My Problem with "Hi, I'm Nancy Rubin"
Over the weekend I watched an episode of a new series streaming on HBO Max called “Hi, I’m...” that a friend I grew up with recommended. The premise of the show features ordinary people doing extraordinary things. One of the first episodes profiled a former high school teacher of ours, Nancy Rubin.
Nancy Rubin was a teacher for decades, spending most of her career at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA. Nancy taught a class called “Social Living,” which was a sophomore requirement. Social Living covered sex education, drug awareness, relationships, and anything that was too embarrassing to be brought up in a normal class. Nancy was open, caring, and non-judgmental. She was many students’ favorite teacher, and I liked her very much.
The extraordinary thing Nancy Rubin did for her students was to ask each of them to write a letter to their future selves. The letter could talk about what was going on in their present lives, their hopes and plans for the future, their musings and dreams; anything you wrote to yourself was acceptable, although Nancy recommended being kind. The student was asked to write two dates on the letter: the date it was written, and the future date you would like the letter to be received. This date could be in one year, five years, or decades. Nancy kept a vast filing system in her home, and endeavored to send each student their letter when the date arrived. She kept at this for at least three decades. Now long retired, she is reaching the end of the pile.
The episode was produced and directed by another of Nancy Rubin’s former students, filmmaker Jennifer Steinman Sternin. I’m assuming it was Jennifer who found and selected some of Nancy’s past students to interview. Some were filmed as they opened the letter they had written to themselves decades earlier, to emotional effect. Some were interviewed regarding what Nancy was like as a teacher. After a few minutes into the episode, I became suspicious regarding the narrative that was unfolding.
I knew some of the former students interviewed, people who had been my classmates back in the Eighties. They were the same people who had gained notice in high school. This attention was not unwarranted; they were all talented people. They were also people with whom, because of my life circumstances, I felt I had little in common.
One of the differences between Social Living and other classes was that it was a mix of all students. In the 1980s Berkeley High worked on a tracking system: some students were on the college prep track, the rest were receiving the typical undereducation of any institution in the underperforming California Public School system. This meant that, though Berkeley High’s enrollment had a large percentage of students of color, my classes as a college prep-tracked student were predominantly White, with a few Black and Asian kids from educated families thrown in. But everyone was in Social Living.
Why, then, were the same voices being amplified - the voices of well-liked Berkeley High students from educated families who went on to become objectively successful adults? Although there were a couple of students from a different socio-economic background being interviewed, their time on screen was recognizably limited. Why hadn’t the filmmaker cast her net a little wider? And what had happened to my letter?
When I moved away from Berkeley in 1984, it was with complete intention. Although Berkeley could be a haven for left-leaning people, its downfall has been its limitations as an intellectually homogenous place (I’m talking about the city, not the university). There is a reason that “Berkeley Liberal” is a slur. Any place that favors political correctness over the reality of how this country operates is openly displaying its missteps. I was sick of being surrounded by people who acted consciously obtuse regarding what the rest of the country/world was like.
One of the most annoying aspects of neo-liberal culture is its insistence on symbolism. If you take your kid to the protest march, if you post a placard in your window for all to see, if you sign that online petition, you’ve made a political impact. The bitter reality is that you haven’t, and no one cares. Empty symbolism is not the same thing as putting yourself out there and taking action, which is often risky and uncomfortable.
Let me provide an example of how this played out at Berkeley High in the Eighties. There was much canvassing by students who felt they were addressing the social ills of the day. People were always shoving a donation box in your face, aggressively calling for money to fight the famine in East Africa, to ban nuclear weapons, to kick the ass of Ronald Reagan. All noble causes, but distant. One day as I sat outside at lunch, an unpleasantly liberal student shook a coin box in my face and demanded I give money to fight apartheid. I made an excuse why I couldn’t give anything. “So you don’t care about apartheid?” they gloated, giving me a disgusted look. How could I tell this student that it wasn’t that I didn’t care about apartheid; in fact, I cared about it very much. It was that my mind was occupied with how I would get food that day, or where I would sleep that night. That I had zero cents to my name.
Nancy Rubin did take action, from the platform of her Social Living classroom. She created a safe space where many students could explore some of their true feelings and challenges for the first time. This was stated again and again in all the interviews featured in “Hi, I’m Nancy Rubin,” almost verbatim. Were the interviewees coached? It all seemed placed to reinforce the through-line, that Nancy Rubin had assigned a letter that had changed everyone’s lives. Why, then, did I barely remember this assignment?
