One Truck at a Time
One Truck at a Time is a documentary project of photographs and short writings that chronicles junk removal culture in Massachusetts. For an entire year, artist and writer Curran Broderick became a junk truck driver to help people get rid of their unwanted objects. This work peels back layers of the human condition and reveals the inevitability of obsolescence.
The photographs function as visual evidence, which confirm the accomplishment of removing unwanted objects from people’s homes. The text further suspends the humanistic relationship between what we acquire and what we discard. Eventually everything will be gone, one truck at a time.
One Truck at a Time is a documentary project of photographs and short writings that chronicles junk removal culture in Massachusetts. For an entire year, artist and writer Curran Broderick became a junk truck driver to help people get rid of their unwanted objects. This work peels back layers of the human condition and reveals the inevitability of obsolescence.
The photographs function as visual evidence, which confirm the accomplishment of removing unwanted objects from people’s homes. The text further suspends the humanistic relationship between what we acquire and what we discard. Eventually everything will be gone, one truck at a time.
Somerville
As we entered, she stood slowly and spoke with tired sincerely, “Everything in here has got to go.” I paused for moment and then tried to explain the rates of the service. But her friend ushered me away and explained that he had died and the price wasn’t important. They just needed everything to disappear. We immediately understood the weight of their situation as we surveyed the contents of the one bedroom apartment. The remnants of his life lay scattered around in small piles that asked, what happened in here? Who was this person? We started in the kitchen and went room by room until everything was gone. The kitchen had nothing but a microwave and out of date pantry items. We filled boxes of Bush’s Baked Beans, Spam, Ramen Noodles and a bunch of other microwavable food that could be prepared in just a few minutes. There were no pots, pans or any kitchen utensils except for a plastic container, spoon and can opener. The living room contained a television stand with a fifty inch flatscreen and a work table littered with computer components. Was he a programer? Gamer? Or something else?Was it just a hobby or something more? I could imagine him here late at night, meticulously installing different kinds of computer equipment with tiny screws. Neon lights probably danced through circuit boards that glowed with electronic fire. He could have written his own code and navigated cyber space through the portals of infinity, but not anymore. It felt like I had entered into a memory where I had access to everything, but knew nothing about the man who lived in this space. The bedroom was filled with moving boxes that held the fragments of an incomplete identity. Metallica shirts fought against white collar button downs and ugly ties raged again studded belts. Metal hangers, graphing calculators and other personal ephemera was boxed and moved. We didn’t ask any questions, we know what we had to do. Just clear the room, one box at a time. And that was it. It was like nothing happened. We had his entire life in the back of our truck and it belonged to nobody. Watertown
The stale, pink carpet on the floors of the complex made me nauseous. Reflected light bounced from hallway mirrors onto walls that sighed with heavy exhaustion. Even the elevator fan hummed a tired tune while it struggled to circulate dusty air. We rode the elevator to the top floor, followed the carpet to the last door of the hallway, and knocked. The door opened. A frail, bald man appeared and silently motioned for us to enter. For a moment everything was okay, but we should have known better. We missed the undeniable signs of weirdness that should have given us the insight to jump ship. The guy’s sketchy silence should have screamed,“take a closer look and ask me what’s wrong with this situation before it’s too late.” We just went through the motions like was any other junk job, but this wasn’t just like every other junk job. We had the mattress halfway to the elevator when we saw them. They crawled over the folds of material and disappeared in to the foam. My body froze and my mind buckled under the emotional strain. I dropped the mattress and braced myself against the wall to steady myself. Under some primitive response, we dragged the mattress back to the guys apartment door. I slammed my fist against the door until the guy opened up and I looked him dead in the eye and said, ”we’re not taking that.” |
Stow
The couch loomed on the horizon as we sped down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The truck hammered over the pot holes one after another until we skidded to a halt on the side of the road. The house looked like it was about to collapse and there was nobody in sight. I knocked on the door several times only to hear the sound of my knuckles against wood. We turned our attention to the abandoned couch that had been covered with dirt from passing cars. We pushed it onto the truck without any problems and then tried to call the customer. Nobody answered the phone. We called our dispatch to let them know what was going on. They told us to keep trying, so we sat there for the next hour trying to call a person that refused to pick up their phone. Since we couldn’t reach the customer for payment, we had to leave the couch. Carefully, we repositioned the couch on the side of the road just as we had found it and drove away. Boxborough
I rolled my window down so I could hear what she was yelling,“Oh my goodness, so happy you guys came here. We have this huge television that still works, but we don’t want it anymore because we are going to re-do the basement. I’m not sure you guys will be able to get it out. The thing is wicked heavy, my son and his father almost killed themselves putting it down there years ago. But come on in, and I show you guys.” We parked and followed her into the basement. Our feet hit the concrete of the basement floor when we saw the Trinitron. It was at least forty inches and weighed close to three hundred pounds. I shrugged, the scenario was better than coming down from an attic, but it still was a lot of weight to move. The Sony Trinitron televisions were legendary in the junk removal business because they were so much heavier than most of the other cathode ray televisions. They had become very popular in the late sixties and we were still taking them out of people’s homes. Sony had invented the aperture grille, which made their television screens brighter and higher quality. But in order to do this, The glass in the front of the television had to be much thicker, so they were heavy, really heavy. It’s important to plan out how a move will happen, but it’s equally important to not to over intellectualize how the move will happen. There is always a balance between physical strength and angular knowledge. The ideal relationship is struck somewhere between a primitive neanderthal and a dancing ballerina. For some reason, these concepts were never communicated to the customer. We just starred at the television like idiots and wondered why the customer hovered over us. Obviously there was the implication it was much easier to pay us to do it rather than endure romantic notions of self reliance. The move was simple, pick up the television with one person on either side and walk straight up the stairs. As soon as stairs got involved, everything became physically much harder because the weight distribution got all screwed up. This meant the person on the bottom held more of the weight, but they were in a better position to use their legs to lift. The person on the top held less of the weight, but they had to be hunched over, which prevents the use of their legs. This is why the top person often falls coming out of a bulkhead. In this particular episode, the top guy tripped and I pushed the tv into the air. We both ended up splattered on the grass with a giant television that looked like a meteorite fell from the sky. The woman stared at us in a breathless wonderment before asking,“so how much for the swing set? |
