Curbing Their Unease
When an Eviction Crew Empties A Home, Handling the Personal Is Part of the Balancing Act

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The houses on Buckingham Green Lane in Upper Marlboro are, as the name suggests, majestic. Two-story foyers, saplings growing in manicured yards, everything you would want if you had everything, especially if you had recently acquired it. Drapes on the windows obscure the interiors, but you know that the insides are packed with all of the marvelous things you ever dreamed of. New stuff. Shiny stuff. Stuff.

On this late fall morning, with the temperature hovering just above freezing, four team members from All Seasons Eviction ride in a pickup, ready to remove all the stuff from one of these houses in the span of just an hour.

The men look for the address and riff.

Samuel Kifle is explaining the pronunciation of his last name. It's "kee-flay, like souffle," he says. Ozias Richardson guffaws. "Souffle. Where'd you get a name like that?"

"It's French African," says Kifle.

"Man, it's crazy."

"This is it," says Ryan Pulliam. Pulliam -- calm, dreadlocked, 29 -- is the owner of All Seasons. In the current housing crisis, landlords and banks put evictions and foreclosures in motion, and sheriff's deputies serve the papers. But guys like this move your stuff, every bit of it, from inside your home to outside of it. The landlord pays $650 an hour for houses (apartments are less), trash bags included.

This house is something. Six bedrooms, four baths. Corner lot with a lot of yard. Christmas wreath on the door. It's fancier than your typical eviction, though in this economic craziness, who knows what "typical" means.

"Neighborhood like this, rent's at least $3,000, $3,500 a month," Sway Wilson says finally.

"If I lived here," says Richardson, "I'd get one of those hotel bathrobes with my initials on it."

"Monogrammed," says Kifle.

If I lived here is a hazard of the job. You try to treat evictions like a math problem: how to get loveseats and bar stools from point A to point B. But spend too much time handling anyone's stuff, and it starts to get personal. Stories are constructed, lives are imagined, and you start to wonder where in the stuff it all went wrong.

'They're Putting Us Out'

The eviction on Buckingham Green, and all others like it, is essentially commissioned chaos.

Twenty workers, the number required by law for house evictions in Prince George's County, flood inside and grab things -- mismatched things, armfuls of randomness -- and carry them to the door.

An end table and a toaster. A chair and an ironing board. In the airy, granite kitchen, three women of All Seasons sweep the contents of cupboards into black garbage bags. The whole house is filled with clinking and scraping and grunting, as crew members in jeans and baseball caps swarm the rooms.

The tenant, a middle-aged man wearing a scarf and leather jacket, stands outside on the driveway, watching the gutting of the house that was just his. He's not supposed to go inside after the deputies escort him from the property.

"They're putting us out," he says to someone -- his wife? -- on his cellphone. Then he's mute, deflated-looking, like a popped balloon. He declines to answer a reporter's questions. After a little while, he takes off in his car. What man can stand by and watch the relentless and inevitable emptying of his life?

Tenants rarely pack for an eviction, says Pulliam. "They sit there and assume that at the last minute some miracle's going to happen. I'm all about religion, but . . ." The tenant of this house owed nearly $20,000 in rent, the property owner in New York tells Pulliam over the phone.

And outside, the pile of stuff is beginning.

A terra-cotta vase.

A red velvet ottoman with gold tassels.

A set of four matching dining chairs with slender wooden legs, set up on the lawn as if to receive guests.

It's impossible to look away.

"Incoming!" calls a man in a bandanna as he brings a modern-looking desk to the heap. They are as careful as they can be, without the aid of packing peanuts and bubble wrap.

A printer-fax combo.

Three televisions.

A gold-filigree lamp.

So much of it is the kind of stuff that is purchased in optimism, with a sense of brio perhaps -- a red velvet ottoman? Oh, yes, let's have one. Six months ago, All Seasons did six to eight evictions or foreclosures a month; now it's 30 to 40. It will slow for the holidays; All Seasons takes time off for Christmas.

Upstairs, Kifle stands in one of the two master suite closets, surrounded by dozens and dozens of pairs of women's shoes. At least four of the bedrooms appear to have been occupied, filled with clothes and personal effects. Four people with no place to go.

Kifle hates doing closets. He prefers to move impersonal furniture. But it all needs to be done, so he stands here now, placing sandal after sandal into the trash bag. "I don't get it," he says. "If you have the money for computers, flat-screens, shoes . . . why wouldn't you just sell some of it to help pay your rent? I know no one would buy used shoes, but . . ."

The question that hangs in the air is: But why would anyone buy so many shoes to begin with? How would someone not realize eviction was coming? How many months behind in rent does one get before the shoe purchases stop?

Most people live in some version of this house-of-credit fantasy. Beyond-our-means and minimum-monthly-payments have become the American way.

But looking at the piles -- the heaps, the mountains of stuff accumulating in the yard -- the fantasy seems foolish, and a little bit grass-stained.

A coffee table with an elephant base.

A floral print sofa.

Sacks of colorful Oxford shirts.

Flat-screen computer monitors.

It's stuff porn. It's unbelievable excess. It's all on the lawn.

