Junk

by Alison Stewart

  After I figured all of this out, I answered the guy. “I don’t know.”

  He accepted this and put it in a box, I guess for later inspection. It was one of many white lies I would tell during this process. There are white lies you tell to deceive and there are white lies you tell to survive. I was in survival mode.

  Old dishes were wrapped and boxed. Good furniture was put to the side to go into the truck last. They were so good and so fast I had to retrieve a working cordless phone that had been swooped up in the process. It wasn’t their fault. It was in the zone, so it was fair game.

  I watched as John and company backed down the driveway in a truck filled with furniture stacked so high you could see one lone chair leg sticking up like a flagpole. I took a deep breath and went back to the basement, hoping to see a difference, unlike my earlier amateur attempts. I exhaled with relief when I could see roughly a quarter of the basement floor. I was sold on using pros. I booked them four more times in the next few months. After their last visit I sent my twenty-five-year-old niece a picture of a nearly empty basement and she texted me back, “A Christmas miracle!”

  There was one wrinkle. College Hunks could not take anything remotely regarded as hazardous and that included paint cans that had been hiding in a closet in the basement. For that I had to find someone who liked cash and would carry out anything.

  Let’s call him Zephyr, which means strong wind. It isn’t really that far off his real name, or at least the name he gave me. Big, burly, and bald, Zephyr was as polite and straightforward as the corporate guys, but a lot more talkative.

  “Bet you can’t guess what my favorite channel is? Lifetime. Lifetime! I just love those movies.” He laughed at the ridiculousness of a two-hundred-plus-pound man curled up on a couch taking in the plucky damsel in distress movie of the week starring a three-named former child star. He looked a bit like the genie from Aladdin and he promised to grant my wish that this would all finally go away. I’d been told he was a character and he did not disappoint. As he walked around the property preparing an estimate in his head, he dispensed advice.

  “Hold out for the best offer you can—houses fly out of this neighborhood.”

  “You don’t have to paint that whole back, just touch it up!”

  “New roof? Aw, bad move. It ain’t your house much longer.”

  “These people looking for houses want the inside clean. Crazy clean.”

  For the most part the house was empty except for the few Family Hold boxes headed for storage. The garage somehow had become a bit of a dumping ground for those one or two things we just couldn’t seem to throw or give away because they could be useful to someone, somewhere. One or two things had grown to one or two piles.

  Zephyr surveyed what was left, which was mostly a garage full of tools and small electrical equipment. I could tell he was calculating in his mind whether to charge us to take the things away or give us a little cash for the items he thought he could still sell. With all the head shaking going on, I could tell it was going to be the former. He wanted me to know he was fair.

  “I met an old man. He loved his chair. Wanted to move it into his retirement home. Someone wanted to charge him five hundred dollars to move it. That ain’t right. I did it for seventy-five dollars; drove it into NYC and when I got there, he was so grateful he made me lunch.” When he went into the garage for a final look-see, I turned to my sister and asked what she thought about him. “I stopped listening after a while.” The she deadpanned, “I do remember that he held the secret to life.”

  I learned a lot about his life by the end of the meeting. He was originally from Louisiana. We discovered we both like Steve Harvey and we both had small children. He said he learned his lesson from his first marriage and lets his wife be the boss. He believed in putting people to work and he assembled small crews for each job. “Don’t ask me for money. I won’t give it to you. I will give you a job and help you earn something. Anyone can work hard, but a lot of guys who want to work hard can’t get anyone to hire them. I will, if they promise to work hard.” That explained the somewhat dodgy-looking smoke-soaked men who arrived to clean out the garage the next day. They definitely weren’t pros, as evidenced by the busted molding at the base of one doorway. And they were very curious.

  “Yo, lady, you live here?”

  “No. My parents did.”

  “How much you gonna sell for?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “A lot, I bet.”

  “Yeah, ah, could you watch the door frame?”

  Zephyr separated out the items that could be of use to someone else. He said he donates what he can, and he seemed to have specific people in mind, not charities. In some ways he was a refreshing alternative to the superslick experts. He was keeping it real. This was junk. It wasn’t pretty to remove. The corporate chains let you know what they do with your items. Zephyr seemed to operate with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I never asked what became of the paint cans, and he never told me. Eight hundred dollars later, the place was spotless.

  The day we packed up the few remaining family hold boxes to go to storage, it was snowing.

  Sitting on a shelf was a box neatly labeled “Pieces of string too short to tie things with.” Inside the box? Many short pieces of strings much too short to tie up anything. Then there was a bazooka, as in the gun, not gum, found in the pantry, the baggie full of dusty silk flowers, and half of a plastic Easter egg found on the basement floor. I heard these tales from average people, not hoarders or collectors, but regular folks who, when pressed, would fess up to owning many discarded articles of little use. You know, junk.

  What qualifies as junk is subjective. One of the first uses of a now famous phrase equating something useless to something spectacular dates back to 1860. In Popular Tales of the West Highlands John Francis Campbell makes the case for collecting stories and fairy tales even though others might think it silly.

