Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes (6 page)

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:

My major experience with moving a pet was the time we moved our dog, Earnest, from Pennsylvania to Florida via airplane. We took her to these professional pet transporters, who told us that for $357.12, which is approximately $357.12 more than we originally paid for Earnest, they would put her on the airplane in a special cage, which we would get to keep. The reason for this generosity became clear when I picked Earnest up at the Miami airport. It had been a long flight, and since Earnest had had nothing to read, she had passed the time by pooping, so you can imagine what the inside of her cage looked and smelled like, on top of which, as soon as she saw me, she went into the classic Dance of Lunatic Unrestrained Dog Joy Upon Sighting the Master, yelping and whirling like the agitator on an unbalanced washing machine, creating a veritable poop tornado inside the cage, just dying to get out and say hi.

In fact, this experience gave me an idea for a powerful and semihumane global strategic weapon, which would be called “The
Earnest.” The way it would work is, we’d get some large and friendly dogs, such as Labrador retrievers, and we’d keep them in cages for maybe a week, feeding them bulky foods, then we’d parachute them into the Soviet Union. The cages would open automatically on impact with the ground, and these lonely and highly aromatic dogs would come
bounding out, desperate to lavish affection all over the human race, and that would be the end of Soviet civilization as we now know it. Of course there is always the danger of escalation. The Russians might come back at us with, for example, St. Bernards. Maybe we’d better just forget it.

Another way to move your pet, of course, is to take it with you in the car. The problem here is that most motels don’t allow animals. I know of one couple who once got a dog into a motel by claiming it was a Seeing Eye dog, which they established via the clever ruse of having the husband wear dark glasses, only the dog didn’t really hold up its end of the bargain. Instead of acting like a trained professional, being alert, looking out for obstacles, and so forth, it was dragging its owner along like a motorboat towing a reluctant water-skier, stopping only to sniff people’s crotches and snork up low-lying cocktail peanuts. Another problem with the Seeing Eye ruse is that it won’t work if your pet is a snake, for example, or a cat. There
are
no Seeing Eye cats, of course, because the sole function of cats, in the Great Chain of Life, is to cause harm to human beings.
The instant a cat figured out that the blind person would follow it wherever it went, it would lead this person directly into whirling unshielded manufacturing equipment.

I once, as a favor to my sister, transported her cat in my car about ninety miles to her new apartment. Naturally it turned out that the only place in the entire car that the cat wanted to be was
directly under the brake pedal
, which meant that if I needed to slow down, I had to reach down there and grab the cat without looking—an activity comparable to groping around for a moray eel in a dark underwater cave filled with barbed wire—and then I’d hurl the cat, still clinging to pieces of my flesh, into the backseat, and then I’d hit the brakes, and then the cat would scuttle back under the pedal. As you can imagine, this cat and I were the best of friends by the time we arrived at my sister’s apartment, and I only hope that I see it again someday when my hand has healed to the point where I can aim a dart gun.

Children are more difficult to move than pets. You can’t just put a child in a crate and stick him on an airplane. God knows I have tried.

The important thing is preparation. Psychologists stress that you should break the news of the move to the child as soon as possible, ideally at birth. “We’re going to move!” you should shout gaily, the instant the child’s head emerges from the mother. The child will probably cry at this news, but this is normal. Most children are unhappy about moving, which is why it is so important, at each stage in the move preparation process, to sit down with them, one on one, and lie to them.

“It’s going to be
such
fun!” you should tell them. “You’re going to make
lots
of new friends!”

Of course this is probably not true. Probably they will wind up in a school where all the really good social cliques have already reached their full membership quotas and have long waiting lists. Probably your children will immediately be branded with lifelong
unflattering nicknames such as Goat Booger. But there is no point in telling them this now.

If you’re moving a long distance, you’re probably wondering what’s the best way to get both cars to your new home. One way, of course, is for the wife to drive one car and the husband to drive the other, but this can be lonely and tiring, especially if there are small children, who will of course be clawing foot-long strips of each other’s flesh off before you have pulled out of the driveway. So what modern moving professionals recommend is that you
let the children drive one of the cars
. This way, the adults, in Car A, can relax and talk or listen to classical music, while the children, in Car B, can amuse themselves by playing imaginative highway games such as Death Avengers of the Interstate, and you can all arrive at the motel in a good mood, ready to enjoy a relaxed and
happy evening together until the police come.

If you are moving yourself, you simply wait for the most humid day in the history of the world, pull your truck up outside your new home, and start carrying your possessions inside. Every hour or so you should take a break, which will give your possessions an opportunity to scurry, giggling, back out to the truck, so that you may carry them inside again.

If you are using professional movers, the correct procedure is as follows:

1. You stand in the middle of the living room.
   

2. Hundreds of burly, impatient, sweating moving company men come swarming at you from all directions carrying identical brown cardboard boxes, each of which
   has your last name written on it in a helpful manner.
   

3. “WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS?” say the burly, impatient men, making it clear by their tone of voice that if you do not answer them within two seconds, they will sweat so hard that they warp your floor.
   

4. You pick a room at random. “That goes in the spare bedroom,” you say. Or: “In the dining room, please.” It makes no difference. They will put it wherever they want. Sometimes, for fun, the movers will completely fill up a room, floor to ceiling, with boxes, thus creating a humongous Rubik’s Cube out of your worldly goods, so that to get to any one box, you have to move 1,357 others in exactly the right pattern. I warned you, way back at the beginning of this chapter, that it would be easier to just set fire to everything, but of course you wouldn’t listen.
   

It is best not to attempt this all at once. It is best to space it out over a period of several years, so that you may savor the joy of discovering the kinds of comical items you chose to pack and, at great cost in money and effort, move to your new home. You can even make this a traditional nightly family event, with everybody gathering around a packing box and laughing festively as you unwrap 750 square feet of protective wrapping paper to discover, say, the key that operates the radiator of your former home.