Last Saturday my roommate and I moved from MacArthur Park to Culver City. We hit and quit an apartment’s worth of debris in five hours. We squeezed a 8′ couch through our new front door in a sequence that confirmed my desire never to give birth. We sweat our T-shirts to the hem and then put on new ones to do it again.

This is not a story about furniture, though. This is a story about a sixteen-foot truck.

Sixteen feet looks like this

I originally reserved a ten-foot truck from Budget.

Ten feet looks like this

Ten feet was good because Sara and I really didn’t have that much stuff to move, and there was little space in either our old neighborhood or new to stick a big truck. However, I got the heads-up from the rental place the day before that the ten-foot truck might not be available — and I could have a larger truck for the same price.

I mentioned here that I might not be comfortable driving a big rig, and the agent offered me the cargo van as well.

I said we’d play it by ear and figure it out Saturday morning.

So Sara and I arrived, and verily the 10′ truck was still out.

Said I: “And the larger truck is twelve feet?”
Said the agent: “Sixteen feet.”
“Jesus.”

And I said, “It’ll be OK. I’ve driven a sixteen-foot truck before.” This is true — I have — but with one important distinction: I drove one in North Carolina. I drove it from the ample parking of a Durham townhouse to the ample parking of a Winston-Salem apartment down the ample lanes of Interstate 40. There was so much room in North Carolina I could have left the driver’s side door open and dangled my feet like Fred Flintstone.

In LA? Not so much.

Reminder: 16 feet looks like this

There was a lot of praying involved in driving down Beverly, and Alvarado, and 8th, and Grand View — and by the time I arrived at our apartment gate I was confidently letting God do the driving because I had no crapping idea what I was doing. I also had no crapping idea where to park — though our back alley was an option, if we had to — although we had no one to attend it.

I had a plan, however — a plan to BACK IN THE FRONT GATE.

Gate I tried to get a 16′ truck in

Our apartment was on Grand View Street. There is side-street parking on both sides of Grand View Street. Furthermore there was a moving truck loading on that street already, and I was so unsure of the lane space and the truck dimensions that I made Sara guide me through like an air-traffic controller.

Then I commenced to try to back the truck through a gate which — I later noted — was exactly six inches wider than the truck itself. DOES ANYONE SEE A PROBLEM WITH THIS PLAN?

But lo, I backed, and lo, I sweated, and lo, I was surrounded by parked cars whose distance I could not estimate. And lo, cars attempting to pass on Grand View were stopped in both directions as I ate my bowl of fail mix.

I was on only my second try when a man in a sporty silver Toyota sedan addressed Sara and me as he waited for me to get out of the way.

Said he: “Exactly what are you ladies trying to accomplish?”
Said I: “I’m trying to back into the gate.”
He got out of his car. “I don’t have time to wait here all day.”

He was tall, with his T-shirt tucked into his jeans and a perfect rectangle crewcut that was black on top and silver on the sides. There was a fleet moment of oh Jesus he means to kill us. But he said, “I used to do this for a living,” and he reached for the keys.

I wish my high school track coach could have seen how fast I got out of that truck and gave him those keys.

He pointed at a spot about six feet from the cab.

“You don’t understand — you need to be *here*,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.

He got in. He turned the truck *there.* He backed the truck between a white pickup on one side and a little red coupe on the other. Somewhere the owner of the little red coupe got a pee shiver and didn’t know why. I tried to help guide him but my eye had less information than his instincts. He backed the truck all the way ’til the side of it touched the rubberized stopper at the top of the gate.

Sara and I thanked him. We thanked him and thanked him, but at that moment he seemed more impressed by his accomplishment and his next engagement than by our gratitude. And surely the first time Superman stopped a speeding train, and the sweating townsfolk poured out of the cars to effuse their praise and thanks, Superman was occupied by little thought other than, “Whoa, I just stopped a train.”

It’s like I’m super or something

So. The Crewcut Man bid us good luck and went on his way.

It is important to note that, although Crewcut Man was highly skillful and efficient in moving the truck, it would certainly have been faster for him to say, “Screw it,” turn around in the street, and go another way. But that is not what he did. No.

Do you think that is the end of the story? Do you not see that this post continues?

Because even as Sara and I attacked the truck load-in — and we attacked it like a film crew attacks a coffee pot — it weighed on my mind that there were still many feats to accomplish with the truck:

– driving it to Culver City
– finding a place to park it outside my apartment building
– driving it back
– gassing it up
and, lest we forget,
– PULLING IT OUT OF THIS GATE

Watching Crewcut Man manipulate this truck had impressed upon me that it was no mean feat even to drive it FORWARD. But there was naught to be done for it. God had given me a former professional trucker to get this thing into the gate — surely he had a plan to get it out.

Sara and I finished loading about an hour and a half later. We got ourselves each a delicious cold Diet Dr. Pepper. We braced ourselves for the next step.

I got in the cab. With shaking hands, I turned the key.

Said I, “I’m gonna need you to guide me out of here.”
Said Sara, “OK — and I’ll block traffic. Wait — there’s a car coming already.”

She went to stop that car. I was quite focused on the emergency brake and my shaking hands at this point, and I didn’t even have a chance to turn the key before I heard the strains of “How Soon is Now?” and I wondered, “Who the hey is listening to The Smiths in this neighborhood?”

And lo, I looked up, and the car Sara was stopping was a sporty silver Toyota sedan.

In it of course was Crewcut Man — though his perfect rectangle of hair was now shorter, so only the black remained. Sara and I began laughing insanely. He was pretty freakin’ amused also.

Said he, “Are you two really leaving just now?”
Screamed we, “YES!”
Said he, “All right. Just give me a moment to send some emails for work…”

He worked on his emails and pumped up his “How Soon is Now?” Sara and I looked at each other and laughed and screamy-laughed and laughy-screamed.

How can you say I go about things the wrong way?

When he was done, he took the keys. He pulled out the truck. He pulled it ten yards down the street so it was perfectly straight and so even a woman who had never driven a sixteen-foot truck in LA could get it going.

By that point we were all three pretty flabbergasted by the whole endeavor. We offered him one of our delicious, refreshing Diet Dr. Peppers. We offered him a Stone Brewery Old Guardian Barley Wine, but he chose neither.

Just reward

Said he, “I just came from getting my hair cut. That’s where I was going when I came through here the first time. I was gonna get a donut, but first I thought, ‘I wonder how those girls are doing.'”
Said I, “Well, we sure are glad you did.”
“I really believe things have a way of coming together and working out. It seems that way a lot of the time.”
I nodded vigorously. “Oh yes. Oh, oh, yes,” I said. “I’m glad forces smarter than me were in charge today. And I don’t even know your name — I’m Tory.”
“I’m Emmanuel. Like a-manual labor.”
I laughed my ass off.
Said he, “Yeah, people like that one.”

If I’d thought a little harder, I would have gotten his business card or something to send him some cookies. As it is, I must pay my thanks to the Internet — and if you run into a man named Emmanuel with a sporty silver Toyota and a crewcut, get him a regular Dr. Pepper for me.