Getting By, One Can at a Time

Like clockwork, the little white truck with a black camper rolls into Venice at 1:15 a.m. Rogelio Garcia pulls the pickup into an alley. From the back of the truck, he brings out a battered white bicycle, wife Yolanda’s trusty ride for the next 13 hours, during which she will fish cans and bottles from the trash dumpsters, retracing her one-mile route back and forth several times during the course of the day.

Rogelio continues down the alley. A quick left and his first stop this morning, as it is every morning, is the dumpster behind St. Mark’s Hotel. He has to be there at 1:30, when the trash is taken out. If he’s late, he risks losing the goods to others. Rogelio tears into the first trash bag. It yields 30 Miller beer cans, about a pound of aluminum worth a buck at the Inglewood recycler where he sells his recyclables each day.

Just 15,360 more cans to go and Rogelio and Yolanda will make this month’s $513 rent. Another 6,000 cans will make the $200 they send monthly to their 19-year-old daughter studying business at UC Riverside. An additional 6,000 cans will yield the $200 they send to their 20-year-old son studying aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Once, they made their living in dishwashing and factory work, but when they each got laid off, they didn’t soon find new jobs. They didn’t go on public assistance because they mistakenly believed that would harm their children’s chances of getting financial aid when they were ready for college. They also believed welfare would jeopardize their chances of getting their U.S citizenship, which they eventually received. So, to earn money, they began picking up cans and bottles, and when they realized they could scrape up a modest living this way, they seldom looked for other work.

For the last decade, they have been part of the Venice landscape--the most entrenched in a competitive and thriving subculture of “recyclers” scores strong who mine, around the clock, the city’s dumpsters, bars, restaurants and hotels.

Yet, the Garcias are such a part of the community that last year when a police officer gave Yolanda a $260 ticket for littering, several neighbors, who believed it was unwarranted, wrote the judge explaining that Yolanda always puts the trash back in the dumpsters after retrieving the recyclables.

In his letter to the judge, Demetrios Deligiorgis wrote: “We give the family our returnable bottles knowing that the collected monies are going toward healthy family life and endeavors. We hope this letter . . . goes further to indicate that they are welcomed, established, loved and [a] legitimate entity within our community.” Another neighbor who is a lawyer offered to handle the ticket for Yolanda, who, in the end, did not have to pay the fine.

In the early morning darkness, Rogelio hits a few bars and restaurants where bartenders or cleaning crews for years have given him their cans and bottles. He shines his light inside dumpsters along the way and meets Yolanda habitually at the usual corners.

Yolanda, who stays on the street until 3 p.m., is worn down. Her face is weather-beaten, and the three ulcers she has developed make it difficult for her to enjoy the ham-and-cheese sandwiches Rogelio brings her. She’s on her feet for so many hours a day that in the evenings she sometimes struggles to get from the couch to her bed in the next room.

But she must keep a constant presence in her territory to guard against la competencia. In the wee hours of the morning, other recyclers with aggressive operations--such as one known as “The Bandit”--come driving down the alley. In the daytime, there are the homeless--such as the one Yolanda nicknamed “Correlon,” meaning “Speedster,” because he runs from dumpster to dumpster--scavenging for the next meal or drink.

At 9:30 a.m., the Garcias’ little white truck is full, and Rogelio heads down the San Diego Freeway to Inglewood to sell that day’s gatherings. The load comes out to $79.85; minus $10 for gas, it’s a $69.85 day. Pretty good for winter, since on a good summer day the couple makes up to $85 a load. After the sale, Rogelio heads back to Venice, now lively on a sunny day, to collect more and to relieve Yolanda of her loads.

*

Another evening and it’s 6 p.m. at their home. Rogelio, 53, sits at the kitchen table in the family’s one-bedroom apartment on Venice Boulevard about four miles from where they work. Yolanda, 50, is finally getting some sleep. Their two oldest children are away at college, and their son Angel, 14, is watching TV in the living room.

Rogelio seems thoughtful.

