Estate Sales vs Quarantine

I. 

I was broke and needed stuff, which is how it began. My sister and I had just driven our 1999 Subaru Legacy from New Haven to Los Angeles, arriving November 7th, 2016. It was a bad plan, starting my new life on what I presumed would be the wings of Democratic victory. In reality, it was like driving a thousand miles per hour into a brick wall, but I still had a life to build, minimum wage jobs to beg for, and an apartment in Highland Park to furnish. Which is why soon after arriving I started spending my weekends at dozens of estate sales from Hancock Park to Alhambra, digging through the possessions of the divorced, downsizing, dying, and dead. It became the only way to shop. I bought cast-iron skillets, a sparkly gold grandmother's hammer, chairs upholstered with tropical birds, an antique patio couch that slid back and forth on green rusted tracks. My sister and I wrestled that find from a dead sculpture’s West Hollywood pool and into our shitty living room, a piece of furniture as out of place as we were. 

Soon the apartment was livable, but I couldn’t stop going to estate sales. My compulsion clearly wasn’t about the stuff, or those sweet second-day everything-must-go discounts, but a strategy, like immersion therapy, to relearn how to trust people again. These were the early days of the Trump presidency, after all, and tens of millions of my countrymen supported a fascist. Someone wrote “MAGA” in neat block lettering on a test pad at the stationary store I found work at. A father was arrested by ICE while dropping his daughters off at school down the street from my apartment, a homeless man was burned alive outside my local Home Depot, and I biked home from work one evening to find the coroner pulling a decomposing body from a van parked outside my driveway. Everyone, it seemed, had lost not just their minds, but their souls. I knew that rummaging through cutlery drawers at a dead screenwriter’s bungalow in North Hollywood wouldn’t stop the madness, but I needed to feel that there were still some semblance of humanity out there, a non-evil banality, and I decided I could probably find it in strangers’ book shelves and pine boxes of sweaters, in their weird personal collections (porcelain carousel horses, Yoda figurines, paintings of bathtubs), in opening a dead woman’s closet and trying on her shoes and scarves. 

In a child psychologist’s house in Woodland Hills, I picked up the book A Guide to Architecture in Southern California, the introduction of which reads, “…Southern California as a mecca for the American way of life has persisted unabated to the present as the daily influx of new citizens aptly attests. Smog and freeways notwithstanding, this glorification entails just enough reality to retain a firm hold on those who remain and become a permanent part of the scene.” That book was written in 1965, but with each estate sale I passed through I did sense a new way of life was emerging as if from the haze on the 110, each house bestowing “just enough reality” for me to find purchase in. I was still a foreigner in Southern California, but each weekend I was beckoned into the homes of strangers, from teamsters to teachers to Rose McGowan, whose Pikachu oven mitts are now proudly used in my kitchen. It’s a helluva town, I learned, and while I’m still stupidly gobsmacked by palm trees and coyotes padding across Echo Park Blvd at dusk, it’s the people here I’m entranced by. Where else but Southern California would Jeraldine Saunders, inspiration for and creator of The Love Boat, live and die and sell me her belongings? Her obituary makes sure to mention that she dated younger men up until her death at 96, and the author bio on her memoir, which they were handing out for free at the sale, reads: “Jerry Saunders…the vibrant, vivacious, and voluptuous Virgo from Glendale, California…and star of her own story!”    

Some cope with apocalyptic times by disengaging, through Instagram, Blue Apron and Peloton, minimalist home decor, Amazon Prime (a service that just reminds me of Parker Posey in Best in Show extolling her luck at having been “raised amongst catalogues.”). Sure there’s logic to this practice of algorithmic stoicism, but since 2016 I’ve decided to run full-tilt into the messiness of other people, not just the owners of the homes but the organizers of the estate sales, the lingo and strategy and skirmishes, and of course the regulars, from white ladies in clogs buying for their boutiques, to the scrap metal haulers with their cellphones clipped to their belts, the Armenian grandmothers who treat bartering as a bloodsport, and my favorite, the nosey neighbors who never buy a thing and are just there to gossip about how other people lived. The liquidation companies themselves come in different flavors as well — the celebrity memorabilia teams who employ armed rent-a-cops, the fine antiquity set who run the game in Beverlywood and Santa Monica and who only take credit cards for purchases over $500 dollars. I prefer the “beautiful junk” companies, the east siders, the outfits that advertise their sales somewhat flippantly as “hoarders’ paradises” and hand out gloves if you’re digging through boxes of greasy hardware in the garage. 

