The Move: A Guest Appearance by Micky York

I had waited long enough. My erstwhile roommate-to-be, Joe, had put off the move to Chicago for months. I was up to Plan G, H, and I. Something had to work.

Plan G was for the two of us to go up to the city, choose an apartment, put down a deposit and sign a lease. Then my friend Allison would move in for two months, while Joe saved up more money at home. When she left to go on tour in October, Joe would finally move up. Joe and I hit the city at the beginning of August, ready for a move in date of August 18th.

(Ok, here’s why we waited so long. When we looked at apartments during the execution of Plans C, D, and E, everyone told us we were looking too early, and we needed to wait until a few weeks before we were ready to move. Except in August, everyone said we were too late, and should have been looking months ago. Losers.)

We didn’t look all that hard. Maybe five places, tops. We found one that Joe really liked, and I sort of liked. But it had a free gym across the hall, so I was willing to learn to like it. I gave him a check for $1300. And we went home.

After I had dropped Joe off in Iowa, I started the drive back to Kansas City. Just as I leave Des Moines, my cell phone rings. It’s the new landlord. He’s concerned that Joe didn’t have a job. To which I replied, “Don’t worry about that. You’ll get your money.” He disagreed. He wasn’t down with the subletting goodness of Plan G and asked if I wanted him to mail my check back or just tear it up.

We argued with him for a day or two, until it became obvious that he would not be giving us the apartment. So I went to a party and had way too much wine.

Two days later (August 11th or so), Allison and I were on the road back to Chicago. We’d decided to move in together and think about two months later…later. She made phone calls the whole way. We made 10 appointments before we even got into the city. We looked at almost 20 apartments in one day.

At the beginning, we found a great place. It was huge, in a great neighborhood, and the dude didn’t care that we didn’t have jobs. (I was operating on a whole “freelance web designer” façade.) We filled out the application and kept looking.

We named all the apartments that we looked at (Slanty, Plant Lovers’ Delight, etc.) but we always came back to A Number One. But we wouldn’t hear from him until the next day.

Later in the evening, we looked at another place. It seemed pretty cool. It was big, had a huge kitchen, and one of the bedrooms was painted exactly like my bedroom in Kansas City had been painted. (Not that much of a coincidence, until you realize that my bedroom was orange with a yellow glaze on top of it…cool…and very unique.) It felt like fate. We filled out an application there too, and went to a bar to celebrate our successful day.

The next morning, we called A Number One guy, who said that he was starting to be a little unsure. His girlfriend (and he was fat and old…it was very creepy…) questioned our abilities to find jobs, and that worried him. So Allison talked to her. By the time she was off the phone the girlfriend was totally convinced. But then the creepy guy was not budging. He didn’t want us to have the apartment.

Refusing to be defeated, we went to Orange Bedroom house and started to look around the neighborhood. The street looked fine, but a few blocks to the southwest looked pretty sketchy. It went way down on our list.

We talked to A Number One a few more times that day, offering whatever we could…cosigners, two months’ deposit…we even went downtown and tried to get jobs. Nothing convinced him. And then he said that if we were this annoying when we didn’t even live there, that he didn’t want to have us share a house with him and his elderly mother. (We were on the same page there…) The girlfriend seemed really sorry, but it wasn’t enough.

So we did the only thing we could do. We went to the only bar we knew of in Chicago. This is the day when I first learned to drink vodka on the rocks. Allison got on my cell phone and called the landlord of the Orange Bedroom house, and left a message asking about the neighborhood and the walk to the el.

We had some food. And more to drink.

Our friend Mike happened to work down the street from the bar. So he came over. We were fairly intoxicated after that many hours of crying into our drinks. We told him of our woe. While we were telling, my cell phone rang. It was Orange Bedroom landlord. He told us the neighborhood was great and that his wife walked to the el every day. Mike said he’d go with us to check it out.

Keep in mind that Allison and I were drunk.

Mike drove us to the apartment in his car. On the way, he said, “This neighborhood is great! You’ve been here before and you said how much you loved it!”

Oh. Right. We didn’t walk that direction that morning. We did say that, didn’t we?

We went in. The apartment looked even better at night. It was huge. And he’d let me bring my piano. And he didn’t care about DSL. We asked about credit applications, and how long he’d need to check them.

“Eh, I have your information, if I need to check them, I will. But I don’t really see the need right now. As long as you pay the rent, that’s all I need.”

Why can’t everyone else be like that? We signed the lease and wrote him two checks right there. Drunk.

Then we went back to the bar.

The next day, after a botched job interview at Bennigan’s (where they told me that servers there often got stiffed and did I have a problem with that?) we started to make our way home. We ate at the Steak and Shake. It was a nice drive.

It was late. We were about an hour and a half away from home. We’d get home that night, pack the next day, and leave the day after that.

Until my tire exploded.

The wheel well had come loose and shredded the tire. So I started to change it.

I couldn’t get the lug nuts off.

I called the towing company.

An hour and a half later, he showed up. He wouldn’t let us drive for as far as we needed to go on the spare. He dropped my car off at Sears, took us to a gas station to purchase some libation and chocolate donuts (dinner…mmm…) and finally to a hotel.
We called Miss Cleo that night. She did not have good things to say.

The next morning, I bought a new tire. The man at Sears said “Did you buy these tires here?” I said yes. “I thought so. That’s why you couldn’t get the lug nuts off. Our machine tightens ‘em real good.”

Nice.

We got home at noon. We were leaving in approximately 16 hours. I hadn’t begun to pack. At all.

The rest of the day is a blur. I remember it being really not fun. I remember loading the trailer with my stuff. I remember going to Allison’s and picking up more stuff than I knew she owned. I remember getting up at four the next morning and loading the back of my dad’s pickup.

I remember the rain. I remember the 12-hour drive. I remember the piano that we couldn’t get up the steep staircase. I remember crying a lot.

And then we were there. We spent ages unpacking. We learned the joys of Ikea. We learned that my friend, Sarah, lived a block away. We got jobs. We made friends with a herd of chiropractors. We frequented our neighborhood bar.

It amazes me that so much managed to get packed into one week. 5 trips between Chicago and Kansas City. Far too much money spent (on food…and drink…while we were there, my tire, the towing, the hotel, the piano movers…). A cell phone that was out of minutes 3 days after the new billing cycle started. All amidst minimal hours of sleep.

I don’t know how I made it through the moving extravaganza. Afterwards, I said I wasn’t moving for at least two years. That was last August.

I moved to the new apartment downstairs in June. It’s twice as big as the old one. I paid the piano movers again. And I moved everything down in a few hours.

We still go to that bar.

And every time I see a For Rent sign, or someone looking through the apartment listings, I smile to myself.

Micky York is a professional designer and producer for theatre, based in Chicago, IL. But until complaining starts to pay the bills, he will have to settle for writing for free. You can visit his website, The Tao of Micky, to read his (almost) daily rants.