Over the holidays, his daughter, Adriana, told him that Rogelio Jr. had been eating just peanut butter and jelly sandwiches back in Cambridge before he came home for Christmas. That’s not what Rogelio wants to hear. In the winter months, there are fewer cans and bottles to gather because it’s a slow time for Venice businesses. He frets over his son’s well-being and over the $1,200--his entire savings--he had to spend to install a new engine in their 1988 Chevy truck with 257,000 miles.

The Garcias learned long ago to manage their money. Rogelio and Yolanda can’t remember the last time they went out to eat. Money spent on new clothes? That’s money taken away from higher priorities, Yolanda says.

Her red sweatshirt, black sweatpants, white tennis shoes and the bike she rides all came from the same place as the cans. Two of the few pieces of new clothes they have are MIT sweatshirts that Rogelio Jr. got at school. Hers says “Mom” on it.

After that $69 day comes a $64 day and then a $49 day. Sometimes desperation sets in. At the beach, Rogelio sometimes watches Yolanda walking to the truck pushing her bike, and he can see she has been crying. He feels helpless. “It’s not her environment,” he thinks.

Rogelio remembers how when they first met, Yolanda painted her nails and wore nice dresses. Now they haven’t celebrated their anniversary--except for cooking at home--for years. Their life is made all the harder by having to sleep in the evening to go to work at 1 a.m. They take pleasure simply in watching television. Yolanda prefers the Spanish-language talk show “Cristina,” and Rogelio action movies.

He wishes Yolanda could get a job doing something else, perhaps cooking at a restaurant. “She’s worked so hard all her life,” he says, “since she was 8 years old.”

They’re both from the same small town in Oaxaca, Mexico. Rogelio had been a baker and maker of Oaxacan-style jewelry. She worked for the government using her secretarial skills. They came here separately in 1978 and settled within the Oaxacan community in Venice. They married in 1980.

He worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Westwood and as a meat cutter at a hotel in Marina del Rey for 10 years. Yolanda worked various jobs, including one that paid $7 an hour making pens at a Santa Monica factory.

It was a good job, she says. But when she’d blow her nose after a day’s work, ink came out. Yolanda lost that job in 1985. When she could find no other work, she began picking up cans in Venice. Rogelio was laid off as a meat cutter in 1992. When his applications for dishwashing positions didn’t turn up anything, he joined his wife recycling full time.

Through strict budgeting, they once neared the American dream. During their first 10 years together, they managed to save $25,000 and put it down on an Inglewood duplex. But after Rogelio lost his $9-an-hour meat cutting job and they couldn’t rent the second unit for the $1,000 they needed, they lost the place to the bank in 1995.

Their second big setback occurred in Venice. An outgoing figure in the community named Larry Pritchard befriended the couple six years ago. According to court files, Pritchard convinced the couple to lend him the $20,000 the Garcias had managed to salvage from the duplex and which they had planned to use for their kids’ educations.

Pritchard was supposed to pay back the loan plus interest a year later. When he didn’t pay up, the Garcias sued him. Pritchard filed for bankruptcy. They lost their life’s savings.

“I cried for more than a year,” Yolanda remembers. Her only consolation came from something Adriana said. “It’s just money,” she had said. “We’re not lacking anything.”

*

It’s 1:05 a.m., a new day has begun, and the screen door on their second-floor apartment creaks open. It’s a nippy night, and the streets are damp from sporadic rains, foreshadowing a slow night of recycling because the bars and restaurants probably had few customers. Once in the alley, Yolanda pulls her red hood over her head. The bike squeaks as they walk into the night. She tears into a trash bag, and the familiar clinking and clonking of cans and bottles starts her workday.

The first time she had to reach into the trash to survive, Yolanda recalls, “I was so humiliated, I wanted to die. I would wear my hood so you could only see my nose.” She knows she won’t be doing this forever. But for now it is a trap. With two kids in college, she can’t miss the earnings of even one day to go apply for other jobs; she also can’t risk losing control of her territory.

“I can’t tell you how tired I am,” she confides. “The only reason I don’t stop is because of my responsibilities--those kids going to college.” And still, there is Angel yet to go.

