The email, sent to everyone in my building, was to the point:
Sheriff's deputies were here yesterday to officially evict anyone who
might have been living at XXXX-2. That was one more step that had to be
taken so that the bank can market the apartment. The bank, as required, had
arranged for movers to come and clear out the apartment. They came with
a totally inadequate vehicle for the task, removed some items, and left.
The bank has given me permission to let shareholders take anything they
might want out of the unit. They'll have to pay to clear the unit
of the rest of Michael's belongings. For those who don't know, Michael’s
family took what they wanted a long time ago and abandoned the rest. If
you want to take a look at what's left, let me know. This has to be done
during daylight since there's no electricity in the apartment.
-Diane
Two-and-a-half years earlier, Michael, an architect still practicing in his 60’s, had died suddenly. Apparently, the ambulance came one night, and he was gone. No one in the building ever found out what he died of. No one knew his family well enough to ask, or even who to call.
Two weeks after he died, his family could be seen coming and going. They spoke to no one. Then, they stopped coming.
A month later, a bank called the Co-Op Board. Apparently, the family was abandoning whatever interest they had in the apartment. The bank would take possession and, eventually, sell it.
Yesterday, the Sheriff's deputies arrived.
Diane let me in and walked through the apartment with me. A pile of garbage bags in a corner of the living room marked “Jackets” and “Long Pants.” A dining table piled high with photo albums, a DVD player, towels, candles, two alarm clocks. An office strewn with computer equipment, papers, stacks of magazines. A bedroom with a dresser on its side next to the bed, no sheets on it. A sterling silver business card holder. A fan from Japan. A picture frame with a smiling girl in it. Three corded telephones. Matching ikea floor lamps. A hummingbird mobile hanging from the ceiling. A box of screws open on the floor. A pile of clean towels. Cans of paint and paint thinner. It looked as if nobody had taken anything from the man’s life, just jumbled it.
Diane had known Michael. “His family didn’t even take his pictures,” she grimaced, pointing to the photo album. Faded Kodak prints showed a tiny baby Michael grow from a kid to a boy to a man.
Then I saw two cast iron frying pansl. I saw a Cuisinart. I saw good Japanese kitchen knives. I saw Metro wire shelving, many units of it. Bookshelves and boxes of screws. Hammers and mat knives and picture frames. All really useful stuff, and stuff I did not have. I didn’t really need any of it. Two years on from divorce, and not making a real wage during that time, I was still living in minimal bachelor mode. I had filled in the essentials (can opener; frying pan; coffee cup) at Goodwill over the first year, and my home and kitchen had most of the basics; but here – here were the tools for real living. And it was free.
I surveyed the mountain of stuff in his apartment, and got busy. Helen left, asked me to close up after I left. An air conditioner looked at me. An architect’s file cabinet looked at me. My back winced. It would all have to go down two flights of stairs, then back up three, my arms and feet the only tools to move them.
“I’ll only take a little," I said to myself. "Just a few useful things.”
The first box I opened had hand towels, a blanket with a designer label that read “Sensual Sessions” on it, a number of candles in jars and ten DVDs on how to talk to women, only one or two open. I closed it back up again. The boxes under it had about 100 porn DVDs in it, mostly “Tits and Ass” and “Seymore Butts” series. I closed them back up again. Another box of architectural photos, possibly culled from or intended for clients, were arranged on presentation mats. Then I blinked.
It hit me hard: I was picking at the bones of a life. Everything in the room, from the tables and chairs and lamps, had been a part of his life, useful and meaningful to him. Picking up a floor lamp and walking it to my apartment was one thing. But stumbling into a dead man’s stash of porn crossed some kind of line.
“Poor Michael.”
I began to imagine his life. Buying a set of DVDs online at 2 am, drunk, swearing to himself that he would never suffer the same humiliation he did earlier that day when a co-worker had replied ‘I like you as a friend.’ The solitary solace of a porn DVD a few minutes later. Then silence.
A Zenith portable AM radio from the 60’s. Probably his father’s. Or his when he was a young man. At the beach tuning in a little music, his nose white with zinc, hoping to see a girl from his class walk by. Maybe she'd wave and smile at him. But no.
