A Few Words From the Author

I have always had an endless fascination with my fellow humans and their stories. When I was a child growing up in the Midwest, my friends collected baseball cards, bugs in jars, autographs, record albums—you name it. Me, I collected stories, and scribbled them down in dime-store notebooks.

As an adult, my appetite for stories did not diminish. After graduating from college, I became a journalist and spent the next several decades watching and interviewing people and telling their stories. Stories about senators and scoundrels, preachers and strippers, writers and soldiers, roustabouts and rebels, billionaires and homeless men and women. Each with unique and profound stories to tell.

Many of those stories ended up in the pages of the newspapers where I worked. Many more are still rattling around inside my head. Tapping on the inside of my skull. Waiting, begging to be written.

I was born in Indiana, and my father was an upwardly mobile sales executive. That explains why my family was constantly on the move, shuttling back and forth across the country. Midwest. East Coast. West Coast. Back to the Midwest. Everywhere more people, more places, more stories bouncing around in my head.

When I was 18, I found a job (Teamsters wages!) working for a garbage company. The money helped pay my way through college, but I might have worked there for free because of the people I met, the friends I made and the stories I had the high privilege of hearing.

The characters who inhabit the pages of The Garbage Brothers are entirely fictional. But they were inspired root and branch by the men and women I met while I was, as the drivers I worked with put it, “humping garbage.” For the most part, these were people who had spent years behind bars and who had few options on how to make a living. They were funny, angry, street-brilliant, and at times engaging and dangerous men who had grindingly hard dead-end jobs.

And they all, every last one of them, had stories to tell.