The problem is, there were other iterations to this story that the filmmaker had left out entirely. What about the students, like myself, who would never receive the letter to their future selves? Were we not worthy inclusions?
In 1982 I was a sophomore enrolled in Nancy Rubin’s Social Living class. These are some of the impressions I had of the class: a lot of laughing as Nancy gently nudged us to talk about embarrassing topics like sex and drugs; a lot of misinformation held by young, ignorant students being cleared up; and very little more. During this time, I was abandoned by my family. My struggle in those years was just to get to class and appear to be a normal teenager, though I felt anything but. I was not able to be honest in assignments asking about my home life, my family, my deepest feelings. I had to keep all that under wraps, as I was a child on my own, an inherently illegal and criminal person; an undesirable, because what kind of kid did you have to be for your own family to reject you? I understood there was what came to be known as “mandated reporting”: there were rules in place requiring teachers to report known cases of abuse or neglect to the authorities. I knew better than to disclose my real situation to Nancy Rubin, or any adult, for that matter. My primary objective was to avoid becoming a ward of the State of California.
As I watched “Hi, I’m Nancy Rubin,” and saw shots of the original assignment on paper, I remembered that letter to my future self. And what I remember was that I did not know what address to put on the letter. I had no address of my own, and there was no one in my family who had a stable enough residence where it could have been sent. I also didn’t know if I would even be in touch with anyone in my family by the time the letter was sent – as a fifteen-year-old on my own, my future was completely uncertain. I didn’t even know if I had a future.
What about those students whose life situations were too precarious to complete the letter-writing circle? I couldn’t have been the only one. Why did Jennifer Steinman Sternin not consider these students, the ones who, because of the instability of poverty or abuse, could never have truly participated? As the teacher of Social Living, who had supposedly heard it all, what was Nancy Rubin’s plan for all the letters that had no chance of making it into the hands of their authors? If she had one, the audience was never informed.
Nancy Rubin had done an extraordinary thing with the letter assignment, affecting the lives of so many. But the piece on Nancy does everyone an injustice by only covering the warm and fuzzy. Nancy Rubin was a great teacher, one who thought of ways to open her students up and think for themselves, which is true education. Unfortunately, “Hi, I’m Nancy Rubin” problematically displayed what is wrong with our current culture: it told the narrative it wanted to hear, not the story that actually happened.
I’m still wondering what my former self would have written me.
COVID Tests
My 12-year-old had a minor cold which lasted one day. In order to return to school, he needed to show a negative COVID test. The one day illness becomes a two day trial. In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where we live, it is difficult to find a nearby COVID testing site. It is easier for us to take the subway to Park Slope, a more affluent neighborhood on the opposite side of Prospect Park.
The CityMD urgent care clinic, which provides free COVID testing, opens at 9:00am. The Omicron variant and the holiday travel season are stretching all the COVID test sites beyond their maximum capacity. When we arrive at 8:45am, the line already stretches around the corner, two blocks long. It is December, and although the weather isn’t bad for winter in New York, it hovers just above freezing.
A young couple arrive and stand behind us on line. Luckily they are following this week’s New York State health order to wear masks, even out of doors. But as we stand there, line unmoving, they inch forward toward us. That thing that people unconscious of their surroundings do: keep creeping forward on line, until they are crowding the people ahead, as if it will make the line go faster. The woman talks on her phone right into my ear. I ask the young couple if they wouldn’t mind stepping back, I’m here with my son and we may all potentially be ill. They act like I am their bitchy mom and don’t really budge.
We wait about an hour, the line unmoving. I see a woman about three people ahead who has been holding a one-year-old in her arms the whole time. When will they let them in? The clinic keeps the waiting room sparse for social distancing, so they’re only letting people in as other patients exit.
My son and I pass the time by (quietly) singing Dua Lipa songs and jumping up and down in an effort to stay warm. He has a joke generating app on his phone we play with for a long time which comes up with one-liners that are more like zen koans: If a fly loses its wings, is it called a walk?
The crowding couple behind us give up and leave. They remind me of a recent photo I saw of people waiting to receive booster shots in London. The people are wrapped around a courtyard at St. Thomas Hospital. However, they are all six feet apart and masked up, even outside. Maybe this is not always the case in London, but they looked calm in their queue; no one was shoving one another with masks hanging from their chins, no one had to manage the line.
