Everything that happens to me happens for a reason and each time something strange happens, the law of unusual averages comes rearing its ugly head every single time. This is a true story about angels and devils and how angels and devils work together despite their agendas and beliefs.The story takes place one evening ago...I get an offer for a futon & frame, plus a few pillows and a bed cover from a friend’s friend at work. “She’ll call you,” says my friend Tina.
Sure enough, Tina’s friend calls me and offers me a futon with a frame and asks me if I want it? I often wonder where the word idiot comes from and well, now I know.
She tells me she can transport it to my place when she calls, but as it stood right then and there I was apartment hunting and I wouldn’t be home all that often, but I would make some time for her. But of course, that time frame never materializes, plus when I do reach her, the crew and truck that she had mysteriously disappeared; it was all borrowed, she says.
Another week passes by and I call her up, telling her I still want the bed and though she says she’ll get back to me, she doesn’t and tells me the following Monday that she was too busy on the weekend to give me a call back.
She tells me she’s storing the futon & frame in the garage of her building and her landlord doesn’t want it there much longer. Why it’s in her garage to begin with I don’t know, since she previously told me she had a storage space.
I tell her I can get a van and get it out of there by Thursday, but she stiffly and flat out rejects that notion by saying “No.”
“It needs to be out by Tuesday night or it gets wheeled over to The Salvation Army,” she says firmly.
I hate being threatened by someone I don’t know and it almost feels like a surreal virtual situation inside an Internet chat-room. Tuesday night rolls around and I’ve asked my good pal The Baseball Kid to come and help me out with moving the futon frame.
I meet him at his work place, he punches out and he follows me back in his car to the place where we need to pick it up. The Baseball Kid and I finally arrive to this woman’s place. I call her up and tell her I’ve arrived and she says she’ll be right over. We meet her for a few brief moments and she explains to us that futon is blocking parking spaces in the garage, but as we all see, it’s tucked off into a corner, so I don’t know why she's fibbing.
She's flippant in her remarks as she says goodbye to us in an odd way, leaving myself and The Baseball Kid to figure out things for ourselves.
As we are in the garage trying to get the frame and futon in our respective cars, we are honked at by other residents, who tell us that we are blocking their parking spaces.
So we back out and as I back out, I cannot see in the back as I have the futon in the back seat, thereby blocking my view and I hit a fence. We are still blocking an SUV’s driveway as a big large man tells us and so we move further down the alleyway.
After some more finagling with the futon frame, The Baseball Kid decides it will just not fit in his trunk, due to length and instead takes the futon into his car from my car and follows me to my new studio, where I park my car and drop the futon off. He then drops me back at the woman’s building, the garage still open and leaves me to my only other alternative, which is to push the futon frame 10 blocks.
I have no choice, so I decide to do it. Luckily, I tell myself, the frame has wheels, so it should be fairly easy to push it. What an understatement!
It’s 9:30 in the evening as I begin pushing the futon frame forward through the first alleyway. I fly through a second alleyway with ease, then turn left and wait for traffic to pass before crossing the main thoroughfare and head north until I make a left and begin heading west with the futon frame.
As I am pushing the futon frame through evening negroesque streets, drivers of cars, SUVs, taxis and vans all slow down to take a long and hard look at me, yet none offer to help me. They only stare.
As I cross the sixth block in my 10-block sojourn, the left front wheel falls off! Shit, I think, now what am I going to do?
I pick up the connecting piece and the wheel and move forward. My back and feet are starting to hurt. As I enter the seventh block, to my right I see a young-blond haired woman on a bicycle with two blond-haired young men.
“Excuse me,” I say to them, “Could one of you help me push this frame? I don’t have too far to go and I don’t bite.” All three of them laugh and one of the men initially offers his help.
Eventually the other man offers to push, while their friend follows us on her bicycle. We turn the corner at the 10th block, going slightly north and pop the frame up the curb and into the front doorway.
After 10 minutes of struggling and moving the futon frame around, we realize it won’t fit in the front door, so we move it around to the back and finally like a key into the door lock it fits and we move it straight in.
I thank the two gentlemen with gratitude and they say no problem and disappear into the moonlit night with the woman on the bicycle. It’s now 10:30.
Fast forward to an afterthought this night; angels are every where you go. Just ask for them and they will appear in your most needed hour. Devils some say are angels in disguise, but that’s an outright lie as angels are beautiful and honest.
Devils are deviant and ugly. In the last month, I’ve encountered more devils than normal. Devils are low-down bastards who can be bitter and full of hate, though they may not realize what they are doing or saying at the time.
Angels don’t assume. They just grant your wishes if you wish hard enough.
Devils belong in the dust bin and should be kicked to the curb, the moment you encounter one.
Devil spelled backward is lived. Bitterness and anger tell a lot about a soul that has formerly lived and therefore transformed into a devil.
And I pity them.
Sometimes.
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