The Cerebral Catalyst

Moving out is always a bummer. There are ways to simplify the process. The most important one is to make sure your lines of communication are open. I do not seek to give you tips on moving out, I say take it as it comes. No, my purpose is more selfish. I want to tell you about my own experience on Tuesday, April 26th.

It all started that Sunday when my parents picked me up and we ate at "Hoss's" (Damn the superfluous "s") in Greensburg. I had a pretty bitchin' meal even though I'm on the South Beach Diet. (I broke it for a few days. Don't tell doctor Agaston; that's just between you and me.) We were supposed to plan the move but there were many detours; I had to defend my career decision (starving writer/ perpetual ne'er do well) and fend attacks on our familial bliss from a woman affectionately known as "Peanuts", who is one of my aunt's friends. Don't ask about the name, she doesn't resemble a peanut (more a pear) or the cast of Charles Schultz's masterpiece. Maybe I'm bitter because she thought I was still in school and majoring in computers. I mean, I'm lucky I know how to check e-mail when it comes down to it. My point is we didn't plan shit. Talking to my dad is like talking to a rock, were that rock to continuously utter the phrase "I don't know" repeatedly on cue, unless you talk sports or how A-rabs dress up real nice to protest America. (As an interesting aside, when I lived in Highland Park my dad once drove up to a group of protesters and growled, "Who died for you?" I don't think they had an answer. My grandfather was in WWI and a lot of people died in that war for pretty shitty reasons, too.)

So I continued to ask my dad when we were going to go, I need my queen size bed and I'm not sleeping on that old twin that I have had since I was two. (This is the bed I keep at my parents' house and it's cool because no one is "sleeping over" anyway.) God willing I'll find someone to share my bed with me but I don't expect that to happen under my parents' roof. I'm an adult and you have to remember that adults (and some kids too) like to fuck. At least males; it's what keeps us going. Monday was a washout, I spent the day rotting my brain with TV, some particularly low-grade shit: Judging Amy, NYPD Blue, Everybody Loves Raymond, Law and Order... Later Simpsons and Seinfeld weren't that bad. Not to leave out Mr. 3000, which I actually dug because Bernie Mac is hilarious and spot-on, and Angela Basset is smokin'.

Tuesday was to be the day as I said but I didn't know that in my reverie because I haven't inherited my dad's clairvoyant powers. After worshipping at the altar of Norris (using my Total Gym, for the uninitiated) and rocking out to Love's Forever Changes while thinking about how relevant some of the songs are today even though that album came out during the summer of love, I came upstairs to find my dad entrenched as usual in his recliner with the TV blaring. I heard banshees wailing, machine guns pumping, smelled the fire and brimstone of hastily dispensed vigilante justice. Quite a roar. "What the hell are you watching?" I asked him. "Tarzan," was the reply. I didn't even look at the screen; I couldn't bear to after hearing the monkeys' cries. Sometimes it's better to provide your own visuals. The fact of the matter is that The King of the Apes is better than hour upon hour of the O'Reilly Factor and Court TV. So I press my dad again about the move when he turns to Fox News so I can drown out the propaganda. I get nothing. Nada. Not even a grunt, he just looks down.

Cut to three hours later when he stops making a pizza and disappears outside. What's he up to? Who knows, but I'm expecting something good, on the level of spontaneous parallel parking sessions when I was 15, two actually occurring when I was halfway through Highlander, Sean Connery had just come on the scene. But who wants to live forever? Parking was hell both times but I survived, only to have driven ten times in the last eight years. If he wasn't such a control freak, I could have had the truck and done it myself, then ball that jack up to New York, but I'm not Neal Cassidy and I hope to have more teeth when I die. I'm in my room watching Basquiat, another balls-out flick; I'm halfway through it when I hear a bellowing, "Let's go. Get your junk ready." Everything is "junk" in my dad's eyes, it wasn't a cock reference. The pizza is fresh out of the oven but no one gets a slice. This is bullshit, if I wanted a mystery I'd read Agatha Christie but not really. Tell me when you want to leave. Talk to me, it doesn't hurt. I know sometimes I have diarrhea of the mouth and that isn't always better but sometimes you just need to communicate. So I have to jump up in the air before the shit hits the fan, get my cleaning supplies, grab my bookbag and my porno mag and steel myself for the clump of shit is already raining down on me. My horoscope said that today would feature confrontation of sorts with authority figures and that was right on top of me. It was in the stars, chief.

