Jamie Brodie 02 - Hoarded to Death

But with Clinton, you never knew.

    After two days of phone tag with multiple people in human resources, I got approval from UCLA to appear on Clean My Hoard, as long as I didn’t use my last name and didn’t indicate my affiliation with the university. That was fine with me. All I planned to do was show up, say a few sentences on camera, and do some heavy lifting. I called Raven to let her know I had the final approval, and she passed the good news on to Jennifer. To my amazement, Valerie had also agreed to participate.
    On Thursday, Jennifer called. She wanted to meet with Pete and me before the taping of the show. Pete thought that was a good idea, so we invited her to come over on Sunday.
    Jennifer didn't look much different from how I remembered her. Maybe a little thinner. She was tall for a woman, around 5'10", with strawberry blonde hair that she wore in a long braid down her back and greenish eyes. It took me aback to realize that she reminded me of Abby, Kevin’s current girlfriend. I guess Kevin had a type, at least physically. Jennifer was wearing tortoiseshell glasses, and she looked really cute. But she was nervous as a cat, drumming her fingers on the arms of the chair and looking around the living room, anywhere but at us.
    Pete got her a Coke then sat on the sofa beside me. She glanced at us, then laughed a little. "I can't believe you two are a couple. Talk about coincidences."
    I shrugged. "We prefer to think of it as serendipity."
    She nodded and set down her Coke. "You have to be wondering why I'm dragging you into this mess."
    "The question did occur to me, yeah."
    More drumming of fingers. "I'm sick of my life. I’m still living in the apartment that Kevin and I had. No one that I work with knows how I live. I've been to all my girlfriends' houses, but I can't invite them over. I know they wonder why and they're starting to act weird about it. But I can't let any of them know what a mess I am. And then this year, we got a new teacher. A really nice guy. And he's interested in me, and we've been out a couple of times, but I haven't let him come over yet." She looked up at us; she'd been staring at her knees. "I'm so embarrassed. I can't let this go on. I have to get a life back. And this guy is perfect for me, and I can't let him slip away because I'm too messed up to even clean my own house."
    " Jennifer." Pete's voice was gentle. "You know he might find out about it if he sees it on TV."
    "Yeah, but by the time the show airs the apartment will be clean and I'll be in therapy and I can have him over before that so he can see the place is clean."
    I wasn’t so sure a guy would react well to that. "If you think he's really the right guy, can't you ask him to get involved in helping you?"
    "I could if we'd been dating a couple of months, but it's only been three weeks." She looked at me, biting her lip. "I think he really likes me, and he might be okay with it, but I want to get my ducks in a row before I tell him about it. Or anyone else." Her shoulders sagged. "My greatest hope is that none of my girlfriends watch the show."
    "So why sign up for the show? Why not just clean the place yourself?"
    "Because they pay for all the therapy and everything. And I can't afford that on my own. I need to learn how to tell people about it, and on my terms, instead of just having them discover it."
    "Okay. Makes sense." Pete narrowed his eyes a little. "So why did you want to meet with us today?"
    "Ah." Jennifer perked up a little. "About five years ago, my teacher's aide died. Her name was Lucille Steinwart. I called her Miss Lucille.” Jennifer smiled in remembrance. “She didn’t have any family. She was an old lady, and she had a ton of books stored in her house, and she left them all to me. This was before the apartment got so bad. It was just really messy then. I got a couple of friends to help me and we moved all the boxes of books into my spare bedroom. I never got a chance to go through them. Miss Lucille told me that there were some valuable things in the boxes, some first editions and signed stuff and a couple of other extremely rare items that I could probably sell and make a lot of money off of. I think the first editions are mostly mystery writers. Lucille was really into mysteries. That's another reason that I want to get the apartment cleaned up, so I can find out what's in those boxes and sell anything that’s valuable. Then I can pay off part of the credit card debt that I've built