Hoarders

My favorite show is Hoarders. Like porn, I find it comforting. And like porn, I know what I like.

“Please God,” I say, as the episode starts, “let there be no running water.”

Because really, if you can only watch three or four hours of Hoarders a sitting, you want to pick an episode without running water. No running water means no cooking, no dishwashing, no bathing, and (fingers crossed) no working toilet.

“Oh no, no, turlet works just fine,” the hoarders still clinging to the barest illusion of normalcy will explain, “See, I just do this,” and demonstrate flushing the toilet with a bucket filled from the neighbor’s yard. But when you pour a bucket into a dead toilet, the turds don’t spiral magically out of sight but circle the bowl lazily, hypnotically, like Japanese carp.

Sometimes the camera will gaze stoically, dutifully over the rim and into the brim of hell: fuzzy turds floating in oily gray film, unknown clumps and smears, violent splatters (and the bowls are always splattered, given the poor diet of extreme hoarders), sometimes foam.

It’s what a pot of chili looks like if one forgets it on the stove. All you can do, really, is put some water in to soak the chili overnight and dread what’s coming. That is, reach in with your hands to scoop out the soggy masses and ruin your fingers scouring the hardened mess. Why bother? Just close the lid and go on with your life, as hoarders often do with their dead toilets.

Anyway, I thought I’d seen it all. Then–gasp!–two drowned rats. In a toilet! They look at first like two long turds–fuzzier than the other turds, it’s true–but a push-in from the camera reveals curled limbs and tails. They seem to have been reaching for each other at the moment of death in this woman’s toilet. What’s the story here? Are these rats lovers? Mother and daughter? Did one fall in while desperately trying to save the other? If you looked into your toilet and saw two dead rats, you’d understand why someone–like 64 year-old Marie of Detroit–might just give up and shit into a shopping bag, then tie the handles and hurl its warm contents into the next room.

In other words, television gold.

Let’s take a moment here and ponder what it’s actually like to defecate into a plastic shopping bag. Pull down your pants and position yourself in a squat, that’s a given. What about the bag? Do you just set the mouth of the bag open ‘neath your blowhole, or do you have to reach back and seal the bag around your entire ass with spread hands? I guess it depends on how solid you think your elimination is going to be. A well-formed, compact turd will drop nicely into an open bag. A bit wetter? It might slide out in one long juicy push and plop square in.

But diarrhea? You’ll definitely need all hands on deck. My diarrhea comes in two forms. Sometimes water and clumps of shit will just discharge in one big dump, as a firefighting aircraft drenches a burning tree. Other times, the diarrhea shoots out in a strong, unfocused spray, as if someone’s turned the nozzle too tight. Now, diarrhea is awful in the best of circumstances. You can be in the master bath at the 4 Seasons and still regret the experience. But having diarrhea–and its painful spasms–while squatting in a canyon of newspapers with your pants around your ankles? And holding a bag to your ass? What if you’re obese? What if you have bad knees? Did you check the bag for holes? Do you even have time?

Maybe it’s not a big deal. Maybe it’s as casual as anyone taking a shit. Hell, they might even light a cigarette or open a magazine as they shit into a bag.

Or into a diaper. How could I forget! Of course. A few select hoarders go the Pampers route, and their houses are absolute piles of soiled diapers.

But it’s the shame, it’s the shame that burns most. Most of reality television is about people doing despicable things without shame. But on Hoarders, the shame is visceral.

“How do you go to the bathroom, Mom?” one daughter asks.

“I’m not,” the mother stammers, “I’m not going to talk about that!”

No need to, because the camera pans over to the heap of shopping bags next to the sofa, with the turds showing teasingly, too obviously, through the white plastic.

Television being a visual medium, I rarely watch a show and wonder, What does that smell like?

This is where it’s helpful to look at the reactions of the various therapists and cleaning experts who enter the house, for they are our surrogates.

Two young men from a cleaning crew simply vomit, right then and there, on finding a shit-bag mountain in the upstairs bedroom. When they excavate the surface layer–this lady hasn’t had a working toilet in 8 years–they find not only that the bags have leaked through the floorboards and were dripping raw sewage into the downstairs kitchen, but that the inside of the mound is composed entirely of cockroaches. The roaches don’t move when they’re discovered. They look at the cleaning crew and go, “You sure you want to get involved here?”

(I always think here, looking at the poor young men who staff the crew, what they get paid. What’s the minimum wage there in Montana? Or Maryland?)

Later we find out that the lady also had a stomach ulcer, which means that she excreted not only feces of every liquid content but also blood and mucus and bile into her Safeway bags. (I’m guessing it’s Safeway: the logos on the bags have been blurred out.)

But a broken toilet is peanuts compared to extreme animal hoarding. When you have 200 cats, as one lady did, the entire house is turds. Piles and piles of it, covered in a coat of cat hair like Chernobyl ash. After turning gray, the turds pulverize underfoot and take to the air. But you may not notice, because the carpet–why do people with 200 cats even have carpet?–is soaked with so much animal urine that you, and half the cats, are blind from ammonia.

Can it get worse?

The cats also, surprise, have some sort of respiratory illness, and cough up copious amounts of sour oatmeal pretty much everywhere. Is that it? Can things possibly get any worse? The lady in question also fears that her precious cats might get hit by cars so all the windows and doors of this infernal house are sealed. No air moving in or out. Since 1992.

You may want to stop reading for a moment and step outside for a breath of fresh air or hug a loved one before we take a looksie into the kitchen.

Watching the cleaning crew approach, investigate, and then decide to open a hoarder’s refrigerator is like watching the numbskull astronauts, who are supposedly scientists, decide to touch the alien egg peeling open in Prometheus.

