I crossed the George late Wednesday night and pulled into the Vince Lombardi rest area to sleep. The Vince is a notorious pickle park, and that night the place was swarming with sleeper leapers, so I rolled down to Bordentown Junction and slept there. That was Wednesday. I drove all day and night Thursday and hit Beverly Hills at 3 a.m. Friday.
The first delivery was Mrs. Fowler, the hoarding artiste from New Hampshire, who was supposed to have 4,000 pounds and ended up with 12,000. Her estimated cost of services had been $4,000 for her move. Ray the Mover told me that Mrs. Fowler had prepaid her full bill of $11,967. How about that? Almost triple the estimate. The extra charges will no doubt spawn another “Tale of Horror from the Moving World,” but it was entirely her own fault. She was not truthful about how much stuff she was moving. Moving stories, like losing virginity stories, have a universal one-upmanship quality about them. Bring up the subject anywhere, anytime, and a randomly selected heretofore reasonable human being will launch into a rabid tale of premeditated malfeasance, only to be outdone by an adjacent interlocutor retailing even more heinous crimes.
I arrived at Mrs. Fowler’s at 8 a.m. The property manager was waiting for me. Good old Mrs. Fowler. The lovely woman had bought a ground-floor condo. I discovered I’d given Tommy bad directions, so he was going to show up late and pissed off. He’s pretty smart, but when you are dealing with directions the key is to stop, figure it out, and don’t go anywhere until you know exactly where you’re going. Here’s a useful tip about directions: Never ask a convenience store clerk, never ask someone loitering on the street, and never ask anyone over sixty-five years of age.
Tommy wasn’t there yet, but I set up the walkboard. It went right inside the front door. No stairs, no long carries, no elevator, and, best of all, no Mrs. Fowler. Tommy showed up at eight thirty with steam coming out of his hairy Irish ears.
“Hello, Tommy. I’m sorry about the directions, but your luck just changed. I’ve got the walkboard inside the house, it’s all on one floor, and all we have to do is wheel everything in. No stairs, no climbing, no lifting, no crazy shipper. If this got any easier I’d ask you to pay me.”
“Fuck you” was his greeting. “I’ll never meet a driver again at residence. If you want to use me you can goddam well pick me up.”
“I wasn’t going to drive two hundred miles out of my way to pick you up, Tommy. I don’t care how good you are.”
“It’s a hundred miles. Don’t exaggerate.”
“It’s a hundred down to get you and a hundred back. That’s two hundred, Einstein. Besides, if I’d known how pissy you’d be and how easy this delivery would be, I’d have done it myself. You could still be home bitching at your wife instead of at me.”
The property manager took off, saying to call him if we needed anything. Mrs. Fowler’s delivery took two and a half hours, which is really fast for 12,000 pounds. It took me almost twelve hours to load it. We sort of guessed which room stuff would go into, and we didn’t worry too much about getting it wrong. Mrs. Fowler probably wouldn’t notice if her beds were set up in the kitchen. We did the best job we could and took off after the property manager signed off that everything had been delivered. He had no idea, but the papers were signed, the van line was paid, and there would be no damage claim. In my world, that’s a successful move.
I’d gotten one load off out of the six I had on board, and it was the biggest one. The only thing on my mind was my scheduled call to Gary in dispatch at the end of the day. I was still crossing my fingers for the pot of gold.
Largo came off smoothly. This was Mr. and Mrs. Howell’s stuff from Marshfield. The Howells weren’t in Florida yet, so the trailer park manager let us in. The Howells had one of those ancient, dark wooden bedroom sets with a bureau, double dresser, vanity with mirror, and bed with a big headboard and footboard. It looked funereal stuffed into the trailer’s master bedroom. Mrs. Howell’s church organ looked like a giant cockroach in the living room. We finished in about ten minutes, and the manager signed off on the inventory. Papers signed, van line paid, no damage claim.
Sarasota was our next stop. Route 19 south to St. Pete and then over Tampa Bay via the dual spans of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. I’ve been on the road so long I remember driving the Sunshine Skyway right after a freighter hit it in 1980 and knocked half the southbound span into the water, taking with it six cars, a truck, and a Greyhound bus. Thirteen people were killed. They used the remaining span for both northbound and southbound traffic until 1987. It was narrow, congested as hell, and the northbound traffic was right next to you with no median. That was scary enough, but it got really hairy at the top—it’s a high bridge because all the tankers and military ships need clearance into Tampa, and at the top was the dangling steel of the other span as it opened into the abyss. Freaky.
As we crested the bridge, Tommy, in the shotgun seat, started cutting a lime for the first of his many daily vodka and cranberry cocktails. He kept his supply in a big thermos at the bottom of his duffle bag. I was annoyed at Tommy because we still had work to do. The unwritten rule was No drinking until the workday is over. I’d have to write the unwritten rule. The unfortunate truth was that to get the quality help I need, I have to make allowances or I’ll have nobody at all.
We came off I-75 just south of Sarasota to deliver Mr. Gross. We headed west off the ramp and had driven maybe a mile when the road simply ended. But wait; there was the billboard, there was the security shed, there was the golf course, and there was the right turn into Whispering Pines, Palmetto Groves, Majestic Manor, Golden Gables, Century Village, Martin Downs, Sunburn Acres, Twin Beavers, or Sunset Farts. Who gives a shit? It’s the same old Florida crap. However these places get named, rest assured, the more lyrical the moniker, the more of a sunblasted, cookie-cutter nightmare the place will be.
This one looked solidly middle-class because the security shed was unmanned and the gate was open. At least it wasn’t a high-rise. I took a right into the development, and a tipsy Tommy Mahoney started languorously reading off street signs.
“Wren . . . Robin . . . Blue Jay . . . Cardinal . . . Oriole . . . Yankees . . . Red Sox . . .”
“Stop screwing around, Tommy, what street are we looking for?”
“Ostrich.”
“Bullshit.”
“Penguin.”
“Tommy, I’m gonna throw your drunk ass out of this truck. What’s the fuckin’ street?”
“Kiwi.”
“You asshole. Gimme the directions.”
“You know something, Finn? You’re really uptight sometimes. You should learn to relax.”
“I’ll relax when I find this guy’s street. What’s it called?”