Thu 8/16 10am, BMFRTE T minus 12.5 hours and counting...
After an early morning lesson, I call UHaul to verify that the trailer they told me would be available this afternoon in White Plains will actually be there. I don't want to drive all the way there and find no trailer. After a lengthy period of time on hold, I finally get through to someone, who informs me that no such trailer exists in White Plains, and seems to be a bit confused as to why I might think there would be one there (because you guys TOLD me there'd be one there just 3 days ago!), but she assures me that there is definitely a trailer in Tea Neck, NJ, that I can definitely have.
Tomorrow.
Wait, tomorrow?? We're supposed to leave TONIGHT!!! After much back and forth, it seems there is no trailer for me unless I want to drive a very long way indeed, and so I decide to accept the trailer in Tea Neck. Not that I've ever heard of Tea Neck, but apparently it's right on the other side of the river. And anyway, I have already internally conceded that I'm in no way packed enough to leave tonight anyhow.
I call Ed and let him know we're not leaving until tomorrow early afternoon. The place in Tea Neck is a gas station, Larry's Sunoco, and when I call there they say that although the gas station part opens quite early, the guy at the UHaul desk doesn't get in until 9. Awesome. I get to drive over to Jersey in rush hour traffic. At least it's a reverse commute...
1030 p.m., BMFRTE zero hour
After spending the rest of the afternoon packing, and then tutoring my last lesson in NYC at 8pm, I head back to the apartment for more packing. I mark the passage of 1030 p.m. by noting that I have officially cleared out 1 of the 4 rooms in my apartment.
3 a.m., BMFRTE T plus 4.5 hours and counting...
I'm exhausted, and looking at a couple hours sleep max, then back up to pack more and then head to Jersey. Again, Keiko has been a saint about helping. I'd be twice as far behind without her help.
8.a.m, BMFRTE T plus 9.5 hours and counting...
I head for Jersey. Keiko is off to work. Tea Neck is some little Jersey town along a little river, tucked in between a couple of freeways. I get lost briefly, and end up having to call Keiko to Google map me and get me back on track. But I do eventually get to Larry's Sunoco,where I am told the UHaul guy will be in at 9. So I wait.
At 9, Filipe the Uhaul guy shows up. We get to the business of setting up the contract, and I ask if I can extend my reservation past 10 days, since according to the BMFRTE Grand Plan, I will need the trailer 20 days. He says the system won't allow him to enter a number bigger than 12, so I'll have to call from the road once I'm a few days into the trip and extend it over the phone.
Fine. So I pay for the 12 days he can give me. I also pay for a hitch ball, so we can attach the trailer. Then Filipe asks me if I have the connector that allows the brake lights and turn signals for the car to route to the trailer. I say no, the folks on the phone assured me that you guys would have all the relevant equipment.
Well, it turns out that Larry is out of brake light connectors. But, Tony's Shell station, down on the river road, probably has them. Filipe calls over there, and they say sure. So Filipe explains to me how to get down to Tony's Shell station. It's not so close. And it's 930 already. So I jump into my car and start heading over to Joe's. As I'm pulling out of the Sunoco, Filipe comes out shouting something about River Road and River Street. But I'm in the midst of an intense recalculation of just how late this is all going to make me getting out of NYC, so Filipe's words take up a place in the mental queue, waiting for processing time.
Once I'm headed down the main road, I finish my calculation: we're not getting out of here until late afternoon. At that point, Filipe's words come crashing into the main part of my consciousness- either he said, "Don't take River Road, take River Street," or he said, "Don't take River Street, take River Road." If it's the former, then that flatly contradicts what he said to me inside the Sunoco, and I figure, if he had been contradicting himself my agile mind would surely have noticed/flagged that in some way. And, I'm well down the street now so no way am I turning around to go back and ask him that. After driving a while, I come upon River Road. I turn right, as instructed, and start looking for Tony's Shell station.
10 minutes later, it becomes clear that I am heading into a residential area that will probably stay residential until I hit Canada. I suppose there was never really any doubt it was going to play out this way.
