Another week had passed in an unemployed limbo, with no good interviews in sight. So I was forced to have to take a job that was well below my standards, according to the play-book that I had established a few years back. It was 8:35 in the a.m., and 95 minutes ago I added “Professional Mover” to my canon of career endeavors.
There comes a point in your 30s when you realize that your prime has been in full bloom for quite some time already, and you know you’re either really close or already beginning the descent down the other side. I realized this as I was carrying a large suede loveseat from our client’s house into an enormous storage truck parked in her driveway. My hair and shirt and pants were soaked in my own sweat, and the loveseat that I was struggling to carry now had a perfect stained imprint of my chest and arms and face across its expensive tan fabric. It looked like a bust version of the Shroud of Turin.
Only an hour and a half into this job and my back already ached, my legs quivered, and my balls felt like they had crawled up and hid in some deep cavity of my groin. I could hear myself wheezing at every step; and I had to pee 40 minutes ago, but the urge had somehow completely disappeared somewhere between the last two loads.
“If that guy dies,” the attractive blonde homerenter shouted from her porch, “I’m not going to be held responsible, fellas.” She pointed at me, and the two muscular movers that were supposed to be training me now turned around and laughed at me.
“I … just … I just had a flu shot,” I mumbled from inside the half-filled trailer of the truck. “I guess I’m still a little winded.” My soft clerical hands hadn’t lifted anything but cigarette after cigarette to my mouth for years now. Manual labor was one occupation I never thought I would see myself in, especially not at 8:45 in the morning.
“Just watch the chair, will you, please?” she asked nastily before crossing her arms and walking back into the house.
Jesus, the brawniest of my two new coworkers, made sure she was safely inside the house before he jumped into the truck trailer and violently pulled the loveseat from my trembling arms. “Never drag the shit in front of them, bro!” he advised while effortlessly lifting the enormous chair and placing it atop the matching sofa using nothing but his tattooed forearm and thigh. “Bro, you gotta be cool when the clients are around. When they see us being cool with their shit, then we get the real cash—the tip, bro.”
“I’m just a little out of shape, Jesus.” I replied. “I’ll bounce back by the next load.”
“You’re a skinny fucker, aren’t you?” Jesus remarked after I lifted the bottom of my T-shirt to wipe the sweat from my eyes.
“Yeah. The salad days. Well, the side-salad days lately.”
“You don’t eat meat?” he asked. “Eh, this fucking job will put some meat on you, bro. Toughen your guero ass up!”
“Cheap-ass Erik Estrada,” I mumbled after I was sure he jumped down off the bumper.
I lugged a cardboard box of albums and a rolled-up rug into the truck before returning to the house for the next round. I paused for a few seconds in the secluded hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom to catch my breath when I overheard Jesus talking to the client in the now-empty den.
“So, why you moving, miss?” he asked as he easily picked up a huge box of books and rested it onto his shoulder.
“Well, Julio, I was working at Paramount when I got this place,” she replied, “but it’s just been so slow this past year. Everything’s going to Canada because it’s so cheap to shoot out there. Everything’s going to Canada but me. I can’t afford this place anymore.”
“Well, don’t you worry, miss,” Jesus said. “We’ll get you moved real quick. Three hours tops. I could tell you’re worried about the hourly rate. We’ll get it done as in-ah-spensedly as we can for you. Don’t you worry, miss.” This was Stage 2 of Jesus’ ploy for getting the big tip later; Stage 1 was being cool with the client’s shit, bro.
“Actually, I’m not too worried about that,” she replied. “I’m more worried about that skinny guy you brought. I don’t think he’s going to make it through the day.”
“Yeah,” Jesus agreed, “he just started today. We get a lot of these guys who think they’re tough enough to do this. I don’t think he’s going to work out.” Jesus and I saw eye to eye on that one. I tiptoed into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, then returned to the stack of albums and CDs near the door and got back to work.
After another hour of moving, the entire house was finally empty. My arms and legs were useless to the situation now, so Caesar, the other muscular mover we came with, jumped into the trailer and anchored all of her possessions to the walls with some type of elastic rope. Jesus leaned against the porch column and flirted with the client as she locked her front door for the last time. I watched all three from the street with a cigarette.
