Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act

218 Pages·2015·1.74 MB·English

by  Barry Yourgrau

For Cosima,
in all her variations
Contents
Prologue with Grocery Bags
1. The Chinese Puzzle Box
2. What’s Wrong with Me?
3. Some Kind of Flâneur
4. Let the Right One In
5. Brothers Grim
6. The Cut-Glass Hand Bell
7. Mastering Disaster
8. Dodge Days, or Letting Go of L.A.
9. Home Comforting
10. The Real Stuff
11. The Notorious Bungalow
12. Freud’s “Dirty” Couch
13. The Red Fish
14. Gordon’s Knot
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Mess
Prologue with Grocery Bags
T
hat’s how it begins.
With grocery bags.
Grocery bags, and the unexpected buzz of the doorbell one afternoon, at my
apartment/“writing studio” here in Jackson Heights, Queens. At that rasping
blurt, my heart seizes in foreboding. It always does. Isn’t one of the features of
contemporary urban apartment life that the ringing of the doorbell without prior
warning is a sound ripe with menace?
“Who is it?” I cry, rising uncertainly from my desk chair. The reply makes
my heart dive through the floor.
“It’s me!” cries my girlfriend, Cosima. “Let me in!”
I have the shock of being caught.
“What’s up?” I ask, when I reach the door and open it a crack.
This is the first time in five years that Cosima has been at my threshold,
though her apartment is just around the block. Her brow and upper lip are
beaded with sweat. Laden grocery bags strain from both hands.
“I forgot my keys at home,” she pants, irritable and short-winded. “Let me in,
these bags are heavy.”
I struggle to keep a wild edge out of my voice. “I can’t,” I reply abruptly.
“Why don’t you go to your mother’s?” Her mother lives two flights down from
me.
“My mother isn’t at home,” Cosima snaps. “Why can’t I come in?” she cries,
her voice rising.
“Because I don’t want you to see what’s in here!” I tell her savagely, through
gritted teeth. “You know that—okay?”
I can see a look of horror flash in her eyes. She steps back. She’s had a
glimpse past me.
No, I don’t have a crack pipe or a chat-room dungeon habit or a dead body.
But my condition would provoke alarm, even disgust, in most people. Make that
the condition of my apartment. I’m a pack rat. A clutterbug. I have something of
a hoarding issue.
“Jesus Christ,” Cosima says. A stark pause. “Give me your keys,” she says
tightly.
I go and find them, my keys to her place, and bring them to the door. I offer
to help her carry her groceries downstairs. “That’s all right, don’t bother,” she
answers, laboring off toward the elevator. I watch her go.
“I’m sorry,” I call after her.
I shut the door, numb. I go back to my desk chair and sink down with my
heart still pounding. I feel shamed and exposed. Some line has been crossed, a
hidden life revealed. For a few minutes I get up again and go about lamely
gathering and throwing out some of the litter of newspapers, magazines, and
junk mail adrift on the floor by the entryway. But then I get overwhelmed and I
go back to my laptop, back to resume half-working and half-surfing—my
customary mode, the activity in which I’ve been interrupted. Except that a sick
worm is gnawing inside me. A definition of troubled or addictive behavior I
once read bubbles into my head, not for the first time, here behind my barred
door: It’s behavior that interferes with your intimate relationships and
obligations.
No, Cosima has not been across my threshold in five years, even though this
place was hers before she passed it on to me. Because I haven’t wanted anyone
in here. Not her. Not friends. Not the super, at first because of general concerns
about him sniffing around for the over-aggressive landlord; and then, despite the
place needing some usual repairs and attentions, out of paranoia that things had
oozed into such a state of neglect, the landlord would immediately seek
penalties. This hostility is typical for someone like me. It’s about shame, but also
about the hypersensitive intimacy of the things around me—however trivial and
derelict they seem.
I lie: the super did come several years ago to repair the grout around the
bathtub. It’s long since crumbled again. And the exterminator enters, once a
month: a person with a Dickensian grotty aura about him that feels oddly
comradely. And speaking of God enjoying a laugh, I actually had to let in a film