Moving to New Jersey Soon...Gonna be a 409 Tycoon

Today is day 4 of living in New Jersey. I keep checking the orange levels on my skin, but it’s kind of weird from various sunburn shapes, and mottled with bug bites, because apparently my blood is pure corn syrup.

It’s 8:30 am and I’m sitting in our more-or-less orderly living room, crusted drool on my face, as I wait for Tim to get ready for his first day of work at Titmouse in The Big City. As with most females, my bladder shrinks to thimble size overnight, so it’s a good thing I’m sitting down right now.

Let me tell you about moving out. It was a tiring, all-day affair. I’m not sure if I would choose waterboarding or moving, given the choice. But it happened, and we did it.

I want you to imagine Gollum from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, specifically. I want you to perfectly envision him, his mannerisms, his upsetting skin texture and hairs, the things he hisses to himself, and the way he scampers around. Now I want you to imagine him moving a dresser down three flights of stairs. That was my contribution towards moving day.

Finally, at 10 that night, after we’d moved everything out, put everything else out to the curb, and watched the Asian couple in pyjamas shuffle away with my old half-broken desk, we drove the UHaul back to resplendent Natick, where I promptly remembered that I’d forgotten a bag of food in the fridge and freezer, and gasped like an elderly woman having her purse snatched. We decided to allay the matter by stuffing our gourds with a well-earned deep-dish pizza from Uno’s, the only thing open past 9 in Natick.

The next day we borrowed a car and ran some exhilarating errands—returned Comcast equipment in Allston, after Siri drunkenly told us there’d be a drop-off in Brighton Center (“No, really, guys, it’s hilarious. I mean, it’s right there…”). We returned clownishly large business-cas shirts Tim had ordered online from Macy’s, and failed at three different movie stores in the mall to sell my damn PS2 games. They wouldn’t even give me their usual pittance. I had to fill out forms in triplicate to get $1.60 in cash from GameStop. I used up my game sales on buying a drink from the vending machine later.

I then spent the evening politely declining additional furniture, though we ended up with Tim’s college microwave, because we need one now. It’s roughly the size of the UHaul but apparently it pops a mean bag of popcorn. Let’s just say I’ll be shelling out the $60 someday for a model made in this century. I think it’s the thing Indiana Jones hid himself in during the nuclear blast in Kingdom of the Crystal Turd.

Driving down to Montclair the next day was uneventful. Siri sobered up and took us on a mostly toll-free and traffic-free route, and we pumped ourselves full of optimism at all the “We Buy Gold” stores we were passing. We only stopped once to pee because we’re Men and we wanted to make sure the hamsters hadn’t melted in the back of the truck. The bathroom at the random bagel shop in New York was inspiration for Silent Hill I’m sure.

When we finally arrived in Montclair, we both had butterflies in our stomachs. We had never seen this apartment in person, only video walkthrough and pictures and conversations with the landlady. We found a place to park our behemoth truck and went up to the front door like hopeful Jehovah’s Witnesses. We knocked, and there was no answer. After awhile I called the landlady, and she informed me that the previous tenant had finished moving out and had left the key in the mailbox. I fumbled around in the tetanus-inducing mailbox and found no keys, but some great flyers for Smash Burger. I called the landlady back. Apparently, the tenant’s boyfriend had showed up in the small window of time between her leaving and us arriving and took the keys, which makes around zero sense. The back door was unlocked, however, so we went in that way.

The back door leads directly in the kitchen, which was filled with the previous tenant’s kitchen stuff. The fridge was filled with the previous tenant’s food. The white cabinets were yellow. There were crusted condiments on the insides of the drawers. My mind flashed back longingly to the fantastic kitchen I’d left behind in Brighton. I already knew this would be a downgrade: no microwave, no dishwasher, no disposal, and 2 countertops and 4 cupboards. I don’t think I could fit my bakeware alone in this arrangement.

