Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Chance Booty

The secret lives of storage units

By Kelle X. Lawrence

The usual suspects were gathered at a storage unit auction one November morning at a Portland Storage facility in the eastside warehouse district near the Willamette River. About twenty men and one woman stood in the loading dock area of the facility holding flashlights that they'll use to discern a name brand or the distinguishing mark on a dresser that might be Chippendale or china that might be Waterford. Bidders also look for boxes, because people who put their stuff neatly in boxes might be doing so because the contents are worth more.

Chris Keller is one of the usual suspects. Short, handsome, and full of charm, Keller buys unclaimed storage units and sells anything of value at yard sales or on eBay and Craigslist. Unlike many of the avid auction goers, auctions are not Keller's main source of income. He has a small photography business that ebbs and flows with his level of interest and the intensity of his dating and musical life. By purchasing a "good" unit, he can make enough to live for a few months and sell stuff from his home when necessary.

He calls this line of work "legal piracy." After three months of nonpayment on a storage unit, it goes up for auction. Winning bidders, who aren't allowed to enter a unit prior to bidding, must purchase the entire contents of each unit and clear them out within twenty-four hours.

Keller says it's dirty, backbreaking work. "I think you have to be a little crazy or a little trashy to get into this business," he says. Yet it seems to be the chance for elusive treasure, the proverbial bag of gold that lures bidders back again and again. It's appealing on multiple levels--like Keno, Let's Make a Deal, and Treasure Island rolled into one, or for anyone who likes to rummage through other people's medicine cabinets.

For each unit he wins, Keller pieces together the lives of the former owners. "There's always super-personal shit in them," he says. "Legal documents, court papers, photographs, sometimes people's whole lives." The first storage unit he bought had been rented by a man who had a string of domestic violence convictions and was sent to prison. When Keller entered it, he almost knocked over a bottle of urine. "I think he spent the night in there at some point figuring out what to do or hiding from the law," Keller says.

There was another unit he purchased that had an expensive little cart for helping the elderly and disabled. There was a note taped to it asking that it be left because a relative needed it. So Keller left it. He has a collection of strangers' home movies from the units he has purchased, and he tries to remember the names of people who owned things he chooses to keep for himself. "Someone will come to my house and say, 'Where did you get those cool magnets?' and I'll say, 'Those are Julie's. She was a geologist.' And they'll say, 'Is she your ex-girlfriend or something?' And I'll say, 'No. I never met her.'" Almost everything in his house reminds him of people he's never met.

Keller doesn't have a truck and doesn't drive, so his mom usually goes with him to the auctions. Today's auction is silent, so each prospective buyer carries a pile of bid sheets, one for each of the units for sale. At the appointed start time, the group is herded down a narrow concrete hallway to a gigantic freight elevator that will take them to a unit that may contain the fabled goldmine. As the potential buyers ride in the elevator, they quip about how many vibrators they've found and who recently landed a unit worth thousands. When the elevator opens, the storage unit employee, decked out in black Carhartts with two silver hoops through his bottom lip and two huge spikes crossed vertically and horizontally through each of his ears, announces that the unit up for auction is 20' by 20'. The crowd's expectation is palpable: large units cost more to rent, and the more money shelled out by a former owner, the more valuables it may contain.

The door slides open. Bidders don't need to use their flashlights because this unit has windows and the sunlight streams in lighting up the clouds of dust that twinkle like stars above the junk piled in virtually every available inch of space--a broken wooden door, an upended faded couch, sheets of plywood, a stack of sixteen industrial plastic buckets, a broken fan, an abused-looking boom box, a headless mop, the drawers from a chest of drawers, one of which holds a straw hat from a Carnival Cruise "Mexican" party. And, of course, there is a mattress.

"You can buy a mattress and box spring at any old place for ninety-nine bucks these days, yet every fool will pay forty bucks a month to store it," says Keller disparagingly. He eyes the unit, guessing that "89 percent of it is pure crap" although it seems like no one has been in it for a long time--one of the promising signs an experienced bidder like Keller looks for, because someone who can afford to store their stuff for months without needing to dig through it might have more disposable income. In the Portland area, a lot of meth addicts end up homeless and put their stuff in storage, returning to sell anything they can. Those are the kinds of units one wants to avoid. There is also the smell test. "If it stinks, you know it belongs to somebody who didn't give a shit," he says. "Or else they've been living in it, and you know they're broke."

Keller sees a waterbed frame--he is tempted, but the work of unloading a chock-full 20' by 20' unit holds him back. Most facilities don't allow the use of their dumpsters, so that means unloading and hauling the worthless stuff to the dump--an extra expense and unwanted financial setback if a bidder doesn't uncover anything valuable enough to cover the unit cost.

Keller can romantically call his line of work piracy, but it's much more like gambling. The external factors that come into play are all speculative--richer people tend to use particular facilities, women tend to have nicer stuff and take better care of it, a visible antique means more antiques, a unit with more furniture holds better value than one with lots of clothes. Like poker, it seems to be about 5 percent art form, 10 percent people's predictability, and 85 percent chance.

Eyeing the storage unit once more, gauging the amount of worthless stuff visible, and the time it will take to clear out, Keller decides to pass and guesses that the unit will probably sell for around $400. The auctioneer calls for last bids and then announces the winning price of $412.

Bidders return to the freight elevator with an increased sense of urgency. The first unit's value is questionable and buyers are worrying that their day will be fruitless. They rush out the doors to view Unit 4226, which is a shocking disappointment: it is piled with cheap women's clothes, some standard household items like a '60s split-level end table, an electric fan, and a cloth magazine rack. Keller laughs, "That looks exactly like a bunch of crap from yard sales or the Goodwill bins. She probably moved here from somewhere else, bought all that second hand to set up house for a bit and split town. She was probably a college student or something. Hell, leaving it here is cheaper than going to the dump."

Keller says he can always tell the age of the renter because people of the same age have the same stuff. "I was so excited when I found my first Dukes of Hazzard lunch box, but since then I have found at least five," he says. "Those folks are my age--early '30s. And if they have furniture, they all have that kidney-shaped coffee table they picked up second-hand. Then there are all the rock t-shirts--a lot of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest stuff and real glass rock buttons from the '70s." Keller gets a lot of collectible books from units rented by older people: he has five collectable editions of Moby Dick. "It's kind of depressing everybody has the same shit," he says solemnly.

Keller has also found disturbing things in storage units. One contained boxes of white supremacy propaganda and anti-Semitic children's books with underlined passages. "I just imagined some creepy guy reading that shit to his poor kid. Did he repeat the underlined passages or what?" says Keller. In another unit, he found handcuffs, antique gynecological equipment, and other antique medical devices like saws and scalpels. With things like that Keller is stuck with the ethical question of what to do with it. After a very brief personal moral struggle, it usually goes on eBay. He is in this for the money after all. The anthropological aspects are just added benefits.

The last unit opened is even sadder. It is a small unit barely larger than a closet. It is one of the units with a window, and when the door is opened, a beautiful ray of sunlight, a God ray, shines out into the dingy hall and brightly illuminates the one item in the unit--a stained, sagging, Barney-purple couch standing on its end. This doesn't offer any insight as to why people store what they do. Who dragged that ugly couch all the way to the fourth floor of a storage facility and paid to keep it there? What did it mean to its owner? And after such effort, what does it mean to lose it? A bidder buys it for a dollar.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities