The garbage truck came at four in the morning because the city believed that nobody who mattered was awake at four in the morning. The city was wrong. Everybody on the Lower East Side was awake at four in the morning because the garbage truck woke them up. The garbage truck was an alarm clock that nobody set and nobody could turn off and nobody wanted.

The garbage truck had three sounds. The engine was a diesel growl that vibrated the walls two blocks before the truck arrived. The hydraulic lift was a whine that started low and climbed until the dumpster was over the truck and then the whine stopped and there was one second of silence. The one second of silence was the worst part. Because after the silence came the crash. The dumpster emptied into the truck and the crash was every bottle and every can and every bag of garbage hitting the steel bed of the truck at the same time and the crash was the sound of a building being demolished except the building was yesterday and the demolition happened every morning.

The men who worked the garbage truck were the strongest men on the Lower East Side. They lifted cans that weighed as much as a man and they threw the cans the way a man throws a punch. The throw was not elegant. The throw was efficient. The can went from the curb to the truck in one motion and the motion said I have four hundred more of these before sunrise. The men did not speak. The men worked. The truck moved ten feet and the men threw ten more cans and the truck moved ten more feet. The truck and the men moved down the block like a wave that left emptiness behind it.

I was awake at four in the morning more often than I was asleep at four in the morning. I played clubs that did not close until three and I walked home through streets that smelled like garbage because the garbage had been sitting on the curb since ten o'clock the night before. The garbage truck was the last sound of the night and the first sound of the morning and you could not tell the difference because at four in the morning night and morning were the same thing. The garbage truck did not care if it was night or morning. The garbage truck only knew that the curb was full and the truck was empty and the distance between the two was the length of a man's arms.