by Gil Reavill
“I’ve gone into places where people were extremely wealthy and well-educated and they’re hoarding the same things that desperately poor people are hoarding,” said one San Diego sheriff’s deputy. “What I find almost everywhere is plastic bags. They seem to save those by the jillions. And restaurant napkins.”
Hoarders inevitably tend toward extremes, saving food, even though it may be rotten, foraging compulsively in trash bins, displaying signs of defensiveness and paranoia. Howard Hughes, who kept his own urine collected in bottles, demonstrates the extreme end of an extreme spectrum: syndrome sufferers who refuse to throw away their own bodily waste.
The syndrome gained its name from Diogenes of Sinope, the first Cynic, an acid-tongued misanthrope (“In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face”) who turned his back on the Athens of the Golden Age to live out his life in a barrel. The incidence of Diogenes syndrome in the general population runs about one person out of two thousand, meaning there are around 150,000 in America, 29,000 more in the UK.
The most infamous instance of hoarding was the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, who in 1909 moved into a four-story Harlem mansion at 128th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. They lived without gas, electricity, or telephone (“There is no one I particularly care to talk to,” Langley explained), with ten grand pianos in the house that the Columbia-educated Langley played for his blind brother. A PALACE OF JUNK read the headline over three decades after the brothers moved in, when authorities pried open the barricaded doors of the Collyer mansion in 1942, finding it filled with “rolling hills of neck-deep rubble.”
But there was poetry inside too. “When Homer first lost his sight,” Langley said, “he used to see visions of beautiful buildings, always in red. He would describe them to me and I would try to paint them just as he directed. Someday, when Homer regains his sight, I will show the paintings to him.”
Safely back inside the Extended Stay stockade, I mused on the Collyer brothers and thought about the cluttered Milwaukee death house I had just visited. What if there had been poetry there too? I realized that for a brief interlude I had effectively lost my mind. I didn’t take any notes. I forgot about journalism. I completely abdicated my function as an observer, descending instead into puerile weeniehood.
The Moral Compass called from New York. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
I told her about the job. She didn’t want details.
“Do you want to talk to your daughter?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You don’t have to get too graphic,” my wife warned me.
I spoke with my daughter. Her voice had a soothing, stabilizing effect on me.
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you too, darling.”
A beat of silence. “Dad,” she said, “why can’t you write about something normal?”
I spent a fretting weekend and called Dave Creager on his cell the next Monday. I had seen the “before,” I told him. Now could I see the “after”?
“Sure, come on back up,” he said. “We couldn’t finish this job because we got called away to a handgun suicide in Minneapolis.”
“You interrupted one job to go to another job?”
“Oh, yeah, it happens all the time,” Dave said. Suicides and homicides took precedence over decomps. Fresh blood always trumped decay.
I slowly grasped the nature of work at Aftermath, Inc. Going into the project, I had imagined a chain of prim storefront franchises scattered across the country, something like U-Haul, say, or Burger King, only full of cleaning supplies instead of moving boxes or hamburgers. Crime Scenes R Us. It wasn’t that way at all. I began to understand the fundamentally itinerant nature of the business. There were three or four central Aftermath depots and some far-flung offices, out of which tech crews in white box-trucks would hie forth like Ringwraiths.
A two-man crew such as Ryan and Dave’s might spend three weeks on the road, gradually filling the back of their truck with contaminated material. They might drive ten hours to a site in Michigan, turn around and hit a job in southern Illinois, then head out to Iowa or Minnesota. At the end of a string of jobs, their truck stinkfully packed with reeking bioboxes, they’d limp back into Arrowhead Industrial Park to the little warehouse on South Mandel Road in Plainfield.
Not a life for the faint of heart.
I headed back up to Milwaukee on Son of Wisconsin Death Drive 2: The Sequel, a little more clearheaded this time. The Aftermath truck was parked ass-end in at the front door of the tan clapboard house.
