I picked up Chris along the way just to have someone to talk to. The house was out in Stanton, near where I'd just had a loony racist cut the floorboards out of the doll lady's house. While the area surrounding the neighborhood (Stanton) was shoddy and run down as expected, the neighborhood itself was not.
The homes, while not expensive-looking, were nice places where people kept their lawns uniformly trimmed and everything had a pleasant quality to it. Initially, Chris and I assumed that Dirk had given me an address for the wrong neighborhood…and then we saw it. At first glance it seemed unimpressive, with the exception of two ratty cars in the driveway. Aside from a little overgrowth on the front lawn and the need of a coat of paint, the house seemed boringly ordinary. But that was only at first glance.
If you looked harder, the oddities of the abode leapt out at you. To start with, both of the cars were completely filled with trash—and not just any trash, mind you, but really sinister old trash. Cupcake wrappers that featured the old package design of the Hostess company, newspaper bits that looked like they had gone through a hamster's digestive tract, and wadded balls of tissue paper were the immediately visible items, but inside the car's shell there was more, so much more. Only the driver's seat was visibly empty of trash. I snapped a picture.
Chris and I were shocked at the sheer volume of trash that had been wedged into the car, but that only served to prepare us for what was to come. The trash just inside the gate was a drum roll, a slow buildup of dirty baby diapers, cooking magazines from the 1980s, and random detritus rolling toward a crescendo. The closer to the front door we got, the higher the trash piled up, until it formed twin arches extending down from the sidewalls like fast-food-box ornamentation. I snapped another picture.
The front door was scuffed, as if someone had tried not very hard to force their way through. Clearly the person had never broken down a door in the name of service as I once had. I unlocked the door and pushed it open, only to be dazzled by my new definition of what a dirty house was.
* * *
I used to think I knew what a dirty house was. When Chris and I were growing up, our parents worked long hours. We were frequently home with our two other siblings to do as we pleased. And what apparently pleased us was living in filth. Apple cores would be pushed between seat cushions rather than walked out to the trash; pots and pans with clinging macaroni residue would be stuck behind furniture rather than set in the sink to be rinsed. Toilet paper used as tissues would be set on tables with the intention of them eventually reaching the garbage, but the paper would invariably find its way to the floor. The laundry pile created by six people in a busy household was enormous, and if left unchecked, it would spread out to every corner of the house, mixed in with jackets and dirty socks left on the floor.
My father would rage about the mess, but we were stubborn, lazy children who benefitted from a society turning away from physical punishment on the young. My mother, who'd grown up in a dysfunctional house, a hoarder house by today's standards, probably found the mess cathartic and was almost an ally in our messiness. Certainly she wanted to escape the dysfunction and wanted to have a clean home, but we didn't listen. We were raised to be creative dreamers, and as we saw it, our dreaming precluded us from keeping a tidy home. Eventually my parents got tired of hounding us to straighten up, and we hellions won our right to be filthy. (While the frat had prepared me for crime scene cleaning, growing up dirty prepared me for the frat.)
I remember the first moment that I was truly ashamed of the way my siblings and I were living. I was in high school and had just set a Dr Pepper can on the very top of the heap in the trash can. The pile was already mountainous, threatening to tumble over, and so I had used a Jengalike concentration to keep it from upsetting. My preciseness didn't really matter, because a layer of trash on the ground already surrounded the trash can. But I was resolved not to be the one to tumble the heap and had just succeeded in my efforts when there was a knock on the door.
I answered it to find an attractive older woman standing before me. She informed me that her car had broken down. This being the age before widespread cell-phone ownership, she asked if she could use our house phone to call her daughter. I allowed her in, and as I turned to hand her the cordless receiver in the kitchen, I could see that her eyes were not on me but on the abundance of trash and laundry scattered through the house. The coup de grace was the trash can, and I saw my Dr Pepper can with the sides I'd mashed in to make it sit like an angel atop a Christmas tree.
I suddenly felt the shame of my life's sloth like a lightning bolt. I didn't regret the woman's presence in the house, but the fact that I needed her there to figure it out for me. If I had any concern that I would slip back into a state of unclean living after she left, it disappeared when I found out that she had a daughter who attended Eureka High with me. A daughter who was pretty and more popular than me, and who would doubtlessly hear from her mother about the schoolmate who was kind enough to let her mother use the phone but who lived like a pig in his own filth. And the daughter would tell my classmates. It was almost as bad as if they'd found out I'd been raised Mormon.
I walked the halls in mortification for weeks, awaiting somebody's comment, but it never came. The necessary damage had been done, though, and I cleaned up the house big-time. Of course, my brothers and sister hadn't had the same epiphany, and they continued to make their messes, but I swore that I would never sink to that level again. And with the lapse of living at the frat house, I haven't.
Since most of my siblings have moved out and everyone has grown up, my parents' house also is now what my dad long wished for. Spotlessly clean and cheery, it looks like a grand collaboration between Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade. My mom probably wouldn't mind if there were a bit more laundry around, though.
* * *
Because of my background, I thought I knew what a dirty house was, but that corner house beat my definition to shit. I'd been stopped from fully opening the front door by an unseen presence, so I knew it was either going to be a poltergeist or a very messy home. But even those expectations fell way short.
Wedging the door open wide enough to stick my arm and digital camera in, I began snapping pictures of the living room. The amount of trash visible through my forced opening in the door alluded to the condition of the rest of the house. An awesome mound, peaking and sloping into another pile, formed an unsettled mountain range of refuse that spanned the length of the home, with the summit of the tallest mountain easily extending over ten feet into the vaulted ceilings. Clearly, the living room wasn't filled with floor-to-ceiling trash only because the occupants had not been there long enough to accumulate the trash necessary to reach the eighteen-foot crossbar.
