Of Human Storage

by Jim Washburn

Got a storage unit. Didn’t want to.

There. That’s my first novel. How do you like it? It tells the whole story, doesn’t it?

Storage units are for losers. They’re a largely American phenomenon, like obesity. Getting a storage unit is the externalized version of admitting you’re too fat and so damned untogether that the only way you’re going to lose weight is to have liposuction, except in the storage unit model, you’ve got to pay to store your old fat somewhere.

How did I get into this predicament? I blame a mix of rock and roll and poverty. I was eight and living in La Puente when the Beatles hit our shores in early 1964. La Puente was about as spiritually removed from swinging London as it gets. We couldn’t pop on down to the Crawdaddy to see the Yardbirds; we’d pop on over to the Gemco or the Kreske five and dime and hope to find a 45 record that didn’t suck. Our next-door neighbors were horses, mean ones. If my sister tossed my favorite and only toy rocket to the other side of the chain link fence, it was a goner, because those horses would take a piece out of you if you got near them.

All the horses I’d known til then were on TV—kind, sensible horses who would give Sergeant Preston or Roy Rogers a hand, or Mister Ed, who’d talk to you about your problems. If these neighbor horses could talk it would just be to say, “Im’a fuck you up, lil’ human.”

We were drinking powdered milk, eating whatever was cheap. I wanted an electric guitar like crazy. When my Cub Scout pack had to enter a scout talent contest, we decided to lip sync to a Beatles record. I made our guitars out of cardboard: a Rickenbacker, a Gretsch, a Hofner violin bass, all with aluminum foil pickups. Hours of work, and they made me be Ringo.

Four years later, our lot had improved. We were living in a condo off Beach Boulevard in Buena Park. I had recognized scouting for the malicious, childhood-sucking racket that it is, and spent more time watching Gigantor on my little black and white TV. My parents got me a $25 Victoria classical guitar at the Lucky Supermarket, not my first choice of instrument. It took a couple of years of saved shoeshine and paper route money to get my first electric, a used Rickenbacker for $125. I can still remember the lies the salesman at Kay Kalie Music told me about it. It was a dreadful instrument that brought me only amplified tears of regret.

Two weeks after buying it, a friend’s dad took us to my first swap meet, where there was a blue metalflake early ’60s Strat for $90, which I didn’t have thanks to the Rickenbacker. My friend came up with $25 for me to buy the Danelectro next to the Strat, and I found another Danelectro (they made cheap, wonderful guitars for Sears, out of Masonite) on the way out for $1.

I was off and running. At my peak, I was hitting six swap meets a weekend, making up for all the great records I’d heard and didn’t have, the books I couldn’t afford, and hundreds of guitars to fill the gap left in my psyche by that blue metalflake Strat. I’ve bought stuffed alligators, huge sombreros, a 5' German hi-fi console, and such a lot of other stuff that the 5' German hi-fi console is still in the garage, but I haven’t seen it in years.

Pardon me, but I have to pop out to the Long Beach Antique Swap Meet for a bit. Third Sunday of every month, you know.

I’m back, nearly empty-handed, which is good, since if I’d bought much, it would probably go right into storage. There’s a whole cycle of filth: Many of the piles I’ve sifted through, and partaken of, at swap meets were lots the vendors had bought at unclaimed storage auctions. If you don’t pay your bill, out goes your stuff.

It’s always a sad swap meet moment, when you’re looking through a pile and realize this is some family’s unfiltered stuff: their photo albums, vacation mementos, letters, diaries, homemade cassettes, class-kilned pottery, now strewn on the asphalt for strangers to pick through. Where are the luckless owners: Dead? In Iraq? In Corcoran? Homeless?

I wish our stuff weren’t in a storage unit, but we’re out of room. Along with my lifetime of junk, when my wife moved in, she had the temerity to bring some stuff with her. Then she needed to move out of her barbershop/office a few years ago, and more stuff flowed homeward. Then my dad died last year, so there was a big influx of stuff from his apartment, some of which we stowed in a friend’s garage, which he just moved out of, so hello storage unit.

I checked out several places, none of them festive, unless the detention center at Bagram Air Base is your idea of décor. I mean really, every one of these places looks like some degree of creepy “black site” secret prison. One had outdoor containers, chucked haphazardly amid the weeds and broken trucks. Most were inside, rows of padlocked featureless doors down a long ill-lit corridor.

“What’s the weirdest unclaimed storage you’ve come across here?” I asked one of the lives-on-site employees where I finally rented my unit. “Well, a transvestite left his gear behind. That was some interesting stuff.” A co-worker told me, “It was probably the dog poop. I’d kept telling people I thought I’d heard puppies up there, but no one else did. Then a tenant moved out and the poop was what was left. He evidently had nowhere for his puppies and that was his solution: a hot room with no light or windows.”

The bare bulb in the unit is on a short timer at the end of the hall, so there’s no way those little puppies weren’t living in total darkness most of the time. That’s the saddest storage unit tale I’ve heard so far, but there are probably worse.

To end on an up-note, let me tell you about a credo I just came across. I’m curating an exhibit of the worst album covers of all time at the Fullerton Museum Center (from August 1 til October someteenth), and most come from my garage, a repository of the worst of everything. One of the champion albums in the horde is titled Black Dick for President. It’s a three record set, of course, by an otherwise unknown guy from Watts named Thaddaeus Martin, who evidently had a lot to say about sexual and political liberation.

The front cover features a photo of an African sculpture of a male figure, cropped to show just enough of the body to put the dick in proportion. It is the sort of dick you’d expect to come packaged with an anvil. Along with setting you free and shortening the work week, the cover promises that BLACK DICK IS FASTER THAN ALL DICKS, MOVES COOL AND SINKS DEEP, DEEP INTO YOUR MOST PLEASING MUSIC BOX.

Nestled amidst similar testicular testimonials is what I consider a true nugget of wisdom:

BLACK DICK KNOWS THAT THE ONLY CRIME ONE CAN COMMIT IS THAT OF NOT BECOMING WHAT ONE SHOULD BE.

That too is a whole novel.

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