Ryan poked his head out of the back. “We’re pretty much done,” he said. “Dave went over to get the family, have them do a walk-through.”
“You went to another job since I last saw you two days ago?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Up in St. Paul. It was pretty bad. A suicide, and the guy had a couple Irish setters that tracked his blood all over the house. It was a real mess.”
Ryan offered me his digital camera. Aftermath techs always exhaustively document their jobs for insurance purposes. As I scrolled through the scenes of carnage, Ryan gave me a blow by blow.
“The husband and wife had a big argument,” Ryan said. “I guess they were pretty drunk.”
The wife passed out on the couch, while the husband went down to the basement, “where he kept his guns,” Ryan said. He climbed back upstairs carrying a .44 with a target barrel on it, and shot himself in the head at the top landing. The cartridges were Magnum-load hollow-points, “which basically cause your head to explode,” Ryan said.
“The wife stayed in a alcoholic stupor on the couch,” he added.
“She didn’t wake up?”
“I guess it was a deep sleep,” he said, shaking his head. “She didn’t hear the shot, but the neighbors did, and they called the landlord, who opened the door and found her lying there, still asleep. The sheriff’s deputy said she had some of her husband’s brains spattered on her.”
I flicked through the camera slide-show of the job. The dogs, Ryan said, had made a little feast of their master before the scene was discovered.
“What is all this white stuff down here?” I asked Ryan, looking at a photo of a blood pool in the camera. “It looks like paper or something.”
“Before he shot himself,” Ryan said, “the guy cut up all his credit cards and scattered the pieces at his feet.”
A tableau of misery: confetti evidence of his debt, plus an alcoholic wife passed out on the couch.
Dave came back from across the street. “The wife was there when we were working, and she asked me, ‘Will you wash my dogs?’ I said, ‘Hell, no, lady, take them to the fucking vet or somewhere.’”
“Only I bet you didn’t say ‘fucking,’” Ryan said.
“Fuck, yeah, I did,” Dave said, but Ryan and I both knew he hadn’t. I had seen Dave with the family on this job, and while at most other times he could be raucous and bawdy, with grieving relatives he was the soul of politeness and discretion.
Dave gestured back toward the front door of the house. “You want to go in, see what the aftermath of an Aftermath job is like?”
“Do I need to gear up?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Come in and see.”
The transformation awed me. The stink, what there was of it, was coming from the material packed in bioboxes in the back of the truck. The house itself smelled…well, not like a summer garden, since it was still piled high with the musty detritus of a man’s life, but nice enough.
“We like to mix TR-32 cherry with TR-32 mint,” Dave said. “We call it candy cane.” TR-32 was Aftermath’s high-end deodorizing liquid, applied by spray or used directly in solution. It came in different perfumes, including lemon, cherry, and mint. The air in the house did indeed have a faint candy-cane scent, a North Pole, Santa’s workshop smell, with chemical undertones, as if the elves were enlisted from DuPont.
The whole atmosphere was light-years away
from what I had first encountered. Ryan and Dave had cut out the flooring in the hallway, leaving an irregular, Joan Miró–shaped hole, through which I could see down into the rat’s nest of a basement. Where the biomatter had dripped down onto the floor beams, they had cleaned and then sprayed the aptly named Kilz sealant. The paint showed up bright white against the dingy surroundings. Every bit of material contaminated by “bio,” as Ryan and Dave referred to biomatter, had been packed into the truck.
The whole place had undergone a three-step biowash. That meant Ryan and Dave treated all the contaminated surfaces first with Microban, an enzyme cleaner, then with a foaming disinfectant called Spray & Wipe, and finally with the deodorizer.
“Three stages to remove the biocontamination,” Ryan said. “Kill it, pull it away from the wall, and deodorize it.”
The clutter, though, was left as it was. Aftermath’s mandate stopped at bio. At $250 an hour, they were too expensive to be used as a moving service. The ceiling-high collections of the dead man were the responsibility of the family. I gazed over at the jumble of junk on the front porch. An old-fashioned scythe rested atop the pile, its four-foot blade papered over with a banner that read “Harvesting Movie Memories.”
