Marsh Township Sanitary District

By Dr. John Kevin Scariano

Because I was unable to participate in World War II, as it had ended three decades before, my father decided that the next-best experience in which I could fully attain manhood would be to spend two summers working in a sewage treatment plant south of Chicago. This often profane, sometimes disgusting, but consistently amusing and entertaining narrative is meant to commemorate the history, vernacular, and feel of times long gone by. More than that, this is a book about real characters, my family, and the hometown that I came to know and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481762908

Dr. John Kevin Scariano

Dr. Scariano graduated from Rich East High School in Park Forest, Illinois, in 1974. His job after finishing a B.S. degree at the University of Wisconsin was teaching biology in a high school in Mexico City. Afterwards, he worked as Medical Technologist in Denver, New Orleans, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1989 he was hired to teach at the University of New Mexico's School of Medicine, where he currently works as a Research Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pathology and Internal Medicine. Since most of his relatives were teachers, the author has always loved words, poems, lyrics, and books from around the world. He has enjoyed the art of writing since the age of five years. Dr. Scariano currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico and has a daughter who will soon graduate from the University of New Mexico with a degree in English. She is also interested in becoming a writer.

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© 2013, 2014 by Dr. John Kevin Scariano. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/12/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6289-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6288-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6290-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910584

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

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For my brother, Anthony Gael Scariano,

who encouraged me to complete these stories.

1

In the late spring of 1975 and again the next year, never with prior approval, my father telephoned the superintendent of the Marsh Township Sanitary District (MTSD) to request that he employ me and my best buddy for the summer. The MTSD is a water-treatment plant that processes industrial waste and sewage flushed down fifty thousand toilets in the homes and factories of Chicago Heights, Illinois. Since my dad was friends with the superintendent, Al, the petition was honored. Anthony then browbeat the both of us into actually going to work there, thinking it would teach us the value of a dollar, the strong American greenback. Had I known at that time I would spend the fleeting, precious summer daylight wiping raw human excrement with the consistency of latex paint off of hundreds of crisscrossing pipes, that I would contract an infectious disease from scraping maggots off the windows surrounding the primary tank, or be exposed to unprotected skin contact with endocrine disrupter carcinogens like diethylstilbestrol and dioxins spewing out of the chemical factories, I certainly would have hitchhiked to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to subsequently disappear. If my momma knew I would also come dangerously close to drowning in a bubbling pool of warm, liquefied feces, she would have had a brawl with the old man. But since he was such a well-recognized ballbreaker (Rompecoglioni could be his old-country nickname), I had to stick it out.

Summer is a romantic season, not one for us poor flatlanders to squander in the cold, bleak upper Midwest. My best friend opted out the following summer, but Pop insisted that I stay on for an encore. He tried pulling the same scam on my nephew twenty years later, but Anthony the Third was smart enough to call it quits after one week working at the MTSD. I’m not sure I have ever once learned exactly what the value of a dollar is, but my eyes at that time were forever opened to the inbred patronage, racism, and corruption so typical of those troubled days, just before the FBI busted and convicted nearly the entire Chicago Heights City Council.

Some had fathers that sent them to summer enrichment programs in Maine or Vermont, as John McBride did for his girls Emilie and Marianne, or to music, tennis, or art camps. Maybe they let their offspring travel to Europe by themselves or merely permitted some slacking, wherever it be, whiling away the sunny season in shaded hammocks or on beach towels, surrounded by novels, suntan lotion, and Grateful Dead cassettes. Others may have had daddies who ended up in the slammer; they might have committed unspeakable acts irreparably harming their children or one of their kin; or maybe they just embarrassed the kids in public, reprehensibly, never to be forgiven. Not many of us were forced to work in a sewage treatment facility though.

