Enter San Man

The anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation shows she can hang with a san man, and yes, she mongos:

[Director of N.Y.U.’s Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought Robin] Nagle, who is forty-five, has been researching the Department of Sanitation for the past several years, while working on a book, “Picking Up.” At first, the san men were convinced that she was a plant, from one of various surveillance agencies. “We are from different worlds,” she acknowledged. “I have tried to close the gap between us. I walk in, I’m female, I’m an egghead, I’m older, I have a Ph.D. — for some reason, they foreground that. My response is ‘La-di-fucking-da, I have a Ph.D. Whatever.'”

She said that she had earned her commercial driver’s license in 2004, and pointed to a Teamsters Local 831 jacket hanging behind the door, with “Robin” embroidered on the front. “You have to know what you’re doing or you’ll end up killing somebody,” she said. “As one of my instructors told me, if a car can be a weapon, a garbage truck can be a nuclear weapon.”

Nagle’s interests lie more with the trash collectors than with the trash, although the two intersect on the subject of “mongo” — sanitation lingo for “redeemed garbage” or the act of collecting it. (Nagle consulted a lexicographer, looking for help in tracking down the etymology, to no avail.) “Within the department, if you mongo or if you don’t — there’s kind of a dividing line,” she said. “‘He mongos.’ ‘Do you mongo?’ ‘Oh, mongo, are you kidding? I wouldn’t mongo.'” She paused. “Hell, I mongo, absolutely. And I have some pretty nice things.” A book cart to her left bore a sticker that read “NYU Asset Management: Authorized for Disposal.” She had found it on the curb. Maps on the walls outside her office were rescued from a Dumpster. And her winter wardrobe draws heavily from a stash of cashmere sweaters that she found in a garbage bag behind the Dakota, while accompanying a san man known as the Mongo King on his rounds, in 2003.