Ralph
The phone rang at 11:30 at night. I was all the way uptown on 106th St., Ralph was in his Greenwich Village apartment. I answered. “Dixie! Got a dumpster on Hudson Street. Get your car down here we can load some shit“.
Ralph was a key member of our theater company who orchestrated, and did most of the manual labor for our renovation on Walker Street in TriBeCa in 1990, turning an old textile warehouse into a theater. So I pulled on jeans and chugged downtown in my beat up 1979 Chevette hatchback, and under cover of darkness, we scaled the walls of a construction site dumpster knee-deep in who knows what construction detritus and discarded sharp objects, to extract valuable two by fours and pieces of plywood that we could remove nails from and reuse to build our theater. We did this at all hours all the time during construction, with Ralph directing us on what we could keep and what we could discard.
Yes, occasionally there was a neglected pile of new bricks or aluminum studs left unguarded by a city of New York project…. We felt we could use a few of them more than the city could. there were a few close calls with flashlights and “hey yous!”, but we were a step too quick.
We repeated the dumpster diving for months, with racing heartbeats, and the fuel of youthful idealism, to supplement raw materials for our new artistic home. To this day whenever I see a dumpster, I can’t resist peeking over the side to see what we would use… And I always think of my dear wonderful comrade and brother I was in the trenches with. I love you buddy, and I can’t thank you enough for what you gave to me.