Junk Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Alison Stewart

  All rights reserved

  First edition

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61373-058-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Is available from the Library of Congress.

  Interior design: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Introduction

  I

  WHAT IS IT?

  1

  The 411 on Junk

  2

  Pack Rats (Human and Otherwise)

  3

  Junk as Art: Q&A with Vince Hannemann, Creator of the Cathedral of Junk

  II

  WHO HAS IT? AND WHY?

  4

  From Austin to Akron: Junk Busters USA and Trash Daddy

  5

  Defining Your Terms

  6

  Space Junk: Q&A with Donald Kessler, Former NASA Scientist

  III

  WHEN DID IT BECOME BIG BUSINESS?

  7

  Junk Vets: Chicago, Illinois

  8

  Business and Show Business

  9

  TV Junk: Q&A with Brent Montgomery, Executive Producer of Pawn Stars

  IV

  WHERE SHOULD IT GO?

  10

  Annie Haul: Portland, Oregon

  11

  All You Need Is Less

  12

  Free Junk: Q&A with Deron Beal, Founder of FreeCycle

  V

  HOW CAN YOU USE IT, FIX IT, OR LOVE IT?

  13

  Junk Recyclers: Regeneration Station, Asheville, North Carolina

  14

  The Repair Café

  15

  For the Love of Junk: Q&A with Mary Randolph Carter, Author of American Junk, Garden Junk, Kitchen Junk, and Big City Junk, Among Others

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  “Put it in the basement.”

  EVERYONE IN OUR FAMILY said those words at least two or three times a year. Maybe more. OK, definitely more. And that was over a period of nearly fifty years.

  For me, it started with high school textbooks. Just weeks after I graduated, my parents moved. They packed up twenty-seven years of their life, and my books, and sent it all about six exits down the New Jersey Turnpike and into a spacious brick home in a leafy small town. I went off to Brown and my stuff went to Princeton. That was 1984.

  When I made return trips home from college my folks would ask me if I wanted to take any of my texts with me. I’d always told my parents, Not right now, but I assured them I would get the books out of the basement soon.

  I am not sure why I wanted to keep those books. Somewhere in my mind I assumed I’d need to refer to Milton’s Paradise Lost at some point in my post-collegiate life. I also stashed away, among other things, some faux Wedgewood embossed low-ball glasses that belonged to my grandmother. She used them for sweet tea. I planned on using them for cocktails.

  Over the course of the next ten years I used my parents’ basement as a personal storage space. I was living in an apartment the size of a goldfish aquarium, so Mom and Dad kept my books and the newly anointed barware in the basement alongside my Michael Jackson Bad LP—as in long-playing record, for those readers born after the O. J. Simpson car chase. Of course that twelve-inch plastic disc would be valuable one day. I am not sure to whom I thought I might sell it, but hey, you never know. I really had planned to learn how to hawk things on eBay rather than just bidding.

  My sister had plenty of stuff in my parents’ basement, too. She left behind a few yearbooks and a wedding dress. Her old dollhouse was saved for her daughters to enjoy one day. They both now have graduate degrees. Mostly, the basement was a place to stuff our stuff. We, everyone in my family, would put things down there that we believed we would get to one day, possibly need one day, or possibly give away one day.

  One day.

  One day came and went a thousand times over while everything in the basement stayed put until 2012. That was the year my sister and I had to clean out our late parents’ home to sell it. I knew it would be difficult to sift through their things and relive so many memories while being confronted with the fact that they were no longer around to remember with us. After the flower arrangements and funerals, the thank-you notes and the tears, there was a practical matter at hand: the house. Which meant, the basement.

  The first days of the clean out were fairly easy. Mom and Dad both had great taste in clothes, so bags and bags of suits, shoes, purses, and ties went to charitable groups like Dress for Success and The Clothes Closet for college seniors who can’t afford new interview suits. Most of the sheets and towels went to shelters set up after Hurricane Sandy. Boxes of books were donated, all except for my great grandfather’s Harvard Classics; I’d had my eye on those since I was eleven.

  After the initial flurry of activity, my sister and I finally acknowledged the elephant in the room—or rather, the elephant that was the basement. It had been an unspoken issue from day one. Maybe we thought it would go away if we didn’t talk about it. When getting a face full of the reality of your parents’ death, on some level these kinds of unreasonable thoughts seem plausible.

  Walking through the house you’d never know about the subterranean level. The first two floors were wide-open spaces, walls painted a soft white with eggshell finish. There weren’t a lot of decorations or tchotchkes, just a few simple things like a hand-carved sailboat. On the walls there were paintings by R. C. Gorman depicting serene Native American women, seated and wrapped in colorful blankets. The kitchen was white. Completely white: Counters. Appliances. Floors. White floors in a kitchen that my mother mopped herself well into her eighties. The couches in the living room and family room were white too. It was all so very tasteful and orderly. A stranger would never know what lurked below.

