Dave Barry: Homes And Other Black Holes

Another problem that sometimes arises with professional movers is getting them to give you your furniture back once they put it in the van. This problem is especially serious if the driver, after he puts your stuff in his van, goes around and picks up several other households full of stuff, which he then has to drop off, usually in Zaire, before he can go to your new home. The solution to this problem is to do what savvy moving families have been doing for years: hijack the truck. Get a gun, and simply demand that the driver unload at your house first. Of course this means you’ll wind up with somebody else’s possessions, but it doesn’t really matter. You’ll never get them unpacked anyway.

The big advantage of moving yourself is that you get to rent a rental truck. Rental trucks are highly specialized vehicles that are not released for use by the general public until they have undergone an intensive “breaking-in” program of being used to carry violent cattle with severe intestinal disorders over rough terrain for a minimum of 1,700,000 miles without maintenance.

These machines are capable of traveling the length of several football fields on a single tankful of gas, yet they boast the kind of cornering, braking, and acceleration characteristics normally associated with municipal stadiums. No question about it: Once you get behind the wheel of a rental truck, you’ll wonder what the sticky substance on the seat is. But before you’re ready to think about the truck, you need to go through all your possessions and make a serious futile effort to get rid of them. A key element in this effort is ...

A garage sale is basically when strangers come to your house and examine your personal belongings with un disguised contempt.

The first ones you’ll meet will be the garage sale Regulars. Garage sales are their lives. They’ll show up at your home early, generally about two days before the sale is scheduled to begin. The way they find out about it is, they use computers to examine satellite reconnaissance photographs of suburban neighborhoods for signs of incipient garage sale activity, such as people standing around arguing about how much to charge for a 1953 set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that’s missing volume 18 (Saliva-Tapeworm).

How do you price all those treasured personal belongings? The truth is, it doesn’t matter what you charge, because the Regulars aren’t going to pay it. These are people who do not own a single possession, including furniture, that they paid more than $2.50 for, and they are not about to change their policy for the likes of you.

GARAGE SALE REGULAR (picking up a sale object): What’s this?

YOU: That’s my grandmother’s brooch. It’s twenty-four-carat gold, it has eight flawless diamonds, and these are real pearls in the center here. It was presented to my grandmother personally by the King of England, whose crest is on the back.

GARAGE SALE REGULAR: I’ll give you a dollar for it.

The Regulars will quickly pick you clean of everything that anybody might want to buy, so when your sale actually gets under way, it will consist of people getting out of their cars, examining your possessions the way you might view an unexpected leech in your pasta, then asking you: “Is this it?” The only thing they’ll be interested in buying is anything on which you have carefully placed a large sign stating: NOT FOR SALE. They’ll walk up, read the sign carefully, then ask you: “Is this for sale?”

It can make you feel vaguely inadequate, watching people reject your possessions. At least that’s how it affects me. I find myself wanting to please these people. I want to say, “If you don’t see what you like, we’ll order it!” But of course this tends to defeat the whole purpose of the garage sale, so the best thing to do is just sit there grimly until the sale is over and you can throw everything away.

Okay, now that we’ve cleared out some of the dead wood, it’s time to proceed with the next step in the moving process, which is ...

You won’t start out this way, of course. You’ll start by selecting the objects with great care and wrapping them up very gently. You’ll keep this up for a week or so, packing box after box, making regular trips for more, getting to be good buddies with the clerks at the liquor store, getting a satisfied feeling when you gaze upon the big stacks of filled boxes in the living room. And then one day you’ll look around and make a chilling discovery: You’re not making any progress. There’s still just as much stuff lying around unboxed as there was the day you started. There might even be more. And so you start to pack with less care, faster and faster, until you find yourself in an uncontrolled packing frenzy, throwing everything—dirt, money, deceased spiders—into liquor boxes in a desperate effort to empty the house.

What you are up against here is a strange phenomenon that has astounded scientists and liquor store clerks for thousands of years: It is impossible to empty a house. You can’t do it. Somehow, word that you’re moving gets out to all the dumps and garbage disposal sites, and in the dead of the night there comes an eerie rustling sound as all your old possessions, the ones you threw away years ago—broken appliances, coffee grounds, Pat Boone records—rise up and come limping and scuttling back to your house, where they nestle in the backs of your closets, waiting to spring out at you the way Tony Perkins kept springing out at people in Psycho, only more unexpectedly. If you throw them away again, they’ll crawl right back the next night. Eventually you’ll lose your sanity, and you’ll start deciding to keep them. “This looks like it’s in pretty good shape!” you’ll say, holding up the owner’s manual to the Chevrolet station wagon that you sold in 1972. And all the other old possessions, back in their closets, writhe with joy, because they know there is hope for them.

This is how deranged you can become: The last time we moved, I had to physically restrain my wife from packing several scum-encrusted rags that I had been using to clean toilets. It was also my wife who decided to keep the greenish chair that looks like what would happen if a monstrous prehistoric creature blew its nose in our living room. We had remarked many times before that all the pain and anguish of moving would be justified by the fact that we would be leaving this chair behind forever. It broke into open laughter when it was carried into our new home.

After packing a box, always write your name on the top (e.g., “Barry”), so when you get to your new home you’ll be able to tell at a glance what your name is. Tropical fish should be individually wadded up in newspaper. In fact, it’s a good idea to pack several boxes full of nothing but wadded-up pieces of newspaper, so you’ll have plenty on hand in your New Home.

When packing perishable items, such as yogurt, make a mental note to throw them away immediately upon arrival in your new home. Be sure to take along at least 2,800 pounds of your old college textbooks with titles like Really Long Poems of the Sixteenth Century, the ones you never read when you were in college, the ones that are still packed in boxes from four moves ago. These are sure to come in handy.

It is best not to pack important prescription drugs such as tranquilizers. It is best to keep them on hand and gulp them down like salted peanuts.

Another total breakdown of rational thought occurs when you start deciding to leave behind things, as little gifts, for the new owners. You will look at your collection of seventeen thousand cans of various paints, none of which has been opened since the Protestant Reformation and each of which contains about a quarter inch of sludge hardened to the consistency of dental porcelain, and you will say: “The new owners will probably be able to use these!” You will say the same thing about the swing set gradually oxidizing into a major rust formation in the backyard, even though you know the new owners are a childless couple in their seventies. You will leave them your old eyeglasses, deceased radios, filthy rags, and baked goods supporting fourth-generation mold colonies. You will leave them half filled bags of lawn chemicals that have, over the decades, become bonded permanently to the garage floor. Near the end, you will display not the slightest shred of human decency: