Change has never come easily to this city’s dirtiest industry. In the early nineties, a Houston-based waste-management company called Browning-Ferris decided to expand into New York City. The Times reported that the company hosted a press conference on the steps of City Hall and sponsored the 1993 New York City Marathon. It even won a lucrative contract to collect trash from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. But the local garbage industry was still firmly under mafia control. One morning, according to “Garbage Land: On The Secret Trail of Trash,” by Elizabeth Royte, a Browning-Ferris executive’s wife awoke to find the head of a dead German shepherd on her suburban lawn. A note stuffed in the dog’s mouth read, “Welcome to New York.”
New York City has a crowded system for collecting businesses’ garbage. In San Francisco, a single waste hauler has an exclusive contract to collect trash. Seattle is divided into four waste-collection zones, handled by two garbage companies. Los Angeles is transitioning to a system in which eleven districts will be serviced by one hauler each. These cities have government-regulated commercial-waste systems. Philadelphia uses a free-market system, as does New York, in which private haulers negotiate directly with businesses. Still, it has only about fifteen commercial-waste haulers; Chicago and Houston, also free-market cities, have fourteen and a hundred and forty-one, respectively. More than two hundred and fifty licensed commercial-waste haulers operate in New York.
When I recently walked down a four-block stretch of Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I identified about forty businesses—restaurants, clothing shops, bodegas, banks. Licenses in windows listed the commercial-waste haulers they use—at least fourteen in all, by my count, for a stretch that covers only a fifth of a mile. If there was a pattern, I couldn’t grasp it: the Starbucks at Ninety-third and Broadway uses a different commercial-waste company from the Starbucks at Ninety-fifth and Broadway.
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Benjamin Miller, a former director of policy planning for the Department of Sanitation (and the author of “Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York, the Last Two Hundred Years”), told me this is rooted in the New York garbage world’s mafia past. The commercial-waste industry was traditionally lucrative and not very transparent, so it was an attractive venue for organized crime. In 2001, the city created the Organized Crime Control Commission, which was later renamed the Business Integrity Commission (BIC), to promote competition and discourage criminal control of the commercial-waste industry. The commission set maximum garbage-collection rates to prevent extortion, and launched other anti-corruption initiatives. It worked, more or less: the mafia no longer dominates commercial waste, and the booming number of haulers kept options plentiful—and trash-collection fees low—for businesses around town.
But those efforts had an unintended consequence: in an already congested city, unrestricted competition has coaxed a whole lot of garbage trucks onto the streets—more than four thousand. Trucks crisscross each other, often several times a night, as they drive overlapping routes around town. Besides adding to traffic, this can be bad for the environment and public health. Diesel pollution poses a cancer risk, and is associated with asthma and chronic bronchitis. The black carbon in diesel exhaust contributes to climate change. Garbage trucks can be a hazard for pedestrians and cyclists, and a 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that the fatal injury rate among waste workers was more than eight times the average for all professions.
In October, the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN), a union-backed, non-profit advocacy group, proposed that the local government organize the city into a to-be-determined number of commercial-waste zones, and that it invite trash collectors to bid for all the businesses in each zone. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration “is reviewing the proposal,” a spokesman told me. The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a non-profit that studies local-government finances, is developing a second franchise proposal, which CBC’s consulting research director, Charles Brecher, told me will likely be released this spring.
Environmentalists and labor activists say that a franchise system, similar to models in Los Angeles, Seattle, and elsewhere, would lower the number of garbage trucks on the road, minimize mileage, and eliminate route overlaps. ALIGN’s report claims that New York City’s residential-waste system—which is publicly run, by the Department of Sanitation—is five times more efficient than the private commercial-waste providers. A franchise system could also force waste haulers to meet increased environmental and labor standards in order to participate, like recycling more and lowering their trucks’ emissions.
“Today, New York’s commercial-waste industry is the Wild West,” Matt Ryan, the executive director of ALIGN, said. “We have all these different companies competing for business on the same blocks. It obviously keeps costs low, but it drives down wages and safety standards for workers.”
Franchise opponents such as the National Waste & Recycling Association argue that commercial hauling requires a much more customized collection service than residential waste does—which makes ALIGN’s comparison misleading. A restaurant might want its trash picked up after a late closing time; a small clothing boutique might need its garbage hauled only twice a week. They also argue that a government-run franchise would eliminate competition, once a hauler wins control of a zone, sending trash-collection rates higher. If the new scheme reduces the number of haulers in New York, as is intended, bigger operations could have an advantage over smaller ones.
