The First Night

The first night

I spent Friday night packing up the remainder of my possessions, my entire life fits into 16 medium sized boxes and two cat carriers. My college roommate Jerry came over to help out with the move as did Pancho, Dave and Arnaud.

I hate moving, it's uncomfortable, tiring and expensive. I try to avoid helping people move, there was a time when I owned a small truck so I got called to help people move remember bit. I remember back to 4 years ago when Derek called me to help him move from west LA to Hollywood, Derek had done no packing whatsoever, we had to pack everything in addition to moving all his crap. The lack of preparation slayed me, the whole move should have take at max, 3 hours but since nothing was prepared it ended up being a whole day affair. Since that day, I swore that if I ever had people help me move I would be prepared. To that end, I started packing two weeks ago. I also trashed most of my old furniture (I've had the desk, dresser and night stand since I was a kid, they're probably older than me, they're also made from solid oak so they weigh a motherfucking ton).

The HOA charged me $150 to move in, and they only gave me 4 hours to move in 8am to 12pm on Saturday. They said they would charge for any additional time I spent moving. This did nothing but add to neurotic over preparation. Pancho and Arnaud arrived at my apartment at exactly 7am. I had rented a dolly to help carry the heavy boxes, I figured a dolly would help shave time from the move and potentially help avoid any one from dropping a heavy box and breaking something. The five of us packed up the cars in one hour, we managed to fit everything into the 4 cars we had (including the cats) . But, since it was 8am I was already behind schedule (we were supposed to be at the loft at 8, we were just then driving over to downtown).

To rub salt into the wounds the HOA also had an inspector on site to verify any damage done to the common areas of the building (the cost of repairs would be deducted from my $500 move in deposit). The inspector seemed to be very ashamed of his role in the HOA micromanaged move in. He kept saying 'sorry to do this, but, you know, they pay me' he would say this with a shrug, then look down and fiddle with his clip board.

Due to the absolutely stellar work by Jerry, Dave, Arnaud and Pancho we unpacked the cars and got everything up to the condo in 30 minutes. We had just completed my entire move in just under an hour and a half. We all reconvened in my condo, Jerry surprised us by pulling out a bottle of Verve Courquot champagne. Jerry said that while he was in New York the big thing was to 'saber' the champagne open. This entails using a sword to cut off the cork, the pressure from the champagne would spurt out any shards of glass that would happen to be in the champagne. Jerry Grabbed my grandfather's service sword from World War II. As a child I was never permitted to handle the sword without my grandfather present and I had to wear cotton gloves, I treat the sword the same way as when I was a child. It was disturbing watching Jerry try and fail to saber the bottle open (in his defense, the bottle was partially frozen). This whole scene must have made my grandfather spin in his grave. After the forth attempt I took the sword away and grabbed a dish towel to open the bottle like the middle class men we are. Jerry was muttering something about Napoleon not drinking champagne unless it had been sabered. I poured the first glass and the champagne immediately began to fizz out of the bottle, I had to zamboni that shit to stop it from getting everywhere.

Everyone left the condo around 10am, I was left alone to try and unpack. I'm absolutely certain that having an in unit washer and dyer is the height of luxury. I did 4 loads of laundry, the novelty still hasn't worn off yet. The fridge is brand new and it also has a ice maker and water dispenser, both are items that I haven't had since I lived at my mom's house. At long last, I will now have enough ice for parties. Also, it turns out that new fridges are wrapped in some sort of plastic sticky wrap condom thing. It took me a full hour to take most of the plastic off, I still haven't been able to get the sides deplasticized. My fingers still hurt from pulling on the plastic.

Jerry came back around 4 and we grabbed some pizza at a new hipster pizza place on 7th and Main, we also grabbed a 6 pack and hung out on the roof top (the sun was finally out, June gloom has been really heavy the last couple of days). After Jerry left I took a nap, it turns out I would need the shut eye because Derek said he would come over for a night out.

Derek, his roommate Mike and Derek's exotic looking half Japanese, half Italian cousin Christina arrived around 9. We hoofed it over to the Broadway Bar,  we had a couple of drinks, I was waxing poetic about Broadway and how great it used to be and could be again to Christina. She asked a very simple question when I remarked how it was all run down now, she asked 'so, how did this happen?' I don't know if I can articulate how things went bad on Broadway, I have some ideas of what happened, but it would require another blog post to explain (foreshadowing!)

We bar hopped to the Golden Gopher next, I struck up a conversation with some girl smoking a cigarette she mentioned she was from Sacramento (midtown to be exact). Derek jumped in and started chatting up a storm, we found out that the friend of the Sacramento girl was having a birthday, her party asked if we wanted to go to a strip club in East LA with them, and since Derek loves strip clubs it was only natural that we go.

This strip club (I've forgotten the name, I was pretty drunk by this point) had a line at 1am, it's the first time I've ever seen a strip joint with a line. When we walked in I knew we would be like fish out of water, the place  was 90% Latino and 10% black with a tiny smattering of white people here and there. It was also one of the busiest clubs I've seen, there were 4 women pole dancing at any given time. The front row was filled with overweight Latino dudes getting lap dances from very hot Latina women, there also didn't seem to be any no touching rules, these guys had theirs hands on everything.

Some how we ended back at my loft. Derek had made a run to the liquor store and bought a fifth of jack and a thing of tequila. We drank and talked. I think people left to go home around 3 am. Thus ended my first night.

The next morning, I woke up still drunk and in a room of blazing light, since there are no blinds on my windows the light from the morning sun woke me at 7.

Ending thoughts:
parking around here is a bitch, it turns out that my structure is actually 2 blocks away, I still don't have key card to park yet so I had to park in a lot. I hope this doesn't cause too many problems down the road.
While I was waiting for Derek last night some homeless guy on 8th street was screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs. Because of where my building sits his voice was amplified and it was actually scaring my cats. At that moment all I could think about was how I hoped that I haven't made the mistake of my life. 5 minutes past and the guy stopped, Derek came and we had a good night

PS. I posted this from my iPad since I don't yet have the interwebs set up so excuse any formatting or spelling errors.