“You think he even notices the condition of this place?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “A person like him doesn’t usually notice anything that isn’t part of …” She paused to choose her next word with care. During that moment, Vogel pounded on the steering wheel and glared at the phone while screaming at it. “Well, a person like him doesn’t really notice anything.”
The call went on for a few more minutes, then he suddenly ended it and sat motionless in the car for so long Margot thought we should check things out. As we started to walk over, the door flew open, and he got out dressed in his show costume: jeans, Red Wing boots, and a flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His hair was a mess, and he hadn’t dyed the gray to match the rest. His cheeks were glossy, and his weird eyes looked a little bit infected.
Margot pointed at his face. “You have something—some french fry, maybe—in your beard.”
“Can we get this done tonight?” he asked, grabbing at the wrong part of his face.
“Well, it depends,” she said. “And you missed it. It’s on the other side.” He brushed all over, missing the food each time. You could tell Margot wanted to just pluck it out, but she also didn’t want to touch him. Who would?
“Maybe you should get some rest,” she suggested.
“I don’t need any rest. Has the studio said anything?” Vogel asked.
“About what?”
“About me.” The way he said “me” was deeply disturbing.
“They said you weren’t on the airplane,” she said with care.
“What else did they say?”
“Well, nothing, Chuck. They said they had no idea where you were and they wanted to know when we heard from you so they could get the insurance company off their backs.”
“Don’t tell those sycophants anything.”
“Sycophants?” I blurted, a little bit amazed that I didn’t keep quiet.
Vogel zeroed in on me. “I have a master’s, and a vocabulary, you piece of crap.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
Vogel rubbed his face, and refocused on Margot. “Don’t tell them anything. I have a—” he began. “I need to talk to them myself.”
“Whatever you want, Chuck.”
“I don’t want you in the middle of it, okay, Margot?”
“In the middle of what?” Margot said, lifting an eyebrow to make it obvious she wanted us to play dumb.
Vogel stared at us for a long time, without blinking, like a dog on a chain, then he grinned, sort of. It was a dark, celebratory expression. “You haven’t heard anything about me?”
“We’ve been out here in the middle of rural nowhere, hauling around boxes of garbage. How could we have heard anything?”
“Good,” Vogel said. “Good, good, good.” He started patting around for his phone, then realized he’d left it inside the car. He rooted around in the car for a long time before he found it.
“Whose car is this?” Margot asked when he was back.
Vogel immediately became evasive. “I want to interview the hoarder first. While I’m fresh.”
“Well, there’s a problem. She’s not here right now. It’s just the guy, Hoot.”
“What about the daughters?”
“Upstairs.”
“So, why exactly did I drive halfway across the country in two days if there’s nobody to interview?”
“Nobody knows, Chuck. You had a plane ticket.”
Vogel looked like he was going to take a bite out of Margot’s face for saying that, but remarkably, he took control of himself by baring his teeth (it wasn’t a smile), shaking a finger at her, and nodding his head. “You’re right. You’re right. You’re right,” he gibbered. “I did have a ticket.” As he was thinking about what to say next, he looked around, and you could see the situation of this house dawn on him all at once. “What have these rednecks done to this place?”
“Looks like June didn’t get better,” Margot said.
“June,” he said, letting his face lift like a madman’s. “I remember that nasty woman. She chained herself to the bulldozer. Cost us thousands. Maybe it was a bad move to blow that house up after all.”
Margot’s eyes went wide, and she looked right at me. “I thought it was a gas leak.”
“When gas comes out of a pipe it’s called a leak, right?” Vogel said. “Boom. Five years later, we’re the number four reality show in the country. God bless America.”
“Don’t you feel anything?” Margot said.
“I feel like the tree in that idiotic book my kids made me read when they were little. Tree gives everything it has to some gimme-gimme freeloader who skips town without a thank-you, goes broke, then all he wants is to sit and rest for a while. When I look at this pit, I feel like that stump, like I’ve been shaken down by a bunch of con artists. Let’s pause for a moment while I have a good cry and write it down in my journal.”
Vogel charged past her and pushed through the front door.
Margot followed him, but stopped for just a second and took me by the shoulders. “You heard that, right?”
I nodded.
“All of it?”
“He said he felt like a stump.”
Margot snorted through her nose. “Good. For the last couple of days, I’ve been having trouble figuring out what’s real and what isn’t.”
“The Giving Tree is a lady,” I said.
Margot considered that for a moment. “You’re right.”
“Just seems like somebody needed to point that out.”
Margot touched my shoulder. “Indeed,” she said, and then she followed Vogel inside.
I LIKE TO BE ON hand when they’re shooting. It’s not part of my contract but it helps a small crew get things done. Because of Vogel, Margot asked me to be on hand for all kinds of contingencies. I followed Margot into the spot they cleared, and it was amazing how they’d been able to create the illusion of a place that wasn’t a disaster. They had a chair with a bookshelf behind it. Everything was lit aggressively, and the shadows hid a lot of what was dingy and broken down. Vogel sat in his chair across from the one for the person being interviewed. He already had two sheets of paper towel in the collar of his shirt so Karin could do something to salvage his face and hair for the shoot. While she powdered his forehead, Vogel shook two pills from a bottle and swallowed them dry.
