Time to Move

Three large U-Haul trucks.
The big ones, the biggest ones you could rent at the time.
I remember Boompa making a big deal about the bit that overhung the cab,
like it had a special name. I can’t remember what it was.

I remember the buildup to the move.
It was just after coming back from Cleveland,
and we’d detoured through Lynchburg, Virginia,
where my aunt and her husband lived.

Apparently, my mother fell in love with the area,
and that was all it took.
It’s not like things were going well for the family in Houston anymore,
so… Virginia, here we came.

I tagged along with Boompa as he outfitted the cars with CB radios for the journey.

Breaker-breaker one-nine for a radio check,
he coached me to say, as I squeezed the talk button.

Some trucker answered that we were coming in loud and clear—
and added “little buddy” at the end.
I guess it worked.
I was the first one to get to use it.

The huge new antennas on the cars looked out of place.

We were in the front seat of his Cadillac,
and I opened the center console to pull out the car phone.

“Why can’t we just use this?” I asked, pressing some buttons.

“It’s too expensive, and I’m not putting one in your mother’s car—
she’s already lazy enough as it is.”

His answer confused me.
He always said Mom was lazy.
Always.
I didn’t get it.

It was weeks of packing at home.
I vaguely remembered the packing and moving from the house I lived in with my parents
to the house we then shared with my grandparents.

“The next house is going to be bigger,”
my mother told me, smoking a cigarette while packing a box.
“You’re going to have your own room again. Aren’t you excited?”

“Will I still get to play with my friends?”

“You’ll make new ones,” she said. “Better ones.”

I was skeptical.

Eventually everything was packed and loaded.
Three large U-Haul trucks, the biggest they had—Boompa had said.
We had a lot of crap.

Dad drove one, Boompa drove another,
and some friend of Dad’s drove the third.
His name was Skeeter or something, I think.
He smelled just like Dad—whiskey and cigarettes.

Mom drove her station wagon,
and I think Granny drove the Cadillac.
Or maybe it was someone else. I can’t remember.

The journey seemed to take forever.
We’d stop every couple of hours,
and I would bounce between the station wagon and the Cadillac.

Once or twice, I got to ride in one of the trucks—either with Dad or Boompa.
Both got tired of me very quickly.
I’d be on the CB radio doing my breaker-breaker checks, chatting with truckers.

Boompa said I had diarrhea of the mouth
and I was going to get us robbed or killed.

“Diarrhea of the mouth” was his favorite phrase, I think.
He’d say it about anyone who talked. Didn’t matter how much.

At some point, we had an issue with one of the trucks
and ended up on the side of the highway.
I got tar on my leg—don’t remember how.

Dad’s friend suggested using diesel to get it off.
At the next gas station, they did just that.

I remember it burned my skin,
and Dad was rubbing at it with the blue gas station rags
like he wanted to take my skin with it.

At one of the gas stations, I found a condom dispenser in the bathroom.
The sign said it was for sex,
so I bought one.

I knew sex was something I wanted,
and the Boy Scout motto was “Always be prepared,”
so I put the quarter I had left from buying a candy bar in
and turned the dial.

A Trojan fell out of the chute and into my hand.
It was ribbed for her pleasure, the wrapper said.

I stuck it into the checkered Velcro wallet Boompa had given me
at the start of the journey.

I don’t think I ever did anything with it.
But I felt proud having it in there.
It was a secret—something I had
that no one else on the journey knew I had.

At the motels we stayed in,
the six of us—Mom and Dad, Granny and Boompa,
my sister and me—would all stay in one room.

Dad’s friend got a whole room to himself.

Eventually, we got to our new house.
Well, it was a really, really old house—not new at all.

Mom said Boompa got a really good deal on it.
That the rent was cheap.
And this one had four bedrooms—we all got our own rooms again.

That was a good thing.
Ever since learning to talk, my sister wouldn’t shut up
and kept me up all night at our old house in Houston. Clearly, she had the diarrhea of the mouth.

Plus, I had a condom now.
So I could have sex.