The middle aged woman who now fills the space left by the crowding Millennials is worse. She has a glowering expression, made uglier by heavy black eyebrows which are drawn on. Her white-rooted dark hair is drawn into a messy ponytail, and she is wearing what looks like pajamas. She shouts into her phone in Spanish, and what she’s saying is not very nice. She steps forward, screaming right into my ear.
We’re going on two hours waiting outside, but the line stays as it is. We’re getting really cold just standing there, so my son and I take turns standing in a patch of sunlight that has appeared on the other side of the sidewalk. We alternate to make sure we won’t lose our place on line. As I stand in the sun, I see a man instead of the woman behind us. Looks like she was holding a place for him. Maybe the crowding problem has ended for now.
The older man looks benign, even sad. His grey sweatpants are dirty and torn. He wears a filthy paper mask pulled down under his nose. Somehow he owns an expensive new model Samsung phone, which he shouts into. Thirty minutes pass as he creeps nearer and nearer. Because he was having a phone conversation, I had gestured to him to step back a little, which he waved away. Now I step between the man and my son, wrapping my arms around my son from behind to protect his body.
Too cold, I go back to the patch of sun for a minute. Watching from across the sidewalk, I see the man move all the way until his body is against my son’s back, and he is literally breathing down my child’s neck as he screams into his phone.
I’ve had enough. I move across the sidewalk in a rush. “Sir, can you please step back? We’re trying to social distance.” I add, to make my point clear, “My son might have COVID.” Not, you might have COVID, and you might be giving it to a child.
The man turns on me. “I’m fine. I’m not doing anything. You aren’t even on line, you left to go stand somewhere else.”
It is not a good idea to get my ire up. I have a bad temper when pushed too far, and like most mothers, I am very protective of my child. “You’ve seen me on line, we’ve been here for hours!” I respond in my loud actor’s voice. “We’re trying to keep warm! I am only asking you to retain some social distance. Please step back from my son!”
He freaks out. “I’m fine, I can stand where I want to! Nothing is happening here. I’m fine! You step off. You have no right to tell me what to do. You mind your own damn business!” As if this wasn’t my business, the business of all of us, to end COVID.
I open my mouth to respond, but he is screaming over my voice. I cease talking and cross myself without thinking. I look into his sad eyes and retain eye contact while he carries on about how he is fine, but I am bad. I won’t let the eye contact go, because at this point it is the only way I can communicate with this man. Some others step out of the line to witness the scene, some looking ready to step in if necessary.
His medium brown skin looks red. Is it the cold, or is he really that enraged? In his eyes, I see what he thinks of me: a Park Slope karen. I curse the woman named Karen who made other white women’s voices seem racist, entitled, and easily dismissed.
I stare in his eyes until he loses steam and his diatribe peters out. “You must be having a really bad day,” I say after a pause. “God bless you.” The man gathers energy and turns on me again. “I don’t accept that! I don’t accept anyone telling me ‘God bless you’ when they don’t mean it!”
My staring eyes look sad. I say nothing, finally breaking eye contact to turn forward and act as a barrier between the man and my son. My son and I talk quietly and wait, our feet and hands numb. I comment that I am relieved they are finally letting the woman holding the baby for hours into the clinic. I tell my son it is never a good idea to think you can judge what another person goes through. A neutral statement.
After about five minutes, I hear a small voice behind me. “Excuse me, Ma’am.” I turn around. “I should have never yelled at you like that. I was wrong. I’m really sorry. I should have never done that.” Tears stand in his eyes. I make light of it. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m just trying to protect my child. Anyone standing on this line right now is having a bad day. The only thing that really bothered me was when you said I didn’t mean it when I said ‘God bless you’.” I laugh a little, so does he, and the tension lightens.
After 2+ hours myself, my son, and the man behind us are let into the clinic. I check my son in at the digital registration module while he holds two chairs for us. When I come back to my chair, I notice the man from the line has seated himself across from us. My son and I keep to ourselves while he plays his Nintendo Switch and I leaf through an outdated copy of Brooklyn Parent. When I glance up, I see the man looking right at us with a sweet expression, tears still standing in his eyes.