  I didn’t like going into the basement. Even walking by the door gave me the creeps. For some reason I began to equate it with the attic crawl space in the scene in The Sixth Sense when the little kid who sees dead people gets pulled in and roughed up by a pissed-off ghost. When I walked past the basement on the way to the powder room, I kept my eyes focused straight ahead.

  This was a fairly recent phobia for me. When I was younger, I loved going down there to see if my Nancy Drew books were still stacked in a corner or to sift through old photos of the family in Mexico circa 1971. But over time the basement stopped being a family museum and became a family mausoleum. It wasn’t a hoarding situation. Or a garbage situation. It was a junk situation.

  Day one. Game face on. I’d psyched myself up. It was going to be a long slog. I would eat the previously mentioned elephant one bite at a time. I flicked on the light switch just inside the door and walked down the curved stairwell and arrived at the final landing and looked around. And then I ran back up.

  My second approach was more successful. I created a new paradigm: this was my job. I was an executor of an estate, being paid to deal with all matters. I had a time frame to get this done, so I better get to it. But first I’d need tools and backup.

  I went to one of those giant home improvement barns and walked the aisles looking for supplies. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would need so I went with my gut. I bought bags—Ziploc, contractor, and recycling. Rope. Labels. Storage bins. More bags. Duct tape. Plastic gloves. Flashlights. I am surprised I wasn’t stopped and questione
d at checkout about my motives given that my shopping cart would have fulfilled the punch list of a first-time abductor.

  Once I assembled all my “tools” I felt I was ready. All I needed was a support team. My sister and my friend Silvia were on board. My sister lived out of state, so we agreed to meet once a month for a long weekend of cleaning out until the basement was barren. In between our intensive weekend sessions Silvia and I would work on our own.

  All three of us were at the first session. Our spirits were good for the first eight hours. There were some big laughs. I found my mother’s charge card for the now defunct Bambergers department store, only it wasn’t any old credit card: across the top it said HOMEMAKER’S CARD. Try giving out one of those in 2015. There were other finds worthy of a time capsule. A billfold with francs and lira. A toy bank that looked like a one-foot crayon. A Life magazine from the year I was born. In one day we filled ten bags full of giveaways and another ten full of trash, and had made a few piles that weren’t quite identifiable yet. After day one, full of warm fuzzies, tears, and a few “Oh, wow” moments, we walked back up the stairs satisfied. We went out to dinner, had some wine, and felt like we were on our way.

  The next morning we returned, flicked on the lights, walked energetically down the stairs, and stopped cold. The place looked the same. The same. Was this a cruel joke? Had someone put back everything we removed? Were we starring in the sequel to the movie Groundhog Day? We’d imagined a dramatic before and after reveal. It was still a before and before scene. How was it possible that the area looked like it had twenty-four hours earlier given that three grown women hyped-up on caffeine and adrenaline had purged or stored anything we’d put our hands on? How?

  Though at that first glance it appeared we had not made a single dent, we had. A teeny, tiny little dent. A ping, really. It was then that I realized I was at the first stage of the Kübler-Ross DABDA grief model. It was the big D. I was in denial. Somehow I’d decided that this project wasn’t so bad and that it wouldn’t take long to, you know, tidy up. Given what was in front of me, stage one was over almost as soon as it began. It didn’t take me long to move right through the denial to the next phase, that A.

  Anger. Why was there all this stuff? What the hell were we going to do? Why did they have to die anyway? How were we going to do this? My sister expressed it best when she pulled out an enormous bag of used Christmas bows and proceeded to shout, “Really, Mother? Really?” But for my mom, a child of the Great Depression, a shiny Christmas bow was an enormous luxury and not something to toss in the trash. I think she physically could not throw one away. And so, she didn’t. The bows made sense to me—however, the cheap water glass from my prom with a blue stamp that read “G.R.H.S, ‘We’ve Got Tonight’ May 27, 1983,” did not. The theme was the name of a soft-rock Bob Seger song. As an adult I realized it was a wholly inappropriate theme song for hormonal teenagers, given the lyrics spelled out the rationale for a one-night stand. (We’ve got tonight, who needs tomorrow? We’ve got tonight babe, why don’t you stay?)

  My anger subsided quickly when I realized so much of this junk was the history of our family. We found my sister’s report cards from fifth grade. In 1966 she was a very good student and “was learning to become gracious about winning.” Both are still true for her at age fifty-nine. I found boxes and boxes of VHS tapes my parents had recorded of my newscasts. We found an autographed book of poetry by Langston Hughes that my mother received when she was a teenager. We found a button from the 1963 March on Washington when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. We recovered the letter my grandfather wrote to our great-grandfather asking for my grandmother’s hand in marriage. All this junk was the unfortunate byproduct of a lot of love.

