The time of year, and the impending prospect of having to help my brother-in-law move, have set me to thinking about what had to be the most improbably eventful extended weekend of my life, with consequences that ripple forward to today. I’m sure it’s mundane, and it’s probably pointless to anyone but myself. But consider it, if you will, my belated tribute to Wally, illustrating as it does that trying to be nice to people you don’t know or like all that well inevitably gets you into predicaments that are scarcely to be believed.
Setting the stage: Summer of 1988. I’d bailed out of grad school at the end of the fall term in 1987, and was working as a proofreader for an advertising agency (which paid only slightly better than being a grad student on a fellowship stipend). Having gotten rid of the worst roommate I’d ever had (a little bearded homonculus of a pathological liar who parlayed a variety of congenital health problems into far more than his share of sympathy and forebearance), I had a college acquaintance living with me (let’s call him Roy) who was doing an internship in Atlanta between his first and second year of grad school.
Through acquaintances of his, I had met a woman I found very intriguing when we all went see They Might Be Giants one hot evening; she hated booze, cigarette smoke, and loud music, and I was sweltering inside, so we’d both wandered out onto the sidewalk where the air was quieter, cleaner, and cooler, and we’d had an extremely engaging conversation. At that time, she was in Atlanta interviewing for elementary school teaching jobs, having just finished college a month or so before, so I had no idea whether I’d ever see her again. It also didn’t seem likely that if I did, we’d ever date, since she was Jewish and I wasn’t, I smoked and she hated smoking, I was quite impoverished and she obviously wasn’t, and I was living the teenage lowlife scum lifestyle later to be popularized as “grunge”, while she was into Broadway shows, travel, romance novels, Mandy Patinkin, etc. She was very eager to get married and start a family, while I was far from being in any financial or psychological state to do either. To top it off, she considered herself informally engaged to a college boyfriend.
Months before, at a party, one of my best friends and I had been buttonholed by a common acquaintance from graduate school, a woman in her mid-thirties that neither of us knew all that well, but who’d always seemed unobjectionable enough. She asked whether we’d be willing to help her move to Auburn, Alabama during Labor Day weekend. Having had enough alcohol to be unable to think of a way to graciously decline, we agreed in as noncommital a manner as possible. The intervening weeks afforded us no plausible basis for backing out, however, so we made plans to get an early start on that Saturday morning, load the truck (which she was to procure), drive to Auburn, unload, and return to Atlanta in time to allow my friend, whom I’ll call Ted, to attend the departmental party for incoming graduate students being held that night.
Meanwhile, another college friend and former roommate, Joe (again, not his real name), had contacted me about moving to Atlanta and living with me for a while. Since Roy was moving out to return to graduate school soon, it seemed a good solution to finding a replacement roommate, so we agreed that he’d move down to Atlanta. He set his departure for the Friday before Labor Day. He warned us that his arrival would be somewhat late, however, since he wouldn’t be leaving until well into the afternoon, and his conveyance was to be the '67 Volvo he’d assembled from the most serviceable parts of two '67 Volvos he’d acquired, and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t end up stranded somewhere in northeastern Mississippi or northwestern Alabama, where parts for '67 Volvos are rather thin on the ground, particularly after business hours on a Friday. So we didn’t worry about waiting for him at the apartment that night when Roy’s friends, the one’s who’d accompanied us to the TMBG show, suggested going out to the Irish pub down the street from us.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the woman who’d made such an impression on me previously was one of the party. She’d been hired by the Atlanta Public School System, and was living with the parents of one of Roy’s grad school friends, who were very old friends of her family. On this occasion, she ended up sitting next to me, and while she was obviously more taken with my roommate than me (as indeed were the vast majority of women who met him), we became friendlier and friendlier as I bought her more and more drinks. I discovered, a little too late for the information to have affected my behavior, that she was unaccustomed to alcohol, didn’t generally drink, and had only once been what she considered drunk. At the time, some part of my brain was dimly aware that this was likely to have unfortunate consequences for her later, but being a male in my early twenties, that organ was doing less of my thinking than others, and having spent the better part of the last two years in graduate school, where your choices are often celibacy or dating and then breaking up with people you’re going to see daily for several more years, I have to admit that I was less concerned about her being sick later than I was elated at having my arm around an attractive woman who seemed favorably disposed toward me.
Ted, my partner in the ad hoc moving enterprise for the next day, joined us partway through the evening, and quickly made up for lost time in alcohol consumption. As the evening came to a close (precipitated by the bar doing likewise), I suggested that she accompany me back to my apartment, and nearly succeeded, but in the end her friend shepherded her back to their car (I took it as a good sign that her own objections centered not on going home with me but on getting back to her friend’s parent’s house, where her car was, so that she could drive to Columbia, SC the next day as planned). My roommate and I stumbled back down the street to our apartment at about 2:30 am, waited up until Joe arrived, Volvo intact, at around 4 am, and finally went to bed at about 4:30.
