The Home That Disappeared

A quirky but true story about finding a home.

Howard Greenstein served in Korea for a few years in the late 1960s. Shortly after he was discharged he was put on full disability. He never talked about it. I don’t know what happened, but I can say this: to all appearances there was nothing physically wrong with him. I met Howard in the mid-1970s when I was a grad student in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico.

I lived in an old adobe house with one wall precariously leaning out toward the small garden on the sunny side. The place was slowly disintegrating like many of the aging houses in the student neighborhood near the university. My favorite pastime in those days was sitting on the front porch with a cheese and braunschweiger sandwich in one hand, and a big peanut butter jar full of ice cubes and cheap wine in the other, watching coeds stroll by. Despite persistent and innovative conversation starters yelled across the front lawn, and repeated invitations to join me for a braunschweiger sandwich, I didn’t have much success attracting tan, leggy females.

One day this unkempt guy on a rusty girl’s Schwinn bicycle with balloon tires came slowly pedaling down the street. He glanced in my direction a few times as he was floating toward me, and I stared at him because, frankly, there was nothing else moving on the street. Just as he was about to pass by my place he steered a wide, languid circle in the middle of the street and stopped in front of my house.

“I’m Howard Greenstein”

Still seated on his bike with one foot on the ground, the guy stared at me for a few seconds, smiled broadly, and blurted out, “Hi. How ya doin? I’m Howard Greenstein. I live a few streets away. Yeah, we’re neighbors. You got a nice place here. I see you’ve got a sandwich and a glass of wine. It’s a nice day, isn’t it? What’re you doing, watching the girls? That’s great. I live in a garage in an alley on the other side of Yale, so I ride my bicycle around the neighborhood to meet girls. I met a girl in the library. I see her every now and then. We have nice talks, but she’s married. Well, what are you going to do?” He seemed shorter than average, kind of skinny, had lots of dark brown hair, and spoke in staccato bursts with an unrepentant Philly accent.

Because there wasn’t much going on that afternoon, I invited Howard to leave his bike on the lawn and have a sandwich and a glass of wine. He said he wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t drink alcohol, but he agreed to stay for a while.

We talked a long time that afternoon. Howard told me that he lived in some old lady’s garage in exchange for raking leaves and doing general handyman work. It was a good deal, because before that he had been staying on couches in the homes of different friends. He could only do that for a week or two before he made them feel uncomfortable and knew he had to move on. He said he was pretty good at making new friends, so he never had to sleep in the street. One of those friends owned a house painting business and occasionally paid Howard as an assistant. The extra cash helped him stretch out his monthly disability check.

After our first conversation I ran into Howard two or three times a month. Sometimes he would drive by the house on his bike while I was sitting on the front porch, and he would stop to chat. Other times I would run into him on campus, or at the local supermarket. He always had something to talk about — his latest reading interests at the library, his adventures trying to get a date, the theft of his bike, how he was afraid the his landlord would kick him out of the garage, how his counselor would not do what he wanted, how he got really angry at a clerk in a store and was hauled away by the police, and so on.

Howard needs a favor

One day while sitting on the porch, I watched Howard slowly and laboriously pedal up the street on his elderly bicycle. He left the bike on the grass and slowly approached the porch. He seemed a little more hesitant than usual, a bit preoccupied, but finally he blurted out that he needed a favor. I assumed he wanted another short term loan, as he had occasionally requested in the past, small amounts of money that he usually paid back with the next disability check. This was different.

“Larry, I’m moving into a house near here, but it’s full of junk. There’s a lot of junk in this house. You can’t believe how much junk is in this house, and I can’t move into it until I get rid of the junk. I can’t pay you to help me move the junk into your truck so we can take it to the dump, but I’ll do this: If there is something you want in the house, something we find while we are taking the junk out to your truck, then I’ll give it to you. Maybe a couple of things you want. I’ll make you a deal and give them to you. But can you bring your truck over and help me get this stuff to the dump?”

Back then I owned an enormous, beat up 1963 Chevy panel truck. I bought it for camping and driving around on rough New Mexico roads. I told Howard I could probably help him out, but clearly there was more to this story, and I knew that Howard’s judgment was not always sound. Just to make sure I was not about to become a bit actor in some hairbrained Howard-Greenstein-departs-from-reality scheme, I asked him to explain how he could suddenly afford to move into a house, and how come it was full of junk we had to haul out? As I suspected, it was a Howard Greenstein scheme, but it was just plausible enough that I agreed to help him out. Here is what Howard told me about how he got his new home…

a small, old, decrepit wooden house

A couple blocks over from where I lived, a small, old, decrepit wooden house stood on a lot that long ago had given up its carefully watered and manicured lawn for dry clumps of native desert grasses, stick-like cholla, and low prickly pear cactus. Howard thought the house looked abandoned. I wouldn’t have had any reason to notice it, but I could imagine it. My own place would look a lot like that if the landlord locked the doors and walked away for two or three years.

