A Moving Story

Moving is a pain in the arse. Moving overseas is a massive pain in the arse. And moving to New York and trying to find a place to live two weeks before university starts is such a staggeringly daunting task that to describe the level of arse-pain experienced requires those sciencey words usually reserved for astrophysicists trying to convey just how f#@king big something is. Fortunately for me, I managed to land a place to live before I left Australia (fortunate especially since I don't know any astrophysicists). Even still, the comedy of errors that was Moving Day was still a goddam pain in the arse.

I inherited a room off my close friend Daniel. He's lived happily in this little apartment in Brooklyn for two years now. The room is big with lots of light, it's on the third floor away from the noisy street, and not too expensive - a real find by anyone's standards, and (I'm led to believe) especially rare for New York. Anyway, he's a composer too, and a darn good one at that, so much so that he got into Yale in New Haven, about two hours out of New York. He offered me his room, and knowing what a goddam mothering pain in the freakin' arse it was going to be to try to find one myself, I happily accepted. All I had to do was give him a hand moving out, then go and get my own things to move in. Piece of cake.

At 7am on Thursday Daniel goes to collect a small truck for the move. Daniel wakes me at 8am to carry the bed I was fast asleep on down the stairs to the truck. Within two minutes of waking up I'm walking backwards in my pyjamas carrying a mattress down two flights of stairs so narrow and steep it might be more appropriate to call them "ladders". I neglect to have breakfast, which proves to be a big mistake ten minutes later when we're carrying his 100kg keyboard down the stairs and I almost black out from hypoglycemia. Daniel manages somehow to get down to my end (although God knows how since the piano pretty much filled the width of the stairwell) and holds it while I collapse and pant pitifully for a few moments at his feet trying not to vomit up my non-existent breakfast. I eat a banana and feel better. The move continues.

Half an hour later we're on the road. We have to go to Washington Heights to collect Daniel's new housemate Wayne and his few belongings. Washington Heights is about as far away as you can go from where we are and still be in New York. Googlemaps estimates the trip to be fifteen minutes. An hour later we arrive outside Wayne's place whereupon Daniel accidentally sideswipes a parked cab, breaking its mirror. Daniel swears a lot and bangs the steering wheel a little bit. The elderly cab driver abuses us through the truck window in Spanish. The accident attracts what appears to be every elderly Spanish-speaking cab driver in a fifty-mile radius, and soon the air is filled with shrugged shoulders and shaking heads, angry fingers pointed at the truck as though it was a tank, angry fingers pointed at Daniel as though he was a thoughtless retard, all accompanied by so much Spanish that I think I now know how to speak it.

Daniel has to call the police to lodge an accident report in order to claim the insurance. The cadre of Spanish-speaking cab drivers insist that he just give them the money for the mirror. I leave this lively exchange to meet Wayne and help him load his stuff into the back of the truck. Meanwhile the police arrive, looking shitty for having to come and deal with a broken mirror. They talk to Daniel. They talk to the cab driver. They go to the police car and write stuff down. They talk to Daniel again. They talk to the cab driver again. They return to the police car and write more stuff down. Again they talk to Daniel. Again they talk to the cab driver. The cab driver points at me. The police come to me. They ask me if I was driving the vehicle. I boggle. They tell me the elderly cab driver is now insisting that I was driving the truck. They ask for my drivers license. I give it to them but explain (quite calmly, I think) that I was not driving the truck, because if I did attempt to drive a truck from one end of New York to the other on the right-hand side of the road in traffic so heavy it could warp space-time that we probably would have had a much more serious accident than a mere broken mirror before I'd had a chance to get into third gear. They agree but they still take down my drivers license details (which I hope doesn't bite me in the butt one day).

An hour later the accident report is filled out, the cab drivers disperse, and we are finally on the road to New Haven. Fortunately there are no further incidents that could jeopardise the move, my health, or anyone's freedom. We get Daniel and Wayne's stuff inside, drop off the truck, catch a train back to New York, and get drunk.

So now it's my turn to move. The very next day I begin the quest to furnish my room. I'm kind of excited - I've never actually bought furniture apart from the bed I bought when I was twenty-one. I find a great used furniture shop about six blocks from my house and pick out a nice chest of drawers, a mirror, an awesome armchair upholstered in green faux-velvet, and what looks like a cute little wardrobe.

Now, I'm aware that standard practice when one moves house is to measure things. Things like say, the width of doors, or the height of ceilings, or even the weight of items that might require transport through said doors and under aforementioned ceilings. I foolishly neglected to do so. When my wardrobe shows up I realise that in the context of the massive furniture warehouse it looked all tiny and cosy, but now, in the foyer of my building, it looks like someone chopped down an entire forest and turned it into one piece of furniture.

I won't go into excruciating detail of what I shall henceforth refer to as "The Ordeal of August 27th", but let's just say there's still bits of ceiling plaster embedded in the doorhandles from when we had to physically pass this monstrosity over the banisters because it couldn't be negotiated around the turn in the stairs. Whoever inherits this room after me is going to get a wardrobe thrown into the bargain because that thing is not going anywhere ever again except in little tiny pieces.

For now however, the worst is over. I'm having a desk delivered tomorrow (and they WILL be carrying it up the stairs) and then I'm pretty much set. My room is big, it's light, and since it's on the third floor it's away from the street noise (a positive point that somehow slipped my mind during last week's move when I cursed mankind for ever endeavoring to build buildings with more than one floor - are we so PROUD?!...ahem...), it has polished wooden floors and big windows, it's relatively cool in the summer nights and Daniel assures me it's plenty warm in winter. I've become a cliche - a poor artist living in a loft in New York. F#*king tops.