Cleaning Up
The death of a man’s dream has been quietly sitting in the back seat of my car for over a week now. It’s a power I didn’t ask for, and one I have no idea what to do with.
Said dream consists of a cardboard box holding over a hundred sealed CD copies of his former band’s singular album, with a release date of 2001. Their obscurity is rivaled only by their lack of desirability (according to Discogs, five people own it; zero want it).
For over twenty years the box had been sitting in his apartment, which sat below the Hollywood sign in a building that felt like the set of a Charlie Kaufman film. In order for me to get the box, I had to traverse a seemingly endless labyrinth of dismal, dimly lit hallways; the opening of each door only revealed another, far down an additional dismal, dimly lit hallway.
In all the time he had been living in that apartment, which he was in the process of vacating, he did not throw the box away. I must admit, I placed the box in my car fully intending to dispose of its contents, as I personally had no use for dozens of sealed CDs from a band I and the other eight billion people on Earth had never heard of. Yet there they sit, still. Will they remain in my car for another twenty years? They can’t; they take up a great deal of space, space I need to fill with other people’s unfulfilled dreams. Sometimes the dreams consist of a person’s art; sometimes the dreams consist of hundreds of dollars worth of high end beauty products that, suspend your disbelief, apparently did nothing to fill the void. I always feel a tinge of sadness when they embody the former, as they are the manifestation of another human being’s creativity — creativity they, for whatever reason, have decided is best to abandon than to keep carting from stuccoed apartment building to stuccoed apartment building. This feeling, however, doesn’t stop me from picking them up.
The photoless Craigslist ad the man had posted which led me to the box promised “no junk,” and, more or less, was true to its claim. Even the things that appeared, on first glance, to be worthless (a Deftones cassingle, a CD wallet filled with ‘00s-era pop and rap), had desirability elsewhere, were sellable online to people who willingly paid in the tens of dollars for such items.
But not the box of sealed CDs.
I constantly refresh the Craigslist Free Section as if it were my job, which I suppose, more or less, it has become. My favorite ads are the ones without photographs, just vague assurances that picking the items up will be worth your while. Time is always at a premium in these instances, the desperation of the author palpable:
“First come, first served”
“No picking! Must take all”
“Won’t be checking emails”
While most would balk at the idea of driving across town to collect things they have no knowledge of, I have procured dozens of gems in this manner, including a completely functional iPhone, a Nerds Rope suffused with 200 harrowing milligrams worth of THC, and an “Ali G for President” button. To people who don’t like surprises, I ask: what are you, allergic to possibility?
As is the case with all things, when desperation sets in, you can no longer cultivate the character you have spent your entire life working on; the minutiae of your life is on full display. There is no time for fear of judgment, as your apartment should have been cleaned out fucking yesterday.
Each pile is a short story, from which the digger gathers via context clues the kind of person who formerly owned the items, either through purchase or fabrication. On Friday I entered the apartment of someone who it appeared was vacating under less than pleasant circumstances — a sticker on the doorframe, the adhesion of such will require industrial strength Goo Gone to remove, indicated eviction proceedings had been put in place.
She was a photographer, with works properly matted but in dusty Aaron Brothers frames because she wasn’t, y’know, Annie Fucking Leibovitz (I mean in terms of wealth, not quality). Her partner wandered from room to room, sweeping enormous balls of lint into a dustpan, as the photographer talked about all the shit that had yet to be done.
I drowned it out the best I could, because I already felt the imposition of my presence, but still learned more about the photographer than I could ever gather from a conversation. There was the splint she wore when she hurt her wrist, the medicine bottles from Cedars, the program from when she ironically saw Siegfried and Roy, the Trader Joe’s focaccia mix she never got around to mixing. There was a reason behind each thing being brought into the apartment; now, it was all a liability, not an asset.
She had only allowed me to come over and go through her effects after speaking with me on the telephone, claiming she had to hear someone’s voice in order to gauge whether or not it was safe to reveal her address. Being cleared made me feel trusted; being trusted made me feel useful. Each thing I carted out of the apartment was one less thing that had to be disposed of, one less thing for her harried mind to have to worry about. I thanked her, walked to my car, and placed what I could use on top of the box of CDs.