The motto of the day was: Fiction is worthless.

My buddy Pat opened up a box and whistled and said, “Now, Rhett, tell me how you’re doing on old used underwear, because we’ve got a whole load of ‘em here.”

I said, “Well, I don’t know, man. What size are they?”

“How about old socks?” he asked as he handed the box back to me.

I tossed it back into the trash pile behind us without looking inside. One box down, a few hundred left to sift through.

The place was called Mel’s Mini Warehousing. It’s down on southside between Putnam Bridge and the water waste treatment plant. We worked all afternoon in a ten by ten storage unit. The executor had stacked it floor to ceiling, warped and bloated cardboard boxes heaped precariously together.

This mountain of trash had been left behind by an old lawyer who’d passed away the month before. No family. No kids. No will. No heirs. So after the lawyer’s death, all his possessions and heirlooms passed on to people like Pat. Scavengers, auction junkies, ebay resellers. Pat had paid the storage unit operator, a friend of his, two hundred bucks to look through this unit. In exchange for chucking all the trash, Pat would get to keep the few valuables.

Opening a box full of ancient medicines and toiletry, Pat held up a bag of unopened decades-old lozenges and said, “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you, but you can use sixty-five year old cough drops as suppositories. Cleans you right out.”

The boxes were full of all the usual stuff that gets collected and gathered up in the day-to-day of living, but has nowhere to go home to after the funeral. Most of our lives can be summed up in piles of old underwear and toiletries.

This particular unit, though, was mostly books. Old books were Pat’s specialty. After retiring, he made his money going to auctions and yard sales, buying cheap and then selling a little less cheap.

He handed me a box of books to go through. The number one rule: fiction is worthless. Book club is worthless. Mass market paperback is worthless.

After going through a few, I’d haul the trash books in a wagon over to the dumpster. Books by the handful, armful, box load—into the dumpster. [i]Wise Women: A Celebration of Their Insights, Courage, and Beauty[/i]—into the dumpster, and their wise womanly insights, too. [i]Keeping Watch[/i] and [i]The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette[/i] and [i]The Riddle of the Shipwrecked Spinster[/i]—into the dumpster, for the respective crimes of being modern fiction, historical fiction, and a dime-a-dozen mystery.

As an author, I wonder if what I did there can be considered a kind of cannibalism, or maybe sociopathic serial murder. The destruction of hundreds of books without even reading, just a glance at the front and back cover. In Unit P12 at Mel’s Mini Warehouses, we judged books by their covers, and found them wanting.

I know the months, often years, of work, love, heartache, and frustration that goes into the creation of a novel. I spend months crafting a single short story, and when it is complete, if a story can ever be complete, I consider it a part of myself. Every story I write is a little piece of of myself I’ve chipped off and dropped into the world. And that’s just two or three thousand words.

How many hundreds of thousands of words did I throw away in the massacre at unit P12? How many bits and bobbles and hopes and loves and fears of my fellow writers did I toss into the dumpster?

But we saved a few, set aside in a little pile. Among them: [i]Social Register of Philadelphia: 1970[/i]; [i]Grattan’s Failure: Parliamentary Opposition and the People of England 1779-1800[/i]; and the best find of the day, the browning [i]A Discourse of Agriculture, Its Antiquity, and Importance, to Every Member of the Community[/i], first edition, published in 1785, sealed in an airtight bag.

Pat tells me, “There are six other units crammed full of this guy’s stuff. The one next door is all furniture. He’s dead and gone, and all his stuff is still here. All these material possessions, it makes you think.”

I never went back after that one time. Something about it didn’t sit right in my stomach.

That day, I threw away a couple hundred books. In the month Pat spent cleaning out the unit, he threw away tens of thousands.