A Christmas Story

There’s less than a week left until Christmas and my cell phone rings. It’s a friend from my days in the restaurant business and he is calling me to ask a favor. It seems as though his girlfriend’s younger sister and her daughter need some help moving out of their apartment and I don’t live too far from where she is staying now, the storage facility that some of her belongings will be going, or the home of her parents where the rest of her things will be transferred to. I’m smack dab in the middle of the triangle of death as it corresponds with this particular situation. There are a thousand different things that I would rather be doing today, but he is a good friend, I imagine he would do the same for me if I asked, and its Christmas time for crying out loud. What kind of person would I be if I refused to help a single mother and her only child successfully complete a journey from one place to another during the week of Christmas? Can you imagine the remarks that would be made about me by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? “Pick me up in a half an hour.”

The trip down the road is a mixed bag. I haven’t seen my friend in a few weeks and it’s nice to catch up on what has been going on with him, but the entire time the thought that completely dominates my mind is, “I could be doing absolutely anything else right now.” We arrive at the not so upper-lower class pit of an apartment complex and I am immediately drawn to the fact that there is no moving truck and no moving van, but a small pick-up truck with a cap on the bed, an older model compact hatchback, and the small SUV that I am sitting in the passenger side of. Oh, the art of the white-trash move. My heart sinks as someone starts yelling and waving to my friend from a third floor window. I would prefer to skip the introductions and get straight to moving this girls shit down three flights of stairs, into and onto this caravan of nearly useless vehicles, then into a storage unit and just get the whole thing over with, but since it is the Christmas season I decide that I will be as friendly as possible and at least give these people the chance to be able to extend their gratitude to someone with a name. I immediately regret this decision and have an uncontrollable urge to wash my hands.

I’m sure that you have noticed the different smells that different dwellings seem to own and throughout your life run across a place where the smell makes you wax nostalgic about your childhood or the time you left that dead prostitute in the closet for a couple of days too long before you dismembered her body and dumped the pieces in multiple dumpsters around the city. The smell of this place is much more similar to only what I can imagine the latter is like. It reeks of cat piss, yet there is no cat to be found and I have a sneaking suspicion that one once lived here and it is decomposing under the couch. I hope someone else is moving that couch. I decide to start with anything that I can find that is made out of wood or metal and try to stay as far away from anything composed of cloth or fiber as it would be rather difficult to explain to my wife how exactly I managed to get fleas, scabies, herpes, lice, or crabs while helping someone move. I’m going after the small, wooden, and somewhat unsoiled kitchen table when the bombshell drops. “Oh, that’s not going, that asshole can keep his fucking table.”

Over the next few minutes through a series of mumbles, clicks, spit, and some words that I can only guess are a portion of some English dialect that I have never heard before, I manage to put together a partial story. He is at work (she has no job) and is completely and utterly unaware that there are people that he has never met before in his life going through his home and being told what he is going to be permitted to keep. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for me, she is authorizing that he be allowed to keep everything that is not heavy, as well as everything that is not constructed out of cloth and fiber. The thought of the microbes living in and on these things is making me queasy. He is granted the pleasure of maintaining possession of the two and a half foot Christmas tree, but she is removing the ornaments and packing them up. I am trying to tell myself that if he does happen to come home from work to find us emptying the sarcophagus that is his dwelling, maybe he will be more than happy to help, and then I think about the reaction that I would have. I’m moving much faster now.

The couch is heavy and there are no decomposing remains underneath it but as I lift it I’m beginning to think that the putrefaction may be coming from inside of it. As we are spinning it down the three flights of stairs I begin to lose my grip and have to support it with the side of my face to keep it from tumbling down the stairs and pinning me beneath its stink. I feel sick. We continue this ballet of systematically removing items that should probably not be touched without the protection of a hazmat suit for the next two hours before my friend drops me back off at my house. It’s as if we just blew up a bus full of school children or some other horrible act and neither one of us can stand to be in the same vehicle, let alone to speak to the other. We say goodbye, he apologizes, and I burn my clothes in the backyard and immediately take a shower with bleach and steel wool and although it is the week of Christmas, I look as though I am sunburned. So learn a lesson from my misfortune and be suspect of anyone who doesn’t have their own friends to help them move, even if it is Christmas.