moving

Over the phone, J. says: "You sure you don't mind?" I reassure him. It's midnight, I just got home.

Over the phone there is a pause. Then he talks again. "You know, I don't feel like doing this now. If I could, I would wait till tomorrow." He says his girl is not strong enough. He says he's exhausted. To tell the truth, I am too and I wish I wouldn't have to do this.

But on the phone I say, "It's ok." I tell him I promised I'll help him. I should have called earlier, before I left work so that I could have gone directly to his place. I say, I forgot. He says he can come and pick me up in 10.

When we arrive at his place, I know it's going to take longer than I thought. Nothing's been prepared. Drawers are full. The TV, the desktop -- everything is up and running. Outside, the truck is waiting in an empty street of Bed-Stuy. A Uhaul truck. I watch it while they put their shit together. Every now and then, a skinny black guy with more years to him than teeth comes and goes with a brown paper bag in his hand. Between two mysterious errands, he stops to talk with them. He's burned out. Whatever it is -- booze or drugs -- it got him, and it got him good. In the hall, there's also this huge wooden TV set, probably from the 80's. We load the truck.

While we follow a police car I say, "You have interesting characters in your building."

He says he promised this guy $30 bucks to help him with the lighter stuff tomorrow.

When we arrive at his new place, everything goes well at first. We unload the truck and bring everything into the hall then we lock the truck. One piece of furniture, he didn't want to empty the drawers. I have enough moving experience behind me to know it's not a good idea but he insists. So be it. We taped the drawers shut.

As I expected the motherfucker is too long and heavy and requires a lot of clearance to turn. Everything was fine until we reached the stairs. J's new place is on the 3rd floor. The stairs are narrow and steep. Three doors on each floor, and it looks like there's no much place to turn. With the fully loaded baby on our hands, we find out that there's no place to turn at all. To make it worst, the glossy wood of the furniture makes it all slippery.

We sweat and curse our way to the 2nd floor. He's going first, walking backward, and I follow, pushing my way up and carrying most of the weight. I tell him, "Look, let's do this in one go. Just after the turn, stop a few seconds so I can get a better grip, and then we go all the way up." It's so narrow that I have to take the turns by holding the furniture with one hand only. And even like that, there's barely enough room for my arm between the wall and the furniture. From the back of one drawer, on the cover of a bootleg DVD, there's two huge boobs staring at me. Everybody's drawers are the same, but this clearly doesn't help right now. Also, despite the tape, some of the drawers keep opening. So we start turning, the furniture still not sure whether it's going to tip over on the left side or the right, and sure enough J. doesn't stop after the turn but starts climbing the stairs fast. In the empty and quiet building I yell: "Stop! Stop!" He stops and hurts his leg and I barely have the time to grab under the furniture with my other hand. I laugh. This is fucked up.

He says, "You said we do it in one go!"

Then J. calls for a break, puts down the furniture at the top of the stairs while I still hold it a few steps below, and takes out his heavy leather jacket and throws it upstairs. And misses. The jacket goes over the handrail and there's nothing we can do but watch it fall to the 1st floor. I start laughing. He says, "Man! There's my new cell phone in there!" I can't stop laughing. My back hurts, my hands hurt and the furniture is slowly but surely slipping off my hands, but I can't help it.

I say, "Hurry up, go get your jacket!"

But someone just entered the building and he yells at them to bring him his jacket.

I say, "Dude, it's slipping we have to hurry."

So he grabs it again and we start climbing again and he clearly doesn't care that the furniture is hitting and scratching against the wall or that we broke a foot. Hell, we didn't even know there was a foot in the middle of it anyway, so it's not like it's going to be missed.

I'm confident we woke up everybody in the building. At one point, a guy came up and handed us the metallic foot that had noisily rolled down all the way downstairs.

After that, everything else was easy. Even the Queen size mattress was a joke.

This is one of the worst moving I've ever done. I'm usually pretty good with them. It comes close 1st with one I did with Raph, a few years ago in France. Just like Raph to go live in a fucking dungeon. And this is no figure of speech, it was a medieval dungeon. His studio was on the 4th or 5th floor, up a corkscrew stairway. The stone of the steps were at least 300 years old and worn out and slippery and this loser had this fucking big-ass couch that had to be brought up there. A fucking nightmare. We laughed a lot, though.

He drives me home, and it feels good to ride and watch the streets of Brooklyn. I wonder if there are more churches or delis...

Got home after 3 am. First rest in 16 hours. Boot up the computer. No emails. I mean: some professional emails, but no personal emails. I don't know what it means. Or even if it's supposed to mean anything. Whatever.