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My Move To Richmond - With Commentary!
Setting up the Trailer
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We asked if she could help us set the trailer up, get the car
onto it, and stick
around to make sure we did it properly, since this would be the
first time I'd ever done that.
"I ain't got a clue. They never told me how to do
that." she would mumble incoherently as lice excitedly jumped
from her hair.
"You're shitting me."
Once we backed the truck up to the trailer and began to fiddle
with it, she got in her car and drove away, without
checking to make sure of anything. Frosty had to pick up the trailer and pull it by hand, because it was behind a pile of garbage. We had a manual for the trailer,
but it didn't cover everything. So, we're out here, trying to figure
all this stuff out for the first time, and it begins to pour.
We get the trailer physically attached to the truck without a
problem (basically just have to lift it onto the hitch and then
tighten it up).
Frosty recalls: "Then we go to hook up the wires for the
turn signals/tail lights and we notice that the connectors have been
smashed off the truck, so that all that's remaining are these little
metal springs, and the trailer is missing the electrical connector
to connect the trailer to the truck so that the lights work. Well
luckily for us, there was another trailer that had that wiring
harness. Unfortunately, it was zip-tied to the trailer... and we
couldn't take it off. So we thought for a few seconds, looked around
the parking lot, noticed a huge pile of just... junk. Freaking
dresser drawers... old printers and copiers... adding machines...
and stuff that nobody's used probably for the last thirty years...
Just laying out... rotting in the sun."
We started looking for a shiv in the debris. Something we could
cut this zip-tie with. What would MacGyver do? First we found a
piece of metal - that didn't work very well. It wasn't sharp enough.
But what works? Broken glass. It takes about ten minutes to saw
through a zip-tie with a piece of broken glass, in case you're
interested. Frosty notes: "It was actually pretty dull for
glass."
While we were attempting to cut the zip tie, the "lady" actually came back for a second (apparently she had forgotten her favorite Dale Earnhardt
shot glass/ashtray/lunchbox). Frosty suggested that I look at the manual as if I were reading the instructions in order to distract her.
"She's too smart for that!" I replied. Frosty agreed solemnly.
We finally got the wiring doohickey from the trailer. It had five
wires (one was a ground) and four slots to hook them up to. They
weren't labeled, so there were maybe 20 different possible
combinations for this particular wiring job.
Frosty continues: "Needless to say, it took a while. The
first time we had it wired up, the headlights were on permanently,
and nothing else worked. Then we got it to where if you hit the
brakes, the turn signal on the right side would come on. Then we got
it to where the hazards would work, and nothing else (We
giggle)... So we spent probably about twenty minutes trying to
figure out how to get it to work correctly... So we pull it up, and
we go to hook the car up to the trailer - and at this point, it's raining,
like, it's pouring rain, like fucking gulley-washer, pouring
rain." (Editor's note: Gulley-washer?)
So I pulled the car up to the back of the trailer, lined it up
much like David Hasselhoff getting ready to drive KITT into that big
old truck. Meanwhile, Frosty is attempting to decipher the tiny
hieroglyphics that are the trailer's manual. "Connect trailer
to dog's head, and connect the eyeball to the scorpion..."
"There's no instructions," Frosty says. "It just
says: 'This is what it looks like.'"
"It's like so narrow", I recall in the commentary.
"If you fall off one end or the other with that car, you're
hosed."
Frosty agrees: "Yeah, the wheelbase on the car was actually
pretty small, which is, you know, that's a convenient thing. But the
trailer was actually pretty wide. So it was almost an impossibility
to get the car up on the trailer to begin with 'cause the place
where you gotta put the car was just a little wider than it should
have been."
So through lots of perseverance and determination we finally get
the car onto the trailer. Some of the details of this are covered in
the commentary:
Commentary "F-word" count: More than average. Frosty apologizes (He's from New York, where they can use the word "fuck" 8 times in a 9-word sentence).
"Of course at this point, we're both soaked. I mean, we're
drenched. Shirts, socks, like, we've got water in our shoes at this
point, it's raining so hard... And I have to get down underneath the
trailer to hook the chains up to the U-Haul. And as I'm doing that,
the water's running off the bumper of the car, like somebody's
dumping a bucket of water in my eyes."
After several hours, we get in the truck, with car in tow, and
head to my house, where moving my belongings into the truck was
pretty much "the easy part". The difficult part was
keeping everything dry going from the house to the truck. This was
accomplished through the creative use of large trash bags. This rain did rust
some of my weights, and it also warped the wood on the desk I am
using right now.
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3: Terror on the Freeway!
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