  The anger melted into the next stage, bargaining, and we started a set of boxes called “Family Hold” to put in a storage unit. Family Hold ranged from clothing to dishware, anything that brought up the emotions tied to family. There was one rule about Family Hold to insure things ran smoothly and relatively tear-free: do not look at pictures. Pictures could derail a whole day. Pictures could send you into an emotional spiral that resulted in the fetal position and worse, in my eyes as the taskmaster, ineffectiveness. As long as photos were avoided and put somewhere safe, we would be able to forge ahead.

  And we did. Days turned into weeks that turned into months. No amount of bargaining was going to get the job done, and that was when the second D—depression—set in. Cleaning out the basement felt like a Sisyphean task.

  When we walked into the house for the umpteenth time, I realized that the leaves had begun to fall. We’d been at this for so long our shorts and T-shirts had been replaced by sweaters and down vests. We were into a whole new weather pattern and the basement was still, well, the basement. Acceptance, that final A, arrived around the same time as the first blast of cold, crisp air. I knew it in my bones. This task was beyond me, Silvia, my sister, or any configuration of us. We needed professional help.

  “How may we help you have a stress-free day?” greeted the booker for College Hunks Hauling Junk. I clamped my lips together to keep myself from blurting out something cynical or rude and simply told them I’d like to make an appointment. Hey, stress-free? I’m in. I’d never even heard of this company that employs strong college boys to move stuff. Then one day while driving back from yet another hardware store supply run, I saw one of the company’s big orange trucks painted with a cartoon of a superhero-like college boy carrying brimming boxes. I memorized the 1-888 number.

  “What is it you’d like to haul away?”

  It was a simple question, but at the moment I wasn’t sure whether or not to tell the truth. I was reminded of the time I was at a little airport with very small planes. I watched as women getting their boarding passes twitched when the counter agent asked their weight so that the planes could be evenly balanced. Their facial expressions were easy to read: lie and go down in a death spiral because the plane was lopsided or tell the truth and have their significant other give them the eye the next time they ordered dessert. I could have lied about the size of my haul and said it wasn’t so much, just some knickknacks and old furniture.

  Instead, I opted for the truth. “About fifty years of life.”

  And so began a short but intense relationship with John and his college hunks hauling junk. The first visit was all business. He explained the pricing policy to me: “We price according to how much of the truck we fill.”

  “It is going to be the whole truck,” I said.

  “OK then.”

  John was a tall, thin, sandy-haired fellow who spoke with the energetic gusto of a Dale Carnegie graduate. Over time I learned he had been a political science major in college but grew disillusioned with our government. He just wanted to do work that made a difference. He explained how a portion of the company’s profits go toward college scholarships. He proudly told me one College Hunks tale: “There’s a great story about one of our trucks pulling up to a shelter with two beds, a chair, and a table just as a family whose home had been flooded arrived. They had someplace they could move into but no furniture. Our guys didn’t even take it off the truck. It went straight to the people in need.” I don’t know if it was apocryphal or a happy accident, but John sure believed it.

  His two helpers introduced themselves, offering firm handshakes and big smiles. They wore khaki pants and orange-and-green polo shirts. I offered nervous warnings as we approached the basement.

  “There’s a lot of weird stuff down here.” They just smiled.

  “I marked it off in zones. We can just tackle zone one today.”

  More smiles.

  “A lot of it is my stuff, too . . .”

  As we walked downstairs they didn’t flinch. All John said was, “Yes, this is definitely the whole truck.” He looked over his shoulder to his junior hunks and shouted, “We need boxes and bags!” much like the way a TV surgeon asks a nurse for the scalpel, stat!

  I marveled at the good nature of thes
e buff young bros. No matter how many times I threw out little apologetic qualifiers, “Sorry about that pile” or “Bet you’ve never seen that many nonworking pens,” the fellas just smiled and kept working. Their boss must teach them not to crack. I would not want to play poker with any of those guys. Only once did I get a whiff of What the fuck? from any of the workers. He asked shyly, “Ma’am, what is this exactly?” He quickly followed up with, “I’m just trying to figure out where to put it on the truck.” He was truly stumped, as was I for a moment. In his hands he held a two-piece, foot-tall ceramic black cat with an electrical cord coming out the back. The head came off at the neck and inside was a mesh disc sectioned into six pie-shaped pieces. The bottom half was empty. It was heavy. I had to do a little mental detective work searching my memory for clues. I could visualize it in my childhood home and I was reminded of two smells: cat box smell and trying to cover cat box smell. And I also recalled our cat Midnight not liking the thing very much. She was black, too, and would paw at the ceramic version of herself. It hit me: it was some sort of air freshener that looked like an Egyptian cat statue.