It’s Moving Day
Everybody’s moving around here. Our next door neighbors, Hal and Jennie Hollis, are making their monthly real estate relo to a small plantation down the block and Wilson—remember him?—is moving back home, temporarily. You know how some people like to bungee-jump or go antiquing or play shuffleboard? Well, Hal and Jennie like to move. Personally, I can’t understand it. I have moved a few times in my life and I would prefer to have my eyes gouged out by wolverines rather than move again, but that’s just me.
Anyway, Hal and Jennie are now faced with the “furniture dilemma,” a plight well-known to career movers. When they moved here from their palatial estate in Alpharetta, it was to a modest mobile-home, requiring almost no investment in furniture. And now, they are selling the Georgia property so the furniture up there must remain temporarily for “staging” purposes….meaning, to make the place look more cozy. Long story short, Hal and Jennie have a bed down here and not much else. And they don’t want to go out and buy any furniture when they have perfectly good stuff in Alpharetta. We went over there yesterday to investigate this problem and it’s a real head-scratcher. What if the Georgia house doesn’t sell for years—where are Hal and Jennie going to keep their ice cream? And even though it’s only a ten-minute drive to the Williston Washateria, who wants to sit around for hours waiting for their clothes to tumble-dry? Not to mention the echoing effect you get in big, empty, furnitureless houses. “Are you out there, Hal-al-al-al-al?” “No, Jennie, I’m over here-ere-ere-ere-ere.”
All in all, it’s probably not such a bad thing. It keeps you humble, or as humble as people with three houses and a swimming pool can be.
“Jennie, I’m going out to light the firepit so I can cook up some of the fish we caught today on Orange Lake.”
“Okay, Hal—I’ll run over to Siobhan’s house to pick some salad.”
Roughing it. It’s good for your soul.
The Return Of Wilson
Well, old Wilson is back again. He keeps turning up like a bad penny. Seems Sarah Frost wasn’t up to the task of domesticating the big fellow and turning him into a hunter or a jumper or whatever the hell it is these teenage girls do with ex-racehorses. Wilson was too surly. The price for surly is gelding, which is what is happening right this minute to Wilson, after which somebody else will give it a try. Maybe this sobering experience will cause Wilson to give a second thought when he considers future troublemaking. Like, Gawd, what will they do to me next time? The seed of crime bears bitter fruit, Wilson. The Shadow knows.
Moving Day—Part II
Alright, we were discussing moving, a vile experience unequaled in human lore. Can there be anything worse? Oh, it’s not so bad at first when you don’t have so much stuff. When I went away to college in Oklahoma, I carried a mere two suitcases. Although, on second thought, they were extremely heavy suitcases, not much fun to carry on and off the various conveyances involved in this convoluted trip. To save money, I travelled from Boston to Oklahoma on the train. No kidding, people actually did that back in the pioneer days. And back then, trains were very slow. Reticent as I am to besmirch our nation’s railroads, I think I could probably have actually walked to Oklahoma faster than the train took me. But then there would be the matter of the baggage, an impossible encumbrance for a walker.
I do have to admit that I contributed to this endless episode when, while changing trains in Chicago, I noticed I had a long layover and decided to take in a Cubs game at storied Wrigley Field. I had never been in Chicago and didn’t have any idea where Wrigley Field was but I saw that as a minor trifle which a college-bound fellow such as myself should quickly parse. I got on the El, Chicago’s answer to the Subway, and promptly made my way to the game. It was great fun. In those days, you could buy a ticket at Wrigley and sit anywhere but in the box seats. Unfortunately, the St. Louis Cardinals picked that day to give Stan Musial a little rest but otherwise all went well. Well, almost. After the game, I got back on the wrong El train and wound up out around East Skokie and ended up missing my train, so now I had a real layover. Nonetheless, I eventually arrived what seemed like months later in the charming Oklahoma hamlet of Ponca City, which at least had a railroad depot. From there, I bused to Stillwater, which did not. By this time, my overweight suitcases were on the verge of pulling most of the skin off my hands. Then, I made the final error of sending my cabbie to the administration building instead of my assigned dorm so I had to carry the goddam bags another half-mile across campus. I moved into my little room at gigantic East Bennet Hall with optimism and great relief. College would be nothing compared to the trip.
Moving Day—Part III
The rest of the college experience involved minor, less than transcontinental moves, so it wasn’t so bad. I eventually moved into a fraternity house. Then an apartment. Minor inconveniences. I moved to a small cheap hotel room near Grand Central in New York City for a short time. I took a lousy job with Chaff magazine in Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, lived at the publisher’s place for a while and then in an incense-dowsed apartment house run by Indians. I moved back home. The next big move was to Austin. It wasn’t supposed to be Austin, but that’s where I ended up.