We walked around the apartment, surveying the cobwebs in the corners and the sad, yellow-beige look of the place. We looked in the bathroom, turning on the “ceiling light/vent” that rattled into existence and sounded like a generator. We took in the ancient cracked tiles, orange grout, and brownish tub. The real kicker was the shower itself, which was a single pipe zip-tied to the curtain rail. The bedroom was small and dark, with a weird closet and protrusion of wall in the corner. A cloud of sadness and bummertude descended upon us, and we hugged each other silently for a long time.

Soon after, the previous tenant showed up with the keys, and we chatted and I politely pointed out the leftover stew in the fridge. I politely opened drawers and showed her all her leftover cookware. I politely showed her the molding cookware under the sink, nestled in among the wet plastic bags and mouse poop. She seemed dismayed, saying that her boyfriend was supposed to show up and take all this stuff. I politely thought to myself that her boyfriend seems like an incapable moron. She grabbed a bag and took all her stuff, and we started to unpack the truck.

Finally, at the end of the night, we ordered a pizza made of chicken parm and tears, and sat on the floor in the bedroom, at the foot of our re-assembled bed, and just silently ate and thought. We desperately needed a shower, but the thought of our feet and butts touching the walls in there was chilling. We had just done some basic cleaning, but I heaved out the Comet and laid on that sucker til it was shiny and white again. If there’s one thing I learned from my days as a dishwasher, it’s that Comet is a miracle worker.

I won’t continue with the mundane details of the following days, but it can be summarized by: we cleaned. Note, we cleaned, not, we unpacked. I felt like any female character in a Miyazaki movie, scrubbing up Howl’s pubes and ready to cut off my braid to show I’m a woman now. We spent at least $30 on cleaning products. I wish I’d taken before and after pictures, but I can only sink back to that level of needless depression by watching “Requiem for a Dream.” If you want to know how it went, imagine something that is brown turning into something that is white. That’s pretty much the gist of it.

Some highlights:

We used scrubbing bubbles on the white tiles in the bathroom. It blasted away the orange soap scum living in the grout, and the brown on the tiles wiped away like in the commercials. I was duly impressed.

I used 4-hour cling gel on the inside of the oven, which was made from a Model-T carburetor. The stuff I removed was pure black, like the lung bile of Satan. The color of the oven interior is actually apparent again. I took the two racks out, which were blackened, and made them shiny again. I pulled off the knobs and soaked them in hot soapy water, and then used a green scrubby to take the coating of grease off of them.

We mopped the kitchen floor about 4 times before our feet stopped sticking. My bare feet are usually black by the end of the day though.

Every. Single. Surface. In the kitchen was coated in a fine sheen of grease. I don’t know how or what. I just attacked everything with 409. The tops of the cupboards were orange. They were supposed to be white. Same with the top of the fridge.

I really like the windows in the apartment, especially in the living room, and I spent some time cleaning the insides and the outsides, which were dirty with old rainwater coating. Clear windows makes a bigger space.

I’d like to also point out that I hate gas stoves. I don’t like when the worst-case scenario is an explosion. They’re also a pain in the ass to clean. Give me a flat-top electric any day.

I completely cleaned the fridge, and the racks within, which smelled like old crushed eggs. The handles on the fridge, which are white and pointlessly textured, were brown from being handled by mud golems.

Finally, in summary: My muscles were actually sore from squirting cleaning spray for days. When I say we had to clean every surface, I mean it. Every plane on the kitchen cupboards to the tops of the toilet paper dispenser. Even the quarter-inch deep shelf of the mirror frame contained the previous tenant’s boyfriend’s beard trimmings. I’m assuming those were his.

Each night throughout the cleaning phase, we found solace in eating crackers, cheese, and rotisserie chicken while watching Planet Earth. It was good to know that some things, such as deep-sea marine creatures, are ickier than the cat hair and ketchup I’d scraped out of the fridge earlier that day.