After thirty more minutes, a medical assistant calls for “George.” The man gets up, but gestures to my son and I, asking the medical assistant if we shouldn’t go first because we were there before him. The medical assistant reassures him that my son and I will be called in next. George waves goodbye to us, apology still wet in his eyes.
The aggression and the contrition. The rage and the remorse. The exhaustion of being inadvertently drawn into someone’s emotional life. My husband says males in this culture are conditioned to hold in their anger, release it on the wrong person, then feel guilty about it. They spend their lives living with regrets.
So many truths laid bare by COVID.
Depression, Anxiety, or Just COVID?
I’m spending too much time trying to figure out if I’m depressed, or if it’s just a normal response to this COVID-infected half-life we are all living. Lord, how it does crawl on and on, with no end in sight.
Depression – isn’t that what you call having little energy or motivation, brain fog, dragging yourself through the most minor of tasks, no excitement for anything? If I’m depressed, then how do I get through the slog of daily life: trying to figure out how to bring in more money, moving my family life along when everything is broken and takes at least twice as long as it used to, day after day? Is it this “high-functioning depression” I keep hearing about?
If this is the definition of high-functioning depression, you could say I was a high-functioning depressive throughout childhood, so I must be familiar with this state. I certainly felt bad nearly every day. I was a parentified child who, most of the time, took care of my mentally ill mother and alcoholic father more than they took care of me. It was pretty clear by the age of six that their ability to parent me was shaky, and if I didn’t fill in those gaps, we would be separated. Which did eventually happen, but not until I was 15. By then, there was so much abuse and contempt within my family, much of it directed at me, that nothing I could do on my own could heal it, and I left home forever.
The relentlessness of emotional survival had scrambled my center. Once I left home, the work of hiding being homeless, and by 16, earning a living at a factory while retaining my position as a high school achiever, was physically and emotionally exhausting. I became clinically depressed, according to my therapist at the time.
By mid-college, with my life evened out to a bearable routine, and I no longer suffered from consistent depression. Even now, I have a lot of difficulty characterizing myself as someone who is depressed.
Depression is an illness, a dark hole that people fall into and can’t get out of. Life seems ugly, daily routines hollow and pointless and difficult to do at all. Vitality has exited. There is no one you want to see, nothing you want to do. Antidepressants are often the only way to the other side, and there are many reasons why one wouldn’t want to take them. What I have right now must just be tiredness from weekly panic attacks – anxiety is my real problem.
Yet aren’t depression and anxiety two sides of the same coin? And aren’t both of these emotional responses logical, given that our external circumstances are actually really nerve-wracking and depressing? How do we treat a high-functioning depression that will continue as long as governments cannot guide a path forward out of a pandemic, or out of the collapse of society jogging along with it? How can we feel good when it is impossible to direct toward one’s own future, when nothing seems in our control? When one constantly sows, but never reaps?
What are the things you do to stave off COVID depression and anxiety?
Face It, Amerikka
I had planned to post something very different; something more positive. But the exhaustion and anxiety of the past year, including (but certainly not limited to) COVID-19, police brutality against Black people, and the Trump administration finally ending, has challenged even the strongest of us.
The artist is aware they need to put their feelings into their work. This is how we process things. But what if the anger is too great for a writer to pull focus enough to put something into words? Nothing can stop me from writing – nothing except the inchoate rage I often feel, confronting the collapse of society and the isolation of pandemic. Still I try.
My generation (X) submitted our social contracts. Every message we received about our future selves was based on fulfilling the social contract as set forth. If you got good grades, you would be accepted to college; if you received a college degree, you were guaranteed a job at a good living wage; if you followed through with all that, you would receive promotions, better opportunities, and higher income; if you were even more ambitious, maybe obtaining a graduate degree, the world was your oyster. We believed this was true for people of color, as well as Whytes, if not totally equally. That is, if you lived until someone dropped a nuclear bomb. That was the pervasive, constant threat: nuclear warfare will annihilate the Earth and everything you knew. Under these conditions, was attempting to fulfill the social contract even worth it?
Worth it or not, the social contract was broken. None of those things previously described will help you. And, as an artist, you are now only a fool with no means to make a living. You must be working two days jobs and have a side hustle, or basic human rights like food and shelter will elude you. No one in our parents’ generation prepared us for this – not one voice exclaiming this outcome cried out.
