On Derby Day I went to open a can of tomato juice for a bloody mary, but I couldn’t. I knew the can opener was broken because it wouldn’t open the can. Stripped of the singular function for which it was named, and abandoned by the one thing that gave it purpose in the universe, our relationship came to its conclusion. I plan to throw it away and get one that works.
But what if I don’t throw it away? What if I put it in a box with my keepsakes – objects whose sole purpose is to serve as physical stand-ins for purely associative, unphysical memories? The moment I place it in that box, an instantaneous shift occurs and the objective function of the can opener becomes a totally subjective one. It assumes a new task, entirely abstracted from its original purpose, but still connected to that original purpose by association.
In 20 years I would open that box and find:
- One small bone of unidentified origin found while swimming in a nasty little bay on the Red Sea in Yemen
- My grandmother’s rosary, which I prayed (totally incorrectly) at her funeral
- A five-Euro note that could have bought two rounds in a Spanish tapas bar
- A guitar pick that says “Joe Perry,” given to me by my stepdad, who taught me to play
- A nonfunctioning can opener to remind me of a pleasant afternoon spent in the yard with some friends and family for the 138th running of The Kentucky Derby.
My relationship to these objects might appear to run one-way. The things – in some way representative of a moment in my life – are given meaning that is made sensible only in my presence. If I’m not around to tell you why they are important, they are not important; they become an arbitrary assembly of things without classification or purpose. Simple enough. There’s another way to think of it though, in which I and my objects are mutually involved in recollection and meaning-making together. My presence is required for the collection to be sensible, but, in a strange inversion, the objects also make sense of where and who I have been.
All of us are to some degree defined by our stuff. In a sense, the objects we place in orbit around our lives assist us in the act of history making, by serving as points of reference. By dead reckoning and parallax, we navigate our collective and individual present and our proximity to the past with reference to the things we keep around us and the stories those things represent. We keep little boxes where this historical voodoo is performed.
However, one of the key differences between ‘most of us’ and collectors is that collectors have bigger boxes. When I’ve asked collectors what it is that draws them to their objects, why they feel compelled to gather so many, they tend to shrug and say something like, “I don’t know. I just love it.” Deeply unsatisfying as this answer is, a little prodding usually elicits a few anecdotes that bring their compulsions into greater relief. At some level, the collection comes to serve as a narrative or, more precisely, the map of a narrative that describes the movements of object and owner and their proximity to and distance from one another.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin suggested that the communion between a collector and their belongings relies on,
“…a very mysterious relationship to ownership…also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is, their usefulness – but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.”
Benjamin’s assessment couldn’t be more accurately applied to anyone (in the Clifton neighborhood, at least) than to Jerry Lotz, who lives in and among a sprawling collection which years ago spilled from the home he built on the corner of Frankfort Avenue and William Street, through the backyard, into an adjacent lot, and now fills several other houses on the block.
In a pinch you might mistake Lotz for a junk collector, an antique dealer, a hoarder of Americana kitsch, or – diving straight into the deep end – a bricoleur. None of these terms really describes what Lotz does at his place though. One look at the thoughtful composition of Lotz’s compound and you’ll know that whoever has assembled it isn’t working with junk, nor is he running a business, per se. Lotz’s house and adjoining properties are not an antique mall. They’re the boxes where he puts his keepsakes.
“Not open to the public,” I heard him say repeatedly. “Been here 36 years. Never been open once.”
From the sidewalk – through tall, ornate wrought iron gates that are always locked – you’ll catch a glimpse of a tiny fraction of Lotz’s collection: an entire L&N caboose car on tracks flanked by all of the attendant railway artifacts, a fat, grinning, life-sized sow wearing spectacles and sporting an earring that reads “I Love You,” an iron ball that may have once been shackled to a prisoner’s leg, a Maserati, a gorilla, a Studebaker and a two-story replica of the Statue of Liberty whose patina perfectly matches that of New York Harbor’s iconic titan, but whose stern countenance is replaced with the cartoonish face of Richard Nixon and whose raised torch is mirrored by Tricky Dick’s trademark peace sign that beckons not the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but instead calls out to the curious who are drawn closer with the simpler, if equally mysterious, concern: “Just what in the hell is going on here?”
The enormity of Lotz’s collection is nearly oppressive. Following the contours of the objects up and around the property, the eye grows weary from repeatedly stopping to read another sign or consider the significance of another artifact. Where you hope to find an unoccupied space for a moment of visual or informational rest – say, on the ground at the base of a grizzly bear statue emblazoned with the International Harvester logo on its chest – you’ll only find more: a license plate, a roller skate, a little turtle, all placed with intention among their enormous counterparts.