A white vanity table.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

There but for the grace . . .

The crew of All Seasons can sympathize with economic hardships.

Pulliam founded the company after losing his job selling motorcycles last year. He didn't see it coming -- the dealership had been wooing him for months, and had offered him a very nice salary. But he'd been there less than a year when the location downsized. Pulliam's fiancee, Bree-Anne White, had recently given birth to their daughter, Sidney, and the couple had purchased a townhouse in Bowie.

White works in property management and had seen firsthand the money that eviction companies could make. She suggested misfortune could be good business. Pulliam's brother, Corey, and sister, Julie, are both out of work, and now put in hours with their brother for extra cash. Pulliam pays $20 an hour for the first hour, $10 after that.

Kifle has been nearly evicted himself before, and the stakes have seemed higher ever since he had a baby girl four months ago. Now he lives with daughter Fiori, his wife, his mother and his sister in the same complex as Pulliam. He gets part-time work as a computer technician in Washington. People in offices get mad at him when things they broke can't immediately be fixed.

Richardson works in demolition to make ends meet, and says, "We're all struggling right now."

Almost every eviction has an element of "There but for the grace of God . . ."

Another set of dining chairs.

Another terra-cotta vase.

Which is why distancing is important. Treat other people's stuff too carefully, and the things start to seem more like belongings and less like a job. Linger too long in the bathroom and you'll start to notice that you use the same shampoo or have the same shower curtain.

It's easiest in houses like the one on Buckingham Green. Studio-apartment evictions, those are hard. Those, you feel as though you're taking something away from people who don't have much to begin with. The big houses, though . . . Kifle finds a picture of the tenant and his son, standing with Magic Johnson. Shouldn't a person who knows Magic Johnson, he wonders, have managed their money better?

Passing judgment is good for distance.

Someone discovers that the basement is furnished, and everybody groans. They are already out of trash bags. White goes off to buy more. The crew is getting silly, remembering the time that Eric got so hungry in the middle of an eviction that he ate a bag of Oreos from the cupboard, even though all the food was way past expiration. Laughter breaks tension, relieves stressful situations. Laughter is good for distance.

Assorted fake plants.

An Xbox controller.

A "natural bamboo" mattress.

A Dirt Devil.

Four bicycles.

A gas-powered Brinkman grill.

More televisions.

Two more sofas.

China cabinets.

A children's table.

At the top of the stairs, Richardson opens the door of a room that obviously belongs to a little girl. The rest of the house is in various states of disarray, but this room hasn't yet been touched. It is pretty, poufy pink.

Children's stuff is hard to distance yourself from. The evictions that really get to the crew are those with kids, like the one a few months ago where the two little boys picked their way through the mess of their front yard to retrieve their bicycles, and carefully stand them upright in the driveway.

Richardson has a baby on the way. He knows -- with no proof yet -- that it's going to be a girl.

When Kifle packs up kids' rooms, he thinks of Fiori. ("It means flower in Italian," he says. "My little flower.") He thinks about how he wouldn't want anyone touching her clothes.

Pulliam and White think of Sidney. Who wouldn't buy everything for a little girl, if they could afford it? Even if you couldn't really afford it, but thought you could, or at least wanted to try?

This little girl's bed is pink, draped in pink mosquito netting, covered in pink faux-fur pillows. There are pink paper flowers in tall vases, a closet full of dresses, a child-size desk with crayon drawings, and a ticket stub from a recent Janet Jackson concert lying on the floor. Two parakeets chirp in a cage lined with newspaper, and on the wall just inside hangs a sign reading, "Princess Sleeps Here."

Richardson looks into this room and pauses for a minute. "Let's save this one till last, how about?" he says quietly, closing the door again.

The End of the Reign

What began as a pile of stuff on the lawn is now a sea of stuff, wrapping around the side yard to the front, stretching almost all the way to the curb.

Expensive-looking bedding.

A set of cookware.

After All Seasons is finished, the tenant might come back and collect his belongings -- someone heard him on the phone, trying to negotiate a deal with a moving company and a storage facility.

Or the stuff might just sit there, until curious neighbors sidle over, quietly drag away a television or two.

Sometimes, the day after Pulliam and crew finish emptying out a house, they'll be called back and instructed to haul all the contents to a dump. It's as if once tenants see all their stuff on the lawn, they can't picture it anywhere else. Can't picture how they would start over.

On Buckingham Green, when most everything else has been removed over two hours, the crew begins to dismantle the Princess room. Richardson folds dresses into a suitcase he found in the closet. Kifle carries them downstairs. White removes photographs from the wall, dusting each with her sleeve. "Oh," she says. "So cute. She is so cute."

When the last of everything has been removed, Pulliam changes the locks on the front and side entrances, and removes the Christmas wreath from the door.

"That's it," he announces to the crew. Later they'll meet in a gas-station parking lot to grab snacks and settle up payments. Kifle wants to spend some time with Fiori; Wilson is talking about a nap and a movie.

Upstairs, in the little girl's room, the sign reading "Princess Sleeps Here" has been hidden by the open door, and so it still hangs on the wall of the empty room when everybody drives away.

It's the last stuff in the house.