Generation X, the middle-aged people who should be in power, are not. We should have noticed that the goals of our elected officials and political parties were turning to self-interest and corporate alliance. We should have stepped in and put ourselves up for representation and election. We voted, but did not understand that this was no longer a practice of democracy. In many ways, we are the ones to blame.
All our money went into the coffers of the banks and the hungry maws of the 1%. But to what purpose? What did Capitalism, which raged basically unchecked for two centuries, do for us? Now that it has failed, what is left? Certainly not the “trickle down,” or the understanding that the good, Christian rich must give back to the society that made them. That idea started to be let go in the mid-twentieth century, and was all but ballyhoo by the beginning of the 21st.
American society was developed to serve the (typically already wealthy) individual. Indeed, Individualism is the strongest ideal we have. But to what aim? What good is money, if the individual stands alone with no one to share it? Money has not served to make these 1% happy; in fact, most billionaires are less happy than the rest of us, who are now grasping at crumbs. Post-election, Donald Trump is effectively invisible – even Capitalist megalomaniacs have become depressed and live in fear. How did the acquisition of piles money so high they can never be spent become our most important, indeed, our only, purpose?
The COVID pandemic has made all this terrifyingly obvious. Yes, the rich have access to medical care, and thus usually survive the disease if contracted. But everyone at every echelon of society has been imprisoned in panic for over a year. A virus can’t tell rich from poor.
But things feel a little better now that Joe Biden has been voted into the Executive Office. Don’t they? What about the Democratic Party, the frumpy little sister to the surgically augmented GOP? Expecting Democratic leadership to be able to change anything now is like betting your entire bank account on a lotto scratch card. The United States and all the nations that look to it for leadership and trade will be in crisis for decades to come. If the United States insists that its democracy can only offer Free Market Capitalism, then it is not a democracy. A democracy necessitates choice – where is the choice between Capitalism Dark Roast and Capitalism Lite? Capitalism, United States style, likes to keep The People where they can control them: needy, undereducated, and unhappy.
What’s it like for a woman in this climate? Retrograde and servile - despite any professional achievements, degrees, or your lifelong drudging toward the social contract. The backtracking from rights already won runs from deeply disappointing to tragic. If you want to show women how little they’re worth, put them back in the home. Women still earn $0.75 on the dollar in comparison to men; it makes sense that the higher wage-earner continues to work while the woman toils at home, trying to educate the virtually imprisoned children, and deal with all matters of family life, over a screen. Give women no money and no social support, because that would be anti-Capitalist; control their bodies by how and when they are allowed to procreate; and make them feel like they will be solely responsible for God knows what traumas our children will experience through this, because it is always the mother who is culpable. If you are a woman over 40, the message is clear: get out of the way and let someone else take that job you’re qualified for, because you expect to earn a living wage. If you die of COVID, or just from not being able to receive medical care, because most of us don’t have any – your body is literally refuse to dispose. Women are human garbage.
Speaking of unhappiness, I recently realized I no longer feel happy. Ever. Either the knot in my chest and stomach are tight, or slightly looser than tight. Those are the two feelings. And I am one of the lucky ones: the home I own is paid off, my son goes to school in person, and my family has enough to eat. To be clear, I am not generally an unhappy or depressed person. It’s not my brain chemistry default. But my life experiences have shown me that an environment of crisis will create unhappiness and depression in anyone who lives it day after day. The isolation of quarantine; the lack of fair remuneration for work delivered; no education for our children, except those, like my son, who are very lucky; the sadness of the sick and homeless wandering the streets because nowhere is safe. Is this the freedom they told us Capitalism would grant? Is this the glory we would feel once we achieved “all for me” Individualism? They lied. No one is free until all oppression is broken.
Here’s what I’m focusing on for the remainder of 2021:
Renewed: hope
compassion
abundance
change
Less death and hate!
Can the decent among us agree that these are valid goals?
Change is action, not the empty symbolism of placards or social media postings. Look to your local community for grassroots ways to help. Change is The People, all of us - united.
Take the slow movement back into the outside world as a chance to envision a better life than the ones our governments expect us to accept.
The Child Within - Yikes
I sit in COVID-19 quarantine, sometimes imagining the best-case scenario of our release. At best it is an era of renewed hope, a green future, and a return to simpler pleasures. In this New Age, one may be recommended to reconnect with “the child within.” The child within does not need money, status symbols, or getting loaded. Social interactions are plain and straightforward. The child within likes things natural. The child within is rainbows and waterfalls, cabbages and kings.
