August 5, 2010
Spike TV debuted their new reality show the other day and it really hit home.
My home.
Scrappers follows a bunch of Earthy guys who tear metal out of abandoned buildings and sell it junkyards. Sound exciting? Well, it was to me. You see, I live in the area they filmed in.
I had s sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach from almost the very first shot. One of the “scrappers” was standing on a rooftop, and behind him was the building where I worked for nine years and the gas station where I filled up a few days ago.
After that it was like a drinking game- take a drink when you see someplace in your neighborhood. Take a drink when you recognize some homes in the background. Take a drink when you see some stores you pass all the time. Take a drink when the guys stop in at a bar just 2 minutes from your house. Had I been drinking, and I wish I was, I would have been wasted ten minutes in.
That would have made the show more bearable.
Scrappers follows a couple of “crews,” guys who toss scrap metal into the back of their vans and sell them for a few bucks at a scrap yard. Know the old expression “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure”? On this show it is literally true. They dig through construction sites and abandoned homes to pick out brass fittings and aluminum.
The show makes no bones about how it wants to stereotype these guys. They are all Italian, their businesses are called “crews” and the show’s theme music is Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.”
Hmm. Italians. Crews. Rat Pack music. Do the math.
The Scrappers are not presented in the best light, though I am not sure what the best light could possibly be. For example, one “crew” has a guy who sleeps late everyday and seems to have the same number of brain cells as Grandpa has teeth. He also seems to have trouble doing basic things, like talking and walking. He and his partner bicker like an old married couple. Another crew has trouble getting a refrigerator out of an apartment. “Mamaluke!” the owner keeps yelling, and of course he was wearing his wife-beater undershirt. I was waiting for him to offer them some sausage and peppers.
Three guys from a scrap metal crew couldn’t get the fridge down the stairs, despite the fact that it obviously fit or how could it get up there to begin with? They took the doors off, they took the grill off the back, they ripped it apart, one scrapper who wants to be in MMA even punched and beat up the fridge, and still they couldn’t get it down the stairs. Why not? It was obvious to me- there were four guys already on the narrow staircase- there was no room for the unit! Get three of those guys out of there and you’ll get it done!
Another crew couldn’t close the door of their van because the scrap was too big.
A member of the same crew wouldn’t take a mother-load of free scrap because the guy giving it to them was wearing a tie.
But hands down, the lowest of the low, the “Situation” and “J-WWOW” of Scrappers, are these guys, Dino and Mimmo.
Would you allow these guys to touch your junk?
These are the guys called in when the better guys need somebody to do their grunt work. Between then they have the business sense of a worm. They were paid $100 to haul away some old bricks. They could not sell the bricks and had to take them to a junkyard, where they paid $160 to dump them. A full day’s work, net profit: a loss of $60.
The way Jersey Shore proved to the world that every stereotype about the Jersey shore was true, I’m afraid Scrappers will do just that for Brooklyn. Soon everyone will believe that Brooklyn is full of guys like the scrappers, who can’t find an address around the corner and have trouble filling buckets with bricks. Do I know guys like the scarp crews? Sure. I also know doctors and lawyers. Even bloggers, heaven help me.
I also know guys like Dino and Mimmo, heaven help me.
I prayed all night that this show gets cancelled. Fast.
But then I saw this:
Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz declares August 2nd Scrappers Day.
That man may have just lost my vote.
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