Casos de Uso del Negocio

SUZANNE IS SAYING, THIS STUFF IS ME. IF I THROW IT AWAY, I’M NOT MYSELF ANYMORE. THE GOOD NEWS IS, HER SITUATION IS NOT HOPELESS.

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used to play as children, and instantly, like a magic potion, regress to a time in their life they forgot. It’s like stepping into a time portal. This is an important thing.”

Randy says it annoys him when people refer to him as a collector. Collectors aren’t consumed by their obsession the way he is. “I have no life! I have no wife! I have no kids! It causes personal pain!” Plus, Randy hoards not only boardwalk Americana but also “everything that is Randy.”

“Like what?” I ask him.

“I save my hair,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“When you have a child and it has its first haircut, doesn’t the mother save the curls?” Randy says.

“So are you like Howard Hughes?” I say.

“Do you save your urine?”

“I don’t save urine,” Randy says. In fact, he adds, there is a di≠erent enigmatic figure he’s much more comparable to than Howard Hughes.

“Who?” I ask.

“Willy Wonka,” he says. “I, too, have a mysterious place that’s not open, a place that people have for over a decade wanted to go inside and look around.”

His mysterious place turns out to be 21,000 square feet of shuttered-up space that used to be a Woolworth’s. He would love to open it to the public, but the town council hasn’t allowed it. “They hate me,”

he says.

Randy disappears inside. Then he flings open the shutters. I step inside. And I gasp.

“Randyland!” says Randy, his arms outstretched.

It is gigantic—a vast and crammed shrine to Randy and the things that make him happy. There are arcade games as far as the eye can see—Space Invaders and Asteroids and pinball machines.

Discomfortingly, there are also hundreds of mannequins, all lined up in rows, each

an eerily perfect reproduction of Randy.

They have Randy’s grin, Randy’s haircut.

The only way you can tell them apart is that each wears a di≠erent costume. And each costume is from a di≠erent part of Disney World, where Randy once worked as an arcade mechanic: “Here’s Animal Kingdom Randy, Indiana Jones Randy, A Bug’s Life Randy, Guest Relations Randy. This is Merchandising Randy from Main Street…”

“What are these for?” I ask.

“The Randy mannequins are the Mickey Mouse of Randyland,” he explains. “They represent my life in the amusement busi-ness, both as patron and operator. And they are my replacements, for my time is lim-ited. They are the story of Randy that will live on, a story of sacrifice and dedication, of happiness and sorrow, a story of faith.”

R A N D Y A N D S U Z A N N E A N D K E V I N all hoard for di≠erent reasons, but they have this in common: Their possessions are a fortress, insulating them from the ter-rors of the outside world—and their fragile place in it. I never quite realized until I met them that—in a less extreme way—that’s what my possessions are to me, too.

I believe the producers of the hoarding shows have an agenda di≠erent from the viewers’. They love it because hoarding is probably the most visually startling men-tal disorder there is. Whereas I think we watch because we’re worried: Could we become this?

We’ve been told our whole lives that buying things proves we are successful and functional. And I think this PR trick has infected the hoarder’s pathology, too.

“People with hoarding problems,” says Randy Frost, “tend to feel good when they acquire or save something that lets them fantasize about what they could do with it or could become with it. That fantasy is reinforcing. Actually using the possession does not seem to be reinforcing. Owning something allows them to have a potential identity. Getting rid of something takes away that potential.”

In this way, he says, their motivations

“are really no di≠erent from the rest of us.”

We buy into the manufactured idea that our possessions make us better people. We get convinced that throwing our stu≠ away ruins that chance.

So maybe, if you know it’s time for some spring cleaning but are finding it weirdly hard to chuck anything, the healthiest real-ization is this: Your stu≠ is no better than you are. And that’s fine. So toss it.

jon ronson is a frequent gq contributor. His most recent book is the short e-book Frank: The True Story That Inspired the Movie.

Randy’s parents, “kind of overcompen-sating” for his nine months of getting bul-lied every year, gave Randy enough money to spend all summer where he was happi-est—inside the arcades. He got so adept at one game, Fascination, winning all the prizes, that the owners banned him. In his teens, he got a summer job as an arcade mechanic. That’s when he started to “find old friends, the machines I’d played as a kid, in back corners, in disrepair.” His boss would tell him to pull out parts to fix other machines, which horrified Randy. “They wanted me to kill my old friends! Eventually somebody got the bright idea: ‘You like the machine so much? Instead of getting paid this week, take it home with you.’ ”

Randy has amassed “thousands” of vin-tage pinball machines and arcade games from the boardwalks of his childhood. They fill every inch of his life, including his home life. “More often than not, I can be found sleeping right with the games,” he says. I ask him how he can a≠ord it. “Sometimes I wonder, too,” he replies. “I’ve been in the amusement business for thirty-five years and have had periods where I made good money. I live very inexpensively.”

A fraction of his machines, about 180, are here at the arcade in Wildwood.

There’s even the very Fascination machine he got banned from playing as a child.

Purchasing it, he says, “was a triumphant return from the humiliating injustice that goes along with my life.”

He could have worked for NASA, he says. They headhunted him after he was rated “genius level at industrial design” in a nationwide junior-high IQ test. But he turned them down, saying, “I don’t want to be responsible for some [astronaut’s] life.”

NASA was flummoxed, Randy says. They told him opportunities like that don’t come along every day. But he has no regrets.

“People come in here, see the games they

○ Suzanne’s not-very-functional kitchen (and her collie) in Richmond, Virginia.

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2) HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES. 3–5) PROP STYLIST: CLAIRE TEDALDI AT HALLEY RESOURCES. 6) FROM LEFT: RV/BAUER-GRIFFIN/ GC IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES; 247PAPSTV/SPLASH NEWS/CORBIS; GARETH CATTERMOLE/GETTY IMAGES FOR BURBERRY.

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