Tom McAllister

A couple years after my grandmother’s death, my Uncle Mike fell behind on tax payments and lost his house to the bank. I knew nothing about his life then. He smoked constantly and had speckled the couch with little burn holes by falling asleep with lit cigarettes in his mouth. He owned a signed Steve Jeltz home run ball and a fist-sized piece of the Berlin Wall, which sat side-by-side on top of a bookshelf. In old photo albums, there are pictures of him at one of my birthday parties with a black eye; I later learned that he’d been attacked outside a bar for being gay. I didn’t know until much later that he’d struggled with drugs and alcohol. He’s still alive and on Facebook–he’s been sober awhile and works for a church in North Philly–but we haven’t spoken since my dad’s funeral seventeen years ago. I never had a sense of how my dad felt about his brother, besides being frustrated with him. He’d waited too long to ask for help, and now we had one weekend to clear out a three-story home that had been overstuffed with five decades worth of clutter.

I have never worked harder in my life, nor for so little reward. We put in 14-hour days, hauling bag after bag after bag of trash to the local landfill. The dump was open to the public then. You could drive in and just drop your trash in the pile. There was a time when you could throw your garbage directly into the incinerator, until the city realized it might be hazardous to have thousands of pounds of toxic ash festering in the middle of our neighborhood. I learned more about the ash pile years later, when I was digging through Philadelphia Inquirer archives for an unrelated project. That ash spent more than a decade on a barge called The Khian Sea until finally it was illegally dumped in Haiti. Incinerated scraps of cloth, boxes of books, thousands of empty beer bottles, splintered drawers and end tables. Whatever it used to be, it was all just garbage. Still, nobody will take responsibility for it. Eventually, even our trash colonizes the developing world.

Between this grueling day and my wife’s own experiences sorting through the detritus of her deceased parents’ lives, we both have developed an intense aversion to surrounding ourselves with with clutter, leaving it for others to collect and categorize and throw into dumpsters. Once a year we work through our house and eliminate all the excess junk, and despite our vigilance, we still have ten bags of trash to haul to the curb and two carloads of odds and ends to deliver to Goodwill. I don’t know where it all comes from, the junk. It reproduces on its own and tries to fill every square foot of your home. We manage it with baskets and shelves and cabinets, and when they overflow, we go to The Container Store for things to hold our baskets. Half of what we donate ends up in a dumpster before anyone has a chance to buy it, and somehow it all ends up adhering to the garbage island in the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, your things find their way back to their own kind, clumping and floating like the eighth continent, this grim new ecosystem of plastic bottles and knickknacks and things that used to be treasured by people who were alive.

My dad showed me the room where his sister used to sleep. She’d had a seizure one night and died in her bed. I never met her, but I heard about her often enough to know her premature death had scarred everyone in that family in ways I will never fully fathom. She’d been dead for years but most of her stuff was still in the same place. We dumped the contents of her drawers into trash bags and then we dragged the furniture down a winding staircase and then dropped it on the curb for a junk man to find.

My uncle had two friends helping, younger black men I’d never met before. One wore a t-shirt stylized to look like a Wheaties box, except it said WEEDIES and had an image of a Rasta man smoking a joint on the front. The other owned a dog named Satan. Later, my uncle would have a falling out with Satan’s owner; without any evidence, I had always assumed it was somehow about gambling debts. Uncle Mike would describe this man and Satan as his enemies and tell me not to trust anything they said. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where we would run into Satan or his owner. None of this is symbolism. This isn’t a metaphor. It was just his dog’s name.

When I was older, my mom would strongly imply that the man in the WEEDIES shirt was my uncle’s boyfriend. Until the end of high school, I had never knowingly associated with a gay person, and I had no understanding then of the difficulty of growing up closeted in a devoutly Catholic household. On top of that, dating a black man in our racist little neighborhood–it was beyond my comprehension, beyond my effort.

By the end of the weekend, we had emptied the house, and only when we sat on the front stoop eating cheesesteaks–the most satisfying meal of my life, considering my exhaustion–did I realize how sad my dad was. The house he’d lived in was gone. His brother was never going to become the person my dad wished he could be. I was too wrapped up in myself to care about all that. I was 15 and convinced that I understood the world better than anyone. I’ve tried to bury that arrogant, narrowminded version of me, but some days I want to resurrect him. I want to cling to that defiance, that confidence. It never felt good, exactly, but it felt like a direction.