I’m a mover. I move people and things. I do this with a 26-year-old van and 34-year-old muscles. It’s hard, lucrative work. I’m my own boss. I’m off the books.
I get most of my business advertising on Craigslist, an online message board with portals all over the globe. Craigslist is an open marketplace of sex, love, televisions, housing, sarcasm and mental illness; an electronic flea market peddling the cast-off possessions of the middle and lower classes, the apartments to keep them in, and the lives to animate it all. Anonymous and intimate at the same time, people who’ve never met can come together to exchange cats and coitus in a black-and-white environment; tantamount to getting directions from a Russian in broken Spanish, it’s to the point, dictated by necessity.
People are nervous when moving their lives. There are various kinds of moves; divorce moves, marriage moves, eviction moves, graduation moves, new job moves, cheaper housing moves, I suspect I’m an artist who should live in New York City moves. It’s always a big deal to the person moving and almost never a big deal to me, the mover.
I show up, and I just want them to be ready. That’s the most important thing. It seems obvious, that one should prepare to pick up their lives and shift them geographically, that one should pack and protect their possessions, but, apparently, it’s not obvious. Often, I show up to find the remains of the previous evening’s drinking binge. The customer, overwhelmed by having to collectively assess the objects that fill their life, turns to the bottle.
I sometimes wish my customers were coke-heads. Coke-heads pack. Drunks reminisce. Drunks pick up the book, and, before throwing it in the box, remember the girl who gave them the book, the argument about communicating, the need for another drink. Drunks forget to tape the bottom of the box. Drunks put a hundred books in a box, a hundred pound un-taped box of books at the top of a 4th floor walk-up.
Sometimes, upon arriving, I realize that I am, by necessity, the only person who has ever visited the apartment. Twice, I found an apartment filled with used q-tips. They were everywhere, on the open areas of the floor, and behind dressers and under coffee tables – hundreds of used q-tips. On one of these occasions, in Long Island City, the q-tips were interspersed with coins, mostly quarters, a few hundred dollars worth of coins, and one large jug of change which we were instructed to throw out. The customer, an effeminate 30-something-year-old man with good manners and the disturbingly strong odor of lotion, had also never met a record he couldn’t purchase. Most of these albums would be considered kitsch, married couples singing Bavarian hymns smiling in tight yellow shorts on velvet couches, but I suspected no conscious irony in their presence in his collection. The job consisted of loading the van with 50 crates of records, 10 garbage bags of clothing and abandoning all else to a landlord who would mostly likely burn the apartment down while weeping quietly on the sidewalk.
While our vinyl obsessed, ear cleaning compulsive, lotion reeking host ran out to the store, no doubt for more q-tips, my Moldovan helper and I filled our pockets with hundreds of soon to be abandoned quarters from the bottom of this hopeless wishing well. We occasionally took guilty sidelong glances at each other as we peeled them off the floor, regret that had more to do with the greedy lapse in hygiene we were trespassing than the unwarranted notion that we were stealing. Perhaps we collected enough to buy tetanus shots.
I later deposited the albums, garbage bags and, it turns out, great conversationalist, at a home in a suburb of Boston, where his unsuspecting and unfortunate new roommate helped carry a plague from my van into an immaculate two-bedroom.
I love my van. I’ve loved all my vans. They are traveling boxes of security. Generally, all of my earthly possessions can fit into a van, although I have been trying to avoid proving this to myself as of late. This particular van is a 1990 Dodge B350 Ramwagon. It has a huge 8 cylinder engine and almost never breaks down. When it does, I forgive it, because it’s my van.
It’s 14 feet long with windows all around, like a church van, although in it’s previous life, it was owned by a university in Texas before being purchased by a gay accountant for the sole purpose of moving to New York. He sold it on Ebay – to me. Since then, it’s been broken into 4 times, had most of its front end replaced, received new tires, many cans of white spray paint to cover graffiti and rust, gained a home-made roof-rack and visited Pittsburgh, Boston, D.C., Philly, Baltimore, Richmond and all points in between. I’ve put forty thousand miles on it in a year-and-a-half. It was built in Canada.
Volume is a puzzle. Couches are not big. They only take up the volume of air they displace. That is to say, they can be surrounded on all sides and in all orifices, and I am the conductor of the symphonic geometric orgy that takes place in my van daily.
Nobody thinks I can fit their stuff in my van. They have generally been wrong. It has 9 by 5 by 5 feet of cargo space, and a roof-rack. I strap mattresses to the roof rack, and, if necessary, anything else that attempts to refuse inclusion. I am limited only by aerodynamics, for which I have little respect. On one or two occasions, I have almost doubled the height of my van. I have only once gone under a bridge and lost the legs of a kitchen table, and only once forgotten to strap down a mattress, which may still be in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.
My downfall is Ikea. Ikea furniture is not built to be moved once assembled. Optimistic, upwardly mobile youngsters bring compact boxes named after blond children home and with dowel and metal hook engineering, guided by Swedish hieroglyphics, puzzle together sheets of air, woodchips and Viking spit into clean, modern Scandinavian furniture. It works great as a thin, pine-laminated veil over emotional and financial poverty, but it doesn’t last a trip up a staircase.
I defend Ikea, even as I’m busy destroying their products during a move, because I’m Swedish, and an insult directed at Sweden is an insult directed at my mother and her cooking. Ikea isn’t to blame. People who don’t dismantle their Ikea furniture before moving are to blame. Ikea IS made of air and woodchips, and that’s why it’s cheap, environmentally friendly (pine is a renewable resource) and easy to assemble and disassemble. It’s not built to move whole. If you’re upset that you bought something that should move without being dismantled but falls apart into an environmental disaster every time you move it, you have a Ford Econoline, not an Ikea.
When I think of it, I explain to the customer that I can’t be responsible for assembled Ikea furniture breaking during a move, but usually I forget, and, if it breaks I’ll shrug and say “It’s Ikea crap, man. The stuff’s disposable.” - The equivalent of a waiter blaming his errors on an innocent kitchen.
Now, just so we’re clear, I’m not a careless mover. I don’t break things often, but, some damage is inevitable. If you wanted a perfect mover who was insured for damages, you would be paying two or three times what you’re paying me. I’m not quite the back-alley abortionist of movers, but I don’t have a medical degree either. I’ll scratch your coffee-table, but I’ll deliver your guitar unscathed, and most of my customers have guitars.
I’m a semi-professional mover. I’m a writer, a comedian, a recovering addict, a friend and I’m good at moving people, strange, flawed, nervous people with too much crap and nowhere to put it.
I forgot to mention, I was in Montreal, Canada last month. I flew up there with the same girlfriend mentioned in the previous post to get her visa. For some reason, to get a visa to stay in the United States, you have to leave the United States and get the visa at a U.S. consulate in another country.
