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The following is a true story. It is not exaggerated, not wishful thinking, not a clever writer making up crap to amuse folks on line. I have been telling it since 1995 when it happened, and the particulars have not changed. I have even written it before, as an internet post, though never in the detail I provide below. I am committing it to paper (or, if on the internet, electrons) because I recently had occasion to recount the tale, and it occurred to me that I really do need to get a polished version of it down for posterity.
I am not kidding. This is true.
And I call it, “They Exist.”
Here’s the background. In 1995 the company I worked for decided to move its main corporate office from Larchmont NY, to Boca Raton, Florida. I was one of the employees offered an opportunity to move with it. Circumstances made keeping the job a better option than staying in New York, so I agreed to make the move, finding an apartment and arranging for my belongings to be shipped with a professional moving company. I drove everything I could carry in my small car down with me, and spent ten nights sleeping on an air mattress while I waited for my things to arrive.
On the day the truck arrived, I took the afternoon off so I could meet the moving men, who I had never met, at my apartment in Fort Lauderdale.
The first thing that happened is that the truck got lost and arrived three hours late. The driver had to call me three times to get directions – at one point reporting a current location some forty-five minutes farther away than he had been during his previous call – but they ultimately zeroed in on the correct location, and I ran down to the apartment complex parking lot to meet the two guys with the truck.
I must now describe the two guys with the truck.
They were both clad, as you would expect, in overalls. The shirts underneath were neat button-downs, and they were wearing thin black ties.
The driver was a roundish guy on the wrong side of two hundred and sixty pounds. He wore a hat and had a little moustache. He was tremendously exasperated over having been lost for so long, a circumstance he blamed on his assistant, who had been reading the map wrong. He did say, however, that he would now make sure my furniture and the boxes were moved into my apartment with a minimum of fuss. He asked if the apartment was on the ground floor. I told him no, it was on the second floor, up a flight of exterior stairs. He rolled his eyes with exasperation. “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “It is.” He grunted and gave his co-worker a nod.
His co-worker was his physical opposite: a very thin man with protruding ears and a broad, amiable smile, charming in its genuineness but simple-minded in affect. He may have been borderline retarded. I liked him at once, without speaking a word to him.
The two men went to the back of the truck and rolled up the gate, revealing an expanse of boxes and padded furniture. The fat man ordered the thin man to get up there and start handing him boxes. This, the thin man did. He moved so industriously, in fact, that he handed the boxes to the fat man faster than the fat man could stack them behind the truck. At point he put one heavy box on top of another heavy box that the fat man was holding, almost causing the fat man to fall over. The fat man let out a pained “Whoufff!” and almost fell over. The thin man apologized.
I said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to take the big furniture items first, so you won’t have to maneuver them around the boxes that are already in the apartment?” The thin man and fat man looked at each other. This was a great idea. They put the boxes already unloaded back in the truck, a process that took several minutes.
Now the two started carrying furniture out from the parking lot, through a doorway, into the wing of the apartment complex that contained my empty apartment. They saw the stairway, two sets of six risers with a bend in the middle, leading up to the second floor walkway where my apartment sat. It was going to be hard to maneuver some of the bigger pieces, a combined cabinet and bookcase, up that obstacle course, but it had to be done. The fat man said to the skinny one, “You pull and I push.” The thin man struggled mightily with his burden. The effort this took was so hard on him that his legs wobbled dangerously, slipping against the risers as he struggled for purchase. The smile, however, the eye contact with me as he shared that unwavering smile, never left him. It was like he was putting on a show, with me as audience.
At the landing, the cabinet/bookcase got wedged against the railing, and would not go any further. The fat man said that he needed to get past it, so he could guide its movement past the bend. “Bring it back down!” he ordered. The thin man started to comply. I said, “Excuse me, this silly – why don’t you just go up the other stairway on the other side of the building, and meet him here?” The fat man took this as a capital idea. He went around the building, so he could climb the other stairway. Simultaneously, the thin man climbed down on the outside of the railing, so he could push. The fat man arrived, did a double-take when he saw that the thin man had somehow gotten around my furniture, and gave me another exasperated look, a look that communicated, again, the message “See what I have to deal with?”
They managed to get the big item up the stairs with only two or three minor mishaps, each of them involving minor physical injury to the fat man. This involved the cabinet being dropped on the fat man’s foot, the cabinet jamming the fat man’s hand, the cabinet crushing the fat man against the railing. Each time the fat man let out a horrified yelp and each time the skinny man apologized.
We reached the second floor railing, breathing heavily from all the effort. I asked the two men if they’d like some water before they continued. They both allowed as how it had been a long drive and how they would like to use my bathroom. I opened the door for them. The skinny man started to enter. The fat man stopped him by blocking his way with his arm, pointed at his own chest to establish that he was going first, and preceded his friend through the door. Would you believe me if I told you that he tripped on the molding where the tile of the entranceway became the carpeted living room? He did not quite fall over, but it was close.
They did their business, brought the cabinet into my bedroom with several additional physical insults to the fat man, and at least one spat where the fat man cried out, “Why don’t you do something to help me?”
The skinny man went back to the truck and returned with the frame supports of my bed. He said, “Where do you want this, mister?” I’m afraid I stared at him for a moment. This was a two-room, one bedroom apartment, essentially a living room with kitchenette and a bedroom. An idiot could surmise where the bed would go. I said, “The bedroom.” He took the frame into the bedroom. A few minutes later he returned from the truck with the mattress and asked me, “What about this?” The fat man rolled his eyes again. I said, “On the bed frame.” The skinny man brought my mattress into the bedroom.
With all the furniture moved, it was now time to get those boxes. A word about how I labeled my boxes. There were 28 boxes. I wanted to make sure that none were missed, so I wrote on each one of them with thick magic marker, in letters several inches tall. They were all labeled something like, CASTRO BOX 1 OF 28. Or 2 of 28. Or 3 of 28. Etcetera. The skinny man asked me, “How many boxes do you have?” Again I stared, and said, “28.” The fat man rolled his eyes yet again. The thin man went and started getting the boxes, one at a time, in order, actually moving them in the pile on the truck so he could deliver them numerically. I will note again, for the record, that his big broad smile – never showing teeth, but still an upward curve of his lips – remained on his face during all 28 box trips, none of which the fat guy participated in.
There were no further disasters as the rest of my items entered the apartment. I signed for the delivery and tipped them. The skinny guy reached for the money, but the fat guy pushed him aside and took it all. I thanked them. The fat guy said, “Service with a smile.” He actually said that.
The skinny guy smiled at me again as the pair went down the stairs. For the first time, he took off his own hat and scratched his head. His hair was, I must report, short on the sides but had a tendency to stand upright on top, when the hat was removed. It was, I swear to God, bright orange red.
I locked the door and, feeling like a man in a dream, followed them out, standing there as they drove away.
The first thing I said when they were safely out of sight was an awestruck, “My God, They Exist.”
And since then I have always wondered how many other customers saw the resemblance.
August 21 2008
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