It wasn’t long before I got to know
the contents of his storage unit: six
or seven microwaves, as many upright
vacuums, washer and dryer and leather couch
evicted from home, five-gallon buckets
of copper wire, white and yellow brass
in smaller buckets, landline phones and bases,
monitors and motherboards, hundreds
of CDs, beer cans he collected for years,
a Bible, a Book of Mormon, two smart TVs
with 80-inch screens, a table his father made,
air compressor, bird feeder, boxes
of flannel shirts and jeans and dozens of fading
tees with rockers’ pictures and touring schedules.
He pointed out the mattresses he once
concealed behind a wall of scrap and slept on
till CCTV caught him leaving at dawn.
The managers took mercy, did not have him
booted or arrested. He did not lack
for helpers. The druggists put his many pills
in caddies they delivered monthly. (He took
some of them.) He borrowed eating money
from soft hearts and minds—good luck getting
it back!—and spent it on smokes. Friends washed
his clothes, let him shower and couch surf until
he outwore welcome: good at ma’am’s and sir’s
and thank-you’s; polite, but rarely keeping
promises; always needing one more favor.
Not long after we met, I said, Your junk
is an anchor tied to a noose around your neck.
It is dragging you down. He didn’t like it.
Twice I helped him clear space for sawing
and sorting scrap in bad weather. In weeks
he refilled it. He cataloged for me
what he’d added, the dumpsters and the roadsides
and the casual day jobs he’d gathered it from,
proud of fetching a pickup load for nothing,
though it took most of his disability
to pay the storage fees. You’d rather house
this stuff than find yourself a home, I said.
He didn’t like it. Perhaps it was wrong to speak.
Scrap was his lover, beer cans were his children.
Often, even when he had a place, he
slept in his car. When he was flush (he won
a small lawsuit) or a friend paid, he liked
to stay in hotels with free breakfast. He spent
his money, when he had some, on online
dating and cigarettes. Now and then
he worked hard taking things apart, sawing
and prying till their center could not hold.
He’d quit coke and booze cold turkey, he said,
now scrapping metal was his high. He stuck
with smoking even after he struck a match
while his O2 was on, and the fire flash
scorched lips and nose. Lucky to be alive,
said the nurse. Not so sure, he told me.
He lived the adventures of dying objects.
In his kingdom of things, he sat on a wobbling
swivel chair and dealt out judgment: this piece
I will cut down with my Sawzall and sell, that
piece I will save. To ask how he decided
their several fates was to ask God to explain
why one nation must perish and another
flourish. As necessary in his realm
as the turkey vulture in hers, and in his greasy
wifebeaters the subject of a similar
revulsion, he often invited me to share
the joy of returning made things to the matter
that elemented them. I’ll teach you if
you’ll let me, he said, but mostly I resisted.
The skin on his fingers was as thick as leather.
His blood sugar was wildly out of control.
I saw his being kind to the hapless,
heard his obsessive naming of old wrongs,
his costliest collection. Once, angered
by a talking to, he drove away shouting,
Good-bye from the bottom of my black heart.
Much later: I am DNR, do not
resuscitate, but he called 911
three days running. At the end he swore off
playing me and tried to keep his word.
I hope I sufficiently acknowledged it.
He said he loved me. In the house of an old friend
he died in his sleep. By his urn I lay this flower.
J. S. Absher is currently revising his 70,000-word memoir of his father.