I turn around, and backtrack to the main road, keep going down it, and in short order come across River Street. I turn right, and after another 10 minutes, I find Tony's Shell station.
When I arrive, I see a couple UHaul trucks parked in the back, and I see a guy, who projects like you would expect Tony to project, having a spirited discussion with a young woman. There is no one manning the counter inside, and only one other person who appears to be working, who is pumping gas. After all, it's Jersey, and you're not allowed to pump your own gas, because if you were, it wouldn't fit in with New Jersey's long-term goal of being the Least User-Friendly State in the Union. You can pick up on this in the state motto: "New Jersey- You Don't Like Us, And We Don't Give A Shit."
So I not-so-patiently wait for (Tony?) and this woman to finish their rather heated discussion. Since I'm close enough to overhear, I quickly pick up the gist of the discussion- the young woman has returned a UHaul truck, but in doing so, locked the keys inside the truck. Tony is saying that that means he is going to have to either call a locksmith or break a window to get in, and she's going to have to pay for that. She is indignant- why does he not have an extra set of keys?? He is trying, not very successfully, to calmly explain that there are 33,000 UHaul trucks in the system, and exactly what would make her think he has a spare for every one of them?
After listening to this for a while, with no resolution, I notice an older woman has appeared behind the counter inside. I go inside, and soon enough discover that this is Tony's wife. She listens to me explain what part I need, and says she'll go get her son, who should be able to help me. After about another 10 minutes, a greasy guy comes in, listens to me explain (again) what I need, and then disappears. After yet another ten minutes, he rematerializes, holding a part in his hand, which he appears to have taken off another vehicle. Whatever. I'll take anything as long as it works. I fork over some cash,, jump in the car, and head back to Larry's.
1030 a.m., BMFRTE T plus 12 hours and counting...
At Larry's, Filipe and I together get the trailer hitched to the car, and set up the wiring. We appear to be good to go. I get back on the road, and thankfully don't get lost on the way back. Traffic, while heavy, is not too bad either. At 1130, I am parked in front of my office, which is the first thing I am going to load. Sadly, I never actually got around to packing _anything_ in there, so Keiko comes over on her lunch break and together we get the whole office packed and loaded by 130pm. At that point, Keiko has to go back to work, and I'm looking at having to get everything I own, a sizeable chunk of which is still not packed, down 22 floors and loaded into the car and trailer.
Ed has taken the opportunity that my lateness has provided to squeeze in more tutoring, so I call him to let to tell him not to hurry- now we're not leaving until around dinnertime. I head over to the apartment to begin loading there. At the office, I'd been extraordinarily lucky to find a parking spot on the street right in front that was big enough for my SUV+UHaul trailer combo. No such luck at home. So, I did as any New Yorker does- I double-parked and put on the hazards. Since I had pulled around to the back entrance, on 87th st., I figured I had some time before anyone affiliated with NYC traffic noticed.
On the way home, Tom calls to say he's done tutoring and is willing to come over and help me load the trailer. I have always liked Tom, but his personal stock with me is rising stratospherically now. So not long after I get home, where I frantically continue to pack stuff, I get a knock at the door. I open the door, and there's Tom. And look! He seems to have brought 2 friends, whom I've never met. And look! They seem to have brought a luggage cart full of stuff. Wait... why would they _bring_ stuff?
We quickly establish that these are not, in fact, friends of Tom's. What they are, in fact, are the new guy who's moving into the apartment, and his buddy, who is helping him move in. Apparently, even though I warned my landlord that it might take me until Friday to finish moving out, and I paid him through Friday, he told this guy he could move in Friday morning.
Aside: And now, a word about finding a place to live in Manhattan...
As a veteran of finding a place to live in the city, I have noticed the following: apartments in Manhattan generally come in two basic categories. First, there are apartments which are (relatively) affordable, and basically totally unlivable. For instance, the cot in a hallway that I could rent, which came with bathroom/kitchen sharing privileges, for $800/month. I actually gave that one serious consideration, because it was the first situation that didn't fall into category 2, which is, (relatively) livable, and (completely) unaffordable. After you've seen 20 places, all of which are one or the other, you start becoming a dangerous combination of depressed/desperate.
