The hoarder.

In the year and a half that I’ve lived in my Los Feliz apartment, I never saw the woman who lived across the street, downstairs from my friends the flamboyant Southern boys. The shades were always drawn. It was like Willy Wonka’s factory: nobody ever went in, and nobody ever went out. The only indication, indeed, that anyone even lived there was a sign tacked to the front door a few months ago, when the landlady was remodeling another apartment in the building (which is, by the way, one of those cute olde-Hollywood Spanish-style suckers with a red tiled roof and whitewashed walls). The sign basically said, “If you’re not a cop with a warrant in your grubby little mitts, stay the FUCK out of my apartment!”

I guess someone had infringed on her privacy.

Well, last week I found out why. The first sign that anything was amiss was the week-long yard sale, tended by...no one. The invisible tenant was holding a yard sale! But she was nowhere around. For days I gazed across the street, puzzled – that the stuff (books, dishes, fax machine, computer, stereo, a broken couch, a mountain of odds and ends) was still there, and that people weren’t just carting it off wholesale. I’d never experienced a weeklong yard sale before, moreover one that wasn’t presided over by somebody.

Then my neighbors filled me in on the gossip. The tenant had been evicted. She was, it turns out, a hoarder. I feel like I should put it in capitals. A HOARDER. Now, I’ve heard about the crazy people with stacks of newspapers up to the ceiling, but I’ve never seen a real hoarder’s nest. I figured it was only old crotchety men in lightless tenements who practiced that particular brand of weirdness, not middle-aged, seemingly intelligent (if a bit short-tempered) women in high-end neighborhoods. Well, two days into the sale, going in search of someone to sell me a couple of books, I got a glimpse inside this woman’s apartment, and my jaw dropped. Filthy carpet covered in gunk, stacks of old pizza and takeout boxes and empty gallon cat litter containers, STUFF piled up underfoot and against the walls in a disorderly jumble. Stuff everywhere. And it stank.

Turns out, too, that the tenant had successfully fended off the landlady for three or four years, despite being taken to court more than once and causing the landlady a stiff fine by the fire department last year. It took a lot of time, effort and dogged determination to uproot this woman from the apartment she had taken over so thoroughly, like a a crop of mushrooms, all connected at the root.

Later, after the sheriff had locked Ms. Hoarder out, after she’d driven off with two U-Hauls full of stuff, and the landlady had brought in a fleet of Got Junk? trucks to haul off her junk, I walked through the apartment gingerly, under the guise of maybe being interested in it myself – after it had been fully fumigated, smudged with sage, and exorcised by an Orthodox priest. The front bedroom was still – now this is after filling four Got Junk? trucks – still so full of stuff that there was no way of getting to the bed. Evidently this poor woman had, by default, been sleeping on the living room sofa. There were still mirrors, pictures and a dozen handbags hanging from the wall of the other bedroom, a filthy bathroom full of bath products, a filthy kitchen full of stuff, and all over the stained carpet miscellaneous piles of framed pictures, wire organizer containers (the irony!), clothes and tchotchkes and furniture. And an entire garage filled to the door and ceiling with more junk.

It’s creepy. It’s disturbing. I couldn’t help but understand the disgust of my gossiping neighbors. Their whispers were thrilled and horrified. We raised eybrows with the Got Junk? guys. We made sympathetic faces to the landlady. There was a general “thank god she’s gone” sentiment. Sweep the dirt somewhere else. It – she – doesn’t belong in our upper-middle-class enclave of Pottery Barn-perfect homes.

It's awful and sad. I know hoarding is a symptom of mental illness. I can’t imagine the burden of being this woman (I came home, glanced around my own messy apartment nervously and set to work cleaning it with zeal). Although her former apartment is being slowly, laboriously cleared out, remodeled and steam-cleaned to within an inch of its life, she took her illness with her. How soon will those two U-Haul loads of stuff morph into another two-bedroom apartment so jam-packed that she won’t be able to forge a trail from the kitchen to the bathroom? Is she in treatment? Is she ever going to be okay? I thought how scary it must have been to be locked out by the cops while there was still so much of her STUFF inside. She’d been given plenty of notice, but, I suppose predictably for someone in her condition, she hadn’t swung into action until it was too late.

And you want to know the capper, the thing that makes the whole situation just shimmer with weirdness?

The woman is a MAID.