The Gretsch in the Bathtub, or How Not to Move

by Jim Washburn

Little Jimmy was a dirty boy. He was afraid of the bathtub, because that’s where the monstrous Gretsch waited to nab him. Jimmy knew that no sooner would he be sinking into a bubblelicious bath than—Twang!!—the Gretsch would grab him and pull him under, where, beneath the suds, there also lurked Hagstrom the Merciless and the dread Teisco. Little Jimmy decided he’d better give that bathtub a wide berth.

I’m sitting in my new office, the converted garage “mother-in-law house” at the back of our new domicile. It looks neither like an office nor like a place where you’d wish to store any relative. It looks like a guitar explosion. They are everywhere, in bits and pieces, piled atop one another. In the bathtub, there are indeed 15 stringed instruments and a flute, for want of anywhere else to pile them. There is no true Gretsch among them, just a Japanese copy from the early ’70s, along with other budget makes going back to the ’30s. They’ll never be worth much, but they have the potential of becoming very clean.

As regular readers know, my wife and I had to move from the house I’d rented for 32 years. I spent many of those years hitting six swap meets a weekend. I’ve always felt an obligation to be some one-man Village Green Preservation Society, sheltering the obscure oddities of my generation so they would not be forgot. It seemed there was always room to cram a few more things in, and the layers of Troy had nothing on me.

And now Troy has moved. In the past 12 days I’ve lost 11 pounds. I’ve been averaging four hours of sleep a night, and have been peeing blood for five days.

We weren’t able to prepare for the move as I’d wanted, since a pile of work came my way, and money makes such a lovely crinkly sound. We did manage to divest a fair amount of stuff via eBay and local charities; we rid ourselves of some of our largest things at a yard sale, and gave or loaned other stuff (whole drum sets and the like) to friends. Once we had the keys to the new place, we started running carloads and pickup truck loads of stuff in. One day, three friends and I moved the better part of 12,000 record albums. Another day, I rented a truck and we moved the guitars, amps and another full load of things.

Even so, when the somewhat forewarned movers arrived with their big moving van, they took one look at the remaining stuff and said it would take another truck, a second crew and at least $2,000 to move it all. Did I mention that our new home is exactly one mile from the old one?

I suggested they move the furniture and stuff that made sense, and return Monday to face a far more organized and packed garage. They were a great trio of movers. I chipped in, not to cut down on their billable hours but because I always feel uneasy when other people are working and I’m not. (And never forget the absolute cardinal rule for when friends help you move: You must always be working at least as hard as they are. You will never reach satori otherwise.) I’d been up packing til 12:30 the night before, couldn’t sleep at all and got up at 3 a.m. to pack some more.

A long day, that, and when the movers were done, I started right in on the garage, some of which was boxed and sensible and some of which looked like a rats’ warren, if rats collected electronic gear and ’60s Hit Parader magazines. That’s about when I started peeing blood. (I finally saw a doc-in-a-box yesterday and found that, due to days of dehydration and strain, I’ve got acute prostatitis. The doctor said that also would account for my lower back pain, not that moving 12,000 records wouldn’t.)

I continued boxing and moving loads, with a few hours of sleep thrown in, right up until I heard the truck again Monday morning. Then it was a mad rush to stay half a step ahead of the movers, creating aisles and boxing stuff so it could be moved. I cleared one bookcase just so we could use it to prop the garage door open, because its springs had sprung decades before.

These movers really moved, yet two truckloads later, there were still piles of stuff at the old house and with our last day looming, we were hauling stuff by the carload and an in a friend’s pickup truck again. The retreat became a rout, and I was throwing anything into a box, recalling the Vietnam War credo, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” And after all that, the driveway was still filled with Goodwill items and trash. I swear, this house was the clown Volkswagen of houses.

Our new house has 550 more square feet all told, but it’s not the pile-the-garage-to-the-rafters kind of square feet, hence the bathtub, and a back yard that presently looks like a Slab City flea market. It’s going to take a couple of more solid weeks of work to get this stuff organized or make it go away, and probably a year to whittle the various collections down to a livable size.

I’ve learned a few things in these past weeks. I’ve learned how to get the W from an old Woolworth’s sign into the back seat of a car. I’ve learned you don’t need sleep and food as much as you think, at least until you hit organ failure. Another thing I learned is a proper amount of shame and chagrin. It was one thing when all this crap was my personal vexation; it’s quite another thing to see my friends struggling under its weight, wrenching their backs, jamming their fingers, bruising their shins.

It must be like this when people help an addict, except helping addicts usually doesn’t get you wrenched, bruised and jammed. It just isn’t right, and I am ashamed. I’m naming the period between now and next late August the Winnowing Year. I’m going to try to sell, give away or compost about 40 percent of what I have. Beware the deluge.

It was a mix of sad feelings standing in the empty house. The new tenant—the landlady’s daughter—and her contractor boyfriend came by to size up the house. “This place is shot,” he said flatly, and it probably is. It’s an empty husk of a house that was slapped up cheap in 1955 and hasn’t had anything much done for it in decades. But, along with all the junk, 32 years of my life was crammed into it. I stood in the bare living room and said, “Goodbye house.” It came back in a brittle echo I’d never heard in there before.

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