You’d be hard pressed to come up with any convincing conceptual separation of the objects in Lotz’s collection, or why they should exist together. A totally unscientific taxonomy might divide his belongings into:
- Statues of animals doing people things
- Things made of die-cast aluminum
- Representations of African Americans that range from troublesome to totally offensive
- Eagles
- Gas station signs from the Golden Age of the American automobile
- Painstakingly precise reproductions
- of same
- Injuns
- Things constructed partially or totally
- from Bakelite
- Cars, small cars, miniature cars, toy cars
- Objects tenderly recalling or otherwise honoring the Coca-Cola Co.
- Things that are innumerable
- Things obscured from view by other things
Without Lotz though, you’d be missing something. The card catalog that decodes a collection is its collector.
If Lotz’s collection is his life’s work (and it is), his daily task is that of an interpreter. He’s the cipher for, and the only unifying element that gives context to, a collage of the iconography of American consumerism that he presides over. In talking with Lotz about his collection, you’ll get scraps of information about the objects, tangential histories, and the way his stories intersect with them.
Lotz sometimes speaks in oblique, associative, conversational volleys, approaching a topic from every angle at once. Ask him about the caboose he bought in 1974, for instance. Before long he’s told you where he got it (“Louisville Scrap. Used to be on Main Street.”), how much it weighs (“80 tons.”), the crane company that moved it (“McKinny. They’re not in business anymore.”), their hourly rate (“$1,400 per.”), how his property is zoned (M-3 heavy commercial, “I could run jack hammers all night long or run a truck stop if I wanted.”), and the city’s interest in his project (“This little sawed-off bastard come from the city one day said, ‘You get a permit for that?…Is that track 3 feet off the sidewalk?’…They was on my ass like a fly on shit. And now look at it. It’s the prettiest place on Frankfort Avenue. Everybody says so.”)
Thrown in among the other details will be a thumbnail history of federal legislation governing equal opportunity as it applied to the increasing presence of females in the railroad industry during the 1970s, and the effects of these changes on caboose design.
“When you was a little boy and you seen a man outside here, leanin’ on the back of the caboose, his buddy was doin’ his dumpin’ inside,” said Lotz. “This caboose was built in ‘65. In ’69, women applied for the job. But for them to hire a woman they had to privatize the crapper and the bunk beds; to hire a woman they had to put the bunk beds on the side and privatize the shit-house.”
And so the caboose was taken out of use and a new one, built with separate bathrooms, took its place.
Lotz was showing me some good looking old cobblestones he dug up to lay track for the caboose; he said he gave the rest of them to his brother. Then he turned abruptly and pointed across the street at another house he owns.
“That’s one of mine,” he said. “That used to be the dropoff for the [Louisville] Herald-Post paper. Dad used to deliver papers and they were delivered into the basement there. The basement’s brick all the way back.”
Lotz had been talking about cobblestones and his brother and had seamlessly transitioned into a recollection of his dad, the bricks in another building, and histories of the neighborhood that connected them.
“I was born in the ‘37 flood, on Main Street, in a house down there that’s been in the family a hundred years,” said Lotz. “They had me when the flood come up. And we moved over here on William Street. There, at the third house on the street, you could pat your foot in the water…[The water] come up to the corner at the grocery. [My dad] held the red light to help the boats get up there with meat in them – that’s how high the water was…The water was up that high past December. It was the worst flood ever…And there was people lost for years around here when that happened. A lot of families wasn’t even found for a long time. It was terrible.”
Something’s always within arm’s reach that Lotz can pick up and say, “Somethin’ here you probably never seen.” His mantra is: “Ornery, interesting, and different. That’s what I buy and that’s what sells it.”
It’s as close to a Rough Guide to his predilections as you’re likely to get. He’ll point to something, tell you about it, how he got it, how much he paid for it, or what he traded for it. Then, without fail – sometimes abruptly, sometimes
seamlessly – he’ll segue into a description of how a different object figures into the timeline of his story.
For instance, he told me about six German-made mahogany statues – female figures holding clocks – that he tried to acquire for years to no avail. Time and again he’d ask about them, only to be rebuffed by the owner, who told Lotz, “Them clocks are not for sale, Gold.”
When I asked him how he got the name Gold, he unstrung a yarn about the giant gold chain he used to wear, the way some unscrupulous White Castle employees drugged his coffee once in a bid to acquire it, and how he finally sold the chain for $3,000 to his brother who, in turn, sold it for a hefty profit without ever saying thanks.
Later on, while we were watching a motion-activated, life-sized, rubber, animatronic deer head singing “Friends in Low Places,” I asked Lotz if he collected any old country records. He said he didn’t, but asked if I’d seen the ‘59 Cadillac parked out in front of his place.
“That’s Pee Wee King’s Cadillac,” said Lotz. He’s the one who wrote…the ‘Tennessee Waltz.’ It made him a millionaire. He owned King’s Records on 2nd and Jefferson. I went down there every Saturday and bought party records.”
“What kind of party records?” I asked.
