2 years, 3,000 miles

New essay
More photos up at the lyrical photography thing.

Two years ago today, Todd was stuck in Des Moines, Iowa for the third day in a row.

He was driving cross country, from Sacramento to Long Island. He had packed up his life and belongings, threw everything into a 1994 Toyota 4Runner and headed east. To be with me.

Still boggles my mind.

So I thought in honor of this anniversary, I’d tell you the story of the day he left California.

The night before Todd left, he was scurrying to finish cleaning his apartment and get his furniture out of there. He wasn’t taking anything with him except his clothes and few prized possessions. So his bed, his dresser, his couch – all that stuff was going out by the garbage in his apartment complex. The problem was, how was he going to get it all out there?

Now, let me backtrack a bit and tell you that Todd had decided to sparkle-clean his apartment with some combination of bleach and disinfectant. He was probably high off the fumes and not thinking clearly. In fact, I’m sure the combination of exhaustion, stress, worry (you try picking up your entire life and moving across the country without stress) and cleaning products had him thinking he was Jesus. Or at least some form of immortal.

Also, you should know that Todd’s apartment was in, how should we say this? Oh, a ghetto. Many nights when I was the phone with him I would hear sirens and ask him what’s up and he’d say “Nothing. Nothing. Don’t worry.” Which meant, worry. Sometimes he would hear gunshots. Sometimes he’d have to cut off a conversation because his upstairs neighbor was beating his wife again and Todd being Todd, he’d have to go upstairs and set the guy straight or do the safe thing and call the cops. Mostly, Todd thinks that doing the right thing is not always doing the safe thing. Which led to a lot of worry on my part.

So Todd has to get this stuff out of his apartment. He can’t move it alone. He, in his bleach-high state, comes up with the grand idea of looking outside for someone to help him move the stuff. Let me phrase that in a different way: He goes outside and finds two crackheads who will help him move the furniture for a few bucks.

That seems all well and good until you realize these crackheads have to come into his apartment and help him. All Todd’s belongings are on the floor of the living room: his stereo, his computer, things like that. Things that can be exchanged for cash if, for example, you’re a crackhead looking for quick drug money.

The guys help him bring everything out to the dumpster. Todd pays them. They leave. Then Todd decides that he needs to air out the apartment because it “smells like jail.” I suppose jail smells like bleach. So he opens the front door and opens all the windows and puts a blanket and pillow on the living room floor and gets ready to sleep. Big day tomorrow. Getting out on the road nice and early. He needs sleep. I say something to him about sleeping with the door wide open in that neighborhood. I say something to him about crackheads knowing what’s on his living room floor. I say all this to him as he’s falling asleep and my last words are drowned out by “I’ll call you when I’m hitting the road in the morning,” and then a snore.

Morning comes. I wait for his call. I adjust my time to California time and give him a few more hours to get going. I’m anxious for a lot of reasons and I just want this trip started and for him to be on his way here.

I wait.

I wait.

It’s almost noon New York time and no word from him. He was going to be on the road by 7. It’s now 9 in California.

If you know me, you know I love to panic. I’m a worrier. I’m a Worst Case Scenario kind of person. I figure, let me get the worry out of the way. I stop waiting for his call, and I call him. His phone goes right to voice mail.

Shit.

Worst Case Scenario Girl steps up. She whispers in my ear something about crackheads and open doors and stereo equipment with a street value of roughly 20 rocks of crack. I immediately imagine a scenario in which Todd has been tied up and beaten and his belongings and car stolen by some thugs. Thugs he invited into his home last night. I call my friend and relay the entire thing to her. She explains a million reasons why my elaborate drama could not possibly have taken place and I counter with, well maybe he didn’t get robbed and beaten, maybe he overdosed on cleaning products and he’s in a bleach coma or he’s hallucinating or……

I stop myself. Deep breaths. It’s now 1:00 in the afternoon. He should have been on the road a few hours already. He should have been out of California and on his way to me.

I call him again. Voice mail. My heart sinks.

Now, I know in the back of my mind that there is a rational explanation for everything, but the back of my mind does not always work in tandem with the front of my mind. It’s a curse. It makes for some very irrational, if amusing-to-me-NOW moments. Like this. This is amusing to me two years later because I know how it ends.

It ends with his phone being dead and him waking up early with a bleach headache and going back to sleep so he didn’t start his trip off feeling like shit. That he didn’t call me and tell me he’s getting started later is neither here nor there. When I finally talked to him and blurted out my entire scenario about crackheads and duct tape and a fenced computer, all he could say was “you’re cute.”

And so began the great trip eastward, two years ago.

He still makes me worry all the time. But that’s part of the charm of living with someone who fully believes that life is meant to be interesting. It’s been an interesting two years, indeed. In a good way. A very good way.

(This is two parter. The saccharine part comes next, beware. Oh, and we don’t really have an anniversary, per se, so we just call it November 11th, which is the day he finally came to NY for good)

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