A thing Larry Gorski has learned in more than 20 years of hauling away other people’s garbage is that no one bothers to hide anything from the junk man. “You can’t believe what goes on in this city,” he says. The owner of one apartment he called on had stockpiled more than 500 bottles of his own urine, each neatly capped with plastic wrap secured by a rubber band. Some of it was in the fridge. Another place Gorski visited had a toilet built into a staircase. “It was on one of them wide stairs,” he says. “He cut a hole, and when it flushed it just went into the basement, it didn’t go into the sewer. He put a shower curtain around it so it wouldn’t splash.” The smell was overpowering. Worse, the man had called him out just to show him some old 78s. “I don’t buy records,” says Gorski.
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The shop, located at Pulaski and Grace, is more of a depot. Once a week, he and his two helpers, Barbara Siemen and Art Aldmeyer, jam his ’95 Ford pickup with junk there and drive 135 miles to the Shipshewana Auction Barn, in northern Indiana’s Amish country. A lot of Gorski’s stock goes to Amish buyers, who are not overly fastidious consumers. “They’ll buy tables with three legs, dining room sets with no chairs, a china cabinet with the door broken off, ’cause they can make all the parts,” he says. Because they don’t use electricity, he adds, the Amish don’t want standard appliances, but they’re always in the market for small gasoline engines, which they adapt to various purposes. “They’ll buy snowblowers, take the motor off, and throw the snowblower in the garbage.”
Gorski waits for Aldmeyer and Siemen to climb into his truck, adjusts his black cowboy hat, then takes the driver’s seat. Siemen started hauling junk for Gorski eight months ago. She’d worked in a liquor store for 26 years, but when the place closed she couldn’t find a job and didn’t have a pension. “Larry saved me,” she says.
Some of Gorski’s calls are less dangerous than just plain weird. “At one house the lady had a goldfish,” says Gorski. “It was bigger than the bowl. It had to be bent in the bowl! I said, ‘Let me bring you a bigger bowl,’ but she says ‘No, don’t touch my fish.’” He shakes his head. “A lot of them are nuts.” Once he was summoned to a dead magician’s apartment in Logan Square and got there before the hearse did. “From the way it smelled he must have been dead a week,” he says. “They hadn’t even taken the body out and they were already selling his stuff! I came away with a lot of top hats, some canes, 55 swords, and a box for sawing a lady in half. At auction it went to a guy who sold it to the Harry Houdini museum at Niagara Falls.”
Gorski learned the value of junk growing up in Ukrainian Village in the 50s. His father, a lithographer by trade, supplemented the family income by salvaging wood from the buildings torn down to make way for the Eisenhower Expressway. “Me and my sister would clean it, take the nails off,” Gorski says. “My dad would sell the wood, and we would straighten the nails and sell them on Maxwell Street.”
While Aldmeyer and Siemen tote furniture to the truck, Gorski negotiates with Popuch while rolling up a rug. Popuch points to a black steamer trunk and says, “You get this.” Gorski expresses interest in a framed poster, but Popuch says, “You don’t get that.” Gorski takes a pass on the drapes and a helmet-shaped hair dryer. “Then take that chenille bedspread,” Popuch says. Gorski does.