  Practical men may despise the tales, earnest men condemn them as lies, some even consider them wicked; one refused to write any more for a whole estate; my best friend says they are all “blethers.” But one man’s rubbish may be another’s treasure; and what is the standard of value in such a pursuit as this?

  “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is the battle cry for the true junk warrior.

  Each generation has a different relationship with the items that find their way into a life. Just try to convince a child of the Depression that using a department store bag once is the right thing to do. Their children, the Baby Boomers (seventy-six million of them), were taught to buy, buy, buy and that something new is almost always better. Practically speaking, during their lifetime it did become cheaper to buy new than to fix the old. Their children, the Millennials (eighty million of them), live in a world where a new mp3 player, smartphone, or e-reader is released biannually. There are homes in America where you can find three generations of families with four different generations of iPad under one roof. George Carlin said it best when he joked, “That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. . . . A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. . . . That’s what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”

  Economist Thorstein Veblen first presented the idea of conspicuous consumption in the 1890s, and a century later a few resourceful entrepreneurs tackled the problem of what to do with all that has been conspicuously consumed. After the “go-go greedy” 1980s, the next decade became the “What the hell do we do with all this stuff?” ’90s. The answer: Self storage is now a $24 billion industry. Junk removal became a viable, respectable, corporate enterprise. National franchises—The Junk Kings, College Hunks Hauling Junk, and the seminal 1-800-Got-Junk—popped up across the country. The growth of this industry has been swift. 1-800-Got-Junk started with a $700 pickup truck. In 1999, it made $1 million. In 2011, the company earned $91.5 million.

  Three of the highest rated cable television shows today are about
storing junk (Storage Wars), selling junk (Pawn Stars), and finding junk (American Pickers). There’s a genre of women’s magazine devoted entirely to dealing with stuff. Getting Organized magazine’s tagline is “Treat yourself to some sanity.” Better Homes and Gardens, with a readership of thirty-five million, publishes an extra edition twice a year simply called Storage. And ironically, when looking for magazines about clutter, I Googled “magazine clutter” and got 50,600,000 results, and most dealt with how to avoid drowning in periodicals—even the ones about how to de-junk your life.

  Someone wrote that only in America do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage. Other countries do treat their junk differently, but some developed nations like Japan are seeing the problem, too. Where you can buy stuff, people do. However, in a place like Cuba, junk doesn’t often become an issue because new things rarely make it into the country—everything must be reused. While visiting Havana, I was amazed at how our host cooked dinner for us. He pulled out a beat-up, wrought iron chair missing a seat. In its place sat a loosely woven metal basket full of charcoal. It was his version of a Weber Kettle Grill, and it worked great!

  He upcycled out of necessity, but these days many people are starting to do so out of a concern for the environment. The books The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health—and How We Can Make It Better and Garbage Land offer earnest and frightening looks at the dangers of too many material goods.

  For me, junk became a very personal issue—one that led to this book. Looking back, if I could have poured a truckload of cement into that basement, filled the room to the ceiling, and claimed I had no idea what happened, I would have done so. It took me eight months to clean out that house. Junk removal took over my life.

  This clean-out process left me with so many questions. Why do people hold on to junk? Are we hardwired for it like some animals? And how did removing junk, storing it, and organizing it become million-dollar industries? And what qualifies as junk anyway? These questions led me to spend nearly two years on the junk research trail, from yard sales to McMansions to deserts. The result is a who, what, where, when, and why of junk—not necessarily in that order, because, as I discovered, junk knows no order.

  A couple of notes. Because stuff is personal and many nice people let me invade their space, some of the names have been changed out of respect for their privacy. I’ve noted the changes with an asterisk. But they are all real—boy, are they real—and they have the junk to prove it. All the junk removal ride alongs and interviews were conducted during the busy spring-cleaning season, from May 2014 to August 2014. The Q&As are edited for clarity and to stay on topic because, frankly, I can be chatty during an interview.

  And, yes, you will see the word junk a lot in this book. A lot. And as tempting as it may be, I do not suggest you make a game out of taking a drink every time you read the word. It would be very bad for your liver.

  I

  WHAT IS IT?

  1

  THE 411 ON JUNK

  * * *

  JUNK. CHAFF. DROSS. Trash. Stuff. Garbage. Rubbish. Debris. Paraphernalia. Throwaways. Collectibles. Gimcrack. Gear. Trappings. Knickknacks. Thingamabobs and thingamajigs. Junk seems to share the quality of indefinability with another famously (or infamously) difficult object to identify. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, not about junk but about obscene hard-core pornography, “I shall not today attempt to further define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced by that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

  Well, a great place to see it—and get the 411 on it—is the 411.

  US Route 411 runs just over three hundred miles, heading from central Alabama, passing diagonally through Georgia’s west border, and winding up in Tennessee. While it doesn’t intersect with any major metropolitan areas, it does skirt close to Birmingham on its south end and Knoxville on the north. The towns connected by Route 411 are small and home to folks who have a healthy love of family and football.

