Brad Walsh

The Move

In the place we just moved out of, we had two landlords – brothers – and one of them told us that we could move our things on Saturday and Sunday (the first of the month) because nobody had rented the place yet for October. But halfway through Saturday the other one came by and said we had to be out by midnight that day. This brother’s name is Bernard. We call him Bernard the Tard because he’s the most dumbfounding example of a landlord I’ve ever seen. How this man got to be in the position he is (nepotism) is a mystery (family pity). Landlords are, generally, not too bright and not too classy. Sweaty tank tops and indecipherable rambling are to be expected. But Bernard the Tard is a fucking trainwreck of mind and body.

So we moved in just one day, with barely anything packed in the morning, using my car and Kathy’s dad’s van. We have a shit ton of furniture; it took us all day. There were the two of us, Kathy’s parents and brother Chris, Jake, and Anna and her friend for a little while. We weren’t done until well after two in the morning, when everybody’s arms and legs and backs were on fire. Jake, who had to work early Sunday morning, even took a dresser in the shoulder for me. Now that’s devotion. I owe him kind of big time.

Yesterday I unpacked my bedroom and created the most comfortable bed ever with a bunch of layers of stuff. Tonight we start the kitchen and bathrooms, because this morning getting ready to go out to our respective offices was a bit of a transient experience. Must get the internet running at home because I am an addict (as is Moby, who has been oft e-mailing my friend despite his internet hiatus – New York is a carnival and Hannah is the painted Zebra that all the local papers write about). TimeWarner is notoriously slow on the installation, though.

Lunch yesterday was penang curry at an amazing Thai place right down the street from us, and for the first time, somebody we knew (Ben) was walking by! In our neighborhood! Where we live! We run into people we know now, instead of people in handcuffs being taken from the cop cars that littered our block into the station at the end of it. The walk to the subway this morning was nice and calm instead of ugly and noisy.

Park Slope is an infinitely nicer place to live than Gunset Sunset Park. When we gave directions to our old place it was “when you come up out of the subway, walk away from Dunkin’ Donuts and toward White Castle. Turn left at the police station and walk to the BQE. We’re across the street from the federal prison and around the corner from the big yellow porn store.” Now the directions are “come up out of the subway, walk away from beautiful Prospect Park and past the beautiful old block-long armory building, turn left on 7th Avenue and walk through the beautiful old town full of restaurants you’d want to eat in and under lots of actual living green trees, and arrive at our house across the street from the beautiful famous historic cemetery.” Gotta pee? Try one of our two bathrooms. Fall in the dirt while you were running around in the park? Wash your pants in our own washer and dryer. Don’t like sitting in this living room? Try the one upstairs. Find a cricket in the basement? If you’re Anna, pick it up gently, declare it “a great sign of luck on your move-in day!” and let it loose in our own private garden backyard.

When I moved around as a kid, the first meal in the new place was often Kentucky Fried Chicken. I remember being nine, eating mashed potatoes on the carpeted living room floor of a wholly unfurnished apartment in Euclid, Ohio when my mom separated from my stepfather. He U-hauled all the furniture away, so we had nothing that didn’t fit into the car with us. We drove through KFC and listened to the Pointer Sisters on my boombox, plugged into the corner of the room. When my mom and my second stepfather separated and we moved into a new house, the first thing we ate was KFC.

I couldn’t go to KFC this time when Kathy and I moved into our new place because the night before I had yelled “well fuck you!” at the window and driven off. Jake was slow at the drive-through and the guy on the other end of the speaker was getting impatient. He started giving me ‘tude so I told him to “hold on a second!” to which he countered “Sir! You only have 45 seconds to order!” There was nobody in line behind us. So I said my fuck you, honked the horn a few times because I am of grade-A breeding and completely in control of my temper, and drove off to McDonald’s so Jake could ingest something horrible. Our first new apartment meal was White Castle (their mozzarella sticks are not bad). I am going to die at thirty.