I think most people at some points in their lives have experienced reoccurring nightmares or at least reoccurring dreams. And whether they’re nightmares or dreams, they’re usually not pleasant. When I was 16, for three nights in a row I dreamt I walked into an old, Victorian style room that was located somewhere in Europe and sometime in the 1770s. It had a real Dickens feel to it, and like Marely’s ghost, a floating head would appear and chase me around the room. It scared the you-know-what right out of me. Three nights in a row this happened to me, and on the final night, I could stand it no more and actually took control of the dream. When the head popped up, I suddenly had a shovel in my hand and swung. I batted the head away like it were Stephen King’s version of Whac-A-Mole. The dream ended, and it never occurred again. Take that, floating head!
Like reoccurring nightmares, real life has its share of reoccurring instances, doesn’t it? They are usually as unpleasant, and worse, you can’t wake up from them, like that unwanted acquaintance who, without warning, will pop up (yes, sometimes in the middle of the night) in your life after years of peace and wreak havoc on your wellbeing.
If there was ever a floating head in my life, it’s this big blue pleather sleeper sofa. I’ve written about it twice now (first about my car breaking down on the way to retrieve it from parents’ cottage in Wisconsin, which resulted in a $400+ tow that completely nullified the fact that the couch was a free hand-me-down, and second about Sun Day Managing Editor Mason Souza and I tussling with its sticky girth up a flight of stairs on a hot and humid day). Well, dear readers, the trilogy of the big blue pleather sleeper sofa ends here and about as well for the sofa as for the floating head of my nightmares so long ago.
As everyone knows, my wife and I recently moved and of all the items we possessed, I was concerned about moving this sofa more than all the others combined. It’s big, it’s pleather, it’s puffy, it’s heavy, and its reluctance to be moved is no less resolute than a sleeping giant’s. And once again I enlisted A-lister furniture mover Mason Souza to help me with the job, a task he was not so indirect about telling me wasn’t thrilled to do. I didn’t blame him. But, hey, I ultimately got it in my condo by myself, the two of us should be able to get ‘er out lickety split.
Turned out the only easy part of moving this couch was over the five feet between the condo’s living room and entrance to the foyer, which, by the way, is on angle to the straight line out the door.
After a few laborious minutes maneuvering that couch around the angle we got it into the foyer, and it was like stuffing a whale into a bottle. It was a straight shot out the door, but the couch was stuck. Following the advice of a business associate of mine, we wrapped the couch in sheets so it would slide easier, but even before we got the couch in the foyer, it shed the sheets like a bad fashion trend.
Mason was on one end of the couch, I on the other, and we pushed, shoved, pulled, lifted, but the couch made it clear: it wasn’t going anywhere.
An idea struck just then. Since we couldn’t sell our condo, we have to rent it out, and I thought that maybe the renter would want the couch. I called her but she declined, saying she had a sectional she was moving in (a sectional!? Good luck with that).
With effort, Mason and I wrangled the couch back in the living room, at a loss for what to do with it. I then thought my realtor’s son (who just moved into a house with his college buddies could use the couch and best of all, he worked for a moving company. So the plan was: if you can move it you can have it. No luck. He was unable to get the couch when we needed it gone by. We abandoned the couch at the condo, and I retreated to my new home to decide what to do with it. In reality, only one option remained: break the couch apart.
Two days later, I returned to the condo armed with a sledgehammer and box cutter and went to work. Each swing and slash was a glorious release of a year of aggravation this couch caused. I was pleased to dismember it. When I was through, I hauled the pieces to the condo dumpsters, and like that floating head, the reoccurring couch was over, proving that sometimes you need to take a shovel or sledgehammer to a problem to get it to go away.