Yolanda thinks her life was fated. Starting as a young girl, she worked constantly for her mother at a restaurant and her father at a general store. Once she took a test and qualified for a prep school, but her parents said there was no money. “My destiny was set when I was born,” she says.

Sometimes she gets impatient because she thinks that Rogelio’s too complacent, that there are other bars and restaurants where he could go to ask for recyclables.

Rogelio, who rushes to relieve her of her loads, also gets desperate in slow times, though he tries not to show it to avoid making Yolanda sadder.

The St. Mark’s dumpster, Rogelio’s first stop, used to be a more profitable one until a few weeks ago, when the bar inside the hotel was shut down. After St. Mark’s, Rogelio makes his 2 a.m. stop at the Town House saloon. He backs up his truck, and Stephen Wark, the bartender closing for the night, brings out the bottles.

Wark asks a stranger: “You know about his son, right?” referring to Rogelio Jr. going to MIT. “What’s going on with them is phenomenal.” Rogelio flashes a polite and proud fatherly smile. He knew MIT must be good two years ago when he began telling his Venice friends like Wark about his son’s acceptance. “MIT?” he recalls them asking. “You kidding me?”

*

While Rogelio and Yolanda are traversing the alleys of Venice, their son is waking up to traverse a far different world.

“There is a point where they stop understanding what I’m learning,” says Rogelio Jr., a quiet young man who stands a head taller than his diminutive father. “At the same time they know I’m going beyond what they learned. I call my mom every time I get a high score. Even though she has no clue what I’m doing, she still encourages me to keep doing good work.”

Rogelio Jr., who makes it home only for Christmas, is in his third year, pulling almost a B average. His $32,000-a-year education is paid through a combination of grants, loans and the little money his parents send. With graduation looming, he’s heard that employers fight over MIT graduates at job fairs. A good job would mean being able to help his parents pay for his younger brother’s college education, he says.

Rogelio and Yolanda encourage education because they know that is the key to a better life for their children.

Bringing in $15,000 a year on the average, the Garcias have paid their taxes religiously--saving each receipt from Rogelio’s daily trips to the recycler and writing off the thousands of work-related miles on the truck--believing that failure to file tax returns would harm their children’s financial-aid chances.

One good thing about this work, Rogelio says, is that he always could--as he still does with Angel--go home at 7 a.m. to drive his kids to school. “We would tell them, ‘Study, so you can have good jobs.’ We want them to work for them, not for us.”

Says Adriana: “It was always, ‘Do your homework, do your homework, do your homework.’ It was never an option that I wasn’t going to go to college.”

Going to the beach to work with his parents when they were in elementary school helped Rogelio Jr. decide to hit the books. He got a perfect score in the math portion of his SATs and graduated 10th in his class at Venice High where he took advanced placement courses and earned a 4.2 GPA.

“He was definitely a very talented student of mathematics,” remembers Barbara Komatsu, one of his high school math teachers. “That’s why he ended up at MIT. He’s that caliber.”

As a high schooler, Rogelio Jr. had visited Caltech in Pasadena, but he had also visited Cambridge--and had fallen in love with it. At first, he felt out of place in the mostly white and wealthy environment. He was made fun of for pronouncing words differently and he was once asked if he belonged to a gang. He joined a Latino student group and made some friends. Still, he doesn’t tell them much about his family background. It’s hard enough to fit in as it is.

But he’s not embarrassed by his parents; he has an admiration now for how hard they worked to raise him and his siblings. When he was in elementary school, though, some schoolmates saw him picking up cans with his mother and made fun of him. He quickly learned not to mention it.

“Some people just use it to bring you down,” he says. “It’s kind of hard taking it as a little kid. Now as an adult I feel fine about it. It’s work. They’re not stealing or anything. They’re getting us ahead.”

Rogelio and Yolanda have been teased, as well. Neighbors have called him a “filthy man,” which Rogelio dismisses because, as he says, as soon as he takes a shower, he’s not filthy anymore. A defiant Yolanda says, “I may collect cans, but I don’t collect welfare,” referring to some of those who have made fun of their work. But what does hurt her is that since her children began going to college, some neighbors stopped talking to her--presumably because they’re jealous.

