"Aspirational" (text version)

the story of a beautiful stranger-hoarder and her dog

Collage by katymcclellan.substack.com

One aspect of dog walking that I had not anticipated, or given any particular thought to before beginning the job, was the volume of empty Brooklyn apartments I would see on my dog-walking route.

What I have come to see in New York is that the apartments of strangers, vacant of the people who pay to live in them, inhabited at 4 o’clock by only a mute and restless dog, contain and illuminate vast troves of vulnerability.

The apartments of friends don’t hold the same kind of intel. Your opinion of your friend’s apartment is colored by all that you know of who they are. But the apartment of a stranger, empty of their influence in the flesh, tells a story of yearning, of aspiration.

Each vase and tchotchke rings with a mood, a fleeting idea, now made permanent, of whom they thought they’d become if they bought it. The chore charts of young children, with stickers placed on their completed tasks, the finance bro with a messy loft, his fifteen freshly dry-cleaned sky blue shirts, and the coffee-lined mug in his sink that reads, “I work to give my dog a better life.”

I got into this line of work for the dogs and the exercise, but, inevitably, I am haunted by the humans of Brooklyn, unable to stop their empty apartments from divulging their stories to me.

I’ve seen bondage equipment and sex toys, but only once. Most of what I see isn’t explicitly personal. However, it’s the mundane objects that tell me who the person truly is. Mostly what I see is longing and contradiction. Self-help books surrounded by junk food, a thousand cat toys for a cat who only sleeps, liquor collections robustly well-stocked next to refrigerators holding only canned dog food and one ancient, sighing broccoli.

Some apartments brim with positive energy! Many do. Most are neutral, but it’s not those that make an impression years later. What I have seen of how people live in Brooklyn with their dogs is that their dog is providing, unwittingly, a critical mental health service. I believe that, as a dog walker, I am a (super low stakes) first responder, allowing the hard-working and occasionally drowning people of Brooklyn to hold onto their last vestige of the natural world, the descendant of a long ago wolf, their pet dog.

In my experience over the years, hoarders tend to live in the nicest and most expensive buildings. The first hoarder apartment I went to was in a spectacular Brooklyn high rise. It was a journey to find the correct elevator bank and when I arrived at the cloistered apartment, a cutting-edge modern code system served as the key, sleek in design and ASMR-like in the delicate way that it locked and unlocked.

The door opened gently, like a satin ribbon sliding off a pressed tablecloth, and there it was, an apartment that seized my heart like a gas pain. The sink was overflowing with dishes, not dirty dishes, which could have, charitably speaking, given the home a sense of coziness, that lived-in feel, but rather the sink was overflowing with pots and pans, possibly never used, but stored there. Junk mail plastered the enviably ample counter space, along with catalogues, auto loans, Amazon packages in various states of undress.

Canned food and all manner of unopened boxed food products, clothes scattered to and fro and, notably, expensive clothes: Helmut Lang boxes, jewelry boxes. Mess, but the mess of a very high earner. A greeting card and a gift basket — something about ‘colleagues thinking of you’ in a place of prominence on a deluged coffee table. I wondered if the card and basket were recent or had sat there for months, from a markedly difficult time that had smudged from past, to present, to always.

The dog's food and water lived in one uncluttered corner of the home, a hallway that looked calmer and sparer than the hurricane of the living room.

This is a trend I've noticed. When people's apartments are in disarray, they still take pains to shield the dog, or the dog represents something aspirational. Their ability, if not to nurture themselves, then to nurture another.

It's painful for me to enter the homes of the mentally ill among us. People who no doubt, if I hadn't seen their home, would believe them to be thriving.

In the affluent hoarder's home, the little dog, a chihuahua-terrier mix as I recall, bigger than a guinea pig, but not by much, sat atop a Mount Everest of clothing cresting over the couch.

“Hi, sweetie!” I said, calling out the little dog's name in my honeyed dog walker incantation, a name long forgotten to me, but let's call her ‘Frida’ because people in Brooklyn do love to name their terrier mixes Frida.

A strong, brave name for a powerless animal, living in an expensive box surrounded by Louis Vuitton shoes tossed helter-skelter. I leashed up little Frida in her doll-sized harness, but the apartment had made me so heartsick that I found I needed to glance at the pile of unopened mail and bills and see who lived here, alone. Certainly alone because well, you can tell from the shoes. If a woman lives alone, there are many pairs of women's shoes all the same size, very distinct from a yuppie lesbian couple's home, which will have women's shoes, but of two sizes or styles and wedding photos or track lighting or some other sign of taste, energy and agency. The single woman's mail had on it a unique and distinctive name that would be easy to Google.

Out on a slow, puttering walk with the terrier mix, I saw on LinkedIn that Frida's mom was a big deal.

The occupant of this tornado-struck apartment was an internist at a reputable hospital in the area, who it seemed, upon further reading, oversaw lots of other medical practitioners. I thought of all the patients in her care and the medical professionals who must look to her like a goddess, appearing radiant and competent in her LinkedIn profile, and I thought of how no one, no one could ever know her apartment looked like this, with not a half foot of empty space except for the rectangle of a shrine on the floor, where her dog ate and drank over a marigold-colored ShamWow.

I walked Frida around the block as she sniffed and investigated fresh and pungent garbage bags, found a tree to pee under and looked up at me curiously, asking with her dark round eyes, ‘Did I, too, live in trash and boxes from Tiffany's,’ or was it just her lonely internist mom?

Returning to the apartment, it felt cruel to leave the dog, not because of the mess, but because of the loneliness it stirred in me.

Crouching to the floor to wipe Frida's paws, the loneliness seeped into my jacket fibers and the pores of my cold nose, permeating my nostrils and hair strands like cigar smoke. I washed my hands and the faucet drummed on the billowing silver pans.

A thought struck me, and these thoughts always do in the atmospheric apartments of strangers. I thought of her, the woman’s, aging-but-not-yet-too-old parents never being allowed to visit this expensive high rise. I thought of romantic interests, rebuffed because: who could come here?

Your place or mine?

Never, ever mine.

I thought of her touring the building, selecting this apartment, signing the lease.

I want that one: the apartment impossible to find in the elevator bank no one knows to go to.

At the entryway, I blew the dog a kiss and said, certainly to myself, in the dulcet tones I reserve for dogs: “You're a good girl. (Kiss, kiss.) You’ll be okay! Buh-bye, Frida.”

And I closed the door, which latched soundlessly in that seamless, modern way.

**** This woman’s job and the breed of her dog and the dog’s name have all been changed for this story. You don’t know her. I don’t know her.