They started with Hoot. His deafness posed some technical challenges. We knew he could talk well enough but they kept the older daughter, Jaymee, in Hoot’s field of vision to translate. Whiteboards would be too slow. The problem was, Hoot kept wanting to look halfway between Vogel and Jaymee, which made it seem like he wasn’t paying attention to anyone. Bill set up a second camera and ran a feed of Jaymee signing Vogel’s questions through a laptop just underneath the camera recording Hoot.
Once tape started rolling, it was amazing to see the crew in action. It always takes a few questions to loosen up the subject. This took a lot longer with Hoot. No matter what the question was, he kept coming back to his own questions about our contract with him, about the house. He wanted to be clear on the details. “Do y’all sign over the house once we’re done, or do we have to wait until the show goes on the TV?” he’d ask. His words came in bursts, loud and without inflection. These questions would piss off Vogel, and he’d make Margot answer them. Jaymee would translate Margot’s answers. Hoot apparently thought Jaymee was making things up because he couldn’t see Vogel’s mouth moving. After they got through a few rounds of this, the interview lurched forward.
The questions were broad and general. Vogel asked them in a way that suggested their own answers. It wasn’t long before Hoot started editorializing. “A big house is more work, Chuck,” he said. “The old one wasn’t any trouble. This one has more ways to break. Who needs a digital faucet? Power goes out and what? You’ll just have pee hands.”
Vogel moved on to questions about individual rooms. He tried to stick to the script, but after a few
minutes, he just gave in. “The place has seen better days,” he said, which didn’t seem to flap Hoot in the least.
“It’s true. The place ain’t tidy,” Hoot said.
Vogel couldn’t sense that he was getting messed with. I think he thought Hoot was an idiot, which didn’t work well for anybody. Vogel said one of the great American ideals is the pride of individual ownership, which he didn’t see playing out around him. “In fact, it’s the opposite with you people.”
Hoot leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the knee. “The thing about freedom is you don’t get to tell me what to do with mine. Y’all’s show is called Revive Your Dive. Doesn’t say nothing about any strings attached. Nobody in this family asked for a new house, did they? Nobody came begging. You basically shoved this house up our butts.”
At this point, I didn’t know what to feel. Hoot was fantastic for TV. He seemed born to be on camera. He told Vogel things we always wished we could say. His daughters couldn’t believe what he was saying, and neither could the rest of us. Vogel bristled with rage, and it was clear he was one step away from flying completely off the handle. But he got it together and said, “All this garbage stacked up around here doesn’t seem to be the work of you or your daughters, which kind of puts your wife in charge.”
Hoot’s face got real serious as his daughter signed to him. When she was done, he asked her to sign it again. I could see Hoot getting more and more deeply frustrated as she went on, until he interrupted her and said, “I vowed to have that woman and to hold her, for better or worse, rich or poor, healthy or sick until death do us part. Nothing in any of that gives me leave to back out because of how she keeps house. How is it you don’t know that?”
Margot’s hands were tented over her mouth. Vogel told Bill to cut, and Margot shook her head. She rotated her index finger to make sure he kept rolling. Vogel looked disgusted and started walking out of the room, through the teetering stacks toward the front door, when June stormed in.
“What have you done?” she bellowed, coming at Vogel with her head down like a five-foot offensive lineman. “What have you people done to my things?”
Vogel put up both hands and said, “Look, there’s no way to shoot inside of this landfill, which doesn’t actually belong to you people yet.”
“Not here, there,” she screamed. “Out there in my storage.” She kept coming at Vogel, red-faced and huffing. She pointed right in Vogel’s face, the charms on her bracelet glimmering.
Gavin looked at me. I looked at Margot. We all shrugged and somehow all understood that we should just keep quiet.
“My storage is my things. My things ain’t anyone’s business but mine.” She pointed at Vogel again. “You told me that’s how it would go when you got me off that tractor. You told me my storage would be off-limits, forever.”
“Look, lady. Why would I want to go in there? Why would anyone want to go in there?”
She kept coming at Vogel, who backed up until his heels hit the same cord I'd tripped over. He went down hard, and the light fell in an arc, clipping June in the side of the head, which sent her reeling into a stack of milk crates that knocked down the fill lights. All of that brought June the rest of the way down in a tangled, squalling heap.
In the middle of all that was the sound of a breaking bulb. Farm darted to the power distribution box and flipped the switch, throwing the room into darkness. Vogel was cursing and so was June. Hoot jumped up and started pulling things off his wife. Vogel started yelling at the top of his lungs. I guess somebody was standing on his fingers.
Soon enough everyone was up and screaming. Hoot was trying to soothe his wife, but she pulled free of him and screamed about her rights and the Constitution and how she was going to search everyone for her treasures and her precious little angels.
“Leave me alone,” she screamed, and ran out of the house, crashing into everything on the way out.
When June was gone, Vogel spat on the floor and walked out, saying, “All you freaks need now is a midget and some Siamese twins.”
