Industrial strength: Mr. Clean

Muscle & Fitness, July, 2004 by Jeff O'Connell

CAUTION: A GARBAGE MAN, A PREACHER AND A BODYBUILDER--THIS ISN'T THE START OF A BARROOM JOKE, IT'S JOE ALLEGRO'S RESUME

REVEREND JOE ALLEGRO has hoisted more tonnage than Lee Haney, Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman combined, many times over. That's not counting the weight he manhandles in the gym, where the holy terror benches and squats 315 for reps.

No miracles here--the 43-year-old is a 14-year veteran of the New York City Department of Sanitation. This morning, though, he's supervising trash collection as he maneuvers a standard-issue Ford Taurus around a neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, on the lookout for one of his trucks. Dressed in a green uniform, with a single earring punctuating his shaved head, the sanitation supervisor is a dead ringer, ironically, for none other than Mr. Clean, America's favorite household-products icon, not to mention one of the Sexiest Men Alive (or so said People magazine back in '98).

Allegro may be called upon to ticket an abandoned vehicle or serve a summons for an improper disposal, but his main responsibility is making sure the two-man crews on his watch complete their routes, leaving no trash-can lid unturned. His is one small square in a multilayered chess match that unfolds every weekday across the five boroughs of New York City, involving an armada of trash and recycling trucks, 5,000 or so uniformed sanitation workers, mountains of refuse and unexpected obstacles like traffic jams and bad weather.

Driving down the street, Allegro nods toward the line of lids before him. "I love empty pails," he says, smiling.

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He and his colleagues do this because you and I never stop producing garbage. That makes trash collection--er, sanitation--the most Sisyphean endeavor imaginable. While the grime washes off with a shower, lifting all that waste eventually trashes a body's connective tissues and joints. Police officers and firefighters may suffer more fatalities, but, among public servants, sanitation workers get banged up the most.

"I loved working on the truck, but I wanted to get off because it beats the shit out of your body," says Allegro, who joined the department back in 1989. "On average, two guys are picking up maybe 10 tons a day, five or six days a week. My first month off the truck, my weights went up at the gym, I was sleeping better, and the aches and pains were gone."

All that heavy-lifting also burned a ton of calories and left his muscles perpetually overtrained, stunting their growth. After he received the aforementioned promotion off the truck to supervisor in 1995, Allegro's relieved 5'11" body went from 185 pounds to 200, he says, in just two months.

It's not just the sheer weight that makes trash hard to handle, he insists: "When you're picking up a pail or a bag or a piece of furniture, you don't have much control over it, so it's not like lifting in the gym. You don't know how much it weighs, or the motion it's going to take or whether it's balanced. It inflicts a lot of wear and tear on the body."

(Then there are the really chance, unexpected encounters. Several years back, one Brooklyn sanitation worker died when he was splashed by acid. Cut glass and diabetic needles routinely stick through trash bags, piercing collectors' skin. A bag of cash of mysterious origin might appear or perhaps a dead body. Allegro assures me that it's considerably less funny in actuality than it was in the 1990 movie Men at Work, starring Charlie Sheen. Workers who encounter cadavers usually require time off and counseling.)

Knowing that a formerly sedentary recruit is a blown disc waiting to happen, the department suggests preventive maintenance in the form of some basic exercises. Having already pushed weight seriously for five years, Allegro needed no such phys-ed primer. He's asked if joining a crew as a bodybuilder made him a marked man whenever the truck came upon a household appliance waiting by the side of the road.

"They'd all look at me, but I'd be like, 'Dude, these muscles are for other things, too,'" he says, laughing. "'They're not just for picking up refrigerators.'"

TRASH-TALKING

Back when Brooklyn-native Joseph Anthony Allegro was in his early 205, working at a shoe store in Greenwich Village, the only oversized features on the scrawny 160-pounder were his mouth and maybe the chip on his shoulder, until a disgruntled customer knocked it off one day. Humbled by the realization that he couldn't back up his trash talk, the angry young shoe clerk sulked off to the local sporting-goods store, where he purchased a home weight set.

Training would eventually change him in ways he could never have imagined then, but the immediate payoff was a mellowing that created room for introspection and a sharpening of focus. He grew physically, too, and decided to take his physique onstage in the summer of 1990, finishing third in a natural show.

He continued competing, always single-minded in purpose: to come in better than he had the show before, regardless of where judges placed him. By the mid-'90s, this struggle with self had led to some intense soul-searching, which would become particularly sharp whenever he'd diet for a show. As he ate his five or six meals a day, all prepared to exacting calorie counts and macronutrients, usually by his own hand for quality assurance, he became extremely cognizant of food's effects on his body.