“Nasty party records,” said Lotz. “Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, they wrote party records. I remember them sumbitches too. I went down there every Saturday and got me party records and Saturday nights you could set down there and watch Pee Wee King sing music for free in the back of his record shop on 2nd and Jefferson, right across the street from all the dives – Gay ‘90s, Nick’s Big Six, Wendell’s, The 300 Club – all go-go girls, carryin’ on every night.”
Perhaps associating the two objects and the dive bars he’d just been describing, Lotz pointed at another fake animal head on a plaque and said, “When busing started, I almost got locked up over that head. I come out of Gay ‘90s or one of them joints one morning. It was already daylight. Started walking down 4th Street. For some reason or another they had a flea market. My eyes lit up and I come across this paper mâché horse head…” And he was off.
In these stories, the past is kept ready-to-hand. Lotz walks through his belongings and finds personal narratives attached to them, hanging like nametags, accessed in random succession and in chance combination. He’s got a lot of stuff and a lot of stories. There are no easy equivalencies with Lotz though. His aesthetic and his temperament are mercurial in equal measure. If I was dubious once or twice about the accuracy of Lotz’s memory, or the reliability of his historical perspectives, I was uncertain about the scrupulousness of his collection a few times too.
Some things, specifically commercial artifacts from our culture’s racist past, are troublesome. In other venues, some of the toys and images compiled in Lotz’s house are given thoughtful context and commentary. In museum exhibits, for instance, things like coon jiggers – toys that mechanically animated a small black caricature of the Stepin Fetchit variety – are presented with deliberate reflections on the darkest time in this nation’s collective memory. In response to expectations for any contrition about these, and similar objects, Lotz said, “It’s history. Ain’t nothing we can do about it. It’s just history.”
Lotz squatted down to turn the toy on and the thing came alive with a terrible racket as the two figures, attached to a motorized cam, started shaking around aimlessly. There was a moment in their reckless, chaotic movement though when the figures came into a rhythm. The little metal joints and the stiff wooden legs and arms shimmied against the regulated motion of the motor. For a second, the two lifeless objects appeared to dance the way that people dance. It was remarkable, beautiful and unsettling.
While Lotz invokes the word “history” often, he seems to have little need for an overarching, objective scrutiny of history. From what I could tell, his interests lay at the point where the outward histories associated with his objects intersected with his own history. Those that don’t fulfill that task, those that don’t fit in, are kept around only long enough to be traded for objects that do. If one thing is operating very clearly in Lotz’s work, it’s a selective nostalgia for a time period stitched together infrom the hundred years bracketing the turn of the last century.
A lot can be said of nostalgia and why, particularly in the present historical moment, we’re predisposed to it. Nostalgia is often seen as a passive, sentimental indictment of progress, a romantic longing for a simplicity that was likely never present. But the compulsion to engage in nostalgia could be viewed in more active terms as a recourse to the sometimes paralyzing uncertainties attendant to life in a modern era fractured by uncertainties – specifically uncertainties regarding the past which can appear beyond our grasp, unmoored from this moment and drifting. By this measure, nostalgia is used to construct narratives that associatively bridge that gap, making the past relevant and accessible.
However, a persistent danger exists in nostalgia that can terminate in murky or inaccurate concepts of history, and even cultural amnesia. It can pit the desire for romantic recollections of the past – some accessible past – in opposition to the inconveniences of actual history. There’s a delicate interplay that we navigate constantly between what we remember and how we remember it, between that which we willfully ignore and that which we are obliged to preserve.
Good, bad, or ugly – ornery, strange, or different – the things in Lotz’s collection are assembled to describe parts of the past that, in every meaningful regard, ought to be remembered. They tell part of a story, Lotz tells another part of the story, and anyone who happens to be nearby can get an earful and come away with good questions that might, and probably should, compel them to look for more answers.
We keep stuff that we find, stuff that was once useful, and stuff that has been given to us; collectors keep a lot of it. Lotz keeps watch over his things and puts them where they go. He doesn’t let a lot of people past the gates. They can look from the street. Now and again though, he’ll give somebody a gift. And they usually remember that gift.
“When I give somebody something, you ain’t never got no reason to ever get rid of it ‘cause you ain’t got a penny in it,” said Lotz. “Some of these kids, I give ‘em stuff and they come back as grown men and girls and tell me they still got what I gave them. I say, ‘That’s what it’s for. If you find somebody that loves it as much as you did, just let ‘em have it and tell them the same thing.’ When you give somebody something, they have no reason to sell it.”
I was sitting on Lotz’s bench while he was inside for a second. In the gutter by the curb, a few birds – chickadees and finches, I guess – were pecking at a piece of bread. One little guy picked up the whole piece in his beak. It was twice as big as he was and it was in the shape of a heart. They pecked it to pieces and flew off to go and shit somewhere in the neighborhood, who knows where.
Later on, apropos of nothing in particular, Lotz and I talked about birds for a second. He said he fed them every day. We both agreed that blue jays are pretty nasty. Then he told me that they’re the same as mockingbirds, which they are not.
–Joe Manning
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