GLUTTONY DIGEST, SUMMER 2003 -26-
THE NIGHT THAT NEVER WAS: A MOVING EXPERIENCE by Sam Dvorchik “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.” Albert Camus
W
ASHINGTON,
D.C. – I
KNEW
WE’D DRIFTED hopelessly beyond the mundane repetitions of the typical move into some dark and twisting living nightmare when we somehow managed to get the tailpipe of the rental truck pinioned between the front bumper and the driver’s side tire of a Subaru parked on Start: 1801 Wyoming Avenue, N.W. Vernon street in front End: 2309 18th Street, N.W. of the predominantly Distance: 0.07 miles gay apartment build- Estimated Travel Time: 0 minutes ing, across the street from the French café. I believe this was about eight p.m. and it was, of course, raining.
We had made this unscheduled stop only after discovering that my hand-me-down couch would not fit up the narrow, sharply angled staircase of the new second-floor walk-up on 18th street, a discovery that was made on the tail end of a rain-soaked bitchhump of our heaviest worldly possessions down from the second floor of the rent-controlled one-bedroom on 1801 Wyoming, into the truck, and then up the stairs of the new place. We had at the time what seemed like appropriately principled reasons for not abandoning the couch on a sidewalk somewhere. First, my roommate Marc and I agreed that it was unneighborly and wasteful to leave perfectly good furniture in the street to rot in the rain, particularly when it was more likely that eons of weather would erode the couch to dust and lichen before the D.C. sanitation department got around to disposing of it.
GLUTTONY DIGEST, SUMMER 2003 -27-
Second, the moving truck was already loaded with a second loveseat we were planning to deliver that night to Aurélie’s new apartment, several blocks away. And as Aurélie was working the evening shift slinging cappuccinos and Chimays at the French café around the corner that night, we figured we’d just make a quick stop on the way to confer. Though her shift precluded her from reciprocating Marc’s assistance with her own then recent move (a grueling process that had contributed to Marc’s gruesome and painful dislocation of his kneecap a week or so prior), we reckoned that a socially well-connected oceanographer-cum-waitress might know a deserving someone in the market for a free couch. As you shall see, we’d soon regret this well-intentioned decision. n server’s apron, Aurélie slowly Iinterlocked circumnavigated the two vehicles, regarding
“‘HOW IN THE FUCK DID YOU MANAGE TO
our admittedly ridiculous predicament with bemused DO THAT?’ SHE wonderment. “How in the fuck ASKED. WE WERE did you manage to do that?” she asked. We were wondering that WONDERING THAT ourselves. The moving truck’s OURSELVES.” exhaust pipe jutted horizontally nearly ten inches form the vehicle. Backing up at the snippy request of a homosexual couple who were in a hurry to park their car in the illegal spot we were partially blocking while Marc hobbled into the café, the pipe had somehow crushed and passed over the plastic bumper of the Subaru parked at an angle behind us, coming to rest firmly in the wheel-well, just behind the bumper and just in front of the tire. A tentative attempt to extricate the exhaust from this entanglement by inching forward had nearly proven disastrous, as the pipe latched behind the bumper (which had uncrumpled to its original form) quite snugly and with great leverage, threatening to separate it violently from the car entirely. Backing up more than a few eighths of an inch was impossible; there was simply no room to maneuver, and as much as we feared damaging the Subaru - whose owner thus far had miraculously and mercifully failed to notice the attention his parked car was attracting from café goers and passersby, and the onlookers from the windows of the predominately gay apartment building - we were equally fearful of damaging the