The locker room greets him with the sharpness of bleach. For about two weeks, he’s stayed away. Even when the Los Angeles Sanitation Department saturated it with disinfectant after his co-workers were exposed to the coronavirus, he avoided going in, tormented by the thought of bringing it home to his three children and his immunocompromised wife.
Trash truck drivers are the front-line workers we mostly forget. The virus can survive on cardboard and metal and plastic surfaces, sometimes for several days. Sandro Sanchez, with his thick black beard, wrinkle-free face and good humor for someone who wakes up at 4, touches 50 to 100 garbage cans on every shift.
He wasn’t afraid at first. Trash truck drivers had access to N-95 masks well before the pandemic. “But when this happened,” he says, “they ran out real quick.” The department still issued one per day, along with rubber gloves and bottles of hand sanitizer, and that seemed like enough. He even enjoyed the lighter traffic and kept his routine, listening to NPR and picking up yard waste.
Until the phone call.
“Hey,” the man told him on a Friday afternoon, shortly after Sandro got home from work. “I just wanted to let you know that my brother has the virus, and I was over at his house.”
Sandro had just seen this person, a co-worker and a friend. They’d just been together without protective gear. His mind raced. Had he gotten infected? Had he infected his family? Moving forward, he changed. He started applying extra sanitizer, and washing his hands whenever possible. And he gave up his favorite part of the job.
He enjoys meeting new people and chitchatting on his route as he travels into Hollywood and Koreatown, right through the heart of the city. Now people were staying away. And after that phone call, he made sure to stay away, too.
He also stopped using the locker room.
That’s where his workday starts, usually, when he trades sandals or tennis shoes for his heavy brown work boots with scuffed toes. “But then when my co-worker’s brother got it,” he says with a tone of traumatic reflection, “I just, I didn’t want to go in there anymore.”
But over the past week, things slid back toward normal. Traffic is worse. Sandro gets a new N-95 mask only once every three days. And he is back in the locker room.
Entering the bleach den, he changes his shoes, laces his boots, puts on a mask and washes his hands before heading out into the city, with gloves on and a bottle of sanitizer.
He still doesn’t talk to strangers.