Dirty Dave found an old Pac-Man board game amid this heap of trash.

Dirty Dave has been a little tough to take lately. Around a week ago, I received a phone call from a production studio in California. They work for a television program called “Taboo,” which is part of the Nat Geo network.  ”We’re doing a special on jobs that nobody in their right mind would want to do,” the voice on the other end told me. “We’d like to feature DuAll on our show.”

Dirty Dave’s eyes lit up. “I’m gonna be a star,” the guru of garbage said. And he well might be. There will be a crew with us for the next couple of days, documenting DuAll as we clean out a house that is full of animal waste and that features a sewer backup that exploded out of a basement toilet. Just the job for Dirty Dave.

“Pete, I want you to walk me down the red carpet,” he said. I doubt it’ll reach such elegant extremes. I also doubt that if Dirty Dave actually were on a red carpet, he’d want me as his arm candy. Regardless, he’ll have to move into a bigger office now in order to accommodate his newly swollen head. He’s on top of the world. At least in the world of garbage.

Can you guess what this is?

Today’s photo contest isn’t as evident as some of the past ones, so I’ll offer you a clue:

Salt and ice

Would make things nice

For connoisseurs of old.

Today these coils

Will almost boil

To keep libations cold.

 

You'd never know it from the street, but this house was packed with garbage.

It was an unassuming house, a two-story affair with three bedrooms and two baths. It sits on a quiet residential street in a small town in southern Minnesota, and looks like a stalwart example of the rural American ideal. Until you open the red door to the front porch.

The porch.

We were fortunate to get this house in the winter. The cold helps to keep the odors at bay, and even with a sub-freezing day brewing around us, the stench from this porch was overpowering. Dirty Dave doubled over and could not contain his retching. And this was just the front door.

The living room.

There was no visible floor space in the entire house. Instead, it appeared that the occupants threw everything on the floor: chicken bones, coffee grounds, pizza boxes, tissue paper, clothes. To move from room to room was an exercise in trash surfing.

The kitchen counter.

No space was spared. The cupboards were full; the bathroom, packed.

I decided not to take anything home for myself.

The master bath.

It was a never-ending misadventure in filth. Each room had its own character, and its own details.

The family room.

We found the vacuum, unused, amid the trash.

What would Bob Vila say?

The downstairs was bad. The upstairs did not disappoint, either.

Yes, those are feathers.

Closer examination revealed a bit about the habits of the occupant of this room.

Time and money to burn, apparently.

What this photo does not show is the dozens of soda pop bottles littered among the refuse. Each bottle was filled with urine.

The rest of the house was much the same: a garage packed with garbage; bedrooms full of trash; a basement full of bricks and clothes and junk. We loaded up a cube truck twice and a large dump trailer three times before we had reached the floors.

In cases like these, there isn’t much goofing around. We show up to work. The less time we have to spend in a mess like this, the better. We had six guys out to this job, and we were on site for less than six hours. We even managed to clean the place before we left.

The living room, after.

Mirsad Kekic, a true DuAll Star, tackles the kitchen sink.

Dirty Dave works on the bathroom.

The master bedroom, cleaned.

As good as it's gonna get.

Then it was back to the shop. In upcoming days, I’ll show you some pics of the cat-poop house that I saw today. Oh, and I also checked out a sewer backup. All in a day’s work.

Welcome home.

I was fortunate enough to be able to get out of the office and work at this garbage house yesterday. Unfortunately, that means that I’m behind on my paperwork, so until I finish my clerical duties, I’ll leave you with this snapshot of my yesterday. I’ll return later to do a formal post on the experience.

I'm not sure, but this looks like an evil-natured Deceptacon.

Nobody could get to the lamp. As much as the teeming masses yearned to purchase a tropical-themed lamp, nobody could get close enough to exchange $65 for the light-throwning power of this fashionable item. The robot would not allow it. Charged with protecting everything on the glass end table, this pugnacious Transformer threatened to vaporize anyone who dared run off with the prized piece.

How to defeat such an evil-natured robot? I turned to The Flaming Lips for advice, and perhaps I’ll enlist the help of Yoshimi. If she can’t do it, we’re in trouble. It could be our first unsuccessful trashout ever.

It just doesn't add up.

I know what it is, but I don’t know how it works. This dinosaur from offices past was forgotten in a bedroom in the suburbs. It’s a Victor adding machine, a mechanical precursor to the calculator. I had previously only seen them in movies, where an accountant wearing a visor, with a pencil behind his ear, would bang at the keys, pull a lever, and rip off a slip of paper much like a cashier’s receipt.

The adding machine is a nearly forgotten piece of business life. It has gone the way of the three-martini lunch, ashtrays at every desk, and the keypunch. It is now nothing more than a quaint relic to a more primitive time.

The ever-elusive concept of monogamy.

I love people watching. As I watch the huddled masses trundle past, I make up stories about them. I see an overly made-up, aging woman and I come up with an fictitious life history, all the way from when she came in second at the Roseville Elementary School talent show, to when she was an extra in a Mountain Dew commercial, to teaching drama back at Roseville Middle School. Or I see a young man in a backwards baseball cap, and I imagine he’s walking down the sidewalk at the exact pace of a Nickleback song. Some people listen to music in public. I like to stare at the public.

In our homes, though, the people are gone. Instead, all I find is artifacts, a smattering of details that someone left behind. From these clues I like to form a vision in my head of who the person was who left this stuff behind.

The above sign provoked just such a thought process in me. I won’t share my vision here. Instead, I’ll leave it to you to infer who posted this sign, and why.

It's not a hot market for plastic robot dogs.

At the house with the sketchy frog in the basement, this plastic pup stayed upstairs. He didn’t seem particularly ferocious; indeed, he sought refuge in the shadow of a hymnal. Ten dollars proved to rich for this piece of… well, what is it? Do you put coins in his mouth, and have the mechanical canine store them for you, like a doggie bank? Does it understand basic voice commands, like “sit,” “speak,” and “guard the hymnal?” Or is it part of a psychologist’s experiment, like a modern version of Harry Harlow’s wire-vs-terrycloth monkey study? I asked this fellow to speak, but he shared nothing with me, and not even my threats of tossing him in a garbage bag and taking him to the dump loosened his resolve. Too bad for him. My threats are not empty. I took care of the insolent devil.

Yeah, so what?

I would say that eighteen dollars for a clay frog with a flippant expression is a bit steep, which is probably why this warty wanker stayed on the shelf after everybody had left the premises.

He was downstairs, leaning against a candle, surveying the unfinished basement, looking relaxed but ready to jump into the mix should the situation call for it. While we were there he didn’t move, although he did ask Dirty Dave for a cigarette. When Dave told the frog he didn’t have any, the amphibian got cute and started hopping around, unleashing his tongue. We had to bag the salty fellow, and because nobody wanted him as a donation, he ended up in the dump. Who’s the tough guy now, frog?