TLDP*
I think it’s possible I may be in the middle of the actual, rockbottomest, worst week of my life. On the one hand, WTF? On the other hand: god I HOPE it’s the worst ever; it’s barely survivable as it is–if it got any worse, well dang I don’t know.
So here’s the backstory. As I’ve mentioned over the years here, and as has been evidenced by the fluctuating negativity of my expression here, I suffer from serious depression issues. When I’m good, I’m very very good, but when it’s bad, man, it’s horrid. My memory of the three years I lived with my dad after highschool–my physically abusive alcoholic dad–is literally nothing more than an image of myself curled up in a fetal position behind my bed. I do occasionally come across something–usually a song from that era–that triggers a different memory of that time, but if I think back just to remember, that’s the, uh, thumbnail image that period is filed under.
Every few years I have another period of unbroken depression like that, where my life is reduced to the absolute minimum actions of survival. During times of deepest depression like this my life has only one guiding impulse: inertia. Gravity and time are the only things that affect me, because to avoid their effect would require effort. If I’m working in a complicated job, I lose the job, usually to fear- and stress-induced selfdestruction. I don’t show up for work, I leave important things undone, etc. I’ve self-sabotaged myself out of all the really great, career-type jobs I’ve had. If I’m working in a low-stress job, like oh say a video store, I show up I do the reqwyrt I go home I go to sleep. On my days off I watch movies and sleep.
Besides basic biological functions, if I haven’t listed it above I don’t do it during these periods of deepest depression. Sending birthday cards to nieces; renewing my drivers license; taking out the garbage; nothing that’s not required for A) immediate survival or B) hiding my state from the rest of the world (i.e., I do just enough laundry to get by on; I wash it as I need it, it stays dirty otherwise) gets done.
So apparently that makes me a hoarder. Although I don’t think that term is right: I have three years worth of garbage in my apartment not because I want to “hoard” it, but because the effort required to take it out overwhelms and defeats me, and so I go to bed. If I can’t summon the effort today, maybe I will tomorrow. I mean, if I take THIS pizza box out, then I’ll have to take THAT one out. And the one beneath it. And where will it end? When I’m in this state, the simple contemplation of a pizza box induces–and I describe this in the most literal, unexaggerated possible manner–cold sweat, churning stomach, and occasional headaches. So I’ve “hoarded” three years worth of garbage.
Cut to a month or so ago, when I get laid off from the video store. Now I’m at home, Jabba the Hoarder, buried up to the neck in pizza boxes and dirty laundry. I’m already a month behind on rent, and suddenly my only source of regular income has stopped cold, with literally zero notice–my boss informed me that I was going to be laid off by asking me for my key.
Coincidentally, at about this time, the on-again/off-again model recruiting I’ve done on the internet for a couple of gay porn sites toggles to on-again. And I’m struck as if from above by a bolt of inspiration: instead of recruiting models and sending them to other sites for a small fee, I’ll recruit them for myself: I’ll start my own gay porn site. It’s the only thing I can think of as a relatively steady source of income that I can’t get fired from. (If it works, of course; that’s a given.) So I talk to the most recent recruit, he likes the idea of working locally, making a site that will become a steady source of income. He helps me recruit a few more guys. We find a novice webdesigner who’ll work for way less than he deserves, we find a strategy to get the site launched with minimal dollar input, though of course maximal effort input. We get the guys shot, the site building–
–and of course I’m going home every night to this nightmare of nightmarishness, that just gets nightmarier and nightmarier as I spend more time away from it working on this web project. And of course at the same time, still out of work, I fall a second month behind in my rent. Everything–and I mean everything–is coming to a head at the same time.
And then I get offered my old job back at the video store; the woman who’d been passed over for layoffs due to seniority, turns out, was looking for another job anyway. My boss had backed the wrong horse. So cool: my first paycheck will go to pay one of those heavy duty cleaning outfits to come in and un-hoard my apartment, just in time for me to be evicted. Which, fine, whatever, I understand; two months of back rent is too much to ask any landlord to float. But I’m certainly not going to leave them my nightmare to clean up on top of that. Besides, there are things at the bottom of the pizza box ocean that I’ll want to take with me when I go: over the last couple years I’ve misplaced, within my own little landfill, a cell phone, an Hermes scarf, a bag or two of yarn, several important books, etc.: you get the idea.
So I call around: do you do “hoarder” cleanup? If so, do you sort? Garbage from non-garbage? After several replies of “No, we don’t sort, we just dump,” I found a mom-and-pop outfit that says “Oh sure, we’ve done lots of hoarder jobs, we know just what to do. We sort everything, no problem.” I arrange for them to come by on Saturday morning, they look everything over–“Oh yeah, we’ve seen this kind of thing before. No problem,” etc. They estimate it’ll take a couple days and cost a thousand bucks. Fine. Whatever. I’m ready to start over and move on.
Monday morning, not knowing exactly what to expect, I grab my toothbrush just in case, and I take a couple days worth of clothes and put them aside in one of those Ikea things of stacked wire-mesh drawers. Just in case the sorting takes the form of putting everything I need in big garbage bags or something. And come 10 o’clock, I hand them the key and $1,000, and I go to work.
I come home that night to a new apartment–that is, to my old place, before I buried it in the sheddings of depression. I don’t see most of my possessions, but the bedroom is full of black garbage bags, so those must be the sorted out stuff, the non garbage. I check in with the cleaners on the phone; they have a few more hours of stuff to do tomorrow. Including the bathroom which, I’m inured enough to the mortification of this whole situation by now to admit to you, dear reader, that a normal person wouldn’t even want to pee on it. The bathroom alone is worth $1,000 to me. I sleep on the floor, covered by a couple yards of fake fur that I discover folded up in a laundry basket. I’d bought it a couple years ago for an unfinished project and they’ve unearthed it out of the closet where it had been waiting for fruition. I wake up, refold the fur, and I’m out of there before they return.
I get home the second night, Tuesday, and the bedroom lamp is nowhere to be found, so I can’t really go through stuff. “Wow,” I think. “Your possessions look a lot smaller when they’re all stacked up against the wall.” Thinking at the same time that this is not true; every time I’ve moved, I’m always astonished at how much stuff I own: it seems to multiply as you box it. In the morning light, I discover that all my clothes are gone. With the exception of a few dress shirts and a couple coats that had been hanging in the closet, everything else is gone. “Wow,” I think again, “they include laundry service in the thousand bucks? Impressive.”
Then I see that there are no shoes in the closet. 8 pairs of Birkenstocks and a pair of Timbalands were back in the back corner of my bedroom closet; my summer birks are on my feet. I look up, top closet shelf: my hatbox is gone. The leopard-spotted Stetson I paid $135 for seven years ago, which lives in its Stetson box all summer, not there. My Manhattan Toys Plush Monster, bought several years ago and never gifted because it was so cool, and now discontinued and triple digits on eBay, also missing from the top shelf of my closet. I turn and look at the stack of wire mesh drawers: empty. I notice my hanging files, the paperwork I manage to keep track of no matter how nonfunctional I become: the milk crate that houses hanging files of birth certificate, insurance stuff, tax stuff, letters I want to keep, etc. That milk crate is now contains the bricks that until yesterday propped up my broken down bed.
I move out into the living room. In the light of day I see that the wacky ceramics I’ve collected over the years are all cluttered on the bar. Or are they? Among my antique aquarium ornament collection, my favorite piece was the hand-sized piece of porcelain coral. Not there. Among my mid-century vases, my favorite–and the most likely to go three digits at ebay, the black one that looks like the Jetsons borrowed it from the Flintstones–not there.
As I reach for my phone to call them to see fut the whuck, it buzzes. I answer. My landlady. Now, I’m not a racist, but–oh hell, she’s German. Add a German accent to your worst nightmare of “you MUST pay ze rent!” and seriously, is it racist to agree with me that the German accent ups the nightmare quotient just a little bit? Come on.