He said nothing on the drive down and I cranked up the classic rock to drown out the silence. He did say one thing when a furniture truck merged unflinchingly in front of us. "Go ahead and hit me, then I won't have to work anymore!" Shit, I thought. He's got a death wish, and I'm not ready to go. C'mon, I've got at least forty more years of heartbreak and misery to go, and there are nobler causes to die for than the retrieval of a secondhand bed and a ratty wing sauce-soaked couch.

Traffic is pretty smooth through Squirrel Hill and we get to Shadyside without incident. My dad parks in some guy's driveway, which is better than how he normally stops in the middle of the street and watches the yuppies bitch and toot the horn yelling about how they can't even wait a minute, what's the rush. Simple difference, my dad has lived in small country towns all his life. There, life is more laid-back, progress retarded and inverted to the point where some people never move out of their parents' houses. Well, I'm moving back there; and yeah, a bit of me is dying, but I'll be back because there's nothing good about living in the country you haven't read in Thoreau.

I run into the house and get the bed ready, pull the sheets off of it like a ten-dollar hooker and disassemble the frame. I come out to find my dad lobbing pillows from the couch everywhere and then he starts half carrying half dragging the couch down the stairs (you have to understand how awkward it is to carry a couch with its shape and weight) He was whipping it around like a paper doll and I ran out to give him a hand and stop him from taking out a few yuppies walking with a stroller, don't want to put the future CEO of some heartless corporation in harm's way. He nearly chops my foot off in the process. After we get the couch off of the porch this pimply-faced wiry red-haired guy huffs and puffs dramatically that we need to move our truck. My dad turns around, a foaming rabid gorilla worked up into a real lather. Our chirpy redhead decides to wait in his house until we get the couch on because my dad could have popped his head like a zit (might be a cliché, but one of my favs). We get the couch on the back of the truck but not before almost putting it through the window of some douchebag's BMW while the guy just gaped at my dad's impalpable rage. I tried to calm my dad down, tell him it's useless to get so pissed. I think about the Tarzan, how you couldn't write shit like this, how he'd become that wild-haired gorilla, more animal than man. Sometimes we just act like beasts. The question I pose to you is, are we merely talking monkeys with opposable thumbs; or are we evolved, empathetic humans capable of transcending barbarism?

We precariously placed the bed and its post next to the couch, bracing it with the befouled cushions, "befouled" being an understatement because a whole wing of a dead bird was stuck to the bottom of one. Dad left the gate open; he didn't care if any of it fell out. I told him he should have used some bungee cords but he gave me some babble about it being sturdy enough. Fine if you think so, but I don't want to be responsible for some mother of four being bludgeoned to death by a bed frame or a dad driving his kids to soccer practice being squashed by a couch on its way to the charnel house. The rain really started to come down now, and I could already see my bed soaked, hanging by clothespins out on the line for the next year.

And so that over, that great ordeal only a pixel in my great move to come, I called C.J. Marchetti and we went out and got hammered because that's what I do. What can be said of that night? I rocked the humor, drank copious amounts of wine and whisky on the rocks, struck out with a few girls, all while carrying a giant rainbow umbrella (that the waitress later said it was cute how I carried it around. A small victory).

As I finish this, I'm on my way out. New things ahead. Better things, I hope. My dad got home fine; the mattress wasn't that wet. The moral to this story: words, always words to communicate. At least until the Earth is ripped apart by the terror of nuclear war and the fallout causes humanity to mutate into blobs of ooze that transmit thoughts by vibrating their gelatinous masses in a manner not unlike the creation of Jell-O pudding pops. But until that day I will be forever your Captain.

Visit Captain Fun's Swarthy Archives.

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Joseph L. Conty, Jr. wears a buffalo hide tunic and sips peach nectar from a chalice. Known to drink multiple flagons of mead for breakfast and chew bear fat for gum, he would like to remind the public that anyone else who dares to use the moniker of "Captain Fun" isn't fit to carry his merkin.

Posted 05.07.05

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