The New “Keeping Up with the Joneses”
A second story addition nears completion at the Andersons, a shiny new boat waits out winter at the Smiths. I notice a Peloton being delivered to the Williams family and I am unmoored. It’s the Joneses… the damned Joneses that have done it again.
Passerby cars slow to a halt as if it were a stop sign. Joggers pause their gait and gawk. Even dogs on leashes pull their owners near, as if this thing… this monument had its own gravitational force.
Past the Millers’ new maze garden and the Davises gazillion gigawatt Christmas display. Past the Goldsteins’ 30-foot lawn- menorah and the John Deere upon which sits Mr. Carter, mowing his eighth of an acre front yard.
Beyond the Greens’ fuschia Ferrari, the Whites’ tan treehouse and the Grays’ gold gazebo all eyes fall on the Joneses this Tuesday evening, owners once again of the tallest stack of empty paper boxes this side of the Long Island Expressway. A totem pole of corrugated consumerism on display for all to envy and idolize.
Come Wednesday it would be gone, sent back to the plant for reincarnation as new packages to be delivered to the Joneses at some later date, giving the neighborhood hope that maybe this coming week would be the time they would finally keep up with the Joneses.
And so I set out to beat the Joneses once and for all. Our stack will be higher, wider, multi-colored even! We’d have boxes big and small, matted and laminated. The joggers and dogs and passerby cars will come to know our impeccable taste and refined preferences and wonder, “I had no idea Rolexes even came in 12”x12” cardboard containers!”
Yes, it was time for a new Cardboard King.
Armed with an iPhone and a laptop, I go to the mattresses knowing I’d have several days to prove my spending mettle. It would take a concentrated effort, one not only of quantity but of quality. Where else to start but Amazon, the smiley-arrowed progenitors of household cardboard collecting? From them I buy a year’s supply of paper towels and Pampers diapers, sixteen bottles of laundry detergent and twenty two books, the kinds you actually flip through. Some of these, it turns out, arrive in plastic envelopes. I promptly return them, demanding they come in a corrugated box.
eBay brings me automotive parts to repair the Mustang that I don’t have and the 1993 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, A-to-Z plus “A Year in Review”. Etsy? Six different pieces of American Flag wall art. Chalk up twenty new big, burly boxes.
Bowflex brings me gym equipment and Best Buy brings me TV equipment and from Mirror, TV and gym equipment (and a mirror)! Five tall, lean boxes. At least a good forty square feet of coverage right there. And then there’s Apple. Who could forget Apple? Two new desktops for when my daughters turn of age, in eight years. I even pick up pounds of food and toys from Chewy for the pets I do not yet have.
Only on Saturday do I take notice of the stockpile amassing in my garage, filling up space as if it were my own, recyclable version of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. Is it enough to keep up with the Joneses? I’m going to take any chances. I need an ace-in-the-hole, the elusive XXXXXXL-sized box. That should do the trick.
Quickly, I call up Lexus to see if they can wrap their new LS model in paper rather than a bow. No dice. Neither will Wayfair send their six-person sauna in a singular, gigantic, recyclable shipper.
I need a Hail Mary. Contemplatively stroking my non-existent beard (for which I purchased a gallon of conditioning oil, in a paper bottle of course), I train my browser on Uline, pulling the trigger on dozens more boxes, delivered in … boxes. Knowing the discerning Long Islanders of my neighborhood might look condescendingly on the nameless and faceless, I rummage through my kids’ art supplies for markers and stencils and go to work. Nike’s Swoosh adorned four boxes, “Samsung’’ four more. Rolex, Burberry, Hermés and Prada, each to be represented curbside the Jaycoffs. I even paint a mid-sized box Tiffany-blue and then cocksuredly throw a Dollar General box onto the Joneses lawn, a spite box if you will, for I know the title beckons.
The buzz began early on that fated Tuesday afternoon when my garage door finally opened to relieve itself of the congregation of corrugation that had been choking its air supply. Carton by carton, I carefully stockpiled the boxes along the curb as if I were playing a game of Jenga in reverse. Admittedly, nerves began to grip me as neighbors drove their final blocks home and began their dog-walks and their evening jogs.
But then they began to stop. They began to stare. They began crane their neck to get a full picture of what they saw. Before them, a venerable stack of flattened boxes so beautiful it could have been sculpted by Rodin; so high, a beacon atop would qualify it as a lighthouse, a Leaning Tower of Packages looking down on everything, even the Joneses.
A scramble ensued. Nobody had ever come remotely close to the Joneses before and, as such, there was no precedent for the contest that had unfolded. But a contest it now was and as such, we needed a judge. It was decided that our auditor would be the old man in the neighborhood tear down, you know, that plot in every community that has been reclaimed by Mother Nature decades earlier. It was with great tension that the bewildered Mr. Jones and I sized each other up while our bearded hermit surveyed our entries when…
“WINNER! JAYCOFF!”
I remember it still; as if my wedding day, that time I was front row at Guns ’n’ Roses, and the birth of my daughters had happened all at once, for as wonderful as all those experiences had been, nothing can quite keep up with beating the Joneses… by what was ultimately determined to be the narrow margin of a box of Charmin 2-Ply Toilet Paper.
The glow stuck with me the next morning, as I emerged from my house in the dim morning light. It stayed with me as I drove past the Whites and their treehouse, the Smiths and their boat. It kept with me as I rode past the Blacks’ Ferrari and the Millers’ maze. All with their paltry, pitiful bits of flattened corrugated cardboard. None of them close to keeping up with the Jaycoffs.
And in the evening I returned, the gleam waning ever so slightly. Our prized pile gone on a pilgrimage to pulp. I made my way past the Gray’s gazebo, steering my 13-year-old sedan onto a pothole-ridden driveway and into an empty garage when I suddenly heard the call of Mr. Carter atop his John Deere. “There they go again!”.
Running up my driveway, ever so careful not to sprain my ankle, I instinctively turned my eye towards the Joneses, where a dark blue Sprinter van sat idle, warning lights flashing.