Salisbury
The house smelled like rotten death. It crept into our nostrils and demanded to be taken seriously. The guy that had bought the home told us we needed to take all of the stuff in the place; the next of kin would pay for it. I nodded and silently wondered if he had a conscience. The buyer waited outside, while we entered the dilapidated structure. I flipped the light switch and nothing happened. I took out my flashlight and shinned it through the darkness. Mountains of newspapers and random periodicals reached the ceilings and poured out of all three bedrooms. They flooded the hallways and ran down the stairs. There was only enough space to walk single file through a life time of old news. The basement was filled with different miscellaneous house hold items. An upright piano sat grumpily and unused in the corner. The rest of the basement had mounds of small loose items: pots and pans, children’s clothes, and various types of cleaning products. Many of the items were fossilized in their original packaging. They were bought, never used, and left down here to die in the cold darkness. Lynnfield
We were greeted by the sound a garage door that struggled to open half way. We approached, not really surprised. The junk business trains you to expect the strange because there isn’t any such thing as, “Normal.” The garage door closed and then opened slowly to reveal a grim caricature of Mrs. Robinson. She stumbled forward on high heels, swaying slightly while she lit the tip of a Marb Red. The situation felt like a time machine that had transported us back into a nineteen sixties’s introspective nightmare. A failed dream that had chewed us up and left us questioning our own moral ambiguity. She gazed at us before clearly stating without any emotion, “We had a flood. Can you guys take all of the stuff here in the garage?” “Sure,” I responded and disappeared into the house. We looked around. It was clear, we had fallen into a nightmare of suburbia hell. The three car garage was filled with: the remains of marriages that crashed and burned, children that were grown and gone, and everything else associated with whatever the nuclear family was supposed to be. We had seen it many times before, so we already knew this would be time consuming and laborious. We loaded pile after pile until the end was in sight. A big refrigerator with double doors was all that was left. Together we started to push the fridge toward the truck. We were moving well until something jammed the wheel on the fridge and we lost control. Everything happened all at once, but in a slow motion sort of way that reinforced our helplessness. The fridge fell and exploded on impact. The doors burst open and the contents of fridge leapt into the air. We watched, stupefied as grey chucks of rotten meat rained down on upon us. We vomited instantly. It was that bad. Who knew how long that grey sludge had been in there festering, just waiting to attack us? The stink rose in clouds of intolerable awfulness. We managed to drag the fridge out of the garage and wrangle it on to the truck. But, it made no difference, our moods were destroyed and our clothes would never be the same. |
Hudson
The unit numbers blurred together in hotness of summer as we circled the complex. Our necks had already been seared red from hours of work in direct sun. All of the storage units looked alike. We were trapped in a maze of unending sameness. After circling complex for the sixth or seventh time, we saw him get out of his car next to one of the units. He smiled at us through yellow teeth. It made me feel uncomfortable in a way that I imagined young girls felt when older men stared at them. Having no choice, I extended my hand to greet him. He accepted, gripping my hand more firmly than I expected. His steely, blue eyes cut into me while I scanned the topography of his face. Wild hair roamed over cracked skin like a rock star that should have died years ago, but never did. He looked like a taxidermy experiment that had gone wrong, except he was real. I laughed, because there wasn’t anything else to do. It felt like we had gotten lost on a dark desert highway and wandered into a slasher film. Finally, he let my hand go and laughed at me like he knew what I was thinking. “It’s all surveillance equipment,” he said as we followed him into the unit. His space was filled with ancient surveillance cameras, VHS recording equipment, monitors and a whole mess of wire. I asked, “Where did all of this stuff come from?” He laughed again, apparently amused by the stupidity of the question. But, he answered, “All kinds of places: casinos, stores, restaurants, banks, and a lot of other places. Everybody is so concerned that somebody out there is going to rip them off. I guess they should be afraid, people these days can’t be trusted. Outlaws are still passing notes to bankers and riding off into the sunset with bags of money. We haven’t evolved at all.” Medford
Before I could smile and shake his hand, he was in my face screaming. At the time, I moved junk for a living, so I’m used to getting yelled at, but this guy attacked us like a wounded animal. When I first started this line of work, I didn’t understand why people took their anger out on total strangers, especially if they that controlled what happened. After a couple months of on the job training, I learned when people called is; it was a call for help. I remember that the majority of his rage was directed at the cost of our service. His frustration was amplified by the fact he had already paid for a junk bag from another company that they refused to pick it up when they saw the contents of the bag. Apparently the rates of the other company didn’t account for an entire bag filled with dirt and concrete. We would take the pile, but it wouldn’t be for free. I had no intention of taking this stuff unless the guy paid what was right.The guy knew it too, he had screwed himself and yelling about our rates didn’t help him make the pile disappear. Eventually, the guy surrendered and handed over his credit card. Deflated he asked, ”why does it cost so much?” I ran his card and said,“because you don’t have to do anything.” |