The family's coming into town from overseas tonight, and my cousin's in-laws have a trundle bed that they're willing to loan my parents to make sleeping space. I'm about 95% done moving from my old place to my new place - having moved everything except a couple action figures and an full-size, Street Fighter II arcade cabinet behind. Moving needed doing, so I rented a van. I drove to my cousin's in-laws' house near City College and loaded up all the pieces for the trundle bed in under ten minutes - and that's including all the 'meet and greet'. Dave and I (Dave was with me for the whole show by the way) then haul ass to my parents' house to quickly drop off the bed and then make a straight line for the 'old place' to pick up the arcade cabinet. The trouble with doing anything that requires stopping by my parents' is that once you're there - you never leave. Hell, I'm still there right now. Dave and I showed up fully prepared to drop off the bed, leave to get the arcade cabinet, bring it to his work down town, and then settle in somewhere to watch that last few innings of the NLCS playoff Game 5 between the Giants and the Cardinals. That's what we WANTED to do. What we DID do is another story. When Dave and I showed up, my super hyper father with his big cheeks and crazy eyes asked, "you boys have enough time to put it together, right?" Who the hell was I to refuse? But then it gets trickier. Putting together a trundle bed, I'm sure you all realize as well, means dumping two old televisions. Right? You can't put together a bed without taking out your parents' trash. It's just not done. So, I take two old TV's from my father - TV's so old they still had separate VHF and UHF knobs - and I put them in the van. In order to make space in the downstairs room, there was an old futon that needed disposal - in the van. I'm double parked outside, blocking my parents' driveway, with an ancient futon mattress and fame and two useless televisions in the back. I haven't even started putting the bed together, and my visit's about to break the one hour mark. Dave and I desperately want to know if the Giants were doing well enough to finally win their way back into a World Series, and I've got a father who's just run off to The Good Guys to buy a replacement for the two televisions he just charged Dave and I with the task of disposing. I send Dave upstairs to watch the game and call down to me should anything big happen, and I slam that stupid bed together as fast as my hands were able. Just about done (doing it the half-assed way for time's sake) Dave calls me upstairs. Sure enough, shortly after I gained my bearings in the kitchen so I could focus on the television, Barry Bonds hits a sacrifice fly deep into center field so the Giants could tie it up 1-1. Then back downstairs I go, with Dave, and we finish that bed like a couple of bed assembly professionals. Would I sleep in it myself? Hell no. But anyone smaller than me just might have a good night's sleep. Dad gets home with his new 27" television and, after I brought it in and stood it right side up on the table, he gets confused as to why his new cable-ready television won't get any channels without cable. I explain two things to him. One, dad will need rabbit ears for the cable port in the back of the television. Two, it's REALLY late, the game's almost over, and I still have an arcade cabinet to move. He understands, Dave and I run upstairs just to check on the game, just for the hell of it, and before we can decipher what's going on, before the image on the screen reached full color from the grey of off, we see David Bell sliding into home and then all the Giants rushing the field in a mad, mad, mad celebration. The Giants just won the pennant, and all Dave and I saw as a total of ten minutes of one of the most tense games of the year. Dave and I hop in the van and take normally rather docile routes to our old place at top speeds. We rush in, clear a path through all the garbage that remains from half a dozen roommates, and lug that arcade unit out of the apartment. Walls were banged, dolly's lost their footing, and my (I being the primary weight bearer throughout the move of this thing - I'm bigger, it's what I do) arms are getting tenderized with every pounding from every turn of this hundreds pound heavy thing. Finally in the van, Dave and I were amazed once again that we were able to load the van, twice, in less than half the time it took us to meander about at my folks' house. Hauling ass once more, we battle traffic outbound from the ball park as we traveled into downtown, eventually squeezing the van into an alley - the alley in which Dave's company is neatly tucked away. The arcade cabinet is easy work getting out of the van. The arcade cabinet is easy work getting into Dave's work. The arcade cabinet is easy work getting through the downstairs meeting room. The arcade cabinet is a stubborn bitch to get through the final doorway before it reaches its resting place and, as the dolly slid out from underneath it twice, ground up the top of my right hand, wrist, and forearm pretty badly. All things that needed to be moved and/or assembled have now been moved and/or assembled. It was time to repay Dave with dinner at Taco Bell. I'm having a rather rough night, and by rough I simply mean a sudden influx of manual labor that disturbed an evening preplanned to be a leisurely night filled with bad food and baseball. I just needed to top off the tank of the van and bring it back to the night drop-off location at the rental place and then go home. That's all I needed to do - that one, simple, thing. Instead, though, my being upset at missing 99% of the game that night was escalated to anger as I was interrupted in pumping gas at the Chevron station on 6th and Howard. I'm standing there, pump in hand, pump in tank, gas flowing from Point A to Point B as it usually does - and I start to smell something. I start to smell something bad. And as time clicked on... I was smelling something horrible. Piss. Fresh, hot, hasty urine. I tried not to breath, but being a mammal I was forced to. And as the stench grew stronger and stronger I couldn't take it anymore and walked away from my gasoline-related duties. I walked along the length of the van, in the direction of the back of the van, towards the Mini-Mart of the gas station where, I prayed, breathable air would be abundant. As I reached the back of the van, there he was. He, the source of my nasal dismay, the epicenter of the stench of which I was downwind from. A bum. In the middle of a well-lit gas-station. Stolen squeegee under one arm as both hands were engaged in keeping his aim... ...all over the back of my van. Just as I was about to say/do something, I heard the gas-pump click. It stopped, and I made quick work of getting back to it, placing the nozzle back on the pump, taking my receipt, and getting the hell out of there. I recounted all the details with Dave over a couple crappy bean burritos and bean tacos, and we laughed and giggled and pretty much just focused on the baseball game we missed and conspired about how we'd get tickets to the World Series. |
