Birth. Taxes. Death.
Then comes Rob Means, or somebody like him.
Means is a junkman, and that’s not a simple job. He’s a hauler of heavy things, a recycler. He’s also a psychiatrist for cluttered souls, a dispenser of order, a guy who listens to people tell happy stories about their stuff even as they’re sending that stuff to the great landfill abyss.
Junk is such a big deal that soon, junkmen might join taxes, death, etc. as the fourth unavoidable. Soon, the way things are headed, junkmen might rule the universe.
Junk — as a concept, as a business, as a hurdle in our lives — is a smoldering, sometimes smelly mountain of an issue.
“It’s unavoidable,” junkman Means says.
“Everybody I know, and everybody I don’t know, is a potential customer.”
“Some people are just keepers, I guess. Maybe that’s us. I don’t know.”
Pat Rogers says this as she leads Means and two employees into the garage of her Huntington Beach, Calif., house.
There is no car in her garage. There might not be a floor in her garage. There are walls, but they might have pictures of stark naked ladies from, say, two feet down. Who can say? They’re covered by junk.
Messy? Breathtakingly overstuffed? Emotionally draining? Rogers’ garage is all of that. But it’s also what you’d find in a lot of garages. Still, if Rogers’ garage is typical, it’s also painful. Most of the junk in here belonged to her husband, Greg Van Voorhis, who died exactly 30 days prior to Means’ arrival.
Still, even the fact that much of the junk in this garage was owned by a dead person is standard stuff.
“A lot of times we get called when people are in transition. Moving, cleaning, divorce,” Means says.
“Or, when somebody dies.”
Means is a new breed of junkman.
He’s 23, a square-jawed frat-boy lacrosse player, a guy with business smarts and a burning ambition to use them. He believes, passionately, that junk is a growth industry, and he’s getting in on the ground floor.
Just as the word “plastics” was whispered to Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate,” Means looked at his world a few months ago and, to himself, uttered one word — “junk.”
Last summer he used his savings, about $15,000, plus another $45,000 or so he borrowed from his father, to buy the Huntington Beach franchise of 1-800-Got-Junk? In return, he got a high-tech junk-hauling truck with huge blue signs, a lot of cool T-shirts, online scheduling, advertising, a business plan, name recognition and business support — and a “zone” of about 175,000 people.
The parent company, a Canadian outfit, hopes to do with junk what McDonald’s did with hamburger a half-century ago.
Means nods. Junk, Means says, could be the burger business of the 21st Century. “It’s just everywhere.”
People who study junk (and the topic gets a lot of academic attention these days) agree.
American culture, particularly the well-heeled, consumption-happy segment of American culture, churns out more junk than any culture in human history. Not just garbage; that’s another issue. But, rather, dead appliances, singing fish, Johnny Cash posters, car parts, half-finished models, computer printers, coffee-makers, gifts, re-gifts and busted (or, often, fully functioning) gizmos of every stripe.
Our houses are bigger than ever, filled with fewer people. But there’s still not enough space for our junk.
The self-storage industry, a cluster of big and small companies that rent expensive land and then use that land to re-rent even more expensive storage space to people who don’t have room in their expensive houses for their expensive stuff, is, in the current economy, a boom industry. The stock price for Shurgard, a publicly traded storage company (picked randomly for this example) has grown by about 40 percent in the last five years.
Other issues feed the storage trend. Landfills are filling up. Waste hauling is becoming more expensive. A remodeling boom has brought a deluge of junk to charity groups such as the Salvation Army, and those groups, in turn, are more finicky about what they will or won’t accept.
The reasons for junk seem common as raindrops. Shopping, for many, has become an act of self-expression. That leads to junk. Television and other mass media churn out a nonstop image loop of affluence. That leads to junk.
Some argue there’s an emotional force behind the junk boom. In a world where human connections seem weak, a lot of us invest huge emotional capital in possessions, forcing us to keep or store things until they become junk.
If true, that emotion might not be innately human.
“Before humans became sedentary, having possessions was a burden,” says Russell Belk, a marketing professor who teaches about acquisition and material goods at the University of Utah.
“Nomadic people developed systems of sharing when times were good and left behind all but irreplaceable essentials when the time came to move.”
Sometimes, of course, junk isn’t junk.
Van Voorhis was on an airplane, flying home from a business trip. He had a heart attack, leaned forward, and died. He was 38, funny and happy. It was a cruel loss.
Rogers explains all this without crying. She’s done a lot of that in the last month.
“It’s a really busy time, after somebody dies. Nobody explains that,” Rogers says of her mourning.
“I have good days and bad days.”
As Means and his workers clear out her garage, Rogers watches and sometimes steps in. There are photos she holds to her chest. Keepers. There’s a Star Trek book she holds then tosses into the to-toss pile. She finds an old Dale Earnhardt cap of Greg’s. She puts it on.
There are at least five boxes (coffee-maker, computer products, fishing gear, etc.) that were never opened. They’d been bought, given (or, at least, stored), and now they were being hauled away for a fee.
“I suppose everybody has something like this. I don’t know.”
Also watching, and helping, is Greg’s father, Ted Van Voorhis. He’s subdued, alternately too sad for words and willing to laugh. He shakes his head in frustration when talking about his son’s heart attack, pulling open his own shirt to show a scar from his own recent heart surgery. He can’t bring himself to look at the empty cigarette cartons in his son’s garage.
“His mother is taking it real hard,” Ted says. “She can’t talk about it now.”
As the junk goes into the back of Means’ junk truck, a garage emerges. The plan, always, was to make this garage a play room, a place where Greg and Pat could drink a beer or play pinball.
When it’s relatively clean, when Pat says, “I can breathe. God, that’s great,” she tosses plastic darts at an electric dart board.
“This was Greg’s thing. I don’t really know how to use it,” she says, as one of her darts hits the wall.
Will she keep it?
“Definitely.”