But there is a third way, for a lucky few. New York City has a number of rent-controlled apartments. The people who have these generally hang on to them, often for life. For instance, on the floor of my building there were several people who had lived there since the 60's. Those people had apartments which were a little dumpy, since they hadn't been renovated in 40 years, but they were spacious, but with rent control the rent on them roughly 20% of the actual market value. Consequently, they were basically stuck living there forever, unless they moved away from NYC completely. More than one of them, as I got to know them, eventually said, "I hate this building, and my apartment, but I can't ever leave here because I know I'll never find a place for even twice what I'm paying here." It took living in New York City to make me finally decide what I think about rent control: a well-intentioned idea in theory, but the hidden costs of price controls render it a bad idea in practice.
In my case, I found a guy who had moved into a penthouse 1-bedroom in 1978, and then had gotten married in the early 90's and moved to Jersey so he and his family could live in a house like normal people. But, since he had a fantastic rent on that apartment, he didn't want to give it up. So, he spent the next 10+ years variously operating the apartment as a vacation rental, and occasionally subletting it if he found a guy who would tolerate his terms.
His terms, which I easily agreed to, were: I pay $1450 per month, and never interact with the building management in any way, and allow him to stay over and sleep on the sofa one night a month, and in return I get a penthouse 1-bedroom, with a (for NYC) ton of space, right across the street from work. Done and done. Of course, the reason I couldn't interact with building management in any way was that this was an illegal sublet- you're not allowed to do that with rent controlled apartments, and certainly not for more than the original lease. He was paying $1311 per month.
For me, that was an easy deal to accept. I had a bigger apartment than pretty much anyone I knew, certainly in Manhattan, who was paying less than $3000 per month. It was a doorman building, which was awesome. And right across the street from work. When he would stay over, I would either stay over at Nacole's, or, once we broke up, crash at the office on my sleeping mat, which I kept there for those 14 hour days where I would have a 25 minute break in between lessons and wanted to take a nap.
This is the kind of shit that people put up with in order to survive in Manhattan. There are so many stories so much worse. Anyway, back to the main story:
One other thing I agreed to upfront was 2 months notice for when I was going to move out. However, I gave him 3 months notice- on May 15th I told him I'd be moving out August 16th. Consequently, at the beginning of August, when my landlord called me and said, "Here's how we'll do August: you'll pay for the month in full, and if I find anyone to move in for any part of August, I'll split it with you," my reaction was: "Huh?"
My position was: since I gave you 3 months notice, we'll pro-rate August, (a) because that would be like every other renting situation I've ever heard of, and (b) because why would I pay you for a service (housing) you're not actually rendering? My landlord was quite offended. His response was: "If you get a hotel room for the night, and check out early in the morning, you don't go to the hotel manager and ask for your room rate to be pro-rated 'cause you're leaving early."
Wow.
Upon telling this to my friend and office-mate, J-Rob, he responded with: "Nice. Obviously he must have done really well on the Analogies section of the SAT."
So, after much back and forth, we agreed that I would pay him for 17 days in August, because although I was determined to leave on the 16th, I warned my landlord that if anything slipped in the schedule, it might take an extra day to get out of there. Which, as it happened, it did. My landlord, determined I guess to get at least one day of double rent out of this deal, told his new guy, Matt, that he could move in the morning of the 17th. So here we all are, 2pm on 8/17, BMFRTE T plus 15.5 hours and counting, and literally _not_one_thing_ has been moved out of the apartment and into the trailer, and this guy is here with all his worldly possessions, justifiably upset because he thought there'd be an empty apartment for him to move into, and which he had paid rent for.
Although I totally understand why he's upset, he is actually quite hostile for quite a while, and seems to be impervious to the fact that the best thing he can do right now is put his stuff in the corner, allow us to work so we can get out of here as quickly as possible, which by the way we'd ALL like to do, and go call my landlord and take it up with him. But eventually, in his slow, hostile way, he does come to grips and stops harassing me so I can work.
