We're All In The Same Jam

This motley crew of effects pedals on top of my rotary-engine-shaped dinette table is, fortunately or unfortunately, just a fraction of the stuff I've moved or stored or re-homed (is that even a word outside of Tech Services?) in the past week. If all goes well, by the end of November I'll have everything in its right place, as Thom Yorke would say, and I'll have most of the problems with the house at least temporarily addressed. I've sent over twenty truckloads' worth of furniture, personal belongings, and trash to Goodwill and the recyclers. I've made several hundred bucks on Craigslist and spent ten times that on everything from two cheapo bookshelves to ten steel storage units.

Needless to say, I've met some odd people along the way, including the fellow who wanted to make sure that the Paradigm Monitor 7s I was selling for $200/pair had a fresh re-cone job and the people who were willing to pay for a futon that they were then going to turn around and throw away the following day. (Long story.) But the most surreal experience I've had yet was when the gypsy safe-movers arrived.

Until now, I've never lived with anyone who owned a safe. Even when I was married to a Jewish woman. (rimshot! Thank you, I'll be here all week! Try the veal!) Well, now I do --- and the safe in question weighed nearly eight hundred pounds. How do you get a safe from a storage unit to a basement, in a hurry? None of the moving companies in the area wanted to touch it, but there was a glimmer of hope from one of them: "Call 'Bob'. He'll do it this weekend, and he'll do it right --- for cash in hand." Alright then, we'll call Jeff, and we'll ignore that feeling in the pit of our stomachs that says the power to install a safe in a secretive weekend manner is also the power to remove it in a secretive weekend manner.

Bob arrived twenty minutes after the storage unit containing the safe was dropped in the driveway. He was a frankly monstrous man --- maybe an inch taller than me but with arms and wrists the size of my legs and ankles. His brother and their assistant could have hidden behind him. I don't consider myself physically weak and even post-surgery I've lifted and carried 140-pound items around the house and down stairs and up stairs and whatnot. A few years ago I picked up a Lotus Esprit engine and moved it with very little assistance. Still, I couldn't help but be a little chagrined when I saw Bob reach down and pick up the front end of an eight-hundred-pound safe, from the ground. You wouldn't be able to find a vein or a zig-zag line of cut muscle on Bob with a microscope but he had the raw strength of a gorilla.

In under ten minutes, he had the safe down the stairs and stood up in the basement. There wasn't a scratch on it or anything else in the house. This was in stark contrast to when two Bolivians and I took a 425-pound server rack down the basement stairs in 2001 and basically chewed the walls and the doorframes off a brand new house. As they were cleaning up and picking up the boards they'd laid down over the tile, Bob's brother looked into the music room.

"Is that a drum kit?" Why, yes, it is. "I haven't played in years." Give it a shot, then. He sat down and within seconds it was clear that he hadn't lost much of a step during his time away from the drums. I'd kill to have a guy like this available for gigs, particularly since my last steady drummer jumped bail on a domestic violence charge last December. After I bailed him out.

I plugged a guitar in --- and this blog being what it is, we have to note that it was the beeswing sipo back DGT Wood Library --- as Bob's brother played the opening drum line from "Walk This Way". I didn't know how to play the song but it isn't like figuring out a Bach fugue on the fly and a minute or two later we were jamming through it pretty well. Bob and the assistant, a young Mexican fellow with a permanently installed smile, stood at the end of the room and laughed. I had to laugh, too. Twenty minutes ago I didn't know any of these dudes and now we've got a safe in the basement and a tolerable imitation of pre-rehab Aerosmith going on. We quickly agreed to meet again for more of the same. Music, that is, not safe-moving.

We wrapped it up and the crew went to the truck, but Bob stayed behind. "Man, I don't know if you have time for this sometime, but if you and my brother get together to play again, I got some lyrics I want to share with you. I've been going through some things, man, things that have been hard for me to let go. Maybe there's a way to put music to them. Maybe there's a way to put that music out there, you know?" To my surprise and minor alarm, his eyes were not entirely dry. I found myself promising to put music to Bob's lyrics --- about life on the road, loneliness, despair.

We shook hands and my relatively petite writer's fingers disappeared in Bob's paw. Then we stood for a moment and I was conscious of the ridiculousness of the thing --- two men, both above six-one and two hundred and forty pounds, sharing a bit of a moment, reminiscing over our regrets and our dreams for the future. Then I walked him out and as the truck chugged away I called for my son and held him as high in the air as I could, thinking about what a blessing it is to be alive, aware, and not entirely alone.