M2NYi30ES – Drive and Arrive

The drive to New York went surprisingly well, for a star-crossed journey.  Sure, I only saw my wife behind me on rare occasions, during extremely sharp turns, hidden as she was, three feet off my bumper.  With its bad brakes, the truck took so long to stop that I scarcely considered the possibility that she might rear-end me.  We negotiated the highways and bridges and and tolls and avoided the roadway hazards in near-miraculous fashion.  We had rough directions from my wife’s Long Island relatives, and they served us fairly well…until we actually made it to Manhattan.  Their directions put us on the FDR East River Drive, which is a lovely, fast route for traveling north and south on the east side if you’re in a car.  Trouble is, the city has rather stringent laws against driving trucks on it.

Stringent though they might be, breaking laws such as these does not really attract much notice in a city where the cops are beleaguered, with real crime to deal with.  I mean, if something bad had happened on the FDR, the final disposition of the legal case and the inevitable law suits would have gone against me.  As it was, frankly exhausted from the day of packing, unpacking, loading, unloading…and loading again, and then driving for several hours with brakes that technically didn’t work until just before I was about to crash into the vehicle ahead of me, this little legality seemed like something of which I could plausibly deny knowledge.

See, I saw a documentary once about training cab drivers in New York.  Driving around with the trainees, the trainer pointed out a rental truck and told the trainees, “The las’ time dat guy drove dat truck was nevuh.  No kiddin’.  Stay away from dose guys.”  This image buoyed my spirits as I pressed on.  I practiced saying, “Ah didn’ see them signs, Suh,” in an uncharacteristically thick, sing-songy southern accent.  I thought it would be more persuasive of my utter ignorance in case I were stopped.  Drive Forrest, drive!

Denying the Fates at least one laugh that day, we arrived safely at the high-rise apartment building that would be our home in the big, heartless city.  The city was big, all right, but it wasn’t so heartless after all.  Once we found a parking spot for the truck and started to unload, the staff of the building were on duty and efficient and helpful, and luckily they didn’t mind a little rain.  They were especially nice in that helping us required them to take a break from watching the girls walking to work at Scores.  To be absolutely honest, though, the tailgate of the truck afforded them an improved and strategic view of the girls as they walked, oozed, wiggled, and bounced down the sidewalk.  Unloading the truck, this one last time, was one of the things that, unaccountably and against all odds, went well.

Meanwhile, my wife found a parking place for the car.  We shall return to that by and by, but here beginneth the saga of unloading the truck.  The stuff was really wedged in there, as I said, but with all the rattling and vibration of the trip, the load had settled and congealed into a mass.  As we worked our way through the stuff, pulling out things as they disaggregated from the mass, my wife slipped and scraped her shin, painfully, on a piece of metal.

Now, I am sure that hurt, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to me, but my wife has no pain threshold whatsoever.  She has two states:  Pain-free bliss, and abject, debilitating agony.  She never had a headache that was not a migraine.  There is a medical instrument called, appropriately enough, a dolorimeter since it is used to measure pain tolerance.  Being in the same room with one of these would be too much for my wife.  Well, when she scraped her shin, and that drop of blood rose to the surface, she almost passed out.  She turned that greenish-yellowish-bluish, cyanotic color of a fresh corpse and started teetering with her eyes rolling back into her head.  She was not of much use for the next few hours.

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