Storage Facility

For some time now, I've been buying Basmati rice in bulk. As I live in Berkeley, a city with a sizable Indian population, I'm able to obtain substantial quantities. I began with five-kilo bags, graduated to 20- and 50-kilo sacks, and now find that if I purchase 1,500 kilos at a go (packaged in a rust-resistant steel container dropped off at the foot of my driveway on the sixth of each month), my price point falls considerably. In fact, it nearly vanishes.

I was raised in England, where everything is small: cars, refrigerators, houses, salaries, restroom cubicles, and condiments. There's no Grand Canyon in England. There's Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, and now, finally, Legoland. The only thing big in England is the prices. Which is why I appreciate America. If you buy enough of anything, it's virtually free. In fact, strolling through Costco, I feel as though I'm making money just looking. Once I actually begin buying Raisin Bran, I'm on Easy Street.

Like an increasing number of people in Northern California, I don't have a job. Which gives me plenty of time to shop. And plenty of company when I break open my steel container of rice. The unemployed men in my neighborhood stream out of their dwellings (think 1979 Yorkshire miners' strike but eveyone with a Ph.D. and Frisbee) bearing bushel baskets, wheelbarrows, etc. The container is soldered shut to prevent stowaways (though we have discovered people on occasion; they'll never eat rice again, believe you me!) and Keith, an out-of-work astrophysicist who has a Sri Lankan wife and welds, burns it open. Then comes the monsoon, with rice instead of rain. I used to monitor who took how much but now it's like, "Who gives a shit?" as long as the container's empty and ready for pick-up (included in the price of the rice) before my girlfriend Beth gets home at five.

She finds much of what I do repugnant: eating Marmite, wearing singlets, washing my underarms and genitals at the sink, visiting the dentist every fourth year, and driving a stick shift in the Berkeley Hills. So having an industrial-sized container of rice delivered to the house on a monthly basis is the least of my problems. Nonetheless, it's a source of tension.

Despite the fact that others in the neighborhood (some far more enterprising than I) have started to order their own containers and now share their spoils with us. In the past month, our road has received massive shipments of flour, sugar, pasta, a brownish-grey breakfast cereal, and pork. All but the last worked out wonderfully and as I mentioned to Beth the other night, a spaghetti dinner for two now sets us back less than eleven cents (excluding sauce and wine).

In truth, a snide suggestion of Beth's (that I use our empty container to ship Mary Swenson (who broke a costly wine glass at a party of ours) to India) has resulted in additional neighborhood savings. Given the discomfort people endure on transatlantic flights these days, most are happy to reduce their carbon footprints by travelling the oceans in shipping containers (though we didn't have any takers for the one that previously held pork).

We've found a shipping agent who's willing to turn a blind eye, fares are extremely reasonable, and once on board ship, passengers are allowed out to exercise and meet others. We've even had a few "shipping container" marriages (as well as one regrettable sexual assault).

Growing up in Sheffield in the 1960s, hoarding was considered bad. Not because the English had abandoned their wartime mentality (a bunker filled with Heinz baked beans), but because no one really had disposable income. To hoard was to show off.

Here in America, there's no such thing as showing off. You invented it. Everyone has a swimming pool, even if it's an aluminum, above-ground number with a rat floating on its surface. Hell, someone two streets over made a pool out of his empty container (molding some of the marshmallows it previously stored into a waterslide), when he realized it was less hassle to forfeit his $285 security deposit than to buy and transport the genuine article.

One thing we did do in Sheffield was leave butter in the open, finding no need to refrigerate it. I've followed this practice here (possible given Berkeley's temperate climate and vital given the volume of rice Beth and I consume) and have also begun to keep large vats of soy sauce on the premises.

The basic rule with hoarding is the same as that adhered to in storage spaces: use every available inch. That means boxes. And for those of you adopting these methods in cities like Boston, L.A., D.C., New York, and San Francisco (where closets count as "bedrooms"), that means planned pyramidal stacking of boxes with weight evenly distributed by product: a stratum of canned goods at the bottom, an array of layered grains in the middle, then cookies and snacks prone to crumble, with rolls of toilet paper and loose fruit thrown at random to the sides and over the top.