For the next hour, Tom and I commandeer the luggage cart and start taking down anything that can go now and putting it into the trailer. About an hour later, as we're dealing with a giant pile of boxes, in the middle of the street where I'm double-parked, the next logical thing happens: a freak summer thunderstorm comes in out of nowhere and begins pouring rain down in biblical proportions. This is awesome, because now everything is going to be soaked before being packed into a trailer that is going to be hot every day for the next 3 weeks. And it makes working that much more pleasant and efficient. For another couple of hours we work, and I am pretty much ready to promise Tom my first-born daughter, when the _next_ logical thing happens, which is, the traffic police finally discover me and threaten to tow my truck. So I have to pull around the front of the building and park down by the corner. Now we have to walk twice as far to get anything to the truck, and we can't use the luggage cart anymore because you're not allowed to be moving in and out of the front of the building.
So, the last 6 hours or so of this story of moving goes like this: additional people- Keiko, MK, and Ed, show up and all of them get conscripted into carrying things down to the truck, while I frantically pack the rest of the stuff. As we get near the end, it becomes clear that not quite everything is going to fit, and so we end up having to take a bunch of stuff over to Keiko's office, where it is going to live in a corner until I can get it or have it shipped.
On the way, we stop at my old office to leave something behind, something for my old office-mates to remember me by. I've been planning this for nearly 2 months. A couple of years ago we all had to have our pictures taken for the website at work. It was professionally done- they took about 25 pictures of each of us, and we got to pick which one went up on the site.
The day I went in to look at the pictures, I discovered that MK's pics were on the same disk as mine, so when our head of HR stepped out of her office for a few minutes, leaving me to look at my pics, I quickly looked at his. In his group was one beautiful pic, clearly taken before MK was ready, and in that moment I knew I must have this picture. I didn't know how or why, but I knew someday I would need it. So I sent myself an email with that pic attached, just before our HR person came back in her office.
About 2 months ago, a huge ugly bookshelf was taken out of the office area I shared with 6 other tutors, including MK and J-Rob. That left a giant blank white wall in the waiting area. And the first day I walked in there and saw that big blank wall, I knew why I had needed that picture so long ago.
I dug the picture out of my email, and sent it to a poster place, and had it made into a poster 4 feet wide by 5 feet tall. And this night, as we walk back from Keiko's office across the street, we go into my old office and hang that picture on the wall, along with the poem "Farewell", from the Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore:
I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers!
I bow to you all and take my departure.
Here I give back the keys of my door
---and I give up all claims to my house.
I only ask for last kind words from you.
We were neighbors for long,
but I received more than I could give.
Now the day has dawned
and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out.
A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a picture of me, and MK:
It's really unfortunate that you can't see just how totally drugged out he looks in this picture here as well as you could when you were looking at the 5 foot tall version. My only regret is that I could not be there when he first walked in the next day and saw it.
Anyway, we finally finish loading and moving everything at 1030pm, BMFRTE T plus 24 hours and counting. At this point, neither I nor anyone else has had dinner, and we're now a full day behind, so what the hell, let's go have dinner. So we all troop down to my favorite diner- Gracie's, at 86th and 1st, and have a dinner that can't be beat, while I thank everyone profusely for bailing me out of my utterly pathetic attempt to be prepared to move.
And so, at midnight, officially now Sat 8/18, BMFRTE T plus 25.5 hours and counting, Ed and I found ourselves in the truck, finally ready to begin our journey.
Next time: BMFRTE Day 1, or, The Revenge of MK
You know you're pretty hard up as a state when you're sitting around at the State Motto Idea Generation Meeting, and after a long, awkward silence, someone says: "Well, a lot of roads go through here."
You're probably thinking- wow, what a shitty picture. Gus must've taken it. Wrong! This is what downtown Chicago looks like at 4 a.m. when you're totally souced, as Ed was when he took it.
