There
is something special about moving furniture for a living in a city
like New York. Oh, I don't mean the furniture itself, which is pretty
much the same wherever you are; no, what sets The Big Apple apart is
the variety of characters you find yourself working with.
This
was back in the eighties and for all I know things have changed, as
visitors from the States are constantly telling me. Personally,
although I never contradict them, it seems to me that some of the
things they report must be just a bit exaggerated. No Sex Shops on
the Deuce? Never happen. No Three Card Monty artists on Fourteenth?
Give me a break. And where would all the Bad, the Mad, the Wannabe Actors, the Jazz artists between gigs, the lost immigrants ...where
would all these colorful characters find work if not in the Seasonal,
No questions asked, Lavishly tipped Moving industry?
The
best part of the job, for me, was all the stories we only learned a
part of. Who was the thirty something lady we moved from one studio
apartment (one room and a bath) to another just like it? She had a
camp bed and one wardrobe's worth of clothes and some books, and we
gave her a ride uptown to her new address which was strictly against
the rules but what the hell, and when we had moved her and her meager
belongings in, she gave an eighty bucks tip to the foreman, and while
we were all congratulating ourselves on an easy twenty apiece, she
turned and gave the same amount to each of us with the same quietly
amused smile.
Whatever
happened to the guy with terminal Aids we moved downtown from a posh
penthouse in the Upper East Side? He had those lesions they get in
the last stages, and he was exhausted by the whole business, you
could tell. I was packing the apartment alone because, well to be
honest, none of the other guys would set foot in the place. Everyone
had the ill informed belief that the Aids virus would go feral at the
first opportunity, so I loaded the dollies and stacked them by the
elevator. That was how I had a ringside seat while the owner's best
friend spent the whole move trying to convince the poor bastard to
sell this and give away that, and I was there when he threw up his
hands and cried, 'I don't care, take anything you want.' I was there
when he offered me a glass of water with the damndest smile
you ever saw, which only twitched a little when I drank it down
without stopping.
So
the customers were a treat, and no two jobs were alike, but the best
part was the variety of guys we had working with us. We had two
Russian immigrants: there was Peter, a refugee from Belarus who had
literally jumped ship in New York Harbor and now was desperately
homesick. He finally went home during a general amnesty, or so his
mother claimed, but not before getting my address so he would have
someone to write to if it all went pear-shaped. Then there was
Russian Mike, so called to distinguish him from yours truly. I never
got his history straight, he claimed to have been born in Hungary but
his first language was Russian, which would have made him a bit of an
oddity because none of my Hungarian friends would have admitted to
knowing a word of the language, it was a point of honor with them. He
had straggly long hair and a beard to match, and looked a great deal
like pictures of Rasputin, with a deep voice that fit the part. I
always got the impression he felt he was doing work that was beneath
him, and I used to tease him by calling him Munkás
Mike,
which is like Bob the Builder in Hungarian.
One
job I did with him, the customer was a lovely lady, single and some
kind of executive on Wall Street. Everyone was smitten with her to
some degree, but it brought out the romantic in Mike. During lunch
break he went down to the nearest Liquor store, which was out of
character, and brought back what looked like a very expensive bottle
of wine. Then at the end of the job, when the tips were shared out,
he brought out his gleaming bottle with the fancy label and in his
deep and thoroughly Rasputin-esque voice he presented it to the
customer, saying, ' Herrre, I buy this forrr you, forr your eyes. I
drrream about yourr eyes tonight.' To give the lady credit, she
accepted the gift gracefully, if with a slight air of alarm.
Then
there was Joel, a tough Jewish kid who claimed to have been a Hells
Angel- that's a more or less famous Motorcycle Gang in America that
dates back to 1948.
That
made him something of a celebrity because as you might imagine, we
didn't get very many ex- Angels in the Moving Business. He had
everyone spell bound with his tales of daring motorcycle rides and
spectacular spills, and he certainly looked the part, with the
sleeveless tee shirts showing off his bulging biceps. For some reason
the female customers were quite smitten with him- I'll never forget
the time he tapped me for ten bucks during a job, explaining that the
lady we were moving had invited him out to dinner and he didn't have
cabfare.
Only
as time went on did we learn there was a darker side to Joel. Once he
asked me if I would go with him to pick up some stuff he had in
storage. The place turned out to be a Drug Rehabilitation Center,
and as we went through the door I saw a transformation I'll never
forget. Gone was the swagger, the confident tough guy attitude.
Behind the reception desk was this nerdy character with round
spectacles and a crew cut, but one look at his face and you knew who
held all the power.
'Well,
Joel, I didn't expect to see you back here so soon. What can we do
for you?'
Joel
grimaced and kept his eyes on the floor. ' I, uh, came to pick up my
stuff, ok?'
'What
stuff is that?'
I
had feeling that the Nerd knew exactly what Joel meant but just
wanted to make him sweat a little. One of the perks of a low paying
job like that, I suppose.
'Uh,
well, my guitar, and, you know, my stud and stuff.'
'The
diamond stud, you mean? And the guitar? ' The Nerd pursed his lips
and seemed to consider. ' You wouldn't be going to pawn those items,
would you?'
This
wasn't said in an accusatory tone, more like a
we-both-know-that's-what-you-usually-do-isn't-it kind of voice.
'No,
I just, like, want to have them, you know?' said Joel doggedly, still
with his eyes on the floor. ' I got a job, I make good money.' He
glanced up at me and I readily agreed that this was no more than the
truth.
