Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 21, 1995 TAG: 9509210008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The year-round Christmas tree molded from a mangle of odds and ends: a toy car, a helicopter, a ceramic elephant, an old door lock, a Jeep, a rusty toy truck.
The front-porch wreath woven with grapevine, bicycle spokes and a child-sized antique doll - who is missing her right leg.
You may even have noticed the way the lawn is maintained, mowed except for one spot near the sidewalk. Perched amid this fieldlike thicket is a scarecrow: the smiling head of a doll, mounted moplike on a post, with a plastic piece of fence stapled below.
If you pay attention to these kinds of things, you might have wondered why Herbert George's low-rent sculpture park has been looking a little, well, un-curated for the past year or so.
The surreal kitchen chairs that sit under the tall locusts have become blanketed by poison oak vines.
Another sculpture - created from a hubcap perched inside a tire rim, flanked by two rotting bedposts - rests on the ground, knocked down by firemen tending a recent blaze at the abandoned house next door.
Herbert hasn't had time to mend his treasures lately.
``I had it goin' good before, but I been busy taking care of my friend,'' the 71-year-old says.
The friend's name was Bobby. Most people thought of him as a drifter. Like Herbert, he never married. And he didn't have close family nearby.
``He came to spend one day with me and ended up spending eight years,'' Herbert recalls.
The two men would walk the alleys of Old Southwest to exercise and ``just to be nosy.'' Their bifocals were eagle eyes when it came to spotting material for Herbert's sculpture - doll heads sticking out of trash cans, propellers from burnt-out old fans, a green plastic inchworm toy that could no longer inch its way forward.
Three mornings a week for six years, they gathered the neighborhood's castoffs and brought them home. Then they spent afternoons sitting on the porch. Bobby would sit there quietly while Herbert waited for inspiration to strike.
``It's not easy like you think. It has to come to you,'' he says. ``So you sit on the porch and say to yourself, `What can I do with that damn thing?' And you wait.
``Sometimes it comes to you - you remember the old TV wire from the alley, and you get out there and you hang the green worm up in the tree with it.''
He whispers his next sentence like a dirty joke: ``You wouldn't believe what people throw away,'' he says. ``Good stuff, some of it.''
Mounds of furniture pile up on the curb when people get evicted. One old guy who died didn't have a family, so the landlord threw his stuff into the alley - World War II Army pictures and everything.
``Only thing people want when you die, it's money. And it's sad,'' Herbert says.
He's seen wedding pictures thrown out in the trash - and not old ones, either. ``It's sad, too, but that's the way life is.''
Herbert and Bobby spoke often of such things as they stooped to pick up society's castoffs: the shellacked plaque of beer and wine labels, the 39-cent Buffy and Jody magic slate, the plywood rooster that Herbert decided to hang in an old guinea-pig cage - along with a Mount Olive pickle jar lid, two rubber balls and a small stuffed Easter bunny.
And then about a year ago, they stopped cruising for trash. Bobby came down with lung cancer, and it was all Herbert could do to take care of him.
``I've really let the yard go, but I had to," he said. "The boy was sick for a year and I couldn't do anything.''
Bobby died Aug. 1 in Herbert George's house. He was 59.
``It messes with you,'' Herbert says. ``I think a friend misses a friend more than a family misses its children,'' he says. ``I think it's just nature that way.''
Herbert is still shaken from his best friend's death. But he knows that life, like art, goes on - revealing itself in society's throwaways.
He thinks he's ready, finally, to resume his job as keeper of the castoffs.
``I gotta get to work,'' he says. ``The garbage man's coming soon, and I gotta beat him.''
Beth Macy's column runs Tuesdays and Thursdays. She can be reached at 981-3435.
by CNB