Before leaving to get my furniture, I repeatedly asked the Ruemate to leave me a key for the gated parking lot outside our building. I�d be arriving late in the night, and she would be upstate, thus unable to let me into the lot herself.
And you don�t leave a trailer full of furniture and musical equipment out on the street where we were. In my mind, there�s always an enterprising young ghetto thug out there with a trailer hitch, so you can never be too careful. But in a particularly frustrating example of child psychology, by repeatedly asking her to do something for me, I was almost guaranteeing that she wouldn�t.
Greyhound�s swift treads bought me on the first leg of my whirlwind tour, returning me to the town of my birth and into the arms of absent fanfare. According to my schedule, I�d spend the next day sorting, packing, loading and then driving back to Brooklyn.
I�d penciled in God as my co-pilot, but his presence was tentative.
But when the next day dawned and I surveyed my personal items, I was met with a particularly vexing problem of physics. Larger trailers, while luxurious and gluttonous in their dimensions, were too heavy for my meager four-cylinder car. Upon realizing that I �aint got a V6�, the �experts� at Uhaul recommended one of their two smallest trailers. Essentially of the same dimensions, one was longer then tall while the other was taller then long.
As always, I opted for length.
Back home, I wrestled with my oddly shaped items and eventually crammed them into the prohibitively small space afforded. A kitchen table, one mattress, three chairs, one file cabinet, one computer, one keyboard, one amp, two guitars, one nightstand, two bookshelves, a few trash bags full of clothing and a countless horde of boxes all Leggoed together with precision and grace.
A hug and a wave later, I was meandering up the coast with an over-stuffed beast at my heels.
It was almost 11 pm before I managed to pull my hulking whale of a wagon train up to the apartment. I climbed the stairs, exhausted from the ordeal, and searched the apartment for any sign of a parking lot key.
Finding nothing, I called her on her cell phone and discovered that in a fit of �I don�t give a shit�, she managed to forget to leave me the key. Ever the imposer, she suggested that I go and bang on my neighbors door and ask for hers.
Her neighbor who I�ve met once.
Her neighbor, who�s probably sleeping right now.
I should go ask her neighbor for her parking lot key because she should automatically trust me.
Lacking better options, that�s exactly what I did. It took some convincing, but I eventually assured her that I wasn�t some nicely dressed car thief in search of a quick con.
After all, it was readily apparent that I wasn�t nicely dressed at all.
I hustled down the stairs and managed to snake my procession into the lot, parking it in the least obtrusive spot available.
I spent the next hour and a half lugging all of the most expensive items up into the safety of my apartment before finally giving up and bedding down for the night.
The ruemate said she�d be back early in the day to help me with my larger items.
