Riding Shotgun With the Sofa Mortician

Here is one of the great mysteries of Southern California life:

Where do they come from, all these ugly and abandoned couches? Why are so many left to rot on local curbs and parkways? And who bought them in the first place, in those orange and red floral patterns?

Those questions have intrigued and infuriated me for years. Just the other day, for example, I saw a homeless man snoozing on an abandoned love seat at a busy intersection close to my house. It looked to be purplish velour, in a length that never allows an adult to stretch out comfortably. The occupant did not seem to mind.

I firmly believe in the simple notion that couches belong in rooms with walls, or at least on a porch with a floor, or maybe in a well-secluded backyard. Levitz and Ikea did not intend their sofas to be left festering, moist and nasty on our city sidewalks.

Robert Sosa agrees.

He is a broad-shouldered, ponytailed guy who picks up these shredded sofas as if they were matchbooks and tosses them into the back of his Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation truck. He uses the truck’s mechanical lift for the extra-heavy sleeper sofas, especially if the rain has made them feel more like granite than faux leather. Sosa, 37, works solo.

“This is a free service, and a lot of people don’t know that,” he said on a recent morning, as we scaled the twisting streets of Montecito Heights above the Arroyo Seco in the green truck. “I don’t know if it’s a lack of communication or ignorance or what. But if people knew it, it would be less of a problem for everybody.”

To request the service, you must call the city’s bulk item hotline at (800) 773-2489. Regular trash barrel trucks are not equipped to remove furniture. Sosa and company respond only to specific requests from residents, council offices, police and community leaders; bulk item trucks do not randomly scour the streets.

I learned all that the hard way last year when a neighbor left a cracked toilet bowl and other junk on our street for about a month. My subtle and not-so-subtle hints to the neighbor did not seem to produce results. Eventually, I made the phone call to the city, and the stuff was taken away.

That’s what started me down the trail of the sidewalk sofa. My curiosity was finally satisfied when I hitched a ride-along with Sosa.

We departed the sanitation yard on San Fernando Road around 7 a.m. Our route was set by a computer printout of about 30 addresses and a dotted map of northeast Los Angeles. What’s the opposite of a treasure hunt? A junk run? This was it. The driver is a furniture mortician, escorting dead sofas to a grave in a landfill.

At an early stop, a fiberglass tub and matching sink were waiting on a Paige Street curb, rejects from a renovation job on an impressive ranch house. Sosa popped them in his truck. (I watched.) And as we were leaving, the homeowner ran out of her house, wielding an apparently broken vacuum cleaner. Through the truck’s back-end video camera and its dashboard screen, we could see her toss it into the rear as we pulled away.

On Eastlake Avenue, a matching set of two atrocious-looking sofas glared at us from a littered sidewalk. Not my first shopping choice, but someone must have loved them at one time. The remnants of plastic slipcovers still shielded the red-and-orange, floral-patterned material. Who knows what happened on those couches? What seductions, what family quarrels, what diaper changes?

At Broadway and Griffin Avenue in Lincoln Park, we found the largest catch of the day in front of a small brick apartment house. I assumed that someone had moved in a hurry and that the landlord had neatly piled the remains: kitchen chairs, a wooden table, two suitcases, two rugs, a velour couch, rusty rakes, a plastic baby walker, a remnant of a tricycle and a metal bed frame. It made me wonder about the children who once bounced in the walker, rode the tricycle.

Less organized was the heap against a Golden State Freeway noise wall. Beer cartons, broken bottles, rags, the front seat of an automobile, and yes, another sofa dotted the muddy parkway that faces a row of houses on Avenue 21. Sosa took in the big items. One day, he knew, he would be back.

“In certain areas, people keep dumping, dumping, dumping,” he said. “For what reason, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s secluded or maybe they felt safe because they’ve dumped there before and no one complained. Maybe if someone would just stick their head out of their door and say, ‘Hey, that’s not a dumping ground!’ It might help.”

Later, in a nearby alley, another couch awaited. We got to talking about solutions. Sosa pointed out that recycling deposits seem to be work for glass bottles and aluminum cans. So why not create a return/recycling fee for couches and mattresses? People could bring them into municipal or private centers and get their deposit back. Profit-hungry scavengers might clear the streets. Furniture store trucks might take away old items after delivering new ones.

After some more stops--a television cabinet here, a pair of chairs there--we pulled onto the freeway. Our destination was the BFI Waste Systems transfer station at Santa Fe Avenue and Washington Boulevard. From the outside, it looked like any other big warehouse. Inside, the smell hit me with a wallop as we cruised past 10-foot-high piles of trash being squeezed by front-loaders. Sosa let his truck’s hydraulic lifts rise, and much of the contents poured out, chairs and tricycles and vacuum cleaner. But those red-and-orange couches seemed to be caught. Or maybe they were just fighting fate, unwilling to go quietly into a waiting compactor, and ultimately, the landfill.

Sosa told me to hang on. He drove forward, shifted into reverse, gassed it and braked. We bounced, as did the couches. But they still hung on. Again, forward, back, brake. Again. Finally, out they came, plastic slipcover and all, into the stinky junk heap. For a moment more, I felt a little sorry for them. Then I thought: good riddance.