{ tHE MESS HE MADE}


Timberland loafers. When I’m done with them, I never throw them away. I probably have six or seven pairs stashed in various places. Something about throwing away shoes makes me uncom- fortable — the same way I feel when looking at a three-year-old New Yorker magazine that I stuff under the bed or when I move a three-month-old Best Buy catalogue from the dining room to the basement. These behaviors typically emerge


in adolescence. My mom remembers that my years spent waiting tables were profitable for her because she could always count on finding dollar bills around my room. Lift up a stack of pa- pers, find five bucks. A lottery of sorts. She barred the cleaner who came to our house once a month from entering my room — not because she wanted to keep the money for herself, but for fear that if the woman started cleaning in there, she’d never come out. My room often provoked arguments between my par- ents. My dad would say, “How can you let him live like this?” My mom would say: “His room. His choice.” Frost’s research also showed that


many hoarders have close relatives who behaved similarly, suggesting a genetic component to the phenomenon. That would be my father’s father, Sam, after whom we named my son. Sam, a wid- ower, lived alone. He ate out for every meal. Nobody ever visited his apart- ment. When we picked him up, we drove up, honked, and, a few minutes later, he would slip out his front door. After my grandfather died, my fa-


ther entered his apartment and was astonished. It looked very much like my house does now. There were, for instance, hundreds of old Reader’s Di- gests scattered around. “They were everywhere,” Dad told me. I told Frost I was the same way: “I


know I’m never gonna use all this stuff I save, but I still keep it.” He leaned forward and said, “We


hear that over and over again.” I told Frost I could sense my wife be-


coming increasingly frustrated with my piles. He said marriages with hoarders often fracture because the collectors cannot tolerate the boundaries their spouses set. “It sounds like that’s the


16 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | June 13, 2010


Left: The author’s car. Right: The author’s rubbish piles decorate the bedroom and dining room table; the author cleans up in the den under his wife’s supervision.


most dangerous thing for you right now,” Frost said. “If you become more rigid about this or if it becomes too much for her, then it’s gonna be worse.” I told Frost about my son. He is


only 2, but this behavior pattern needs to stop — somehow, some way — so he doesn’t follow my path, and his namesake’s, too. I explained that I feel desperate to give my boy whatever nur- ture he needs to head off what nature might bring his way. Now that Sam is tall enough to see the top of the dining room table, I wonder: When he looks at it, what does he think?


Over the years, there have been interventions. Friends helped me gut my bachelor apartment, hauling out enough garbage bags to move the Hefty company’s stock higher on Wall Street. One set of friends chose to wear gloves. An old girlfriend once cleaned out my apartment while I was unconscious in bed after wisdom tooth surgery. This caused me more stress than the throb- bing in my mouth. God, via clergy, has also intervened.


Before Megan and I got married, our rabbi held three counseling sessions with us, two of which we spent talking about Megan’s contempt for my living


habits. Megan told the rabbi that my slobbiness made her worry about our fu- ture. I told him what I’d always told my parents and others who have confronted me: The stuff is mine; it doesn’t bother me; it’s on my side of the room; just ig- nore it. The rabbi didn’t so much try to offer solutions as to air out the issue. He asked Megan whom she blamed. I was surprised when she replied, “His mom.” She recently told my mother the same thing, and though laughter followed, it was of the nervous sort. I raised the issue separately with my


mom (initially via e-mail, because I lack guts), and her reply was: “That’s just great. Now I look like a bad mother.” I felt like a bad son. Seeking to defend her to herself, I pointed out in another e-mail that if she was responsible, then why wasn’t my sister, who is a total neat freak, just like me? We are 16 months apart and were raised in the same house, at the same time, under the same regime. But (and this is a big but) if my mom


is not to blame, that would implicate my genes in some way. And if my genes are responsible, again, why is my sister neat? The roots of my problem are more com- plicated than a simple designation of nature or nurture, something Frost and other researchers have yet to pin down.


least four years’ worth of newspapers in The author: “Without my wife,


PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL NORTHRUP


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