Author: Eric Fritzius
September 8, 1999
After two and a half years of blissful existence, living in a festering hellhole of an apartment in the city of Tupelo, Mississippi, I decided to pack it all in and leave my heaven on earth for greener northern pastures. The reason behind all of this stems from the fact that I’m engaged to be engaged to be married and I figured it would probably be wise if I actually lived in the same city as my betrothed to be betrothed. So I up and moved to North Carolina.
When moving, one of the major things you have to do, beyond securing a Ryder truck and packing up all your stuff, is contacting all your utilities companies to alert them to your departure so that they can cut you off and stop charging you after a certain date and so you can get your deposits and/or final bills forwarded to your new address. The first utility on my list was, of course, Gun Dog Comics, who agreed to forward all my books to me in NC, at least until I found a new shop. After that, it was just a matter of speaking with the Post Office, to get them to forward my mail, the phone company, the cable company, magazine subscription folks, bank, credit cards, car insurance, and finally the near legendary Tombigbee Electric Power Ass.
I decided to deal with the Power Ass. face to face, rather than through the mail, just so I could get one last whiff of the atmosphere, one that can only be the product of a building of 1963 architecture and décor, possibly even designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s less-successful brother Earl. I wanted once more to walk beneath the roof of angular teal-colored metal, turn my face toward the fine, upstanding employees within and give them an expression that quietly dared them to tell me that my account with them did not exist, as they had done so twice before. No dice. My account was still there and they didn’t even pretend to recognize me as the infamous author of the four previous Power Ass. stories. Damn. And here I had brought my Official Certificate of Power Ass. Membership, just in case they wanted a fight.
The nice lady at the counter allowed me to pay my penultimate bill with no problems and directed me to the service desk in the back where I could see about forwarding arrangements for my final bill and $70 deposit. The service department was also very helpful. I told them that I would be moving out on Sept 2, my birthday, so they should cut me off on Sept 3, just to give me a day’s worth of leeway. They said fine and agreed to forward both my final bill and my deposit. Easy enough, I thought. I went home to begin packing.
Several weeks later, I actually started packing. I waited until the final week of August, just when the deadline was looming. I had been telling myself it would only take a couple of days to do, so why do it now? After all, I’d been able to pack up all my stuff to move from Starkville to Tupelo in an afternoon. (I forgot I’d made several trips back for the rest of it over the past two years, plus bought an immovably heavy couch, chair, bed and coffee table.)
My efforts this time took considerably longer. It was during one of these marathon packing sessions that I noticed that my already elderly window-unit air-conditioner was beginning to make a kind of death-rattle sound and would occasionally lapse into a coma from which nothing but a good night’s rest could rouse it. Once in a while, it would emit a banshee wail, which I took to be a bad sign. Nevertheless, the actual packing of stuff into boxes was more or less completed by the time my woman, Ashley, arrived with me to chunk it all into the moving van. Our plan was to put all the stuff in the van, clean up the house and drive all of it to North Carolina on Thursday, unpack it on Friday and take our four-day rental van to the drop-off point on Saturday, two days early.
Those of you who’ve ever had to move all your stuff to another city can commence snickering now.
Why we wanted such a breakneck schedule is a bit unclear, except that I really liked the idea of leaving Tupelo on my birthday, plus I had Paul Simon tickets for that Sunday, in Charlotte, and I wanted to get there as early as possible. Whatever the case, our plans did not come to fruition exactly as intended.
First off, since we were aiming for a quick departure, we decided it would be best if we kept my cat Winston sealed in the apartment to prevent her from running off and hiding from us and delaying the trip. This was our first mistake, since large pieces of furniture being shoved around sideways through doorways was hardly the least traumatic image for a cat to see. We kept her locked in the bathroom and tried to ignore her plaintive mewing as best we could, but she was definitely not happy.
Secondly, as soon as we were good and hot from loading boxes, my air-conditioner gave up the ghost and died. I tried to resuscitate it, but this resulted in some very unsettling noises from the breaker box, so we decided not to push our, nor our fire extinguisher’s luck. Being Mississippi in August, though, we knew it would soon be 120 degrees in the house and we would need some sort of cooling unit in order to merely survive. Since the vacant apartment across the hall had a nearly new AC, we decided to hork it. No sooner had we gotten it unhooked from the window than my landlord, Mr. Willis, suddenly appeared in a puff of brimstone and told us he didn’t want us touching his good air-conditioner. This is a man, mind you, who’d been to my apartment exactly twice the entire two and a half years I’d lived in Tupelo and whose execution of repair requests usually occurred two months after said request was made, and only then by literally breaking into the apartment while I was gone. His sudden unexpected appearance was boo creepy. We tried to explain about my air-conditioner totally crapping out and about the menacing noises from the breaker, but he still didn’t want to let us move the other AC. We then tried to politely appeal to his sense of duty as landlord, implying to him that he should care about the welfare of his tenants and whether they’re going to die of heat stroke while trying to move out. However, our argument kept getting snagged on the whole `moving out’ part of this and the fact that we were doing it two full days after my last paid day in the joint. He didn’t actually bring this up, but it seemed to become a factor against us all the same.
