Stuff

(page 5 of 5)

It is a sickness, a disease of the soul, we need a Freud, or better yet, a Dante to describe its twisted permutations. Yes, and if there were a circle in Hell waiting for all of us, my father would surely occupy its center. The Archdaemon of Stuff.

He lived in a house not far from my mother's house—in fact, the house I had lived in as a child. For years, he wouldn't even let us in the house. On my rare visits, he'd open the door just a crack—just enough to let a unidentifiable yet unpleasant smell waft out—then he'd squeeze out with his jacket and coat and take me to a diner. But then two years ago he became sick with a slow and fatal disease none of us had ever heard of, and we began spending many, many awful hours on the other side of that door.

Words fail me here. Pictures failed us too, when out of some carnivalesque need to document this perversion of human behavior, we brought a camera into the house while he was in the hospital for a few weeks. 4 x 6 color shots could not capture the awful splendor of it, we needed SurroundVision. We needed Smell-O-Rama, to capture that thick odor which still cannot be identified, nor purged.

You will not believe me — it cannot be believed — but you can only gain an understanding of my father's house if you visualize the entire town dump of a medium-sized suburb crammed into a three-bedroom house. Somewhere underneath was the dilapidated furniture, collapsing from the weight of it all. A small path had been cleared in order to get from one room to the next, but it was too small for us, and my father was a large man. To get from one room to another, he must have climbed over his stuff.

While my dad was in the hospital having his ravaged body explored for disease, we decided to undertake an excavation of the house. There were several layers of stuff, and like archaeologists at a dig, we had to clear away the top layers of garbage before getting to the actual things embedded near the floor. We wore masks and rubber gloves to scoop up the cardboard boxes, food scraps, dirty dishes, rumpled magazines, used tissues and paper towels, destroyed clothing and fast-food packaging, and crammed it all into Hefty bag upon Hefty bag. The process took days, and squat, green, overstuffed plastic bags gathered on the front lawn like a surreal army of malignant dwarves.

Discouragingly, under the wreckage, we found a desperate abundance of cleaning supplies, enough to stock the shelves of a grocery store aisle, bespeaking of resolutions made and forgotten.

And then, underneath it all, we got to the real stuff.

My dad had at least one of everything that has ever been manufactured by the human race, and usually four or five spares. Tools, stationery, compact discs, bottle openers, windchimes, board games, video tapes, office supplies, antiques, books, gadgets, doohickeys, thingamagigs. Widgets. I think he lost things among the chaos and bought more to replace them. We found the guts of a Wurlitzer jukebox. An original Edison phonograph with wax spools. A three-foot tall robot from Radio Shack, its function obscure. 10,000 plastic parts of a deluxe model Mercedes Benz scattered throughout the house, each waiting to be found in its own quirky little hiding place.

And all manner of things electronic: VCRs, monitors, computers, cables, soldering irons, integrated circuits, professional sound editors, manuals, mice, software, disk drives, ham radios, oscilloscopes, capacitors, resistors, transmitters, transformers, transmogrifiers.

For electronics were my father's life-long passion, the soul not only of his business, but of himself, his digital soul. My father had always collected machines, had always repaired and built and puttered around with them, but the advent of the personal computer cranked up his voltage considerably. All in all we found about eleven computers and enough parts to make many more. A computer is not one machine but an infinite number of them. What the Philosopher's Stone was to alchemists the computer is to technophiles. There are a million and one stupid things you can do with a computer and my father had to do them all. His consumption of software was frightening, and apparently continued up to the week of his death; we later found, stuffed into his armchair, recently dated mail order receipts from Egghead for such arcane items as Street Atlas USA v. 3.0, Visual FoxPro 2.6 and The Better Homes & Gardens CD-ROM Complete Guide to Gardening.

It has been a year since my father died, and we are still clearing out his house. I think my father's maniacal appetite for stuff has shaken us all up a bit, has pointed to unpleasant future possibilities for all of us. My mother has begun to toss out the old magazines, the childhood clothing. I can tell it pains her, but I admire her resolve. My brother recently presented me with a box of junk culled from his room, containing, among other things, a chain made of beer pull-tabs, a plastic chicken and a genuine Brunswick bowling pin. (Shamefully, instead of hurling these things out the window, I stashed them in my closet.) I recently disposed of a store dummy—a prized possession for ten years—by leaving it standing at a bus stop in Fort Lee, one arm posed in the air, waiting to flag the next ride anywhere, straight the hell out of my life.

My father died of a degenerative illness called interstitial pulmonary disease, in which the lungs progressively scar until they can no longer absorb oxygen. It is a rare disease, but not unheard of. Its exact cause is still undetermined, but the accumulation of foreign particles in the lungs is suspected. My father had smoked for much of his life—although he had quit ten years before he died — and undoubtedly this habit played a major role in the contraction of his illness. But while cleaning out my dad's house, we all developed hacking coughs, and our noses became clogged with dust. The sheer mass of objects in his home offered an enormous surface area for dust to gather upon. It is just possible that my father was killed by his own stuff.