Monday morning as the sun rises; Hammer, Ankles, Pastor Steve, and
Holy Diver are sitting on sofas in their North Portland living room,
eating a concoction called breakfast pie and discussing the Bible.
Breakfast pie includes bacon Diver found in a dumpster weeks ago and
stashed in the freezer. Diver is a lifelong dumpster diver and
on-again-off-again drug addict. His current drug of choice is
Christianity.
After the Bible discussion (which is short, frank, and
pleasant—Pastor Steve, who doesn’t wear shoes, is a minister to
the homeless), Diver gets his bike in order and then, while the rest of
Portland is just waking up, makes his daily dumpster rounds. He’s been
scrounging a living from Portland’s trashcans for 20 years. But unlike
most people who have lingered in Portland’s back alleys for that long,
Diver is still mentally sharp enough to explain all that he’s seen.
“There are three things I’ve never found in a dumpster,” says Diver,
now 41 with a weathered face, short gray hair, and bright eyes. “A
crying baby, a dead body, or a working handgun.”
Diver’s bike trailer rattles behind him as he pulls onto N
Williams—he welded the trailer together himself and now it’s
loaded dangerously high with about 300 glass bottles and cans. “Dime!”
he says, swooping down into the gutter (a car veers out of the way) to
scoop up two old beer cans.
The first stop of the day is a North Portland assisted-living
facility, where Diver delivers a hard-boiled egg to a schizophrenic
friend. The friend doesn’t eat much unless someone stops by to
encourage him and the whole egg-delivery routine is part of Diver’s new
Christian approach to life.
“I want to help other people, I feel like I have a gift, through
God, to provide for other people,” says Diver. Digging through
Stumptown garbage, Diver finds food and clothes for Pastor Steve’s
entire little homeless ministry commune, where Diver, Ankles, and the
others sleep rent free as long as they stay off drugs.
“If it’s all about just me then I don’t really have a lot of
ambition. I’m happy with a book, a sleeping bag, something to eat, a
clean pair of socks. But there’s nothing better than finding something
that someone else threw away and saying, ‘Hey, I know exactly who this
is for.'”
The egg hand-off goes well. During the rattling ride from North
Portland to the Lloyd Center, Diver explains that before he got saved
and all that, he dumpstered for meth money. It was a completely
different rhythm. He rode fast and dug desperately through trash,
staked out territory and sold whatever he could find.
“There’s lots of illegal things in dumpsters. I’ve found enough
marijuana to fill a MAX train,” he says.
Diver crosses NE Weidler and rolls down into the vacant, grimly
fluorescent parking lot under the Lloyd Center Safeway. This is
where the can redemption machines live. They’re big metal boxes that
crunch aluminum and shatter glass, creating a ruckus before they print
out a tiny receipt Diver can turn in for cash.
“It smells like a kegger gone bad,” Diver laughs, sorting his
trailer trash as he launches into a string of numbers that defined his
life for many years.
“It takes 400 cans and bottles to buy a $20 bag of speed. And it
turns into a monster at that point, because you do a $20 bag of meth
and get high and your whole mission is to find 400 more cans to get
another bag of speed, etc., etc. It’s vicious,” he says. “It’s rough.
It’s a rough life. I’m so glad that’s not part of my equation
anymore.”
Diver’s parents were addicts, too, he says. They moved around a lot,
settling early on in a cheap Los Angeles apartment complex surrounded
by a cinderblock wall.
“I was an introverted kid, I spent a lot of time by myself. I used
to walk around that wall, just daydream or whatever, and it looked down
on this huge dumpster. One day I looked down and it was full of cool
stuff—Vietnam memorabilia, a chemistry set. I brought that stuff
home and was hooked ever since.”
He moved to Portland when he was 20, and for a couple years he got
clean and made good money as an unlicensed electrician, owning a
five-bedroom house and a Cadillac.
“Before my name was Diver, it was Caddy,” he says over the roar of
shattering glass.
For a while after that, he slept out in Gresham with a tight-knit
community of homeless people and was a “Satanic crackhead” before
getting into a rehab program at Central City Concern. He wound up at
Pastor Steve’s after relapsing.
“To say that I have 100 percent faith in what the Bible says and
that Christ is my savior—I would have never ever thought that.
I’ve been through the whole gamut of being atheist, Satanist,
drug-addled. But I consider myself an intelligent mammal and I think
I’ve evaluated all the information correctly.”
The Safeway machines won’t accept all his cans, so Diver heads
inside, claims his $5 or so, and then rides out again toward the
Hollywood Fred Meyer. He stops at some dumpsters on the way. Some are
“nickel dumpsters”—ones that usually just have cans—while
others are known for their occasional gems.
“Let’s check this goodie box right here,” he says, pulling into the
parking lot of a convenience store that shall remain nameless. “I found
six pounds of weed in this dumpster once!” Diver reaches in, pushing
aside last week’s tabloids. No drugs today, but he seems elated at what
he does find: “A perfectly good cup of soup!” he shouts, victoriously
waving a chicken-flavored Cup-O-Noodle.
Diver prefers the low-income areas of town to the affluent suburbs,
even though the Southwest has the best dumpster loot. Among the richer
communities, his trash picking garners at best indifference—and
sometimes hostility. In North and Northeast Portland, he says,
café workers on smoke breaks will point him toward the best
bags. Like Freegans—anti-consumerists who salvage food—and
others who occasionally pick through trashed Whole Foods produce or old
Hotlips pizza piles, Holy Diver sees his dumpstering as a political
act.
“If I recycle or renew this much stuff in one day, I think that’s
amazing… I’m doing a service to humanity whether they like it or
not,” he says. “It would hurt capitalism if everybody just waited until
the FDA-regulated date came up, the food had to be thrown away, and
everybody just got it for free.”
Fred Meyer takes most of Diver’s remaining bottle
load—his trailer is empty and ready to be filled with food and
assorted treasures. He climbs up a tall cargo dumpster in the grocery
store parking. On the right days, this dumpster is filled with flowers.
Today it’s empty, except for a few light cords he eyeballs at being
worth $20 to metal scrappers.
“That’s a hit of speed right there,” he says, shaking his head and
climbing down.
Behind the bar Club 21 on NE Sandy, Diver finally hits a goldmine:
giant bags of pasta sauce and nacho cheese, expensive organic cranberry
juice, piles of canned food, and, inexplicably, two “build your own
gingerbread house” cookie kits. It’s enough food to supply the next
homeless ministry movie night. He gleefully loads the goods into his
trailer, smokes a cigarette and turns around to ride home again. It’s
11 am and he’s done working for the day.
Biking the wrong way up the sidewalk on NE MLK, Diver says, “I don’t
believe in working for someone else, making minimum wage. I don’t
believe in paying rent my whole life. In fact, I could do without money
completely.”
He pauses for a moment, and then adds with a sheepish grin, “…If I
didn’t smoke cigarettes.”