Now the thing about Mr. Willis you have to understand is that he’s proposed marriage to Ashley no fewer than four times in the past already. And while at the time it mostly seemed like he was joking with her, there was also that edge of hopeful possibility in his eyes that Ashley couldn’t quite shake. After all, he’s a widower who’s getting up in years and could use a good woman to take care of him and his household. He’s not a dirty old man, per se, but he’s probably just as interested in some company and a good meal as the rest of us. This being the case, I got out of the way when Ashley went into sweet-talk mode. It worked like a charm. She promised Mr. Willis that we’d put the new AC back in the other apartment before we left and assured him that his worries of us cutting out without first cleaning the place up were totally unfounded. (He knew this was true since Ash used to live in the apartment below mine, and when she moved out she left it cleaner than it had been in decades. Since then, it had taken a good soiling from the various drug dealers and art aficionados who’d taken up residence there.) The only downside to her deal with him was that he made her promise that we’d haul off my pitiful, legless, little red chair that I’d stashed in the vacant apartment in the hope of donating it to future occupants. And with one last unsuccessful college-try at asking Ashley’s hand in marriage for himself, Mr. Willis told me I had his sympathies and vanished before our eyes.
The loading of boxes and furniture itself didn’t physically wipe us out too bad, but the dust and cat-hair, left over from my two-year boycott of house-cleaning duties, nearly killed us. By noon, our noses were aflame, snot flowed freely and we were popping Benadryls like candy. It was also more than apparent that we’d underestimated the moving job by at least a day. So, Thursday afternoon, we decided we would keep packing and do all we could that night, then finish the packing on Friday, clean up the apartment, sleep for a long time and then take off in the middle of Friday night. This being the new plan, we immediately abandoned the packing, let the cat out and fled to Outback where we feasted mightily on steak and Foster‘s.
Friday morning, we awoke, sorely, and decided to warm up to the days toil by leisurely watching Better Off Dead. We were safe in the knowledge that we had plenty of time to watch our movie, then pack up the remaining boxes and clean the apartment before getting to sleep lots and lots.
Half-way through the film, the power went out.
Neither of us spoke a word. We silently realized that the Tombigbee Electric Power Ass. had cut off our power, right on time, just as they had been told to, and the certainty of a hellish day of packing and attempting to clean a festering, dust-filled, non-air-conditioned apartment, in Mississippi, in August, without the aid of a vacuum cleaner and our noses still clogged and burning from the day before, sank into our skulls. We stood and quietly began our woeful, Herculean task.
It shortly occurred to me that I should just phone up the Power Ass. and ask them if they could cut us back on for a couple of days. Surely, if they’d only just cut us off, they could get the power back on within a few hours. Unfortunately, I had also told Bell South to cut off my phone service on September 3, and they too were being terribly efficient in their jobs. Our saving grace was that Ashley had her cell-phone.
As I listened to the ringing in the receiver, waiting for the Power Ass. to pick up, I was struck by a horrific thought. What if the person I spoke to at the Power Ass. recognized my name as the infamous author of the Power Ass. tales? What if it was Desk Boy, who I lampooned in Talkin’ Power Ass Blues Part II? What if it was the secretary who wrote the moronically mis-dated memo from Talkin’ Power Ass Blues Part III? What if it was the nice desk-lady, who admitted that her boss had printed out The Tales collection from my website and had shown it around the office, and who had told me not to write about her in my next story, and then I went and did it anyway? They held all the power now! They probably kept records of my offenses in their Devil-Computer! They could now finally exact a twisted and sadistic revenge upon me such as no human deserves, and there was nothing I could do about it! Nothing!!!
“Tombigbee Electric Power Association?” a friendly sounding female said.
In a nervous voice and as politely as possible, I explained who I was and what I wanted. The female voice offered no indication that she knew of me. And rather than pouring a boiling cauldron of torment slowly upon my head, she explained that they could have the power turned on again shortly, but that there would be a fee involved. I realized that at that moment I would gladly pay upwards of $40 for my power to be returned. Ransom or no ransom, I needed air, dammit! The fee was only $10, and I nearly wept with joy. I thanked the Power Ass. woman profusely for her assistance and hung up the phone.