I woke up to a phone call from Ted, as agreed, at 7:30. I was immediately aware that I was still rather drunk, and that this was going to be a very long day. On Ted’s arrival to pick me up a little while later, we interrogated each other, determined with certainty that we were both still quite drunk and had no business undertaking this project, and set off. On arrival outside Bobbi’s apartment, we found a fifteen-foot UHaul truck, on the smallish side but large enough for most graduate student moving projects.
On arrival inside Bobbi’s apartment, we found furniture of sufficient quantity and dimensions that we instantly realized there was no hope of getting all in that truck. We pointed this out to Bobbi, who insisted that it ought to all fit, that she couldn’t afford a bigger truck, and that we ought to at least try. We dutifully complied with this request, and having filled the front half of the truck with nothing but the bookshelves, we carried our point. Bobbi then began trying to locate a bigger truck, but being mid-morning on a Saturday just before the beginning of the academic year, the only larger truck she could find was a twenty-four footer, close to 15 miles away. We drove the original truck to the new one, transferred the bookshelves to the new truck, dropped off the old truck at the location it had been rented from (the new truck being a Ryder, we obviously couldn’t leave the UHaul there), and returned to the apartment.
As we prepared to carry her dining table to the truck, she asked us to be particularly careful with it, it being an antique, made of solid cherry, and having an immaculate finish. We did so, placing it so that the table top, carefully wrapped in moving pads, was against the smooth back of one of the bookcases, and pressed it snugly into place, leaving no possibility for anything to slip in between and mar the finish. We broke for lunch, Bobbi volunteering to go pick up food so as to allow us to continue loading the truck (she’d barely lifted a finger, much less a box or other articles, the entire time). She balked at my request that she pick up a pack of cigarettes for me, delivering a lecture on the evils of smoking, until I suggested that she’d be as likely to get her furniture to Auburn on her own back as she would to have it loaded onto the truck by my cigaretteless self.
We finished loading the truck by mid-afternoon and prepared to set off for Auburn. At this point, she mentioned that she also needed us to pick up a bed that she’d acquired from friends. We were in Decatur, a suburb due east of Atlanta, and the bed was between Buckhead and Sandy Springs – 10 miles or so away, with no feasible freeway route, traveling perpendicularly to the most direct route to our ultimate destination. Getting there meant negotiating a twenty-four foot moving truck through some of Atlanta’s busiest streets and through some narrow and winding side streets, with a pair of guys in the cab only just beginning to sober up from the night before and having had only three hours of sleep and maybe that many hours of previous experience with such a vehicle.
Having loaded the bed, we finally set off for Auburn sometime around 3:30. The drive down I-85 was more or less uneventful, until about 30 miles outside Auburn, when we were hit by a squall line that turned into one of the heaviest monsoon-type storms I’ve ever seen. We were reduced to driving on the freeway at about 30 mph.
The rain continued unabated, and we eventually made our way through unfamiliar territory and the pitch darkness and rain to Bobbi’s new apartment. Naturally, it was located on the left side of a two-lane road with no shoulder, and of course the dividing medians between the apartment parking lot and the road, combined with the number of cars in the lot and the narrow driving lane between the rows of cars, precluded any attempt to make a left turn into the parking lot in a twenty-four foot truck, especially under the prevailing conditions.
Riding on the passenger side, I noticed that on my side of the street there was a church, brilliantly illuminated with floodlights even in the pouring rain, that appeared to have a large parking area slightly higher than street level that would serve nicely to turn the truck around. The driveway was at the far end of the lot, immediately before a row of pine trees along the property line. We confidently turned the truck into the driveway, and as we climbed the slight incline, discovered to our consternation that what we’d taken for a parking lot was in fact only a grassy area, now completely waterlogged by the rain. The driveway was the only paved area, making a large circle through the lot, and passing under a porte cochere by the door of the church – a porte cochere that was approximately five inches too low to allow the truck to pass under it.
Turning the truck around in the grass was out of the question. The ground was so soaked by the rain that we’d no doubt have sunk the truck axle deep in mud as soon as we left the pavement. There was no way that letting air out of the truck tires would have gained us enough headroom to make it under the porte-cochere, and in any case we had no way to re-inflate them and no desire to buy Ryder a new set of truck tires at several hundred dollars a throw. The only option was to back the truck out of the driveway: a tricky enough maneuver in any circumstances, given that it turned to the right fairly sharply from the street, but an impossible one under the circumstances, considering the darkness, driving rain and the row of trees along the edge of the lot that precluded the driver from seeing oncoming traffic or being seen by it.
I believe it was at this point we began to understand how fatally cursed this entire expedition was. We laughed for a few minutes at the improbability of it all, and then resolved to walk across the street to Bobbi’s apartment and call for a police officer to come direct traffic while we extricated the truck from the driveway.
We could not have gotten wetter quicker if we’d dived out of the truck into a swimming pool. After a few steps, I turned around and couldn’t help laughing again at the sight of the huge yellow truck incongruously parked in front of the church, lit up like day by the floodlights. It was a matter of no more than 250 or 300 yards across to Bobbi’s door, but by the time we reached it neither of us had a dry thread left.