Margot said, “Let’s take a break and reset.”
“There’s glass everywhere,” Farm said. “It’s going to take a while.”
MARGOT SENT ME TO GET June in place for her interview while the rest of the crew cleaned up and reset everything. The second I got out the door, June zoomed past in her car. I texted Margot: She’s gone. Drove off.
A couple seconds later Margot came out the front door. “How long is she going to be gone?” she asked.
“Get those kids to call her and find out,” I said.
Margot was mad, but not at me. We were all at a point where you could just rage at the universe and nobody would call you on it. She told me to wait here and get June in front of the camera the minute she got back. They were going to get tape of the daughters and some B-roll.
“The only way out of this is through, Margot,” I said.
She told me I was a good man, which wasn’t true, but I didn’t protest.
Truth be told, I didn’t want to know what was going on inside the house. Vogel was almost certainly making a mess of it. Those people were smart and decent and looking to defend themselves. Vogel was crazed and careless and meaner than a snake. It wasn’t comfortable to sit in the van, but there was nowhere outside for anyone to be, so I opened the back, got a book, and lay down with my feet hanging over the bumper. A lot of being a teamster on a crew like this involves sitting with the vehicle, so I kept stuff around to make it work: a foam pad, cooler, snacks, and books.
I got out the novel I was reading, trying not to let myself dwell on this craziness. As I read, I felt myself drifting. Every time a car went by on the street, I’d bolt awake and wait to see if it would come down the driveway.
After an hour, I got up, put my book down, and went over to the storage unit. The curio cabinet light was still on. Against my better judgment, I went back inside with the idea that I’d turn off the light as a gesture of goodwill, and maybe an apology. I was also worried she would know someone went back inside, and a trespass would have consequences. As I deliberated, I realized this was her collection. She treated it like a tiny secret wing of the Smithsonian. These rows and bundles of things had their place, like books in a library or records in some nerd’s apartment. The house was a dumping ground. They were two completely different kinds of problem.
Right behind me somebody said, “What are you doing in here?” I jumped right out of my skin, turned around, and there was the youngest Jessup, Lexi.
“My mother is going to freak if she finds out you were back in here,” she said. The girl was maybe fifteen years old, with pink and blue swirled through her beige hair. She wore thick black eyeliner and dark lipstick, and she stared at me without blinking. The light from outside haloed her, so I couldn’t see much beyond that.
“I thought maybe I had left on the light,” I said. “You know, from before. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
“Whatever,” she said. “You should get out of here. For reals.”
I went down to the far end of the container and switched off the lights, then came back.
“Now, for sure she’ll know you were here,” the girl said. “I know y’all’re judging us, but my mom is sick.” She pointed at all the things in the container. “We had a room like this in our old house.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Please understand. None of us is happy about how this is going down.”
“My family made your stupid boss famous. That’s what’s so dumb about all this.”
“I’ve heard.”
“I’m supposed to talk to him next,” she said. “Do I have to?”
“It’s not up to me. I’m the driver.”
“You’re the only person not doing something right now, so I thought you’d be a good person to ask.”
“I think it’s part of the deal,” I said.
She thought about that for a minute, and then her eyes narrowed. “You haven’t seen my room, have
you?” she asked.
I shook my head no.
“It’s the worst. Your lame contract says I have to keep my room like it is for five years.”
“Tomorrow you can paint it black.”
“Red,” she said. “I want the whole thing red.”
“That’ll be intense,” I said. “I’ll guess that’s what you’re shooting for.”
“When y’all were here before, your creep boss put a blindfold on me and took me up there with all the lights and cameras. He talked to me, right in my ear, about the special room he made just for me. When we got to the room, he pulled off the blindfold, and there I was, surrounded by ponies. A rainbow of ponies across the walls. There was even a pony bed with four carved pony heads at each corner. They had real-hair manes and plastic eyes. I was ten, but nobody even asked if I liked ponies.”
“Did you?”
“Ponies are lame,” she said “But it gets worse. He started yelling at me. ‘You distinctly said ponies,’ he shouted. ‘She said ponies in the interview, right? Somebody remind this kid she said ponies.’ Then he stomped and swore at me and everyone else. ‘Why would I make up ponies?’ he screamed. ‘I am not into ponies.’ Then he told everyone that he didn’t just pull a pony room out of his ass.’”
I laughed but didn’t mean to. “Our boss is a monster. We all know it.”
“He put the blindfold back on me and made me walk up the stairs and into the room over and over for an hour until I loved it the way he wanted me to.”
Lexi wasn’t crying, but her eyeliner was starting to get bleary.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“That’s why I can’t talk to him. I mean, unless you want me to claw his eyes out.”
She stepped behind me, nudged me out of the container, and pulled the door shut. “You really shouldn’t go inside of there again.”
Lexi went into the house, and I texted Margot: Still no sign of June.
Margot wrote back and told me they were finishing the older daughter’s interview, and based on the cruel things Vogel had said about her body and face, the girl could hire any bad lawyer in the country and sue Vogel for everything he was worth.
It Needs to Look Like We Tried Page 15