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making boxes
Tuesday, March 28 2000
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Some pictures of Kim and me shot on Cape May Avenue in front of our home in Ocean Beach, San Diego, California.
(The white shirt is an official CollegeClub.com polo shirt, something I could never bear to wear when I actually worked there.)
(that's Kim's white Volvo)
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Kim and I spent the whole day packing our worldly possessions in boxes. It started with a scene at the Ryder Truck shipping store on Voltaire Avenue (half way to Point Loma). Kim and I were stressed out and snapping at each other, but the store personnel were unusually pleasant. I couldn't understand anything the one Ryder guy said, what with his thick Mediterranean(?) accent.
Next we dropped off a couple small furniture pieces at the upholstery place on the corner of Voltaire and Cable. It's run by a stocky, swarthy man named Albert. His hands are covered with layers of scars from many years of small upholstering accidents. The worst of these claimed the end joint of his left ring finger, leaving a shiny burnished stump. We sat at his desk while he calculated the fabric and man hours that would be needed to rejuvenate all the furniture we've dropped off. Nothing on or around his desk, except perhaps the two shop-worn calculators, had been manufactured any later than 1975. Albert suggested that we go to the discount upholstery place on Adams Avenue in Normal Heights to pick out the fabric we wanted, and he and his guys would then set about to doing the work.
So we drove up to our old Normal Heights neighborhood and went into the storied Adams Avenue Theatre. This large ornate building was once a movie theatre, then a place were folks went to see live shows featuring the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction. Now, though, it's a discount upholstery store. It's brightly-lit and stacked high with bolts of cloth tended by bickering but mostly good-natured employees. We ended up buying over three hundred dollars worth of cloth using my trusty and ever-depleting Visa card. Our two mid-modern couches will be a flamboyant primary red and the smaller things we be covered with a fabric bearing the likeness of purple foliage.
After hours and hours of packing, Kim and I walked down to Newport with Sophie to pick up some more boxes and get some ghetto burritos. But the Rodeo Taco Shop, the place where we'd intended to go, was too overrun at the time with teenage slackers, bums and drug dealers wrapped up in their various unappetizing issues, so we went instead to the eclectic Mexican grill adjacent to the Sunshine Bar and had Mexican bean and rice bowls. Mine contained chicken and Kim's contained that fried fish familiar to anyone who has ever had a Southern California fish taco. As we ate, a crazy homeless woman rooted around in the trash out in front until she found a styrofoam doggy box containing some half-eaten fried chicken. She devoured it right there, using the top of the trash receptacle as a picnic table. I couldn't bear to watch. This same crazy homeless woman walked by our yard sale the other day and started shouting "Fuck you, yard sale Jesus!", flailing her arms wildly and muttering about having to bear someone's child.
As we continued packing, I had to be sort of secretive about my technique, which substituted old clothes for expensive bubble wrap cushioning. But some of Kim's preference for name-brand and other "Mercedes" materials was justified today when we saw how easily our generic black trash bags were stretching and tearing as we packed them with our stuff.
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