We called the police and after a few minutes of explaining the situation, they agreed to send out a car. The officer who eventually arrived was almost disappointingly unsurprised and unimpressed by the situation, though he did seem to appreciate not having been sent out to work the accident we might have caused otherwise. We got the truck out of the church driveway and into Bobbi’s, but given the time of night and the rain, there was of course no place to park the truck anywhere near the door of the townhome-style apartment. In any case, there was no question of trying to unload the truck in such a downpour, nor of Ted making it back to Atlanta for even the dregs of the party. It being perilously close to 9 pm, the time at which most stores close in a place like Auburn, we piled, soaked as we were, into Bobbi’s car and hurried off to KMart, where we purchased horrible 50/50 cotton-polyester warmup pants and shirts, underwear, $6 pull-on deck-style sneakers, and in Ted’s case, a nautical-style captain’s hat, with a cheap blue baseball cap for me (having no comb or brush, our hair was unfit for public viewing) – all on his credit card, Bobbi having very little cash and neither she nor I having any credit cards. We returned to her apartment, changed into dry clothes, and ordered pizzas (Bobbi writing a check for them).
Reasonably dry and fed, we now stoically faced the prospect of sleeping on a carpeted concrete slab floor in polyester-blend clothing without so much as a towel to roll up and use for a pillow, after a full day of heavy lifting and carrying. We slept, no doubt aided by having slept so little the night before, but neither of us was what you would call rested the next morning.
We woke to continued heavy rain, though not so intense as the night before. Having no food or utensils in the apartment, we drove to Shoney’s for breakfast, Phil paying as Bobbi had exhausted her cash. We returned to the apartment, moved the truck to a spot near the door, and commenced unloading in the intermittent lulls and pauses in the rain. The explanation for Bobbi’s cavalier attitude toward us clicked into place for me as we were talking during a break (another downpour having started), when she commented on how, as a girl, she always thought it sad that her family’s “help” had to miss having Christmas dinner with their own families.
We’d unloaded about two-thirds of the truck when we uncovered the antique cherry dining table. Turning it upright, we removed the pads from the top and discovered to our horror that something, somehow, had put a gash, several inches long and down to bare wood, in the middle of the top. Ted and I looked at one another (Bobbi, of course, had not set foot inside the truck the entire time), and wordlessly put the moving pads back on, explaining to Bobbi as we brought it in that we thought it best to protect it from the rain. We hurried back onto the truck, grabbed several boxes of books, and rushed them inside, placing them on top of the table. We noticed at one point later in the day that she’d removed the boxes and the pad, but she omitted to comment on the damage, thus ensuring that she would live to see another day.
At close to four o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, fully 24 hours or more after we’d expected to be done, I pulled down the rear door of the truck. At this point, as I started to walk around to the cab, Bobbi’s mouth formed the for-her-unaccustomed words “thank you” for the first time all weekend, and we grunted and set off for home.
I wish I could say that things ended there. Though not much given to such considerations, Bobbi did acknowledge the propriety of reimbursing Phil for the expenses incurred in buying food and clothing during this fiasco. A check arrived in the mail a couple of weeks later. It bounced. In a gesture of faith in humanity I could not myself have managed, Phil agreed to accept another check for the original amount plus the charges incurred which, mirabile dictu, did not bounce.
Proving that there is no justice in the world, Bobbi went on, a year or so later, to marry one of the best-known literary critics in the country, an unusually sweet and kind man (particularly as academics go) at least 35 years older than her, bearing him a child not long afterward and ultimately securing for herself a teaching post at his home institution, one of the most prestigious Ivy League universities, despite her unimpressive intellectual abilities and academic record.
After Roy returned to graduate school, Joe lived with me for almost a year, working minimum wage jobs and trying to get a band going. His best prospect, a collaboration with a pair of women, ended when they were unable to find a suitable rhythm section, and he moved on to Houston, where he had family, and then on to San Francisco, where he continued his musical efforts, more or less fruitlessly, for several years. The women, Linda Hopper and Ruthie Morris, almost immediately after his departure found a bass player and drummer, forming the group Magnapop, which enjoyed some degree of success, particularly in Europe, and released a few CDs to critical approval. (Disclaimer: I know that some online sources give a date of 1987 for the formation of Magnapop. It’s possible that the members of the band had met by then, but in the fall and winter of 1988-89, Linda and Ruthie were woodshedding with my roommate).
On the other hand, I did get the girl. She was indeed quite sick later that night and the next day, and she resisted my suggestions that we get together for most of the next two months. Nevertheless, we had increasingly frequent and lengthy phone conversations throughout that time, and by Thanksgiving we were spending a lot of time together and were very much besotted with one another. She ditched her nominal boyfriend in the middle of a holiday trip to Florida. We went through some on-and-off periods over the next few years, but ultimately married almost eight years to the day after we first met, and have two kids and a wonderful marriage.
Believe it or not, I’ve had at least one single day with more ups, downs, and twists, but without the long-term impact and without extending across multiple days. But that’s another story . . . .