There
was some more palaver but finally the Nerd had to give in, I
gathered because Joel had been released and they really had no legal
right to hold his property. That night in gratitude Joel invited me
back to the West Side Apartment he was sharing with a young lady-
actually sharing is the wrong word, it was more like the way a lonely
person will adopt a feral cat. Joel played folk songs and the girl and I sang
along, and at one point after a few glasses of wine I asked him what
was the story with the Drug Rehab?
'Heroin,
man.' said Joel succinctly, fingering a soft chord.
'
Why'd you do it?' I asked because I was really curious and a bit drunk, ' I mean,
what do people get out of it?' I think we were roughly the same age
but the look I got then was two years older than God.
'Well,'
said Joel, putting down the Guitar and lighting a cigarette, 'It's
like this. Say you come home, and some psycho bastard has broken into
your place and killed your woman and your two kids. Now, if you're on
a high, you don't get totally wasted and lose your mind. What you do,
you say to yourself, hey, that's really fucked. I'm sure gonna miss
that chick, and the kids were great, and if I ever catch the
sonofabitch that did that someday I'm going to mess him up big time, but it's
all cool. That's what Heroin does for you.'
Some
of the outfits I worked for had a sort of class system. The college
boys tended to do smaller jobs; we had a couple from NYU who'd
cannily cornered the market on Art Moves, where a big painting had to
be crated and transported. Then there were the Hispanics, who tended
to work together on big office moves; they loved wheeling file
cabinets and desks into the elevator and across the lobby; some of
the moves used as many as four trucks in rotation – wheel the stuff
on, wheel it off and go back for the next load. Often it was
midnight before the job was done.
Then
there were the Jazz musicians- they were mostly black, and liked
working together. One summer there was a new guy, tall, with an
aristocratic sort of face. His name was Omar, and the word was he
came from Africa, the son of a Royal Family off to New York to sow a
few wild oats. The Jazz musicians more or less adopted him, and he
seemed to get a real kick out of working on the trucks; I remember
him always with a big smile as though the contrast between hauling
furniture and what ever kind of life he led back home tickled his
fancy. One morning, though, I came into the office to find everyone
sitting around talking in low voices. Finally the dispatcher came out
– he was a little guy with
spectacles and a bald patch, and he had to look up to talk to Rupert,
who was about six-two and played trumpet. I heard him murmur
something, and Rupert sat down like he had been poleaxed. 'Oh, no
man!' he shouted, his eyes screwed up in pain, 'Not Omar!'
It
seemed that Omar had been in a truck driven by Julius, the lead
drummer in some group or other. Julius had taken an off ramp too fast
and the truck had turned over, killing Omar who had been riding
nearest the window. Julius was of course heartsick and hadn't come in
to work, and we gathered that the Company was in trouble with the
family in Africa who wanted an explanation as to what their heir
apparent had been doing riding in a truck in the first place. I'll
always remember the few times I saw Omar, and never without thinking
of his life which began on the endless plains of Africa as a member
of a Royal household, and ended so pointlessly and suddenly on the
other side of the world . I remember how he always looked as though
life was just one big joke after another and I wonder if, somewhere,
he is still laughing.
I
mentioned in another node that one of the companies I worked for was
called 'Nice Jewish Boy With Truck.' That particular company actually
had been started, so the legend had it, by the owner whom I'll call
Simon, when he was at NYU and schlepped furniture for relatives and
friends to pay his tuition. Later on, he went into the business in a
big way, with a whole fleet of trucks, all painted bright orange with
the company name in faux Hebrew lettering, which more than once
caused them to be stoned, so I was told, when they drove through the
rigidly Orthodox Hasidic neighborhoods. I wonder what the reaction
would have been had it become known that Simon had converted to
Scientology.
In
those days, very little about Scientology was generally known. I
still have no idea what it is all about, but working for Nice Jewish
Boy was at least an education in the business end of it. We were all
encouraged to think of ourselves as partners in the firm, and there
was a point system, rather like the 'shares' that used to be the
basis for pay on a whaling ship, whereby you were paid according to
how much responsibility you were willing to assume. Drivers got more
than helpers, the guy with the clipboard who took care of the
paperwork was paid the most, and so on. Anyone could do any job if
they thought they could handle it, was the idea. It always seemed
nonsensical to me, as it was precisely the cheerfully anarchic nature
of the work that I liked, so I let responsibility and its attendant
rewards run off my back like water off the proverbial duck , as did
most of the others.
One
time we moved a dentist's office to a new building, and several days
later Nice Jewish Boy received a complaint that a carton of valuable
dental instruments had gone missing. Everything had been numbered for
the inventory and there was no doubt about it; the carton had been
loaded at one end and never made it to the other. This was serious
business for although not all the guys were what you would call model
citizens, out and out pilfering on the job was rare. Mostly what I
think happened was that the light fingered among
us would use the opportunity to case the premises and then return
after hours, so to speak.
Simon
and his fellow Scientologists evidently decided to put their
principles into action to deal with this nefarious deed. What they
came up with was to say the least original. Every man who had been on
the move was called into the office, one by one, where they were told
that the man who had committed the crime had not only robbed the
Dentist, but caused the Company to lose face and pay a substantial
bit of money in restitution. The thief had therefore actually robbed
each and every one of us, since we were all partners in the company
and its interests were the same as ours. There was a good deal more
but I forget the rest, the conclusion being that if anyone knew who
the culprit was they would be doing themselves and all of us a good
turn by giving him up.
I'm
sure Simon and co. were sincere but there must have been a flaw in their
reasoning, for the guilty party never did come to light. Outside the
office I heard a couple of the Hispanic guys discussing the
experience.
'Hey,'
said one , ' what is all thees Scientology boolshit, anyway?'
'I
dunno, man,' replied the other, ' I theen it means you got to rat on
you frens.'