  Most days driving along the 411 you will see an occasional cow and smell some awesome BBQ, especially in Rainbow City, Alabama, where you can get a whole BBQ butt for thirty dollars at a roadside joint. Travel writer Ronda Robinson describes the drive as “a vacation in itself, a respite from computers, e-mail, deadlines, and a sense of busyness and urgency in general. Unlike the interstate, where speed seems to be the ultimate objective, 411 provides a meditative retreat.”1 This is probably true, except for four days every fall when US Route 411 becomes a giant 250-mile-long junk-a-palooza known as the Highway 411 Yard Sale.

  Day One: Alabama

  “Hold on to my chicken,” commanded Sherry as she futzed with the items for sale on a folding card table set up in her carport. She reconsidered for a moment. “My daughter says I don’t need another chicken.”

  “Your daughter don’t know what you need,” was how Betty Jo felt about it.

  Sherry, the original owner of the chicken-shaped table lamp, was having second thoughts. Should she sell it, or shouldn’t she? Letting go is a common problem for people who have attachments to things they know they no longer need but secretly still like or even love. Ultimately she put it back on the card table with the rest of the things she hoped would be gone by the end of the weekend. She saw the 411 as a good opportunity for a little fall clean out. “I got a whole mantel full of stuff, and then I just decided it is time to get rid of it.”

  Sherry and Betty Jo, along with Alice, Patty, Shirley, and their mom, Imogene, spent the bright fall morning cajoling and encouraging shoppers to take home any number of gently used items. They posted a sign out on Highway 411 that pointed toward Sherry’s house on Happy Hollow Road. It was part of a modern middle-class subdivision plopped in the midst of what was once a wooded area. The trees seem to exact their revenge by dropping, almost launching, giant chestnuts onto unsuspecting yard sale goers. The street name was fitting for these Golden Girls of Jefferson County, Alabama. The ladies of Happy Hollow were laughing, teasing, and trading inside jokes in a way that suggested that maybe there was something stronger in their cups than coffee. While the yard sale was a way to clean out their homes, Sherry pointed out it was also an opportunity for a good time. “You meet a lot of different people from different walks of life.” A petite lady in her forties, Sherry’s primly matched floral shorts-and-shirt outfit did not jibe with her bawdy laugh and tales of girls’ weekends in the city. “I told my pastor, if everyone come to church I invited, you’ll have to build a new church. That’s the Friendship Baptist Church.” She made sure I wrote it down.

  These ladies spent a lot of time on the presentation of their goods. They had arranged the tables into rows so that shoppers would have enough space to walk up and down. The offerings included a walker, a tiger costume, an avocado-green Crock-Pot, and many VHS tapes, including The Secrets of Hunting Whitetail Deer. There was a hot dog statue, which was a little ceramic dachshund inside a bun, with a bright yellow mustard squiggle down its back. Betty Jo, big, loud and hilarious, was doing the hard sell on a fish fryer, a black metal cylinder that was about the size of a toddler. It was marked at twenty-five dollars. In her heart she really wanted someone to take the box of hymnals from the Pentecostal Church of God where her late husband was a minister.

  Every inch of every table was covered with household goods, candles, and knickknacks. They had been neatly arranged and tagged with prices. However, a little neighborly yard work was the source of a bit of tension. “I had cleaned and then the man next door mowed the yard and the dust just settled. But I mean, you can tell it’s clean, not stuff that’s been packed up.” These ladies had made a true distinction between what they had to offer and a bunch of junk. “That’s right. I won’t put out anything you can’t use,” Sherry explained.

  Betty Jo agreed. “Stuff you buy, you like it. Junk needs to go into the garbage.” Sh
e put it simply: “Junk has gots to go!”

  The next stop on this mega-long yard sale was down the road a bit. After a turn into a wide dirt driveway there were four rows of low-slung, single-level, metal storage units. They were gray, or possibly white with a layer of grime and dust kicked up from the cars. The owners seemed as eerily similar as the units themselves. They were mostly couples in their mid fifties to early sixties, men in baseball caps and women in white sneakers. They were all pulling boxes and boxes of oldness out of the units. A grandmotherly woman was scurrying about nervously arranging and rearranging her things. She was trying to make an attractive marketplace for potential buyers. She could rearrange the old records and used snow boots for hours and it wouldn’t really make a difference. It was a clear fall day, with leaves whipping around the edges of the property, but the stale smell of the lockers seemed to overpower the crispness in the air. Nothing seemed very crisp or fresh. It all seemed kind of squishy and moldy.

  “Can’t move dishes . . . no one wants dishes,” said an older gentleman who had, well, a lot of dishes for sale. He was very chatty and never stopped moving things out of his unit and onto the gravel. He was trying to create a little goat path inside the unit for potential buyers to wander into the ten-by-fifteen-by-eight metal box. He shared that he and his wife were caretakers for their grown son, who was an amputee. He wasn’t looking for sympathy. This was just his truth. Selling stuff out of the locker helped them get by.

  A neighboring unit owner was considering what to charge for a bag of corks. A dollar was the final decision. This may have been her lucky day. There was a middle-aged gal, about a week overdue for getting her dark roots touched up, who was pawing her way through every storage unit—even the ones that seemed claustrophobic from a distance of ten feet away.