The whole thing started when my friend Jacques Guerin and I were driving around Eastern Massachusetts with a couple of Merrimack College girls. It was getting late and the roads were icy, not the best of circumstances when one is piloting a gigantic (and very heavy) 1950 Cadillac Superior Model hearse such as my own. The accident was not really our fault. See, some other fools were parked in the middle of the highway ogling a previous accident when we came upon them. We tried to stop, we really did, but no dice. The enormous hearse slowly glided down the road until it reached the rear of the accident watchers’ vehicle, at which time it, well, sorta plowed into it. The nice Italian family inside burst forth from every door, exclaiming in, if you ask me, a very uncharitable manner for a group which so callously had blocked the road.
The Merrimack girls were sorely chagrined. “We’ll be late for curfew,” they announced in tandem. Merrimack is a Catholic college. If you are late for curfew, they automatically assume you are committing some grave pornographic atrocity and they are usually correct. We told the girls to get back in the hearse, which was largely unaffected by the collision, and we would take them back. The Italians were none too happy about this decision and began jumping up and down, invoking the intervention of some of their favorite saints and other holy people. We got the girls back in time. I also lost my license for leaving the scene of an accident.
Now you know as well as I do, that if you have no license and the local Chief of Police lives directly across the street it is probably time to move on. Jacques Guerin, whose father was the Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, had a nice apartment at the University of New Mexico. He invited me to come out there and start a magazine. Why not? I packed up all of my earthlies (not much) in the Great Hearse, got a friend named Johnny Chaff to drive me to the City Limits so as not to provoke the Chief and was on my way to New Mexico. You might think this was an unwise move what with me being without a driver’s license and all but it all went swimmingly. People—even cops—don’t really like to bother you when you’re driving your hearse. It’s a well-known fact in law enforcement circles that hearse-drivers are responsible for only 0.1 percent of all major crimes in the continental United States, so let’s get on with surveilling others more likely.
Long story short, the hearse broke down in Oklahoma City, where, as luck would have it, an old girlfriend named Rita Payton lived. She took me in while repairs were made but when I went to pick up the big fellow, the garage man told me I needed a new radiator.
“You will never get a thousand miles with this radiator,” he shook his head.
“Well, how far CAN I get?”
“Three, four hundred miles if you’re lucky. And you go slow, And you drive a lot at night, when it’s cooler. I can give you some stuff to pour in your radiator every time you fill it up. Which will be a lot.”
Gilbert Shelton had earlier invited me to come to Austin to help him put out the Ranger magazine. Austin was about four hundred miles away. I decided to try to make it there. Eventually, despite horrendous difficulties, I made it to Shelton’s apartment in east Austin where I was awarded a sleeping spot on his hair couch. It was a homey apartment but not enormous. I kept all my gear in the back of the hearse. Less packing, after all, for the next move.
The Final Move. I Hope.
There were a few more moves to be made before I ended up in Gainesville in 1965. And a couple after that. But there was NO move that could equal the horrible experience of the Departure From Gainesville. See, when you live somewhere for oh, say eighteen years, you tend to accumulate a few things, especially if you have a great big two-story house with twelve rooms. And then, if you are moving to a tiny little house like this one, you will not be able to FIT all of your belongings in the new place. And even if you could, the person who owns the new place might not exactly like to have stuff piled to the ceiling in every room. So this brings about the need for triage. Oh me, oh my, which of my valuable treasures must I—gulp—leave behind? It’s a heartbreaking struggle, to say the least. I guess I’ll keep this and forego that….no, no, I can’t give up my Wonder Wart-Hog doll. Maybe I can find an heir who would love these wonderful items. (And if someone had, they’d be making a lot of money selling old Charlatans on the internet right now, which others unknown are doing.)
Eventually, of course, you must choose a few things and discard the others. And then you must slowly wrap and pack the chosen items, a task which you become certain will take until the end of time. Inevitably, of course, the day finally comes when the moving van arrives. Even then you scurry around with critical last-second decisions. Can I really leave this? Do I have to take that? Then, it’s over. The van slowly pulls away and you look back on the sad detritus of a lifetime. A tear wells. Fortunately for you, your driver bolts into the room with urgent instructions:
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” he orders, commandingly. “Before you change your mind again!” And you go….sure….you go. But life will never be the same. How can it be without those orange and purple bellbottoms from J. C. Isaacs?
That’s all, folks….
