One person’s treasure

One of a meter reader’s underrated skills is the ability to move quickly through other people’s worlds, sometimes sweeping through nearly 100 homes in a day. There were the regulars with whom I kept up a running conversation for months. Old ladies in housecoats. Retired guys who would wait for me like it was the highlight of their day – at least until the mailman's arrival. A woman I went to high school with, now married and with kids who, if she recognized me, never let on. The woman with her elderly parents in side-by-side hospital beds in the living room. The older couple who always apologized for the state of their basement with references to the Collyer Brothers. We’d carry on our brief monthly conversation, then say pretty much the same things 30 days later.

Otherwise, I spent most of each day in basements, garages, closets hidden behind knotty pine paneling, apartment house laundry rooms – the places where people left the stuff they didn’t want to look at, deal with, had no room for, outgrew or forgot about.

In an ancient basement in Bayonne, old comic books spilled haphazardly out of a plastic garbage bag. Old Marvels from ’61, ’62. Early issues of the Fantastic Four. Spider-Man. The Hulk. I thought about returning to the house and claiming I was in the neighborhood looking to buy old stuff and did they have anything, maybe old comic books, they wanted to sell? It was a fleeting fantasy. I could never find the house again, let alone find my way to Bayonne.

A shuttered candy store was another Bayonne treasure palace. A grim black woman accompanied me inside and stood watch as I read the meters. It wasn’t until I looked around that I realized the reason for the high-security paranoia. The place was literally a step back into time, with old soda and tobacco advertising signs and so much stuff on the shelves I couldn’t make it all out. But for sure, there were boxes of old baseball cards and freaking Disneyland trading cards – rare as hen’s teeth as a coworker used to say. Places like that just don’t exist anymore, at least not on the East Coast.

Somebody in Washington Township had albums in a box under the meter. Right in front was Sgt. Pepper with the yellow band across the top stating it was MONO, which nobody bought; everyone wanted the stereo version. The stuff of legend back in the 80s (the mono version offered different mixes so that some instruments and other effects were more pronounced) today the album exists on YouTube for your listening enjoyment.

Scattered on a table in Hackensack was the record collection of another woman I’d gone to school with, all Motown and Stax singles, each with her name written on the label.

And there were the magazine hoarders. Stacks of LIFE in a house in Teaneck. Over to horny Hillsdale where one guy had boxes and boxes of porn (heterosexual) in the basement. Just down the street – and fittingly in a closet – a neighbor kept his stack of gay porn near the gas meter.

An inexplicably random Supercar Golden Book next to a meter in Hillsdale. Cartons of junky knockoff toys in a Teaneck basement (G.I. Jeff figures anyone?), probably overstock from a five and dime store. In an industrial maintenance supply store in Hackensack that always smelled of floor wax, a sign in the basement for Hobby Land – a remembrance of what the store had been in the 50s and 60s, with its memorable electric train layout.

In a well-lit, neat cellar in Maywood, there was a dead raccoon stretched out on the floor. When I told the homeowner, he replied, “I know.” I shrugged and moved on to the next house.