“Most people’s lives,” noted that original Little Miss Sunshine, Tennessee Williams, in Suddenly Last Summer, “what are they but trails of debris, each day more debris, long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death.”
“What was this guy’s name?” I asked Dave.
He consulted his job sheet. “The deceased was…Mr. Dettlaff. Al Dettlaff.”
The daughter and son-in-law came over from across the street to sign off on the site.
“I want to say up front, thank you,” the son-in-law told Ryan and Dave. “You did a great job.”
They introduced themselves to me as Helen and Tom Belter, and they walked through the transformed house of Helen’s father marveling, as though it were indeed Santa’s workshop.
“I can’t believe it,” Helen said over and over. She was a sad-eyed lady who looked as if grief had shaken her like a rag doll.
I followed Dave and the couple back to the Belters’ house across the street. As Dave completed the paperwork, I spoke to Helen and Tom. I told them I was a writer working on a book about Aftermath, and asked if I could speak to them.
“I wonder if I could talk to you about your father, Helen.”
“You went in there?” Helen asked, clearly upset with the idea. Her family’s dirty laundry.
“I was part of the crew,” I said.
“He was part of the crew,” Tom repeated, soothing his wife.
“I want to be able to write about your dad as he was in life, not as a cleanup job,” I said.
“Right,” Tom said, on my side, getting enthused. He had already picked up on Ryan and Dave’s lingo. “He’s not just bio.”
He’s not just bio. Exactly right. Wiry, small-statured, filled with Midwestern goodwill, Tom Belter solicitously protected his more fragile wife. Apologizing for the clutter (“My father lived here before he moved across the street, and I don’t think the place has ever recovered”), Helen invited me into her perfectly presentable home. We sat at the dining room table and spoke over the course of an afternoon.
Alois Felix Dettlaff was a sedens, a useful word applied to someone who has never lived anywhere else but his hometown. He spent his whole life in Cudahy. As a child of eight, he took over the basement of his father’s drugstore at Packard and Layton, only a couple blocks to the west of where we were now talking, and put on magic shows for the neighborhood. But Al Dettlaff’s path in life was determined when his father, Alois John Dettlaff, bought him an 8mm movie projector. Now silent movies supplemented the magic shows.
“Five cents admission, plus the audience members got a two-cent candy bar and popcorn,” Tom Belter said.
It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession. And Al Dettlaff was always an obsessive man, thorny and irascible. More than anything else, he loved the muffled, time-travel world of silent films, especially early horror movies. He became a collector, scouring archives for such classics as F. W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu.
Dettlaff worked as a quality control technician at machine shops around the area, including In-Land Company and Lucas-Milhaupt, but his real life revolved around silent films.
“He hated the new movies,” Helen said.
“He never related well to people,” Tom said. “If you came over, it was always, ‘Hey, you want to watch a movie?’ If you didn’t, if you weren’t into what he was into, you were stupid.”
To encompass his movie-collecting passion, Dettlaff formed AD Productions and developed a new persona for himself: Father Time. He began marching in local parades.
“He got his ex-wife to sew some sheets together,” Tom recalled. “He had a tricorner hat, which was good for the Bicentennial, and he hung a big hourglass around his neck on a red-white-and-blue tie, with a sign that read ‘Father Time.’”
Marching in Milwaukee Fourth of July or Memorial Day parades, Dettlaff always carried his scythe, the same one I had seen on his front porch.
“I guess he was more of a Grim Reaper kind of character,” Tom said. “He smoked a pipe and chewed tobacco, so the red-white-and-blue tie got a little stained and grotty.”
Dettlaff’s obsession took deeper hold of him the older he got. His only son, born Alois Felix Dettlaff, Jr., changed his name to James and wanted nothing more to do with his dad. Dettlaff himself became increasingly brusque, irritable, happy only when watching silent films.
