My favorite television show is Hoarders, probably because I’m one unsupervised weekend away from being the star.
Hoarders is all about people who acquire lots of things without getting rid of other things, which is sort of the way I do bulimia. Bingeing, I get. It’s the purge I can’t figure out.
As a result, their homes, yards, cars, and kids are stuffed to the gills with tons of paraphernalia none of us would think of keeping, at least not in bulk. I suppose that’s the point; it’s really a form of OCD, although I’m not sure how sensitive the producers or even the participants are to the mental illness’ side of the equation. The show is at home on the Traveling Circus Network, which has a broadcast schedule packed with homicidal chefs and mutant baby-makers whose piety doesn’t extend to making a few bucks off their thirty or forty kids.
Hoarders subjects live surrounded by vertical acres of clothing, trash, and Rubbermaid Salad Spinners, which they habitually gather, name, stack and store. The mess is often six or seven feet tall, and often there’s no discernible path through the forest of collectibles.
The most exciting part of every episode is when a relative, who hasn’t visited for a decade, grabs a whip and an Indiana Jones hat and drops in for tea. There are murmurings of “what the ?” and invocations of assorted deities as they machete their way through the living room.
“I had no idea it was this bad,” the relative invariably claims, like he hadn’t figured it out when his sister missed eight consecutive Thanksgivings because she got lost on her way to the garage.
I wish I could say I watch this show for the possibility of redemption that emerges around the 27 minute mark. The psychiatrist is called and they assess the situation, concluding that an insurance fire is out of the question now that the whole shebang is on television. Then they bring in a professional organizer who pulls a birthday candle from the rubble and says, “Let’s start with this. Do you think you could part with this?”
And then the client bursts into tears and puts her hands over the camera lens, wailing that it’s all too much, too soon.
But in the last ninety seconds, while the credits run, you see the client three months later, and behold! She doesin facthave a kitchen, complete with table and, in the fancier houses, a floor. So there’s usually a happy ending.
I confess I watch the show for the same reason I watch “The 900 Pound Tax Accountant” or “Birds Were Nesting in my Beard: The Menace of Menopause.” It makes me feel better about myself.
I’ve known for some time that I have an unhealthy tolerance for clutter. And I am notorious for acting on the thought, “I might need that someday.” Go through my drawers and you’ll find plastic straws intended to fit the lids of long deceased sports bottles; twenty-nine cent pumpkin carvers; chargers for cell phones that died tragically in the Great Tomato Soup Deluge of ’09; and the defunct cell phones themselves, fused and mummified in the starchy paste you get when the soup includes saltines.
Not a single useful item in the lot, but I know that as soon as I throw anything away, I’m going to need it. When a neighbor shows up at the door, wringing her hands and gasping that pirates are holding her grandmother, and that she’ll walk the plank if they don’t have an assortment of reindeer-shaped cookie cutters by sundown, I’ll have to tell her, “I’m so sorry. If only you’d come by yesterday…”In the distance I’ll hear a splash, and live out my tortured days knowing I might have prevented it all.
Boxed up in the basement are hundreds of photocopies of my old musical arrangements, anticipating the time when there is a sudden, desperate need for “Winter Wonderland” in four part harmony with optional kazoo chorus.
When the crisis comes, I’ll be ready. Elbowing my way through the frantic crowd, distributing stapled pages to the singers, I’ll finally be vindicated for stocking my 72-hour kit with 500 individually wrapped kazoos.
In that tiny, rarely-visited,sane corner of my psyche, however, I realize that the odds of that happening are, like, three-to-one. Maybe even five-to-one.
I know that I should toss out most of that music, that I could safely empty my cupboards of the mason jars and metal lids that speak to a domesticity that never was and never will be, that there would be no harm in shredding the 1984 edition of “Microcomputers and You,” which I kept because I believed my professor when he said thatprogrammers would be the only employable survivors in the new millennium.
And occasionally, I do it. Purge whole bookcases of paperbacks. Give away scores of videos and action figures. Offload entire wardrobes of skirts, jeans and holiday sweaters that were such an embarrassment when I bought them, I carried the sweaters in my hand and wore the bag out of the store.
I achieve ’empty,’ and it feels great, particularly since those shelves and counters are now prepped for the next round of acquisitionin this case, Christmas. The hoarder’s High Holy Day.
Not only that, I can honestly tell myself that no matter how cluttered things get, no matter how many of my rooms and closets devolve into small appliance graveyards and the places where everything else in my house goes for a little me’ time, I’ll never qualify for a reality show.
That is, until someone creates, “The Chair-Shaped Kiester: A Writer’s Life.”
Then turn on your cameras, Mr. DeMille. I’ll be ready for my close-up.
