Philip was at the warehouse at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, September 17, packed and ready for Savannah. He had enough energy drinks to raise questions at checkout.
Michael sent a photograph of a hotel key, along with a room number and an address in the Galleria. The itinerary had changed.
We had rented a Chrysler Pacifica so Michael could work in the back while Philip drove. Two grown men were setting off to retrieve a container of imported furniture in a minivan.
Minivans are cheaper to rent than other vehicles. Apparently, there is a limit to what people will endure for a sliding door.
We had also purchased Meta glasses to document the trip. At the time, this seemed like a marketing decision.
Philip drove to the hotel, where the front desk asked for identification. His wallet was packed away in the Pacifica, so he showed the woman a photograph of Michael.
Her expression changed.
“Oh yeah, we know him.”
Whatever qualifications were required to earn that response, Michael had completed them before sunrise.
We left Houston at approximately 6 a.m. Central, via Pearland. Michael had slept approximately none.
A forty-foot container we had come to call “the Ghost” had finally materialized in Savannah, almost ninety days after shipping from Indonesia. It was about a thousand miles from our warehouse and contained furniture we needed to get moving, including Halloween merchandise with very little interest in arriving in November.
We were going to get it ourselves.
Shout-out to Buc-ee’s in Beaumont for supporting the early stages of this decision.
The conversation covered business, logistics, and several ideas that presumably would have changed the world had either of us written them down. Then Michael took a nap, and Philip drove straight through.
We reached Savannah around midnight Eastern time, an hour ahead of Houston. After approximately seventeen hours on the road, we discovered we could no longer buy beer at a store.
We took this development with the maturity you would expect and found a bar.
Bootleggers, in Pooler, near the airport.
We went in for one beer. Jägermeister became involved, we made friends, and there was something about “blue-eyed babies.” We closed the place down.
Michael’s Meta glasses documented the proceedings with a level of accuracy neither of us had requested. Those recordings will remain in private ownership.
A few hours later, at 8 a.m. Friday, the container arrived.
We had rented a twenty-six-foot box truck. The plan was to unload the container, fill the truck with as much as possible, and put the rest into storage.
There were two of us, one forty-foot container, and a temperature of approximately one hundred degrees. We are old enough to have known we should hire help, but we had rented a truck and were determined to get it done.
Once the minivan had served its purpose, we returned it. This was economical right up until we needed to go somewhere.
We needed step stools, a light, and tools. Lowe’s was about a mile away, so Philip walked.
Inside Lowe’s, the return journey began to look considerably less attractive. Carrying everything back in that heat would require a further decline in judgment, so he bought a folding hand truck, bungeed the purchases onto it, and set off.
The cashier saw Philip at his lowest point. Or so he thought; there were several hours left.
Back at the container, we kept unloading. The Ghost had taken almost ninety days to reach us and apparently intended to take its time leaving, too.
We carried, shifted, stacked, and rearranged furniture and packaging. The storage units filled, the truck filled, and our enthusiasm became quieter.
At roughly ten that night, the Meta glasses recorded us lying in the storage facility’s parking lot. We still could not see the back wall of the container.
There is a particular disappointment in working all day toward a wall that refuses to appear.
We got up and continued. After approximately eighteen hours, we had filled two ten-by-thirty storage units and packed the twenty-six-foot truck. The container was finally empty.
We reached the hotel around 2:30 a.m. Saturday. We had called ahead to explain the late arrival, which apparently gave everyone sufficient notice to prepare absolutely nothing.
Our combined lunch and dinner consisted of two Snickers, two ice creams, and two bags of Doritos. By then, neither of us had much interest in making selections.
Neither room had sheets or towels.
No shout-out for Priceline.
After eighteen hours of unloading in that heat, a towel had become an item of considerable emotional significance. Sheets would also have been a lovely gesture from a business renting beds.
Somewhere in the aftermath, both of Philip’s phones were locked in the truck. Michael had the keys. Communication deteriorated, followed shortly by diplomatic relations.
At one point, Michael announced his intention to leave Philip in Savannah and book him a flight home. Then he needed something from the back of the truck.
The message took a turn:
“I am leaving you here, booking you a flight home … damn, I need in the back of the truck and it won’t … did you change the combo?”
The combination had not changed.
0-0-0-0.
The numbers needed to line up with the indicator, rather than the center of the lock.
Michael can design furniture, build websites, and coordinate international shipments. His attempt to abandon Philip was defeated by four zeroes and a small line.
The partnership continued.
Around noon Eastern on Saturday, we headed for Houston. We were more than two days into the undertaking and had approximately a thousand miles left to drive.
If you have never traveled that distance in a loaded box truck, the cab offers a useful introduction to regret. The seats do not recline, there is nowhere to put anything, and it is loud, bumpy, and slow. The fuel tank holds an impressive amount of money for a remarkably modest amount of distance.
We settled in and worked our way west. We stopped for fuel, then more fuel, and reconsidered the comfort of the Pacifica with something approaching affection.
By Beaumont, exhaustion had caught up with Philip. Michael took the final stretch to the warehouse. Night driving was already a concern because of his eyesight; by then, fatigue had made every remaining decision harder.
That stretch deserves better planning next time. We had used up far too much of ourselves in Savannah.
At approximately 3:30 a.m. Central on Sunday, September 20, we reached the warehouse. Philip had first stood there seventy-two hours earlier. We had been away from Houston for approximately sixty-nine and a half hours.
In between, we had driven to Savannah in a minivan, visited Bootleggers, made new friends, and spent eighteen hours unloading a forty-foot container. There had been a pedestrian Lowe’s expedition, two full storage units, a hotel without bedding, and a brief attempt to dissolve the partnership by text.
Then we had driven a loaded box truck back to Houston.
We had gone to retrieve our furniture, and we had brought it back.
We had also discovered that our friendship could withstand heat, hunger, exhaustion, and an attempted abandonment, provided the person doing the abandoning required help with a combination lock.
How did we survive?
How did we not kill each other?
We are still reviewing the footage.
Some of it, anyway.