Helen and Tom had eight children and fifteen grandchildren. But his progeny left Al Dettlaff cold. “He didn’t relate much to his grandkids,” Tom said, “because they couldn’t talk about silent film with him.”
“Biggest mistake I ever made,” Dettlaff’s father, Alois John (“a gentle smiling man,” according to Tom), once confided, “buying him that damn movie projector.”
But in a single stroke Al Dettlaff justified his hobby, snatching a priceless gem from cinematic oblivion. Thomas Alva Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein had been placed on a list of lost films by the Library of Congress. The earliest cinematic treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s epochal novel (a text that some credit with inventing the modern age), Edison’s Frankenstein was a holy grail of silent-horror-film enthusiasts.
Father Time got his hands on a copy. A 35mm nitrate print, the only one in existence. The print’s provenance was obscure, even within the Dettlaff-Belter family.
“Al didn’t like to talk about it, but I think he bought it from an aunt who was a projectionist,” Tom said. “In those days nitrate film stock lasted only so many plays—then it was discarded. But projectionists didn’t always throw it away.”
Now Al Dettlaff’s obsession had an object worthy of it. “From then on,” Tom said, “that Frankenstein was his baby.”
Dettlaff jealously guarded his find. He resisted releasing it on VHS, at one time spending seven years fussing over a transfer before abandoning it. He always insisted on showing it personally at horror convention screenings.
Finally, near the end of his life, he committed Frankenstein to DVD. Edison’s film is an extraordinary work, still terrifying almost a century after the fact (terrifying and, of course, given the stylizations of the period, hilarious too). The monster (Charles Ogle, the screen’s first Frankenstein’s monster) is created not from stitched-together body parts, but conjured chemically, in a sealed cabinet. In an impossibly eerie scene, a skeletal scarecrow frame grows flesh and features by accretion, until the monster is revealed.
Watching the flickering, hundred-year-old images, I immediately recognized the process. It was human decomposition in reverse. What happened to Al Dettlaff’s body in his stifling front hallway that July was mirrored uncannily by his prized possession, Edison’s silent film.
In the last years of his life, Dettlaff’s body, beset by diabetes and heart disease, was failing him. As
he recovered from a bout of illness at the veterans hospital, Milwaukee County social service authorities condemned his house as uninhabitable.
“We worked like dogs to get the house back in shape,” Tom Belter recalled. “He wanted to die in that house, not in a hospital or in the VA domiciliary.”
Together, Tom and Helen managed to make the place livable, and their work passed inspection with the health authorities. But the homecoming did not go smoothly. Dettlaff flew into a rage when he saw how his home had been neatened and his possessions rearranged.
“It was supposed to be a celebration, but it wasn’t,” Helen Belter said.
The light of an August evening slanted into the Belter dining room. The smell of neighboring barbecues drifted into the house. Helen became teary-eyed, and Tom put his arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“There was love in my dad too,” Helen said. “We had a lot of good times.”
I tried to phrase the question delicately. “Helen,” I said, “what happened at the end? Why didn’t you visit him?”
I saw her wince. It was a knife that had entered her heart many times over the past few weeks.
“Helen did everything for him,” Tom said. “When he was in the hospital, she had to constantly go back and forth getting things for him from the house.”
“He would write down lists of things he wanted,” Helen said. “First of all, it was hard finding anything in there.”
“She did for him,” Tom said, nodding his head firmly.
But during family therapy sessions at the veterans hospital, counselors saw a woman bowed down by caring for her impossible-to-please father.
“Helen, you’ve got to take time for yourself,” the counselors told her. “You have to let go, not see him for a little while.”
So, for the first three weeks of July, that’s what she did. It was hard for her to break the habit, after crossing the street to her father’s house every day for the past few years, for the past decades really, running errands, cleaning, making sure he was taking care of himself, and getting nothing but ire in return. It wasn’t easy to stop going over there. Every day she’d look across the street and see a closed-up house. But she resisted the urge.