I take a paper bag off a storage container that I could use, and peek inside. Sex toys. Masturbation sleeves. I fold the bag over the boxes and put it on a high shelf.
His kids abandoned his belongings. The man left a prodigious number of sex-related things. Did they come across them and recoil in such horror they left the lot? If not, they must have known other people might pick through his things. Why couldn’t they have tossed it all in the trash?
Did it matter? There is no shame in death, no way to embarrassed. His family isn’t around to meet the eyes of his neighbors, picking through his things. My own shame to have seen these things would be greater to bump into his son or daughter while I’m lugging his file cabinet down the stairs. What would they think of me?
I find Frank, another building resident, in Michael’s office, sorting through his file cabinet.
“Hello Frank.” I begin taking items off a bookshelf that I want.
“Hello Strother,” Frank says. “I wonder what this is.” It is a box about the size of a loaf of bread, and on the cover is some kind of plugged in electronic plastic device, looking a bit like a lava lamp. The label reads “Master Turbo Stroker.” While I have no idea how this thing works, it’s obviously a sex toy.
“That’s a sex toy, Frank,” I say.
“What? Really?” Frank stares at it more intently. He does not open the box. After a few minutes he puts is back.
“There’s no more shame in death, Frank,” I note. Frank doesn’t reply. He leaves soon afterwards. I decide not to contemplate what thoughts, judgments or sympathies he may be feeling.
I keep opening boxes. I keep finding new stories. Michael had collected, and kept, more electronic gizmos and wires and chargers than a Best Buy. I find six pairs of virtual reality goggles, a TENS machine, a hand-held clothing steamer, so many internet routers it seems each stage in the evolution of the technology is represented, flip phones and Palm Pilots and dozens of unidentifiable chargers, power strips, hard drives and two, three, no five DVD players. I find a waterproof stainless steel metal suitcase with hundreds of DVDs in it, all hand labeled with names such as “The Night Before” and “The Pasture”. I figure these are movies, but I don’t know any of the names. The cases are nice so I take them. I also take the movies.
Moving pieces one by one to my apartment, a small mountain of Michael’s jumbled stuff grows in my apartment, waiting to be sorted and integrated into a new life. I leave it and return to Michael's. Just one more look, I keep saying.
Opening a box of Pendaflex hanging file folders for Michael's file cabinet, the first file cabinet I will have that isn't rusty, bent and difficult to open, I find a 1995 XXX DVD review magazine inside. Not a banner year, if you’re curious. How it ended there is hard to say. A knock came to his door, he quickly put it away, then forgot about it for 20 years?
All the table lamps, floor lamps and half the furniture are Ikea. The rest is Metro shelving. He obviously had a "style" --clean modern inexpensive lines. My neighborhood is not wealthy, so I figure he must not have thrived in his profession. A poor architect? a slumchitect? Maybe he was disabled and didn’t work much. He certainly put a lot of time and effort into his porn. I find two binders in his office titled “Double Your Dating,” complete with brochure inside and twenty DVDs with topics such as “Eye Contact” and “Dog Training.” I put them down and begin to really feel for the fellow. Unlucky in love, he tried the best he could to meet someone. Perhaps he did. Perhaps these jumbled folders and things had been ferreted away in the back of a closet, never used in an otherwise happy life, never thrown away because he doesn’t do that, only to surface now and be jumbled with all the active parts of his life. Or not.
I take his portable AC unit, as I really need one for Augusts in Chicago, and a few family portraits. I feel I owe it to the man to take and save something personal as well, in thanks—one bachelor passing along his stuff to another, I should at least know what he looks like.
A box from Amazon, unopened, rests on his giant TV, a time capsule from last desires clicked online. No one had bothered with it, not his kids, not anyone. I opened it. The date on the invoice was from late 2016, nearly three years previous. It’s a cookbook. Maybe he was thinking to impress a date with a home cooked meal. Another box next to it is unopened: an Ikea lamp. I take them. I tell myself enough.
Locking the door as I go, I wonder who will go through my things when I die, and what my things will say about me.
(names changed, except mine)
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