Saying Goodbye To Boston: Moving In Manhattan Is Impossible

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I’m told this is unusual, but I actually enjoy moving. As in, I like helping people move in and out of apartments. There’s something rewarding to me about moving a bunch of crap from one spot to another. And not to sound like a complete meathead, but it’s a pretty killer workout.

But after moving myself into my Manhattan apartment, I’m singing a much different tune.

Is there ever a good time to stick a UHAUL out front of a high rise on the corner of two of the busiest streets in New York? For sure not. In hindsight, I should have done this on a weekend to at least get some help from my buddies, but because I’m an idiot, I did it on a Monday morning. I checked, and Keith Hernandez was in fact not free to offer me a hand.

The next logical step was to try and get some help from the building maintenance guys I walked by when I went in to grab my keys. I surreptitiously walked down the maintenance corridor to their little clubhouse tucked away in the bowels of the building and offered them $20 each to help me take boxes from my UHAUL to the building elevator. Harmless, right? Well apparently, greasing the maintenance dudes to do work for you and prevent them from doing their actual job is frowned upon by the super – their boss – who overheard me trying to buy their services. He started yelling, bit of a brew ha ha, and finally I left dejected.

One of the maintenance guys with an actual heart – and not a lump of coal, as I assumed most New Yorkers have – told me he’d prop the side door and let me stack my boxes in the maintenance hallway, as well as have an elevator to myself to transport the boxes. Roll mother fucking tide, Boston’s boy was in business.

I feverishly began sprinting from my UHAUL to the maintenance door, dropping off boxes, then sprinting back to the UHAUL which I’d left wide the fuck open on a busy street with valuables just chilling in it all willy nilly, up for grabs by any passersby. Why didn’t I just lock it? Because they gave me one of those stupid UHUALs where you have to lock it with a combination lock, so locking and unlocking my truck took – as Michael Squints Palledorous would say – foreverrrrrr.

I got all my shit in boxes and duffle bags into the maintenance hallway, but had to leave a bunch of loose shit like my approximately 87 Vineyard Vines button downs (note: it’s not all Vineyard Vines BUT I see Will getting Outdoor Voices hookups for name dropping and since he’s tapped the OV market I’m trying to corner another), and some furniture, like a dresser. I couldn’t move all that shit myself. I needed help with all that, so I locked the truck, brought all the duffles and boxes into my room, and went back down to park the UHAUL, because I couldn’t leave it in the bus lane out front that I was occupying.

Andddddd I lost my space I’d found around the corner from the building. Ever try and park a UHAUL? Naht easy. Even for someone as skilled a parker as me. Ever see me park my ass on a couch for 12 hours watching college basketball? Hall of Fame park job. Anyway, found a place for the UHAUL a mile from my spot. Then I proceeded to wait until some friends got out of work so they could help me with my dresser and 111 John Varvatos henleys (JV, if you’re looking for a millennial sponsor partnership, hmu).

Turns out, you get in a TON of trouble when you use the maintenance hallway after normal business hours, because, you know, nobody is back there and technically I’m trespassing. But there I was, with a few friends, stacking racks of shirts, a dresser, some classy AF artwork to juice up my walls, and a bunch of other shit that I probably don’t need but decided to move with me. All of a sudden, a doorman – who had never seen me – comes busting in, screaming that I can’t be moving into the building at 7 p.m. because I can’t clog the elevators during rush hour. Fuck.

“The guy said I could do this,” I lied.

“What guy?” He looked angry.

“Uh, I don’t know his name. He was around here earlier today.”

“Let me make a call,” he said. I had no idea who the hell he was going to call, or who I just implicated as giving me permission to use the hallway or the elevators. So when he went to make a call, I mobilized my buddies and got all my shit save for the dresser into elevators and up the 31 flights to my new home.

Meanwhile, I stayed back and took the heat when the doorman came back and said that nobody from earlier – not the super nor the other doorman – had said I could move my shit at night. We decided I’d move the dresser the next day. Fine. Good compromise.

Then I woke up with an email saying if I didn’t move the dresser by 9:30 a.m. they were going to throw it out. What the hell? They literally said I could keep it back there until the afternoon. How the hell was I going to move the dresser by myself?

I opened up the IKEA app, ordered a dresser to my new place, rolled over, and hit the snooze. “I’m never moving in NYC ever again,” I told myself as I prolonged starting my first day in my new shitty. I mean city..

Image via Shutterstock

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Boston Max

Spending my retirement fund at Trader Joe's and trying to remember to check my mailbox semi-regularly

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