Friday Mar 29

TimothyMarsh.jpg Timothy L. Marsh has lived in five different countries in the past five years. He now resides in Bali, Indonesia. A finalist in the 2009 Toasted Cheese Nonfiction Contest, his writing has appeared or been accepted in The Crab Orchard Review, The New Quarterly, The Newfoundland Quarterly, Waccamaw Journal  and Green Hills Literary Lantern, among others. His awards include a 2010 fellowship and residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and a 2009 Arts Jury Award from the City Council of St. John's, Newfoundland.
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 Abandoning Furniture at the Hanover U-Haul
 
 
He was 18-to-21 and working 86-hour weeks because the rest of the staff had quit and nobody else wanted to work there, and he begged me (because I must’ve had the look of someone who’d do such a thing) not to ditch my crap (furniture) on the premises, because it was him and only him who’d have to clean it up.
Him: A scrawny good-looking kid with a cigarette behind his ear, all bones and Irish in a black wifebeater, practically brimming with that sulky Irish machismo so common in young South Boston men.
Do the decent thing, he said. If you don’t want your crap, load it up and dump it somewhere else. And naturally, because I’d come there with the exact intention of making several almost-but-not-quite-impossible-for-one-man-to-move possessions the burden of some luckless grunt like him, I was insulted by the insinuation. I assured him that I knew the decent thing and drove to the back of the lot where my unit was.
It was assembly furniture. You could not have sold it for a sip of somebody’s Coke. Giving it away was the same as calling down a curse on someone. There was a desk, a printer stand, and a burgundy dresser. The combined weight was maybe 150 pounds, but weight alone is not what makes certain furniture a terrible thing to do to someone. There is also shape, girth, splintered edges and shin-kissing corners.
I emptied my unit and loaded my truck. Then I drove around the building and ditched my furniture (crap) on the premises. I found a ten-piece furniture dump piled against the wall and added another 150 pounds to the set without turning off my engine.
Back at the office, while the kid batched a few forms and searched for the stapler, I stood at the desk and got a good look at the value of my assurance via a surveillance camera aimed at the spot where I and a dozen others had furtively made a rough job that much worse. The camera was broadcasting live to a 12-inch monitor wearing a sombrero of paperwork and a carton of menthols.
The kid didn’t say a word.
It was a point of high silence that contained all the scorn and disgust of a cheated spouse, and as a show of remorse I turned the blame on him and asked why he didn’t just quit if the job was so rotten.
Everybody’s already quit, he said. And nobody else wants to work here.
I thought this was a strange answer and not an altogether bright one, but before we could get into it he found the stapler, fastened all forms with a swift slam of his palm, and I was gone, happy it wasn’t me who had to clean up my sense of decency.
Big or small, a treachery is not easily abandoned. It sticks around, deepens the puzzle lines in your forehead.
He was 18-to-21 and working 86-hour weeks fulfilling a duty I would’ve deserted in a blink. He was doing it because the rest of the staff had quit and nobody else wanted to work there. After so many years of heedful adulthood, I still can’t see the profit in any such strength of character, and can’t stop looking for it.
I fear this story may be the shadow of future material if that vision isn’t corrected.