We’re Not Movers

1/07/06

Have you ever moved a couch? I have. Being one of the dregs of society, I am not in a position to actually hire people to move my stuff whenever I get evicted from one residence and somehow trick another unsuspecting landlord into signing me on as a tenant. If you’re like me, this leads to problems, most of which concerning the fact that you have to get your friends to help you move your shit. If your friends are like mine, the affair turns into an fanatically unamusing Three Stooges-esque debacle the likes of which one-act plays are made. It’s funny to watch, sure, because you’re just as drunk as they are but the tragedy arises whenever your “friends” leave and you’re stuck in a shambles of an abode and just sobering up enough to realize your formerly only shitty possessions are now shitty possessions lumped into a chaotic pile in the middle of the room…and probably broken..

I hate moving. Mostly because I hate sweating, or indeed anything more strenuous than masturbating while standing upright. But the instance I wish to discuss with you today, ladies and gentlemen, is one that took place several years ago whenever two of my friends and I moved into an old house equipped with an unfinished basement. Said basement was furnished with a bedroom which would become mine, the walls of which resembled plywood held in place with Silly Puddy. On the upside, whenever it rained the odd sewer drain in the basement flooded and filled up the place with a smell not unlike fish that had thrown up on themselves, died, then rotted atop a heap of hangover-poo. (You know, that black, sludgy poo that you get after a night of heavy drinking.)

But at the time of the move-in, all of us were thinking, “Hell yeah! A basement! We’re totally gonna trick it out into a kick-ass game room and pussy palace!” Visions of hot, young vixens of loose moral fiber shaking their various things to throbbing techno music danced in our heads. It did end up being a popular gathering spot, but mostly because whenever we had friends over we all migrated down there knowing we could hardly fuck up the basement more by adding a little extra cigarette smoke and vomit to the ambiance. But I digress.

Upon moving into this future Taj Mahal of decadence, we decided to take two of the three sofas in our possession downstairs to “cozy up the place.” The first couch, a phenomenally unappealing blue and green number I still owned due to the fact that I’d moved enough times in the past six years so that Heilig-Meyer’s had lost track of me and thus could not collect the $400 I still owed them for the monstrosity, made it down the stairs no problem. We stashed the beast in a corner and congratulated each other with a two-hour nicotine and alcohol break. We then realized we had to take the U-Haul back in the morning and decided to haul ass unloading the final couch; a huge, poofy beige number that would have been embarrassed to show it’s face even in the gaudiest, Nagel-painting-stocked 80’s bachelor pad. But the upholstery was only torn in two or three places and that had been tastefully patched with duct tape so we couldn’t bear to part with the piece.

Due to our earlier ravishing success, we brought the much larger couch confidently through the living room, into the kitchen and started down the steps. Here, our gift for spatial relationships failed us. Picture if you can, three male human beings, the combined IQ of which is well over 400, trying to shove a couch the size of a VW Bus through a doorway the size of a virgin’s honey-pot.

“Maybe if we turn it this way,” became the mantra of the evening, closely followed by, “Fucking shit!”

After removing the door by way of prying up the bar holding the hinges in place we finally managed to get the mammoth couch into the stairwell and there was much rejoicing. I think the “high-five” made its first and last appearance at this point. All that remained was to shove the monster down the stairs and call it a night. Easy-peasy.

An hour and a half later we had managed to get the couch halfway down the stairwell where it became irrevocably wedged, stubbornly refusing either forward or backward movement. But we were not beaten! Clearly the situation called for a little thinking outside the old box.

First we unscrewed and removed the “banister,” which consisted of a thin, unvarnished rod of wood randomly affixed to the wall. That freed us up about three inches of wiggle room, and after another twenty minutes of brute shoving and swearing the couch grudgingly trundled another two feet down the stairs…where it became irrevocably stuck.

“I’ve got it!” I cried, delirious with dehydration and alcohol. “Wait here!” I ran into the kitchen and returned post-haste with a tub of margarine, where I proceeded to (I’m not kidding,) lube the sides of the goddamn couch with butter substitute. I don’t believe my thinking was completely askew here, margarine is slippery; I figured, grease the sides of the couch and it should shoot out of there like a ping-pong ball out of a strippers vagina!

In the end, we admitted defeat for the evening when the margarine debacle culminated with negligible results other than a stuck and now greasy couch that smelled faintly of clarified butter and semen. (The mild semen odor was already embedded in the couch, but had somehow gained strength from the saturated fats in the margarine and combined to become some super-smell; like those mechanical cats that join up to become Voltron.)

Three weeks go by. We fix up the new house, which is to say we shove things around until we’re tired of fucking with it and just leave well-enough squalor alone. And the stuck couch remains lodged inside the stairwell. I kind of liked this development, actually; every time I got up in the morning it was almost like a cheap Double Dare course I had to traverse in order to gain purchase to the main floor. The only time it caused a problem was when I was particularly drunk downstairs and just too damn lazy to crawl over the large, beige beached whale on the stairs and just decided it was just simpler to piss in that weird drain that filled up when it rained. Have I mentioned that I’m disgusting?

One day while I was at work my two roommates, possibly high on meth-amphetamines, decided that couch was coming out, by God! Whenever I get home I find couch-filling strewn from Hell to Christmas all over the basement and a couch in two pieces at the bottom of the stairs. So they did finally manage to get the thing dislodged by just sawing the fucker in half, but I have yet to understand why it was necessary to slash into the cushions like a DEA agent looking for smack.

I think we cleaned up the stuffing after only a week.