We locked the cat in the house again and departed for breakfast, giving the Power Ass. time to turn us back on. When we returned, the cat dashed past us as we opened the door, ran down the stairs and into the basement, the door of which Mr. Willis had thoughtfully propped open with a bunch of junk. We hardly cared. The air was on and the apartment was cool. Still, the problem of the cat in the basement was not a small one. Neither of us were keen on actually going into the basement, which was perhaps the only prospect more terrifying than looking at the house’s wiring. Assuming we could get past the junk piled at the top of the basement stairs, we’d be met by a foot of standing water at the bottom, in which slimy things with legs no doubt were writhing. Our fear was that the cat’s little green kitty harness, which we had bought to prevent just this sort of thing, would get hung on something and she’d be trapped down there, forcing us to brave the basement in her rescue. So in between hauling loads of boxes to the van, I had the job of trying to coax the cat out of the basement by calling her from the top of the basement stairs. Several hours later, we discovered that the cat was no longer in the basement, but had turned up under the back porch, having found some alternate route out. We locked her in the bathroom.
It was a long day of packing and cleaning, but by the time we went to bed that night, round 10:30, it was all finished. All we would have to do is sleep a few blessed hours, then put the air-conditioner back across the hall, load up the mattress, gather the cat, and hit the open road.
At midnight, Ashley woke me to say we should get moving. I argued that when I signed on for getting up in the middle of the night I had assumed we’d actually be getting more than an hour and a half of sleep. We’d been working solid for two days and I didn’t think I could manage the drive without a good five hours behind me. Ashley agreed to let me sleep and decided to take the cat out on the leash and harness to let her “use the facilities,” as we’d already packed the litterbox. A few minutes later, Ash came back minus one cat. Apparently once outside, Winston had been possessed by the wandering spirit of Harry Houdini, did a little kitty escape dance and was suddenly out of the harness and beneath the back porch before Ashley could even move to stop her. After that, I knew I’d be too busy worrying about finding the cat to sleep, so we might as well get ready to go and hope that we could catch the cat by dawn. God smiled on us, for as we were preparing the window of the apartment across the hall to receive its borrowed air-conditioner, Winston came running up on the roof and right into our arms. (Well, into our arms, if you define the phrase as me reaching out and yanking her ass in by the scruff of the neck.)
We hit the road around 1:30 a.m. At 1:31 the wailing began.
To say Winston doesn’t travel well only lightly brushes the surface of the true horror. This cat was a constant meow for two straight hours. And while meowing, she clawed at the glass of the windows to get out, tried to claw the glass of the driver’s side wind-shield, clawed at the firewall beneath the dash in some sort of strange quest to get into the engine compartment, and several other maneuvers we judged as suicide attempts. And the thing is, I knew it would go down that way. I’d had a small dose of it when I moved her from Starkville to Tupelo. I’d actually begged my parents to slip me some of the kitty Valium they keep their cats doped up on, but they forgot to bring it when they came to see me off, days earlier. So I was stuck playing cat-wrangler while Ashley drove. After two hours, the cat finally quit trying to actively kill herself and settled behind the passenger seat to continue her loud meowing. Somehow, I was able to ignore it enough to go back to sleep. The cat never slept, but her meowing did slow a bit after a few hours. By the end of the trip, 13 hours later, Winston had pretty much shut down and become, forgive me, catatonic.
Other than that, the trip went pretty smoothly. I got my stuff stored away in NC, and settled into my new life in a camping trailer next door to Ashley’s grandmother’s house, got the Ryder truck back on time and enjoyed a fine concert by Mr. Paul Simon. Winston, for her part, spent three days hiding beneath a couch before coming out to explore her surroundings and seems mighty happy these days.
Gradually, as the weeks went by, my final bills did arrive from all of my utilities companies except the Power Ass. Then, in mid-October, an angry-looking note arrived from them. It didn’t come as the traditional post card bill, or in a regular envelope, but in one of those carbon-copy print through the surface envelopes, like collection agencies send. It contained a past due bill of $40 and stated that this was the third time they had sent me such a bill, that payment was well past due and if I wanted to continue living I was to cough up the dough pronto. Well, I hadn’t even seen any of the alleged three previous bills, let alone ignored them. My inclination was to call them up and suggest that A) they get a clue, and B) they do some simple mathematics, subtract the $40 I owed them from the $70 deposit that they owed me and send me the difference. Instead, just to spite them, I waited another two weeks before sending them the money. Two days after my payment check was in the mail, I received another envelope from the Power Ass., this time containing a check for the difference of what I owed them subtracted from what they owed me. Great. Now I get to wait for them to figure out just what the check I sent them is for and just what they’re going to do about it. With Y2k approaching, I’m not hopeful that their devil-computer will be alive long enough to sort it out.
Copyright © 1999 Mister Herman’s Production Company, Ltd