“We built up our customer base naturally, by going door to door,” Thomas N. Toscano, the chief financial officer for Mr. T Carting Corp., told me. The company, founded by Toscano’s grandfather and family-owned for three generations, has twenty-eight garbage trucks and about eighty employees. “If they force us into a franchise scheme, we’ll have to bid against very large, multinational corporations,” Toscano said.
The cost-benefit analysis depends on your priorities. A franchise system would be more environmentally friendly, but could increase costs for the businesses that pay to get their trash collected. One L.A. County study charted a slight rate increase after transitioning to franchise collection; another, in San Jose, found that rates rose for some customers and fell for others.
But cost can be unpredictable. “You can’t say either public or private is cheaper than the other,” Mildred Warner, a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, said. “It’s a trade-off: shop owners might pay a lower trash-collection rate because of all that competition, but the other costs—the noise, the congestion, the failure to recycle—are borne by the entire society.”
Michelle Wilde Anderson, an expert on local government and land-use law at the University of California at Berkeley, told me that proposals with potential long-term benefits, such as franchise systems, attract less government attention during recessions, when people are focussed on day-to-day challenges. “It’s a harder fight when businesses are worrying about things like their waste-hauling fees,” she said. “But politicians are charged with their constituents’ well-being, and not just their status as consumers. There are other values that governments should care about, too, such as environmental impacts and labor standards. These public interests sometimes cut against choosing the cheapest service provider, but they may yield gains over the longer term, like air-quality improvements, traffic safety, and even future public cost savings.”
Jillian Keenan is a freelance writer in New York. Her work has appeared in the Times, Slate, and elsewhere.
Photograph by Sion Fullana/Getty.
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DAVID doesn’t remember this conversation, but I won’t forget.
“Nice belt,” I said, gesturing to the red canvas belt around his waist.
We had met a few weeks earlier through a Stanford student group. He was quiet and broad-shouldered. I liked him right away.
“I have a leather one, too,” he replied, smiling.
I was thunderstruck. For as long as I remember, I’ve been fairly obsessed with spanking. This obsession felt impossible to share, so I was always hungry for cues that someone could relate. David’s remark was innocent, of course, but I was so desperate for understanding that I imagined connections everywhere.
“You’re in trouble!” a friend once declared when I playfully stole his textbook during a date.
“Really?” I asked, hope rising.
He started tickling me. The relationship was doomed.
I had long assumed my life partner would share my kink. At 17, I met my first boyfriend while living abroad. He was 24 and so comfortable with his sexual identity that on our second date he asked whether I had “ever received a severe spanking.”
Continue reading the main storyHis question took my breath away, and our next 18 months were essentially an extension of that first electrified moment. By the time we broke up, I had come to accept that a shared fetish was a necessary part of any future relationship.
But David, it turned out, is “vanilla” — the word the spanking community uses to describe people who don’t share our quirk. I was disappointed, but it was too late: I had already fallen in love with him.
My dilemma was clear: how could I describe my desires to David when I could hardly confess them to myself? Spanking fetishists don’t have a tradition of coming out. The comparisons to child abuse and spousal battery are inevitable, upsetting and often impossible to dispel, so it’s easiest to keep our interest private.
In 1996, Daphne Merkin examined her own fascination with spanking in “Unlikely Obsession” for The New Yorker. Her confession raised such a controversy that it was still being mentioned this year, when one writer concluded that its “take-away was, something is wrong with Daphne Merkin.”
Even popular books and movies link erotic spanking to severe psychological trauma. In “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Christian Grey’s passion for erotic pain is a result of extreme childhood abuse. The 2002 film “Secretary” suggests that the main character’s spanking obsession is merely a preferable alternative to self-mutilation.
So what is a nice girl (who also happens to love being spanked) supposed to think? More pressingly, what is she supposed to say to her brand-new boyfriend?
At 20, I confronted the situation indirectly; I went to a college party, steeled my nerves with cocktails, and breezily told David’s roommate that I was “kind of into S & M.” It worked. A few nights later, David asked, “Are you, like, into pain?”
“Um,” I said, blushing. “Yes?”
It wasn’t quite true. I’m not into pain; I’m into being spanked. But it seemed like a safe first step.