Except that sometimes, the terrain of the child within is a freakin’ scary place. I’m not even talking about diabolical spring of parent-induced trauma.
For example, remember the routines you had to put yourself through to mentally maintain some kind of control of your surroundings, which you were usually helpless to understand? Habits that would cause a diagnosis of serious obsessive-compulsive disorder in an adult? Not only were there times when you could absolutely not step on any cracks in the sidewalk, but you would have to repeat certain movements or thoughts a prescribed number of times in order to save your mother from dying, or to prevent something equally terrifying from happening. How about the lunacy of verbally repeating or reading words over and over until they appear to be utter nonsense? That one could be kind of fun, until the terrifying realization that nothing is as it appears to be settles in. How about the one where you lie in bed at night imagining infinity? You lay there in the dark, thinking about the universe, and try to get your head around the meaning of never-ending. The existential angst that this produces may not be a desirable re-visitation.
The primal rage of the child within is especially frightening in its lack of control or understanding of its origins. I remember having tantrums in which the blood-boiling anger verged on the homicidal. During one tantrum, I threw the contents of my room into a great pile in the middle of the floor, with visions of torching it all. How does a small child even have these impulses? Does anyone really want to re-visit this violence and fear that is an innate aspect of the child within?
Certain children’s entertainment programming induced a kind of primal fear, a cloying existential creepiness that was downright terrifying, and lingers to corrupt the existing child within. Bruno Bettelheim as well as other child psychologists have made careers out of delving into the notion of how children’s entertainment, in his case fairy tales, purposely tap into the creeping fear of children so that they can be trained and controlled.
Certainly this was true of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. An adult for more decades than I can believe, I still have nightmares about the repellent Child Catcher. I experienced this same kind of terror once watching one of my favorite after-school programs, Speed Racer. A usually benign show, during this particular episode I succumbed to unstrung shrieking, and ran to my dad in the living room, who was perplexed that a tough kid could be so scared watching something so banal. But he didn’t see it. The sequence had to do with someone you love turning on you and becoming evil. It is a frightening archetype of what one actually has to deal with if one has intimate relationships with drunks, drug addicts, or the mentally unstable. Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, I have found this clip of Speed Racer, and I have to say, the creeping horror still spooks me and my child within:
TRIXIE’S DREAM
My husband, a childhood Dr. Who fanatic, describes feeling the creeping existential horror he felt fairly frequently upon viewing his favorite program. This was a show that, though frequently frightening to even adults, was broadcast at 5:30pm on Saturdays, a children’s timeslot.
He was also freaked by a certain episode of Space: 1999. Upon viewing it, the child within me indeed recoils:
DRAGON’S DOMAIN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tbXhu09m5s
Me and my child within have regressed into a quivering fetal position under the bed, hiding from the bogeyman in the closet.
The Blurry Line Between Urban Artist-Collector and Dangerous Pack Rat
This was originally written for The Economist online, but never published. Since its writing, clearing out hoarded homes has become this cleanliness obsessive’s undesired but default specialty (made much more complicated by the return of bedbugs to the US). Let’s just say, I am a very dutiful friend and family member. One person’s garbage is another person’s treasure, indeed. But most of it is garbage.
*******
When I was a child an elderly artist couple lived in the duplex next door. They sometimes hired me for menial, labor-intensive tasks that emanated from an endless array of items that would emerge from their darkened apartment, such as shelling buckets of walnuts, or rolling pennies stored in pickle jars. Ruth and Chet often joined me in these tasks at which I labored on our shared porch, aware that I would never be able to conquer the sheer volume on my own. A strange smell of moldering paper with a hint of cat urine wafted from their door. One day, I was invited to venture inside. Narrow trails led from room to room, but no other spaces in the rooms were accessible; piles of junk, much of it newspapers and books, filled every area. I wondered where they conducted the tasks of daily living, such as cooking, sleeping, or bathing. This was my first encounter with the urban pack rat, or hoarder, as they are empirically known.
As a New Yorker, I have observed a type of pack rat that may exist primarily in a metropolitan environment: people who define themselves as artists, and view their hoarding as a form of collecting vital to their process of living outside of society’s expectations. These folks bunker themselves from external surroundings that they perceive to be hostile and alienating by hoarding. Though hoarders exist in all settings, the urban pack rat artist could be a unique variety, and their members are legion.