She gave us directions to her new, and much less expensive, cabana apartment on the other side of town, just blocks from where I lived. I knew she must have really dropped off the Hollywood radar to move from a house in the hills into a one-bedroom in my neck of the woods. You see, my new neighbor and I resided in the “old Russian immigrant” part of Hollywood, where the neon lights and glittered streets of Tinsel Town converged with the color gray.
“But follow my car down the hill because it gets tricky near the bottom of the canyon,” were her last words as she drove off. And we didn’t follow her directly, and we did indeed get lost at the bottom of the canyon road like she foretold, and she never looked back in her rearview mirror to see that we weren’t there. We were a huge truck storming down a small hillside road, crushing tree branches and spilling trash bins on both sides of us, and we had managed to elude her.
“Hey, grab the wheel, bro!” Jesus said to me as soon as we got off the winding road and onto Laurel Canyon. I reached over and grabbed the rattling steering wheel as he dug into both of his pockets with both of his hands. Several seconds later, his right hand emerged holding a wrinkled little joint. He smiled and lit it up, then took back control of the steering wheel.
Sitting between Jesus and Caesar in the cab of the truck, I automatically became “the passer.” I had intended to only take a puff or two to relieve some of the aches and pains I had coursing through me, but that option really wasn’t up to me as soon as Jesus heard the Rolling Stones on the radio. By the time we reached Sunset Blvd., my face felt like mint ice cream and the realization that I was in the company of a Jesus and a Caesar became remarkable to me.
“Because Jesus … the Jewish one, with a strong ‘J’ … and Caesar were enemies back in the Bible,” I tried to explain, but the concept didn’t translate from mental dialogue to verbal dialogue very well. “Like two opposing pillars of … difference. And you guys … are friends. That’s good you worked that out. Pontius Pilate.”
The cab went quiet for a few seconds before Jesus changed the subject and said, “Check this out …” He sat up closer to the windshield and gingerly rested his hands atop the steering wheel, so that both he and his fingerless gloves were very visible to the lane of cars driving toward us. “Okay … here we … GO!” he shouted and flung both hands across the top of the steering wheel to the left, which looked, to an oncoming car, like he was turning that huge truck directly toward them at full force. He wasn’t, of course—his hands were only cupping the wheel—but it was the sudden jerk of his entire body and that crazy wide-open mouth that sealed the deal for the oncoming traffic. The first car skidded to a halt from 35 miles per hour; the second driver screamed and covered his face before blindly swerving into the next lane over, nearly killing a bicyclist; the third car did a complete 360-degree turn right in the middle of the road.
Every time a horn blared or tires screeched, Jesus, with his red eyes and sloppy grin, would cheer and glance at me or Caesar for our reaction. I’m not sure about Caesar, but I was too busy clutching the dashboard and wishing I had a seatbelt to give a shit about accolades.
“Man, I’m a total DUI right now,” Jesus admitted as he drum-tapped the steering wheel and yawned.
“Just keep it together and try and find that lady’s car,” Caesar replied. “I don’t know what I did with her address, but she said her place was right around here somewhere. I think she said that.”
I had nothing left to offer this job. I was spent. And I was freaked out. And I was high. I hoped we would never find her car so that we could just go back to the office and chalk it up to experience. But the second time around the block revealed the client’s Audi with its hazard lights on down a side street. Jesus decided to park the enormous truck right there in the middle of Fountain Avenue, which was one of the busiest streets in Hollywood at that hour. Once we got out of the cab and walked to the rear to open the back doors of the trailer, a huge pile-up of cars had already begun forming behind us. Our truck was so wide that, not only did it completely block one full eastbound lane, it also went several feet into the only other eastbound lane next to it. All east-going traffic on Fountain now bottlenecked right at the back doors of our truck. Drivers had to inch into oncoming traffic just to get by us, and each and every one of them had something colorful to say about it. And even worse than having to now remove from the truck every box, table, sofa, and chair that we had just loaded into it, was having to do it by way of the 15-foot ramp at the rear of the truck, which jettisoned straight into the traffic jam. It was like being on a model’s catwalk, but instead of camera flashes and paparazzi screaming, “Look over here,” we had aspiring actors in beat-up VWs shouting, “I’m going to kill your fucking mom, you retard!” Anonymous insults were one thing, but to face your insulters and receive their threats for a solid 15 feet was an entirely different affair. There were fists shaken, trash thrown, and coffee hurled at us. Lit cigarettes and fuck yous were tossed our way unrelentingly. And most cars even went so far as to honk before giving us the middle finger when they finally passed by, just to make sure we were looking in their direction for the insult.