There I was for two long summers, alongside a bitterly resentful generation, spawned by immigrant parents who met their American dream that somehow was ironically lost to their children. My dad, the world’s most notable germaphobe, wouldn’t have lasted through a single morning at the MTSD. Why he made me do it I’ll never be able to comprehend. This recollection of the plant, the Heights, its history and people, means to leave behind what many of you might not believe, yet upon my dying day I will swear is true. I’m not sure exactly why, but I thought it best to write down what I heard those guys saying, verbatim, to preserve the feel of those times so long gone by, and thus immortalize those two sad, toxic, dreadfully depressing summers—hopefully the worst ones of my entire life. This is my way of giving the gift back to Anthony the First. He did have, at the end of the day, a great sense of humor, and always a talent for storytelling. I was thinking about changing the names of the real people whom I am etching into eternity by the creation of this testament, but I’m not scared anymore of a mob hit or, even worse, lawsuits.

2

It’s a little before 8:00 a.m., and Bobby and I are driving into the rising sun with hangovers, late for work, oversleeping because my folks are out of town and we partied away the night and early morning on the rooftop, drinking malt liquor and smoking Illinois Central Railroad track schwag. With budget liquor and ditch weed headaches, our swollen, throbbing brains listen to the traffic report on the country radio station and Skyrockets in flight… Afternoon delight! A-a-afternoon delight! Chicago Heights and East Chicago Heights, now known as Ford Heights, are smoggy, dismal industrial wastelands, their warehouses once the site of Al Capone’s distillery operations during times of Prohibition, and also the site of a Ford stamping plant, long closed, emblematic of the post-World War II Great Lakes manufacturing boom. It’s a ghost town these days around those old plants, the epicenter of the Rust Belt. Back in those days, folks had jobs; factory workers could afford a good house and a new luxury automobile every year.

Pulling into the parking lot, the orange sun subdued by the moisture in the air, the freshly excreted human waste boils into the already steamy atmosphere, so we are reminded of every dinner and breakfast that has been passed through approximately thirty thousand hungry digestive systems in the last twenty-four hours on the short walk into the laboratory. The hands of the guys who worked their entire lifetimes at the MTSD are dyed in shades of brown and black. The superintendent insists that all his men eat at the same time, together. How much I would have appreciated taking Charles Dickens on a tour of this plant, to have been able to introduce him to these old goofballs in the lunchroom, holding their sandwiches with years of guano indelibly, everlastingly wedged in all of the creases of their fingers and thumbs. What if I ended up like them? I’d have to wear latex gloves just to be able to eat.

You guys are late!

There’s nothing elegant, brilliant, high-tech, or complex about the way a sewage treatment plant works, even in these modern times. Typically, raw sewage converges, flows into, and settles in a ten-thousand-gallon reservoir or primary tank, where a ten-foot-high corkscrew, a worm-gear, turns and dredges the heavy particles that sediment to the bottom, and siphons them to a waiting industrial dumpster. Astonishing it is indeed, how many corn kernels and watermelon seeds come along for the ride, as well as the balloons, as the guys call them. These are freshly flushed condoms that somehow become inflated during their rafting trip through the plumbing of south Cook County like squalid, illicit baby jellyfish. Every day, you can count on scores of them flowing by, and the guys always get a charge out of it; they never get tired of making a joke of them, which never lessens or lightens the choking ethers of the primary tank that in no small part are sinking me into substantial melancholy. The dumpsters get hauled off to a truck when full.

But a major problem is caused by the sediment as it splashes up from the bottom of the dumpster during the dredging and splatters on the many windows that were incomprehensibly planned for the tiny, dour redbrick primary-tank building. The splatter attracts so many flies that the windows in the summertime quickly become encrusted with maggots. The guys send me in there regularly with just a bunch of rags, a flimsy old paint scraper, and a bucket. My task is to scour the maggot remains off the innumerable windows and then wash them clear. They didn’t give me any work gloves, but I bought some for myself. They like giving me jobs like this because it reminds me (and them) of what a spoiled, rich little brat I am, and how useless, implausible, hollow,