Hoarding, or disposophobia (fear of throwing anything away) has only recently come to the attention of the medical establishment, and is defined therein as a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Brain imaging of hoarders has displayed variations in cerebral glucose levels that differ from non-hoarders. But defining pack rats merely as medical specimens is removing them from a cultural context. One pack rat I know says that he developed this lifestyle because this was how he grew up. His family were scientists and artists who constantly gathered materials for study, piling them in the confines of the apartment. He points out that before the information age and the internet, it was difficult to procure data unless the materials of study were present. Indeed, a common creative personality is one that thrives only when surrounded by material chaos.
Can a line be drawn between collector and pack rat? Collectors seem to be individuals who curate their collections, and impose an order on what could become chaos. In a pack rat, the process of editing and curation seems absent; the items they hoard often carry little aesthetic value, and are meaningful only to them. To the rest of us, their stuff seems like garbage at best. At worst, it is a public safety issue.
No New York legend is more intriguing than that of the Collyer Brothers, two recluses whose Harlem brownstone was broken into by the police in 1947 when it was reported that one of the brothers had died. Tons of personal effects and trash that had accumulated over decades were hauled from the building as local citizens watched in stunned disbelief. The Collyer Brothers were not ignorant miscreants, but highly educated scions of a culturally elite family. In their crammed surroundings they created an alternative world of their own existence. Is this not a creative expression on some level, a collection?
No, says Robin Zasio, Psy.D., director of the Anxiety Treatment Center in Sacramento, CA, and a specialist on hoarding. “In my opinion, there is no inherent value in being a pack rat. Hoarding is a behavior that is driven by anxiety and fear. If they don’t acquire the item, the hoarder fears the experience of discomfort of not having it.”
One of my dearest friends is an interior designer and antiques dealer, highly sought after for his impeccable taste. His holdings include beguiling examples of furniture, ephemera, dolls, and taxidermy from days gone by. I would define him as a collector, as he possesses curating skills. But he sometimes has difficulty discarding of things that most of us consider crap. We have been in the process of vacating a Catskills farm that we have shared for years, and the details of what should be kept and what should be thrown away have become objects of heated dispute. I viewed the dozens of mildewed bed pillows as health hazards destined for the bonfire, while my friend argued some kind of sentimental attachment to them. In the end, I managed to wrest them from his hands and throw them on the pyre when he wasn’t looking.
At the further end of the spectrum are folks like Ruth and Chet, people who perambulate by using tiny trails through each room, or have closed off rooms when they became too gobbled up to be used any longer. This is no minor statement in New York City, where small living spaces necessitate minimal domestic accumulation. In the co-op building where a friend lives, whom I’ll call Mark, such a pack rat occupant has been causing problems. The vermin, dust, and mold that are the by-products of hoarding are considered health and safety risks by the neighbors. Mark, a collected artist, is particularly concerned that a fire could start in the pack rat’s apartment, spreading to his own, where he stores irreplaceable work. Knowing that the pack rat in question is also an artist, I ask Mark if it is not her right to collect material? “No,” sighs Mark resolutely. “Her habits come from the fear of having nothing, from the fear of having no self-identity, which she believes the stuff around her provides. She keeps herself in the safety of her denial. She has an addiction.”
Dr. Zasio concurs. “Someone who collects tends to engage in this behavior for pleasure. Hoarding is a condition that tends to get out of control. Mold can begin to grow, causing toxicity in the environment. These factors can present dangers to the community.”
Yet as a study of outsider culture, pack rats fascinate. Maurice, a man who began frequenting Greenwich Village circa 1905 and bore a striking resemblance to Walt Whitman, was one of the neighborhood’s best-loved characters. His hoarding was triggered by the death of his girlfriend, when he began visiting buildings on the Upper East Side to collect cast-off books from the wealthy. When a fire destroyed his first hoarded apartment, he promptly began a second. Upon being evicted from the second apartment for being a safety hazard, Maurice stored his books and sundries in the public lockers that then lined the subway platforms. Maurice was required to spend all day inserting quarters into innumerable lockers to insure the protection of his collection. Because of his hoarding, Maurice was more or less personally responsible for the removal of subway lockers.
A dismaying display of pathology, or an eccentric creative need to preserve the detritus of our culture? The line between pack rat and urban artist-collector is disputed and obscure.