Over the last decade it has become fashionable in certain millennial circles to announce an interest in bondage or other forms of sadomasochism. The implications are often tame: A couple buys handcuffs, experiments with hot wax, and tosses in the occasional spanking. So when David heard I was “kind of into S & M,” he interpreted the code exactly how I had expected: from time to time, he spanked me during sex.
This was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t the whole story. While there is a strong erotic element to my kink, sex is merely a side dish to the more absorbing entree of the spanking itself.
It’s hard to admit this. A few playful swats during sex seem fun, while serious spankings seem damaged and perverse. After years of pretending I was interested only in the occasional erotic swat, I finally had to admit it to myself: Although spankings do satisfy a strong sexual need, they satisfy an equally strong psychological one.
On my computer, hidden inside a series of password-protected folders, is a folder labeled “David, If You Find This, Please Don’t Look Inside.” It has my favorite spanking stories I’ve collected online. A small fraction are what you’d imagine: A man spanks a woman, then they have sex. In the vast majority, though, both characters are men, have a platonic relationship, and no sex or romanticism is involved.
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This paradox — that my kink is simultaneously sexual and asexual — is one of its most frustrating and intriguing aspects. Perhaps I’d been so uncomfortable with my sexuality for so long that scenes with two men, where there isn’t an obvious stand-in for “me,” were easier to digest. Perhaps I’ll never fully understand.
My kink developed early. As a child, I pored over any book that mentioned spanking, paddling or thrashing. Tom Sawyer went through many reads, as did — believe it or not — key dictionary entries. (Looking up titillating definitions is so common among developing spankophiles that it’s almost a rite of passage.)
BY high school, I’d started to explore my feelings in more public ways. When my best friend and I wrote short stories together, I exorcised my nascent fantasies by subjecting our characters to ritualized, punitive beatings. With classmates, I’d awkwardly introduce the topic with invented references to a “news story” about a “town” that wanted to outlaw spanking.
“What do you think of that?” I’d ask, straining to sound casual.
But when I started college and got my first personal computer, everything changed. In online anonymity I found a community that shared my interest and insecurities. I wasn’t looking for partners to “play” with (as it’s called); spanking, to me, is as intimate as sex, and not to be shared with someone I didn’t love. I just wanted a forum to express my otherwise unexpressible side.
“What did you all do before the Internet?” I asked a woman in an online forum.
“The brave ones looked for personal ads,” she replied. “The rest of us were lonely.”
For the next several years, I settled into a sexual détente: David, under the impression that I was “kind of into S & M,” satisfied my physical desires — almost. Online strangers satisfied my desire for community and understanding — almost. And I stopped feeling like a freak — almost.
Almost, I decided, would have to be enough.
I often tried to pinpoint the origins of my obsession. I’ve been exposed to enough pop psychology to recognize the obvious first question: Yes, I was spanked as a child, but infrequently and never to an extreme degree. Many of my childhood friends experienced some form of corporal punishment and emerged into adulthood unburdened with daily thoughts on the subject. For a few months, I buried myself in physiological explanations for why someone might enjoy being spanked. Pain causes an endorphin rush, which can be pleasurable. The process also causes blood to rush to the pelvic region, which mimics sexual arousal.
“This is biologically normal,” I told myself. “Totally normal.”
Eventually, I gave up. It was exhausting and depressing to try to justify my obsession. Moreover, it wasn’t working.
The solution, I realized, had been sleeping next to me for almost six years. David is my best friend, my fiancé and my champion. If anyone can convince me I’m not damaged, it’s David. He makes me stronger when I can’t do it alone.
But how could I ever express it all — my history, insecurities, secrets and hopes?
I’m a writer, so I wrote it down. And as I translated my feelings and memories into these words, I took control of a desire that has controlled me for most of my life. I felt comfortable, confident — even celebratory.
For about three days. Then ancient insecurities, as they always do, crept back.
“Coming out of the closet” isn’t the right expression. We’re not in closets that can be left in a single step as the door clicks shut behind. “Coming out of the house” might be better. Or “coming out of the labyrinth.”
In our different ways, we all just want honesty and intimacy, right? We’re looking for the people who will love us, even when it’s difficult. Or uncomfortable. Or painful.
I always share my writing with David, and this time would be no different.
“This is hard to show you,” I said as I slid my laptop across the bed. “Also, I’m worried that my paragraph structure is confusing.”
As he read each page, I felt the clicks of a dozen doors closing behind me.
“I love you,” David said when he finished. “You’re so brave. And there is nothing wrong with your paragraph structure.”
Click.