A multitude of spiders apparently had, though, because my digital photos revealed spider webs that could easily ensnare Frodo and all his pals. Spider webs extended from the ceiling down to the lowest levels of the trash, which in some places was only four feet off the ground. Walking around the back of the house, we found that the backyard and most of the remaining rooms were much worse.
Few things are as ironic to me as a pile of trash made from the containers of cleaning supplies, and I tried to convey that message to Dirk as I showed him one of the photographs I'd taken. It simply defied explanation, and I begged him to take a look at the house so that he could see that what I was relaying to him was true. But it didn't seem to matter, because he seriously considered fifty-five hundred dollars an acceptable bid for our services cleaning it all up.
I begged him to charge ten thousand or even twenty or thirty thousand dollars, but he stressed the importance of competitive bidding. He said we didn't have to take the cars and that they'd be gone by the time we started, so we could rule them out of the equation. By the way he figured it, we'd get a crew of ignorant people in there, pay them fourteen bucks an hour, get three giant dumpsters at five hundred a pop, work over a weekend, and the two of us would pocket around two thousand dollars each for our troubles. I wouldn't even have to work. With my back the way it was, I would only need to sit in a comfortable chair and supervise. I begged him once more to reconsider his numbers, which he finally did, raising the bid to sixty-five hundred. After all, we wanted to impress the county with our ability to do great work for cheap.
I didn't know anything about how the county via the Public Guardian's office conducted business in such affairs, but from the moment I walked around the house, I felt a connection, and I was confident the gig was ours. I knew that we were destined to intersect, that house and I, and so I wasn't surprised when a week later Dirk informed me that we'd won the bid.
Since he was still so involved with his sheriff duties, he informed me that once more I'd be doing the supervisory work alone. For that reason, I fought to have Doug on my excavation crew. If I was going to be out there for long hours watching people bust their ass, I wanted some hilariously uncomfortable racial tension to entertain me. Doug said he knew a guy who was a real hard worker, and to complement the mix, the oblivious Dirk threw in two Mexican guys.
I was frothing for the start date, anticipating the impending project to be
Raiders of the Lost Ark
meets
Do the Right Thing
. So my disappointment was palpable when Doug showed up with his buddy, a Filipino guy named Kool. Apparently Doug wasn't a complete racist. He was more of an "I hate foreigners less than I love money" racist, and begrudgingly, everyone got along just fine. Working in their favor was that the two Mexican laborers did not understand Doug well enough to be offended by his comments.
The dumpster Dirk ordered had arrived before any of us got there, and from the get-go I knew there would be a problem. While what the sanitation company referred to as a "forty-foot roll-off" was large, it was nowhere near what we would need dumpster-wise to put a dent in the trash.
"I think we're gonna need a bigger boat," I quipped to Dirk, but he didn't comprehend the reference. We had budgeted for three roll-offs, and one of them might have been enough to take care of what was in the backyard alone.
I would worry about that later, though. For the moment, I was keen on tackling the house. I had a comfortable director's chair set on the lawn under an E-Z Up canopy to keep the sun off me, but for the initial breakthrough I was determined to be in on the action.
Arming Kool, the smallest of the group, with a snow shovel and a pair of work gloves, the rest of us pushed on the front door, inching it open enough to slide him through. He had to stand at a hilarious incline on the sloping trash pile, careful not to sink into its boggy midst. Once inside, he used the snow shovel and his hands to scoop what trash he could away from the front door. Quickly I grew bored, though, and returned to the comfort of my chair, where I decided to employ a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" style of leadership.
It wasn't long before Doug brought out the first intact item: a surprisingly decent clock radio, unused and still in its original box. Not sure what to do, I consulted Dirk. He, too, was surprised at finding something of worth and commanded that the workers put all items of potential value off to the side. We'd consult the Public Guardian's office about the findings after the completion of the job.
Shortly thereafter, amid barrels full of trash, several more clock radios came out, also in original packaging. A blender was next, unused, and then another, cheaper clock radio. Then more kitchen items followed. The stack of valuable items was proportionately impressive to the trash removed.
We'd started the job promptly at 8:00 a.m., and by about 9:30 a.m. the first shark had arrived. She was an old lady who had the look of one of those
Bewitched
neighbor types with mounds of dyed hair, and she was being led around by a small dog on a large leash. She picked her dog up without realizing it was attempting to pee on the lawn and then dangled it aloft so that it could finish its business.
"Thank Jesus, you're cleaning out the Steward house," she said.
"The Steward house?" I inquired casually. I didn't know the backstory on the place, but I wanted to.
"Of course, most everyone around here calls it the Sewer House. Is it horrible inside?"
"It's worse than horrible," I confirmed to her immense delight. "What happened to it?"
"Oh, I don't know too much about it really. I've heard rumors. The guy used to beat his mother…She slept out in one of the cars. For two years she slept in a car, can you believe that?"
Over the course of the day, various well-wishers and gawkers alike came to give me their version of the story on the Sewer House. It seemed that a man and his wife owned several properties in the area and did fairly well for themselves. The two of them lived in the nefarious house in the 1980s with their son, a teenaged burnout and pill popper. When the husband died, the mother and son moved to another of their properties and rented the house out to a large family. The family kept the place nice and was liked by the community, but the owner's son wanted a place of his own.
His mother evicted the family and let the son move in. All night, the son would ride his bike around the neighborhood, threatening neighbors and making their kids uneasy. The mother and her son were both packrats, and by then the mother had made a mess of the house she was living in, so the county stepped in and kicked her out.