Seems she stopped by yesterday, while they were still cleaning. Seems she took pictures of the bathroom before they’d gotten to it. Seems with such a picture she can get a court order to change the locks with 24 hours’ notice. Seems I no longer have the 30 day cushion between me and the park bench that I’d been counting on. Even though at the time I was speaking to her on the phone, the situation had been remedied. Still, putting myself in her place, I can hardly blame her. If this has been a nightmare for me, it’s certainly been one for my landlady as well; for the last couple years I’ve been the kind of tenant that landlord suicides are made of.
So I hang up, having talked her into another 24 hours–I now have 48 hours to find a place and move my junk. My remaining junk, that is: I continue the inventory.
You know how you kind of keep in your head a list of the first say five things you’d grab if your house catches on fire? Here’s mine: my Hermes scarf, titled Grands Fonds (Ebay: $500-$600). My leopard-spotted homburg. My binder containing ~300 movies DVDRed off of TCM over the last several years. My two hand-knitted sweaters, one of which took me over six months to make, and has been greeted, when I’ve worn it into a yarn store I’ve never visited before, by cries of, “Oh I’ve heard about this sweater!” My paisley Birkenstocks. My Jeston-Flintstone vase. My porcelain coral. Let’s see: gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, and gone.
I call the pop of the mom-and-pop team, inquire about what’s missing. He says I prolly wanna talk to his wife about that, and gives me her number. This strikes me as odd, his hanging her out to dry like that; it means either she’s done it before and he’s gonna let her lie in her own bed, or that he thinks she’s the scarier partner to sic on dissatisfied customers. Well, I don’t know about the former, but I can certainly attest to the latter. I really don’t want to relive the conversation with her, but suffice to say that this broad has a helluva set of pipes on her, and that I’m not getting any of my stuff back. It’s at the dump; I should’ve been more specific. “But you said you sorted–” “WE DID SORT!” “But you emptied the drawers–” “THEY MUSTA BEEN DIRTY!” “But the silver Buddha head that was on top of the TV–” “IT’S STILL THERE!” (It’s not.) “All my knives in the kitchen–” "MUSTA BEEN DIRTY!’ “But the hanging folders full of files–” “THEY DIDN’T LOOK IMPORTANT! I’M NOT GONNA SIT THERE FOR TWO HOURS AND GO OVER EVERY PIECE OF PAPER! YOU SHOULDA TAKEN IT WITH YOU IF IT WAS IMPORTANT!” “But you said you sorted, that’s why I hired you, you said you sorted–” “WE DID SORT!”
Sickened, now, reliving even that much of the exchange. Stomach tight, palms clammy, mouth dry, you get the picture. I’m left with the clothes on my back–one black Tshirt, one pair of underwear, one pair of shorts–and a few books and pieces of furniture.
So. Just as my website is up and earning–first paying customer within an hour of launch!–I’m one day past losing all my most precious possessions, and one day from not having a place to live until I get another paycheck and a check from the credit card company from my website’s earnings to get a new place, realistically the first of September.
Yes, I know that I’m the one who didn’t clean my apartment for three years. But there’s no point at which that was a choice I made; some of you perhaps have experienced the kind of depression that leads to that kind of inertia. The very last thing you feel is any kind of control, or choice, in the matter. I suppose if I lived closer to “home,” my sister might’ve checked in on me and helped me stop digging that hole. Although again, there was no digging involved; no action taken. The hole sunk itself around me, until my eyeline fell below ground level, and I was in darkness. A therapist friend of a friend, who gave me a free phone conversation the night I called my friend with, it says here, “suicidal ideation,” is convinced that the childhood trauma I experienced has left me with PTSD. This strikes me as too facile; certainly as suspiciously trendy. But I can see where he’s going with that. In any case, I certainly do feel, at the worst of such times, as if I have absolutely no choice in the matter, absolutely no control over my own life, at other times I find I cannot believe that. But there it is.
Too* Long D**idn’t Proofread
