16 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
S I LV E R LININGDEPT.
FLUSH
A
s the economy goes, so go porta-
ble toilets. When the market is
good, construction sites proliferate, wed-
ding planners book luxury powder-room
trailers, and Portosans are everywhere.
When a recession looms, toilet men are
the first to feel the pinch. This spring,
the bell tolled for the porta-potty in-
dustry. The S. & P. 500 lost a third of
its value. Unemployment hit fourteen
per cent. Events were cancelled, from
film festivals to flea markets and fun
runs. Who would need toilets now?
In the first weeks of the lockdown,
Abe Breuer, the owner of John To Go,
peered into his computer monitors in
West Haverstraw, New York, and saw
the answer: everyone. Governor An-
drew Cuomo needed porta potties and
hand-washing sinks for drive-through
test sites along the Palisades Parkway.
Utility companies pestered Breuer for
shower trailers. Hasidic couples rushed
to marry, but moved the celebrations
outdoors. Breuer’s entire stock was in
demand—both the workhorse PJP
portable toilets and the luxury trailers
with functioning fireplaces.
Breuer, who is thirty-nine, has a red
beard and a short attention span. He
moved among cell phone and landline
and e-mail in-box, barking in spitfire
Yiddish sprinkled with English. “Three
station combo”...“Plus tax”...“This
is the crunch point, ya know?” The toilet-
rental business is actually the toilet-
cleaning business, and Breuer’s biggest
customers were shelling out for more
frequent service. If employers couldn’t
guarantee health and safety to their
workers, the thinking seemed to go, at
least they could offer the appearance of
a germ-free workplace.
Before sunrise one morning, in the
company lot, Breuer had issued a new
directive to his drivers: only two rolls of
toilet tissue per stall, and photograph it,
so that, when customers inevitably called
later to complain that there wasn’t any
(stolen, most likely), they could prove
that it had been there. Breuer watches
his eighteen drivers work their routes via
a G.P.S. tracker. At 11:56 A.M., Silvio was
in Flatbush, Erick was in Chinatown,
and Gonzalez was in South Orange. They
snaked suction hoses into the abyss, thendumped in fresh deodorizer, wiped seats,
and doled out precious bottles of sanitizer.
Lately, the most coveted products in
Breuer’s line have been hand-sanitizing
stations and portable sinks, both, in pre-
COVID times, an upsell, but now pure
profit. He was down to his last two dozen
sinks. They are simple contraptions—a
basin, a foot-pump faucet, and a soap
dispenser—and typically rent for a hun-
dred and fifty dollars a month. Now he
was charging Montefiore Nyack Hos-
pital two hundred dollars a week.
It wasn’t price-gouging, he swore—
his own costs were skyrocketing. A case
of toilet paper that used to cost twenty
dollars now went for fifty. His drivers
were working so much overtime that
the weekly payroll had doubled.
Portable toilets are a two-billion-
dollar industry, but it’s a tough business.
In his first winter, in 2004, Breuer forgot
to put rock salt in his pump truck, and
a tank full of human waste froze into “a
big ice-cream cake.” But the past decade
has been a boom time. Breuer now has
five thousand toilets, seven children, and
a BMW X7. He is a full-fledged mem-
ber of the “big five,” the city’s leading
toilet purveyors.
His competitors were scrambling to
win over customers. In Broad Channel,refused to release his tax returns; claimed
that his Democratic opponent, Hillary
Clinton, should be in jail; and openly
enlisted a foreign adversary to help
achieve that end. This year, he has re-
moved five inspectors general from their
posts and, with the assistance of Attor-
ney General William Barr, corrupted
the Department of Justice to such a de-
gree that we are now unsure of the legal
meaning of the word “guilty” when ap-
plied to a Trump-connected defendant.
The likelihood of political violence
was also apparent from the start. Trump’s
2016 rallies tipped over into displays of
aggression directed at the media and at
those who opposed him. Such is the
chaos of today that we’ve nearly for-
gotten that, two years ago, Cesar Sayoc
mailed pipe bombs to Obama, Clinton,
and fourteen others he believed had
treated Trump unfairly. Sayoc pleaded
guilty; his lawyers described him as “a
Donald Trump super-fan” who suffered
from mental illness, leaving him vul-
nerable to the antagonisms of the po-
litical climate. The twenty-one-year-
old Patrick Crusius was charged with
fatally shooting twenty-three people in
El Paso last year. The language of an
anti-immigrant manifesto he allegedly
posted before the shooting was noted
for its echoes of Trump’s rationaliza-
tions for building his border wall. (Cru-
sius pleaded not guilty.) This May, the
Michigan legislature temporarily shut
down, after armed militia members en-
tered the capitol to protest the state’s
stay-at-home order. A couple of weeks
earlier, Trump had tweeted, “LIBER-
ATE MICHIGAN!”
The Transition Integrity Project, a
nonpartisan group of academics, jour-
nalists, and current and former govern-
ment and party officials, recently released
a report outlining a number of election
scenarios that are both plausible and ter-
rifying. Trump has primed his followers
with repeated warnings of voter fraud,
so there is a real possibility that theymay denounce as illegitimate any out-
come in which he loses. Beyond that,
the report suggests, the Administration
could seize mail-in ballots in order to
prevent them from being counted, or
pressure Republican-controlled legisla-
tures to certify results before all mail-in
ballots have arrived. The authors con-
clude that “voting fraud is virtually non-
existent, but Trump lies about it to create
a narrative designed to politically mo-
bilize his base and to create the basis for
contesting the results should he lose.
The potential for violent conflict is high,
particularly since Trump encourages his
supporters to take up arms.”
This is where we are—at the peril-
ous logical extension of all that Trump
represents. A weather forecast is not a
prediction of the inevitable. We are not
doomed to witness a catastrophic tem-
pest this fall, but anyone who is paying
attention knows that the winds have
begun to pick up.
—Jelani Cobb