Now, a year and a half from Rogelio Jr.’s graduation, Yolanda and Rogelio, who rarely venture out of the Venice area, look forward to flying to Boston for the event. They’re trying to put away a little money for four plane tickets--one can at a time. In anticipation, they’ve already gotten their American passports, which they thought they would need to travel to the East Coast.

*

At 3 a.m. Rogelio pulls up to the Hinano Cafe. Johnny Stansberry Jr., a friendly man who has been cleaning this place with his 73-year-old father for 10 years, brings out the trash for Rogelio. He also brings him a cup of hot chocolate. At this particular moment, one of Rogelio’s key competitors is across the street at the dumpster by the Venice Whaler.

“I call him ‘El Bandido,’ ” Stansberry says of the older man going through the trash.

The elusive Bandit used to go through the trash that Stansberry put out for Rogelio. So Stansberry began holding the trash inside until Rogelio arrived.

A few years ago, Yolanda also had a showdown with the Bandit over the recyclables at the Town House. One night, Yolanda and the Bandit got there at nearly the same time. She had begun collecting there when the Bandit jerked some bottles out of her hands. A Town House employee said, ‘Fine, let’s split the bottles between you.’ After that, the Bandit never came back.

But Rogelio and Yolanda don’t have personal contacts at all such places. For instance, the bottles at the Terrace Cafe near the Hinano are picked up each night around 11:30 p.m. by a woman known as Diana. Stansberry starts his shift at the Hinano about 1 a.m. and walks over to the dumpster by the Terrace to save anything he can for Rogelio. But most nights, Diana has already visited.

The Bandit has a firm grip on a few restaurants of his own, including the Sidewalk Cafe on the boardwalk, a place where Rogelio and Yolanda used to collect. Once, there were more collection sites, but busboys began keeping the bottles to sell themselves, and some started requesting a propina--a tip--if someone wanted the exclusive right to collect their trash.

For those recyclers who don’t have transportation to recycling centers, there are a few local truckers who pay a flat rate of $6 for each shopping cartful of cans or bottles. The truckers then drive to a recycling center and sell the goods by the pound.

On a Friday just after 1 p.m., Rogelio pulls up beside the Gondolier Apartments. He spots an open second-floor window, a signal that Patrick Riley has recyclables for him. Rogelio holds up a bottle to the sky and begins tapping it with a screwdriver. “Ding, ding, ding, ding.”

Two minutes later, Riley comes running down the steps with three bags he has been saving for Rogelio. Riley used to put them out by the dumpster for anyone to grab--until Yolanda asked him if she and Rogelio could have them exclusively. “It works for both of us,” says Riley. “I drink a lot of beer, and I’m helping them.”

If one thing keeps Yolanda and Rogelio competitive it’s these numerous ties they have established. Their connections include Ralph Lowry, a homeless man whom Yolanda can always trust to guard bags of recyclables when Rogelio is late meeting her. Yolanda feels sorry for her friend because he has no contact with his family. She fantasizes about going on the “Cristina” talk show to help reunite him with his long-lost brother.

There’s the security man up Speedway who each night gives her the bottles and cans from the building he guards. And Barbara Fredrickson, a Venice homeowner who years ago gave Yolanda a key to her backyard so Yolanda could stash away her loads. “They’re such hard workers,” says Fredrickson, who hosted a party for Yolanda last year when she got her citizenship. “And they’ve raised such good kids.”

Fredrickson worries about Yolanda, the germs in the trash, her medical bills. As Fredrickson worries, Yolanda is a few blocks away waiting for the young French people who clean the Share Tel apartments and whom she has befriended to bring her what they’ve gathered inside.

With those cans and bottles collected, it’s the end of the day. Rogelio comes cruising down the alley. Finally, they go home. Yolanda goes to the Laundromat. Rogelio bakes some bread.

At 6 p.m. Yolanda tries to get some sleep. Rogelio’s at the table looking somber.

And too soon it is 1:05 a.m. again. The little white truck rolls into Venice. First stop: St. Mark’s.