Howard became very interested in this house. He rode his bike up and down the street staring at the place. It was so old, decrepit and neglected that sometimes he could imagine opening the front door with his own key, walking in, and sitting down on the sofa in the living room — his own living room.

After some weeks passed he decided to walk up one side of the block and down the other, knocking on doors asking neighbors what they knew about the house, its history, its past and present owners. Most people didn’t know anything about the house, or if they did, they didn’t want to talk to the scruffy, prying guy with the Philadelphia accent who came uninvited to their front door. But a couple of neighbors did know something about the house, and they didn’t mind talking with the earnest young man who seemed so interested in the place.

Howard meets with the attorney

The house had belonged to a woman who had lived in it for decades. She had passed away a couple years earlier, and after her death an attorney had come around attempting to gather information from neighbors about certain issues that prevented disposition of the property. After an absent-minded search one neighbor eventually plucked the attorney’s business card off her refrigerator door. Howard scribbled down the name and contact information. A few days later he met with the attorney.

Howard told the attorney everything he had discovered about the house, and asked if his information was accurate. The attorney agreed that the house was caught up in complicated legal issues regarding possible heirs, and it was unclear when these issues would be resolved. Anticipating this kind of response from the attorney, Howard laid out his own carefully reasoned proposal: Due to lack of care the house and the lot were becoming an eyesore in the community. In addition the house was losing value year after year as it sat there without caring tenants to maintain it. Would the attorney be interested in coming to an agreement that would allow Howard to live in the house at no cost, in exchange for making some improvements and preventing further deterioration?

After a pause, the attorney told Howard that such an agreement would not be possible since he, the attorney, was simply caretaker of the property during this legal process and did not have the authority to make that kind of agreement with a third party. Right about here in Howard’s retelling of the meeting he started grinning and giggling and moving around, hardly able to contain himself as he finished the story.

the attorney would deny ever saying it

The attorney then told Howard that if it ever came up, he would deny saying this, but if Howard were to simply move into the house and take up residence, he, the attorney, would not object or prevent him from doing so. In any case the ramshackle house had been determined to be of little value compared to the land it sat upon, so it did not make much difference what happened to the house before the legal issues were resolved.

Howard wasted no time after the meeting. He got a modest advance from his house-painting buddy. He forced his way into the house and took the locks from the doors to a locksmith to have them re-keyed. He opened up accounts to get gas, water, and electricity turned on. It all went as planned except for one very big thing. That’s why he needed me and my truck.

At this point Howard invited me to stroll over to his new place and see for myself the sole remaining problem. By then I was hooked. I had to see the place, and I had to find out what my truck and I had gotten into.

After a few minutes of walking, we stood in front of the place. It looked just as I had imagined: a seedy, neglected property that I had passed a hundred times during my own wanderings through the neighborhood, but never really noticed. To me it was a forgettable background in the community. To Howard it was the beginning of a new life, a home to call his own.

a shiny new key

Howard put his shiny new key into the lock and opened the front door as far as it would go, which was barely enough for us to squeeze in. I walked in, but felt like I had just walked into a guest room closet. As my eyes adjusted to the dim interior light I began to realize what I was seeing. The old lady who had lived there for decades had been a hoarder.

I had imagined that a typical hoarder would designate a room, possibly two, as “hoard central,” and pack them with whatever hoarders hoard, leaving the rest of the house relatively unscathed. But this person was different. Every room in the small house was packed with piles of junk and trash stacked from the floor to the ceiling. The space was packed so tightly that we could not freely wander through the rooms, or even see the walls. We had to navigate through tight little corridors no wider than my shoulders that wended their way from room to room.

Every conceivable space was neatly but tightly packed with stuff. The refrigerator, for example, looked like an art student’s installation. Hundreds of empty, open egg cartons had been nested inside each other and piled up on both sides of the refrigerator and across the top in a seamless, personal Arc de Triomphe.

