linup was with Wade (the big one) in front of the furnace, with me and Ron (the scrappy ones) below the furnace. These guys were not afraid to make noise. Every time they went to lift, they were moaning or yelling or cursing almost embarrasingly loudly. We tried moving it up a few steps before Wade finally shouted "RON! YOU KNOW I CAN'T DO THIS! I'VE ONLY GOT THREE TOES!" I wondered if I'd heard Wade correctly, and he responded "the sugars" when I looked at him somewhat quizzically. So Ron and Wade traded places, such that now Ron was in front and I was down below with the big guy. In fact, both him and I could barely fit in the stairwell at the same time. We'd lift a step at a time, and it took us a solid 45 minutes to make it up the first flight and into the landing. The furnace just barely fit through the doorway from the stairwell to the landing, but a pipe jutting out of it got stuck in a wall. So Wade and I were left standing on the basement side of the furnace, with the whole thing blocking the door, while Ron was out on the landing side of the furnace. Suddenly, Wade turned to me and asked "HEY, IS THERE ANOTHER WAY OUT OF THIS BASEMENT?" "Actually, no this is the only entrance." He started looking around frantically. "I... I... I GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE! I'M CLAUSTRAUPHOBIC! GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" He continued yelling, but also started trying to pull the furnace back down towards us, which would have crushed us for sure. I could barely fit in the starewall with Wade as it was, but now I was getting seriously squished up against the wall in all the hysterics. I tried to calm him down, told him to take a deep breath, but nothing was working. I couldn't decide whether I should continue trying to help work things out in the stairwell, or just bolt back down into the basement and take cover. Ron peered through, saw what was happening, and yelled "I'LL GO GET THE AXE!" "The what?" I thought. "RON! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME LIKE THIS! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME!" While the furnace did fit squarely in the door frame, there was a small 2ft gap between the top of the furnace and the top of the door frame. "Wade!" I yelled, "Wade! Why don't you try going over it!" Without a microsecond of hesitation, this 250+lb guy immediately started scrambling up the furnace, trying to squeeze through the opening in the top. I sort of shrugged to myself, sighed, then started pushing on his ass, trying to help wedge him through the opening. Eventually the bulk of him was directly on top of the furnace, and when Ron came back he was able to help pull him through. He then went down face-first over the other side. But now I was stuck in the basement, with these two lunatics on the other side. The offending pipe that was preventing the furnace from moving any further needed to be resolved, and Ron was holding a full-sized axe. "Now Ron, I've got some wrenches in that room over there, you could-" WHAM! The axe came down on the pipe, ripping out a section of drywall along with it. They jerked it around the bend, shoved it up the remaining steps, and it was out the front door. "Say," I asked, "how much do you get for steel, anyway?" "FOUR CENTS A POUND." This is, basically, life in Pittsburgh. Moxie Marlinspike on X: "I found some old journal entries. This one is probably circa ~2006, just titled "Scrap:" I moved to Pittsburgh at the right time in my life, but at the wrong time of year. Coming from the west coast, I was actually naive enough to be excited about the prospect of winter. I" - that was such a great read.. reminded me how much I miss reading blogs from back in the day.. - did you ever get paid for helping them move that furnace or was the story the payment?