For years he’s been rummaging through people’s yards and garbage bins. His pants are too loose, held up by a belt cinched too tight. His vehicle, a beat up old bike towing a trailer, is usually stacked high with junk.
But he’s a little more intense than your average junk collector. Gerald comes to different community meetings and spouts off about one thing or another. His rants and rambles are usually tangential to the main topic at hand, but it becomes his opportunity to gain an audience.
He’s even run for school trustee. There’s a good case for not carelessly checking names at the ballot box. I figure someone who can’t even manage their own garbage shouldn’t be campaigning to manage our kids. His door-to-door tactics were fairly unusual. His campaigning continued well after dark, and some felt quite uncomfortable with his persistence. Seems if no one answered the door, he would often knock on windows around the house.
But mostly, Gerald is known as “The Junk Man.” He seems driven by an insatiable compulsion to collect junk. Weird stuff. Useless stuff. Rusty metal bike parts, bent window frames, old suitcases, shattered radios. He started piling up stuff in his garage. Then his collection took over his house. Eventually he built twisted mounds of junk in his backyard. Exposed to the elements, things started to rust and rot. Neighbours and passersby complained.
When busted by the health department, he didn’t get rid of the junk, he looked for more places to stash it. He used the cat lady’s yard. The yards of vacant houses became his storage compounds.
Gerald tried to avoid the cops and health inspectors. He went to a vacant house down the block. There he set up a tent with a refrigerator box inside. A home away from home. He got his own lock for the gate. And then he started piling up garbage all around him in this stranger’s backyard.
When I asked him what he was doing there, he claimed the owner had given him “retrospective permission” to live in her backyard and store his stuff there. The lie was too obvious, so I challenged it. He then shifted the story, telling me that “the government offices in charge of such things have told me I could do this.”
I called the out-of-town owner. I asked if she was aware that Gerald was using her back deck as a summer cottage and scrapyard. She said “No way!”
His passion for junk has overcome his respect for people. He goes into people’s yards and helps himself to things which might be useful. If someone tries to stop him he insists that they give him their stuff. He’s threatened several women who complained about his storage tactics. People complained to me, feeling intimidated by his aggressive manner.
Usually “collecting stuff” is just a harmless quirk, one of those “guy things” that frustrates women.
My dad collects stuff. Over his many years working in New York City, he collected a wide variety of weird tools, bits and pieces of metal, odds and sods of lumber, spools of wire and string, car parts and accessories, copious bins of nails and bolts and screws. His stuff was largely confined to a double garage. But at least there was still room to park the car. As a kid growing up, I was amazed at the sheer volume of things for which there seemed to be no discernable use. And if there was a use for it, where would you find it when you need it?
On occasion, my mom or aunt would complain about all that “junk” he would never use. They encouraged him to toss it. Sometimes he would try to comply but, after hours of weeding, came up with only a handful of things that could be tossed.
He fixed things and saved us lots of money over the years. Often the repair happened to utilize parts from his “collection.” I still remember him smiling broadly to mom and saying, “See, I told you it’s important that I keep all these things. You never know when you’ll need something from that pile.”
There’s a bit of a collector in all of us. And lots of folk are habitual collectors. But some become compulsive hoarders.
Gerald’s addiction to junk recently landed him in jail because of his disrespect for the concerns and property of others.
I know it’s not the best place for him. But I hope he uses the break to contemplate a little more respect for his community.
Rev. Harry Lehotsky
514 Maryland Street
Winnipeg, Mb R3G 1M5
(204) 775-4929
lehotsky@escape.ca