But every sale has something to reveal, and a true essay about estate sales would need to include a full biography of every resident and a Smithsonian-worthy history of each object. Even while being dismantled, these places are overwhelmingly full of meaning. I’ve gone fragile, I know. But I find it hard, even at closing time, to leave these places, difficult to turn my back on a life whose details I can only guess at. 

Which is exactly why my home is now packed with the possessions of deceased Southern Californians. If I believed in ghosts my apartment would be teeming with them; my cooking utensils hold the memories of family meals made long before my attempt at whatever Allison Roman believes I can pull off with shallots, the wrenches and hammers in my toolbox have made repairs far beyond my capabilities, and sure, my collection of glass fruits and vegetables belonged to Reaganites in Beverly Hills, but now those Reaganites are in assisted living and the fruit is displayed above a terra-cotta planter depicting a gay orgy, a succulent pot made entirely of red clay mouths and anuses open in ecstasy. I bought that lascivious planter a few weeks ago for sixty bucks from an apartment in Silverlake, a sale that reminded me that just behind the same old lucite flatware and stack of National Georgraphics, you will always find the half-hidden secret that breaks your heart. In the case of this couple, it wasn’t their horny container garden but the collection of assisted suicide books tucked on bottom-most shelf. At the union guy’s place (Meat & Provision Drivers Local 626) it had to be the shrine to Jimmy Hoffa, and at the career flight attendant’s Los Feliz duplex it was the saved United Airlines memo announcing the wreath-laying ceremony for coworkers killed on 9/11. Sometimes the tragedy is just something as simple as a stack of kids’ watercolors no one wants anymore, or the moldy boxes of unsold screenplays. At a pornographer’s estate sale the dirty secret wasn’t the glossies of spread legs or the promotional dildos, but the pornographer himself, now an old man camped out by the register and farting viciously while my husband paid for his Eyes Wide Shut poster.

Recently in Topanga I bought a sack of cowrie shells because they were priced to sell and I thought that the shells’ resemblance to tiny vaginas could lend itself to a fun craft project. Only after paying was I informed that the late owner of the house collected the cowries on the beach in Vietnam while he served, and now I just don’t know what to do with them. It’s moments like these when I’m reminded that this all began because I just needed a cheap couch and a few cereal bowls, and now I own a scrapbook of unwanted family photos, a dead soldier’s Vietnam shells, house plants that were potted by women now dead but whose leaves have kept growing. It’s a responsibility you don’t take on when you shop at Target, but I admit that I love it, the kinship I feel towards these random objects and their long-gone owners. Even the melancholy parts, like the progression of walking sticks to canes to wheelchairs you’ll see in a vacant bedroom, have been a balm for these cruel and selfish times, and a pathway for Southern California to become my home.  

II.