It was somehow less agonizing moving her in than moving her out. It only took about an hour before that last loveseat and box of records were gone from the truck and in her den-turned-office. I was completely drenched in my own sweat again, and thought I heard my lungs blow a valve as I got back into the cab of the truck.
We returned to the Pack & Go headquarters a little before noon. When I stepped out of the truck, my jeans and T-shirt had completely dried, giving them a crisp, ironed feel. My legs didn’t take to walking too well after sitting down for nearly 20 minutes. I stumbled over to a bench in the parking lot just as my legs gave out and seated me.
“Hey, kid,” the portly owner of the company approached me with a clipboard. “You just got back, right?”
“Yeah,” I gasped, “just a second ago.”
“Okay, I want you to go with Ken and Duke on this next one,” he replied, pointing to an older black man and a younger white guy, both built like Greek statues on steroids. “I got a small business for you guys, so it’ll be chairs and desks and shit like that. Probably a good four hours, so you can thank me later.”
Fours hours, I thought to myself. At what they’re paying me, four hours equaled $28. There was no way. There was no way that I could do again what I had just done. There was no way that I could continue working for this company, not even for the rest of the day. I couldn’t tell him this but I couldn’t go on working either. I had to think quickly.
“Okay, but can I grab a quick bite first?” I asked him. “I’m hypoglycemic. I’ll just run to the taco place across the street and be back in 10 minutes.”
The boss frowned and looked at his watch. “Ten minutes, buddy! I got these guys waiting for you.” He jotted something down onto his clipboard and walked back to the office.
I hobbled across the street to my trusty old Volvo parked at the painted white-then-yellow-then-white-again curb. After unlocking the door, I collapsed into the driver’s seat and devoured the ham and Velveeta sandwich that I had prepared that morning. I was completely and utterly exhausted. The logical side of my mind tried everything in its power to convince “us” to get out of the car, walk back to Pack & Go, and continue working for the rest of the day. Rent was coming up, and I was a few hundred behind. But I then realized that the side of my brain that constructs logic was not as persuasive in the mental courtroom as the other side—the side that’s lazy and preferred watching Magnum P.I. reruns on weekday afternoons—not to mention the side that preferred having both of his testicles intact. It was a good back-and-forth for awhile there, with both sides of the brain offering up some compelling litigation points. But only one side was walking out of this tribunal unscathed and victorious.
I fumbled out the damp $20 bill from my pocket that the client had given me as a tip and tucked it into my wallet, right behind the three ones. Jesus was right about that one—being cool with the client’s shit, bro paid dividends. I listened to some BBC news on the radio for a few minutes before admitting to myself and to both litigators that I would not be going back to work as a professional mover. I started up my Volvo and headed off to a better horizon, but ended up back at my apartment, three blocks down from where the client now lived. Job #50 was short-lived and awful. Job #51 had to be better.
Realizing three days later that my back still throbbed, my knees still buckled, and my balls still hadn’t dropped back down to their standard elevation wasn’t the worst part about the whole sad Pack & Go affair. Three days later, the worst part of my half-day of being a professional mover was calling the company—after disappearing midway through my first day on the job—and asking them to write me a check for the couple hours that I had worked.
And after going in later that afternoon to pick up my check for $21, I had to explain to the boss with the clipboard why I never returned to work that day, and how I sat in my car from across the street and watched him looking for me. And I told him that I normally wouldn’t have the audacity to come back there with my head down and my tail between my legs asking for the $21 that I almost died for, but a certain insurance company wanted payment to insure a certain someone’s Volvo for the month of July, or that certain someone couldn’t legally drive anymore.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. Then he looked at me and realized how serious I was about needing the money. He paid me the $21 in cash out of his pocket, and I left and never drove down that stretch of Sunset Boulevard again.