Before he can even see inside the fridge, one guy just vomits into his mask.

“It smells,” he tries to explain, gagging. “It smells like…”

What does it smell like, Johnny? Use your words.

Nevermind, because the camera, with a well-timed musical cue, smash cuts to the contents of the fridge. Now, the horrors of this depend largely on whether the refrigerator is working. Let’s assume it isn’t. I can tell you about putrefying meat moving with maggots, puddles of brown liquid that might once have been lettuce, once-bright melons and oranges that have collapsed, green and black mold that seems to bleed right through the plastic trays, whatever it is that eggs become, a carton of milk opened in the first days after 9/11…

But if the refrigerator is indeed working, things get dark. One lady has been putting her dead cats in the freezer. The ones she can find, anyway. Not only cats. Dead squirrels, opossums, and other roadkill that this kind animal lover had scraped off the pavement, put into a Ziplock, and stuffed tenderly into the freezer.

In a working freezer, they mummify. But sometimes they turn to liquid. If you’re lucky, the liquid freezes, trapping insects in its terrible amber. But it may also ooze from the freezer and down into the main compartment of the refrigerator, dripping decomposed cat liquid onto those nice brown tomatoes that the lady was thinking might still go in a salad.

As the crew removes bags of carcasses, the hoarder reaches out and stokes each beloved former pet. “This was my first cat, my first Lovey. On Lovey! I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!” She collapses on the floor. “What have I done! What have I done!”

“She’s having a breakdown,” the therapist helpfully explains. “She can’t be in here.”

You think, Doc? Because I don’t think any of the hoarders should be present for the cleaning. I know I get real Judge Judy about this, but come on. You can’t have Hoardy McMorty get to reminiscin’ over every gum wrapper when there are Alp-sized heaps of hazardous garbage waiting to be hauled out.

“You go have a nice spa day,” I’d say. “And when you come back, your house will be gone. Literally.”

I wish, just once, that the show would conjure a supernatural porthole like the one at the end of Poltergeist which sucked the haunted home into a vortex. There. Gone. All of it. Congratulations, Lady. You get a clean slate.

But human problems are never so easy to solve. Many hoarders have survived horrific personal loss. Dead children, head injuries, abuse. If the old adage is that hurt people hurt people, may it also be said that hurt people hurt houses. And condos. And apartments. And yards. At the end of the day, hoarders hurt no one but themselves. It is they who have to crawl in and out of their garbage heaps each day, and breathe the ammonia, and eat the putrid food, and shit and piss in shameful ways.

And it’s not that I feel superior to these poor people–not entirely. I feel, in fact, too much like them, that I’m just one depression or adverse life event away from sleeping in a canyon of rubbish. Isn’t that what we feel when we walk past the homeless, or one of those tent cities that no longer seems so transitory on the edges of our nice neighborhoods? There but for the grace of God.

Maybe we can stand to watch Hoarders because there’s hope. Therapists, cleaning crews, trucks, sons and daughters long estranged convene to save the hoarders from themselves. Industrious montages, progress, redemption. It’s the ultimate make-over show. We’re not here to gawk, for God’s sake, we’re here to HELP. We watch thinking we know the answers. We have moral clarity.

And that’s exactly what I would write if I were trying to elevate a gleeful roll in the muck. Luckily for all involved, I’m not that writer.

Back to the action. For we haven’t gotten into the drama of when a hoarder resists a cleaning.

“I can still use that!” a bald man screams, as a cleaner dumps a hair curler covered in roach shit. “I’m saving that for my niece!” a woman cries, yanking a piss-soaked bra from under a dying cat. The hoarder’s friends and family leave in tears, vowing never to return. “I don’t know why I came in the first place,” a son sobs. “She breaks my heart,” a sister weeps.

Once, during a stressful clean, the hoarder actually leaves and goes shopping. He pulls up to the house hours later with a carful of new junk from the Salvation Army. His son charges at him and screams, “What the hell are you doing, Dad? We’re trying to save your life here and you’re puttin’ water back in the sinking boat!”

“You let go of me!” the man says, opening the trunk to reveal a lamp, a golf bag, a painting, and two coffee pots.

The therapist, sleeves rolled up like Princess Diana examining a land mine, calls a time-out.

“You have to decide,” he says plainly. “This is the moment. You can go back to the old way and die alone, covered in cat shit, or you can make a change.”

Sometimes, the hoarder just says, “I’ll take the former.”

I admire that. Given the choice to change, I might choose my own dead toilet rats. Even the man shitting into a Safeway bag is, in a way, king of his domain.

“Oh no,” the children of the hoarder will protest. “You better clean this place up, ‘cause if you lose this house, you ain’t coming to live with me!”

But boringly, most hoarders at this crossroads will choose redemption.

“Alright now,” they say. “Let’s get to work. Let’s clean up this shithole.”

After a montage of mattresses sailing from windows, dump trucks filling, and people sweeping, wiping suddenly visible floors and walls, the transformation is complete. The wreck of a house is now merely an atrocious one.

“Oh wow!” everyone says, perusing the dingy rooms and sad furniture.

Sometimes, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, the house is unsalvageable. Structural problems, collapsed ceilings, deadly mold. The inspector claps a hand on the hoarder’s back and says, “Sorry, buddy, but you can’t live here. I got to condemn this house.”

The episode ends. A dark post-script.

“Three months later, Harold is living in a new house. Despite seeing a therapist, he has resumed his old ways. He is facing another eviction.”

Fade to black.

Is that not the most satisfying hour of television you’ve ever seen?