That weekend Howard and I met at his new place to begin the removal of the previous owner’s lifetime of trash. Most of the day Howard fantasized wildy about the valuable objects we would find as we dismantled columns of decades-old newspapers, magazines, food wrappers, and miscellaneous junk. It was kind of like a treasure hunt, and I admit I was drawn into it.

five trips to the dump

That day we made five trips to the dump before the house was free of junk and trash. We had carefully sorted through everything that looked like it might possibly be valuable, but ultimately ended up with just five truckloads of junk and no treasure. We did find a ceramic water pitcher that looked to me like it was made in the the 1800s, and I told Howard I wanted it as payment for a day’s hard labor. He willingly gave it to me. Later, after checking around, it turned out to be the kind of thing you would find at a garage sale for $3, negotiable down to maybe $1.50.

After all the detritus had been removed, what remained looked like what you would find in a cheap furnished rental. The modest living room had a chair and a sofa, a coffee table, and a couple of old-fashioned pole lamps. The tiny kitchen had a gas stove that looked like something out of last century’s Ward’s Catalogue, and an old discolored refrigerator. The cupboards were stocked with plates, cups and silverware reminiscent of a dilapidated neighborhood diner. Howard was ecstatic. Sure, he had some serious cleaning to do, but he had a new home. Since he left the military it was the first place he lived in that was bigger than a garage.

I didn’t see too much of Howard after he moved into his new place. I guessed that now he had his own porch that he could sit on and try to make conversation with the passing ladies. Every now and then I would run into him somewhere in the neighborhood, or he would come slowly rolling down the street on his decrepit bicycle. We would talk for a while. His life wasn’t too much different than it had been before, but now he lived in a real home.

a trip to New Orleans

One day, maybe a year or so after Howard moved into his home, I was sitting on the porch and he rolled to a stop in front of my place. He joined me and we chatted for a while. He told me that he had saved up enough money from his part-time painting job to fulfill a lifelong dream: he was going to fly to New Orleans and see the Mardi Gras. He would leave in a few days and be gone about three weeks. I wished him well, and off he peddled.

The weeks passed by and I forgot all about Howard and his grand southern adventure. Then one day I was sitting on my porch and I noticed someone walking on the sidewalk coming my way. It looked like Howard, but he always rode his bicycle. Maybe it had been stolen again, I thought

As he got closer I realized he looked different. His ever-present smile was gone. He looked tired, haggard, pale. His gait lacked enthusiasm. Wow, I thought, he must have had a terrible time at the Mardi Gras. Maybe he got mugged.

“Hey Howard, welcome back. How was the Mardi Gras?”

“Larry, I feel terrible. Yeah, I feel really bad and I’m trying to keep it together. You know I just got back from Mardi Gras a couple days ago, and I was looking forward to getting back home. But my stuff is gone. All my stuff is gone. My clothes, my bike, everything. It’s all gone.” He said this in the low, sad voice of fatigue, the voice of someone beaten down. Still, I wasn’t sure what he meant.

a break-in?

“Geez Howard, I’m really sorry to hear that. What happened? Did someone break into your place while you were out of town and steal your stuff?”

“No, no one broke into my place, but it’s all gone. Everything I left in the house is gone, and the whole house is gone. There’s nothing there anymore, just a vacant lot, and that’s been scraped clean by a bulldozer. Yeah, it’s all gone. My neighbor told me it happened last week. The legal thing got settled. They didn’t go inside, they didn’t even knock on the door. They just pushed the house down and loaded the pieces into a dump truck and drove away. All my stuff. My house. My garden. All gone. The lot was scraped clean. There’s nothing on it but a ‘For Sale’ sign.”

I didn’t see Howard at all for a few months. Then I ran into him at a local fast food place. He seemed like he was back to his old self again. He was living in someone’s garage in exchange for gardening and handyman work. He had fixed up a used bike someone had given him, and he was doing a little house painting. He didn’t say a word about what had happened after he returned from Mardi Gras, and I didn’t ask.

a surprising telephone call

A couple of years later I moved to Alaska and we lost touch. About a decade after that the phone rang in my Anchorage home, and Howard was on the other end of the line. He got my number from a mutual friend and decided to call and say hello. I told him what I was doing, and he recounted stories about girls he had met, house painting jobs he had done, books he had read, and odd jobs he had worked. We gossiped about friends and acquaintances in the old neighborhood.

I hesitantly asked him where he was living these days. With obvious pleasure he told me that a few years earlier his caseworker told him about a new rent voucher program he could qualify for. He applied, and now he was living in his very own one-bedroom apartment.

We chatted a bit more. I told him about some trips I had taken to other states and even other countries since I had last seen him. Howard didn’t seem very interested. He paused for a moment, and quietly said that he had not been outside New Mexico since he went to Mardi Gras, and he had no plans to travel in the future.

The story is true, but the name “Howard Greenstein” has been plucked from the air. Previously titled “Howard’s New Home.”