But then strategies for survival, emotional and otherwise, need to change with the times. Last weekend I went to my last round of estate sales for the foreseeable future, what with the pandemic and all. Already I’m thinking that venturing out was a bone-headed thing to do, and my only defense was that I didn’t go to buys things (though I did) but to ask the estate sale company employees what’s next for them. The first people I talked to, a husband and wife team out of Pasadena, scoffed at the mere suggestion of suspending upcoming sales. “It’s just the flu by a different name,” said the husband. The wife asked me, “Do you have pets?” When I told her I had a cat she assured me, “cats build up your immunity, Dear. You’ll be absolutely fine.” On my drive home I stopped at one final sale in an East Hollywood craftsman next to a store called Linoleum City. The team there wasn’t so Pollyanna about the virus; they had squirt bottles of hand sanitizer strategically placed around the home (I’m sure customers tried to buy them), and the women writing receipts at least wore plastic gloves. But still, the employees told me they just couldn’t suspend operations. SoCal cat immunity nonsense aside, the people who run these sales aren’t charity shop volunteers; these events are their livelihoods. “And if we don’t clear out the house, the widow won’t be able to put it on the market,” the elderly owner of the company told me. The wheel had to keep turning, a man’s material life still needed to be stripped for parts. In this case, the dead man was an artist named Michael Hogarth. He made his living as David Hockney’s framer, but his own work was literally a whole different animal. His sculpture “Flying Rat Assemblage” fused rat bones and pigeon feathers into what looked like a mutant vermin crushed on Sunset Blvd. Then there was an industrial trash can lined with plush cerulean silk-satin called “Trash Can Coffin,” and a collection of sculptures made out of kicked lighters titled, “The Lighter Side.” The placard description of those read, “These pieces were some of Michael’s last work, constructed during the time he was going through chemo and found doing larger, more “serious” work too difficult…” 

It’s true that all estate sales have a sense of death or at least finality, and that part of the thrill of attending them comes from witnessing the end of a life, and even imagining what your own home will look like once you’ve been replaced by a cash register at the door and a swarm of strangers pawing through your possessions, not so much in the manner of a Black Friday sale but a cloud of eels and crabs picking apart a whale carcass on the ocean floor. I have bought and worn dead women’s blouses, eaten dinners off Fiestaware that may very well have served last meals. Go to enough of these things and you can see the shape of an entire life, from the garage of wedding China and dusty sports equipment, the pet hair and butt indentations on the couch, Oaxacan souvenirs on the mantle, and then inevitably, the pink bedpan and half-used packages of adult diapers stashed in a corner of the bathroom. And while I know I’m not alone in feeling a sense of comfort in touching the lives of others, I wanted to scream from the foyer of the late Michael Hogarth’s house, Jesus Christ now is truly not the time for touching the lives of others. There I was standing in a house filled with bones and feathers in the midst of a pandemic, witnessing the CDC’s greatest fear: a group of strangers, most of them elderly, waiting in line to enter a dead man’s home and one by one touch his things. 

I got out of there, and I’ve been shut inside with my husband and immunity-boosting cat ever since. It’s raining in Los Angeles as the virus spreads and the city shuts down — Netflix, my old stationary store, the Lakers, the libraries. Everything it seems except for ICE and the estate sales, which are still listed, rain or shine. I don’t believe the companies or the costumers will stop until they’re forced to. It’s just not in these people’s nature to self quarantine. I would know. When I arrived west I spent the first few weeks lying flat on my back on a Craigslist mattress, terrified and distrustful of all other people and this cultish desert of a place, until one day my sister announced we needed certain possessions to live and there was this thing called an estate sale going on near the apartment where she was dog sitting. I know it sounds trite (and you’ll have to take my word that buying tchotchkes hasn’t been my sole response to Trump’s America), but going to that first West Hollywood estate sale, and entering the dozens of other houses after that, restored my spirit just enough to allow me to appreciate people again. I can't help myself. I love their bad shag carpeting and well-worn stockpots, the Hitachi Magic Wands that are always marked for sale as immersion blenders out with the kitchen appliances, the way we all seem to line up little figurines and sea glass on our kitchen windowsills.

And so I get it, I really do, what's lost by staying in your own home instead of venturing into that of another. And I also understand that if you spend enough time among the belongings of the deceased, you become inured to the suddenness of death, or even the idea that objects themselves can hold an invisible menace -- whether it’s a memory or a virus making its way from house to house. I’ve come to rely deeply upon the weekly ritual of estate sales, which serve as an excellent reminder that people are constantly living and constantly dying. But please, let’s not speed up that process.