The Hoarders

The Hoarders THE HOARDERS university of chicago press Chicago and London scott herring is associate professor in the Department of English at Indiana University. He is the author of Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism and Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-17168-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-17171-5 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-17185-2 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226171852.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herring, Scott, 1976– author. The hoarders : material deviance in modern American culture / Scott Herring. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-17168-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-17171-5 (paperback : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-17185-2 (e-book) 1. Compulsive hoarding—Popular works. 2. Compulsive hoarding—Patients—Public opinion. I. Title. rc569.5.h63h47 2014 616.85′84—dc23 2014013969 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48 –1992 (Permanence of Paper). For Marty Dowling CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 19 2 51 3 85 4 112 Note on Method 143 Notes 147 Index 177 hen I was a child, some afternoons my mother would drive us out to a small neighborhood community—nothing more than a street of compact houses—called Wilkes Circle. Here she grew up on the edge Wof poverty, her bricklayer father dead before her thirteenth birthday, her unemployed mother killed by cancer four months after her marriage to my father at the age of twenty. She sorely missed this childhood home, a site of pleasure as much as trauma. She would park the car in front of her old address. She would reminisce. We would slowly pull away. Though it felt like visiting a personal shrine, I had dim awareness of her incalculable losses. On our way to Wilkes Circle we would often pass a house unlike others from my mother’s formative years. Google Maps tells me it was 1027 Woodward Road in the town of Midfi eld, Alabama. This residence was large—a “mansion,” my mother recalls—but far from impressive. A tiny yet dense forest of magno- lias and pines shielded most of the house from public viewing. A chain-link fence laced with weeds surrounded the property. Litter covered its grounds. The neighborhood children, my mother remembers when I ask years later for de- tails, spun wild tales of the home’s owner as they marveled at the things strewn about his lawn. They fantasized about his riches, his solitude, his craziness, his squalor on the inside. Kids being kids, they would sometimes toss a rock at the house hoping that someone would rush out the front door and yell them off. They named this unseen spectacle the Rat Man. Over repeated trips back to Wilkes Circle, my mother’s Rat Man became my own. I too grew enthralled by this person. He inspired fascination, dread, and no small amount of revulsion. His house was far different from my suburban home, which was vacuumed regularly and dusted weekly. A photograph of our smiling family hung in the hallway. The living room harbored an antique cu- rio cabinet fi lled with keepsakes: framed wedding photos, bronze-dipped baby shoes, a Hallmark holiday ornament. The only clutter in sight was a pile of magazines or some overdue self-help books checked out from the downtown library. My house read normal; the Rat Man’s cracked. I never once saw anyone enter or exit the Rat Man’s home, even though I spied intently from our moving car. When I imagined the owner, I thought only of a lonely male draped in black with a white bandage wrapped around his head. | ix Thinking back, I see now that my six-year-old self had confused the Rat Man with the lead actor in The Elephant Man, David Lynch’s 1980 cinematic render- ing of John (Joseph Carey) Merrick, a disabled Victorian male known largely for his cranial irregularities. This makes historical sense. If they are to be trusted, YouTube posts of promotional advertisements show that the cable television channel Home Box Offi ce (HBO) broadcast the fi lm in January 1982. The pro- motion voice-over describes Merrick as a “hooded, shambling curiosity in a Victorian freak show.” I vaguely remember watching clips of this fi lm during one of the channel’s occasional free trials. The trepidation that the “Elephant Man” inspired easily transferred onto the material and human contents of 1027 Woodward Road. I open with this vignette for a good reason: in the midst of my research I real- ized that my mother’s childhood name for this local curiosity was an abbrevia- tion for Pack Rat Man. In her recollection she had dropped half of the popular term for those who collect many things. When she described the house, she was not quoting Sigmund Freud’s classic 1909 essay on obsessional neurosis, a mental illness whose parameters the Austrian psychoanalyst refi ned through a case history he referred to as the “Rat Man.” My mother was simply repeat- ing neighborhood lore of the American South’s working poor. It is nevertheless clear to me that I aimed my childhood terror at someone that many today would consider a compulsive hoarder. I had turned this pack rat into a one-man freak show, but I was not the only one then, nor am I the only one now. While it can be an unreliable resource, Wikipedia fi ttingly lists Merrick’s occupations before his untimely death as “sideshow performer” and “Medical Research Subject.” How did I come at such a young age to think of the Pack Rat Man and his residence as a wrongful aberration and my domestic life as an ordinary ideal? Who put this idea into my head? If I learned from my parents, then who taught them? Why were fear and disgust my default emotional responses to someone I had never met, let alone sighted? It is not inconceivable that this man lived a wonderful life with a wonderful family, each content on their lot and happy amidst their things. Or that a solitary woman lived there in lieu of a solitary male. It is feasible that I could have been inspired by the example of this house rather than repelled by it. One initial answer to these questions is that I made sense of the Pack Rat Man thanks to a fi ctive version of a sideshow performer on cable TV, one that antici- pated a later rash of shows medicalizing real-life hoarders as walking patholo- gies. Even at my early age, I was learning that it is diffi cult to fathom hoarders without appreciating the extensive cultural systems that aid their identifi cation: this is the main argument of my book. Many of us are aware that hoarding can cause pain. We know that hoarding can hurt. We know fi rsthand, by word of x | preface and acknowledgments mouth, or by fl ipping on the television that pack rats, like everyone else, can be depressed, anxious, traumatized, and grief-stricken. During and after their lives, their emotional diffi culties and their piles of stuff can lead to unjustifi - able stress on loved ones and neighbors. These are unremarkable, irrefutable claims, and my comments to come refl ect no desire to discount anyone’s lived reality. But what else might there be for us to know? How did common sense about hoarders and their hardships—my knowledge about them as a child, for instance, or my perception of them as an adult—come to be? These are delicate questions to mull over, especially if we want to avoid sen- sationalizing this topic. Patience is not always my strongest suit, but I remain someone trained to take a topic and worry it for years at a time. Luckily, I am employed by a public research university to wonder about things, where they come from, how they make sense of our worlds. This book tries hard to think about what my six-year-old self did not already know about hoarders. Given that a certain line of thinking about such persons has hardened in conversations inside and outside psycho-medical institutions, the time feels ripe to reassess our knowledge of pack rats, extreme accumulators, and clutter addicts. The Hoarders thus offers my petrifi ed childhood a different way of grasping its heightened response to the Pack Rat Man. I haven’t made it back to Wilkes Circle in some time. When I visited it last, I was not surprised to see the Rat Man’s house demolished. In one of many iro- nies that often circulate around these individuals, row after row of storage units called Fairfi eld Discount Self Storage replaced the dwelling. Little trace remains of this individual save for memories that my mother and I now share when we muse over my youth spent watching her mourn her own. Given a few of the sto- ries I am about to tell you, this vanishing is terribly fi tting. I offer my appreciation to the many librarians, curators, and archivists who as- sisted this book. The New York Public Library held the core of chapter 1.

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