G and the Mattress

I had off on Monday. I hated waking up so much last Monday that I took a vacation day just so I wouldn’t have to. I still woke up fairly early but instead of getting up and getting ready for work I just laid there with the cool breeze gently flowing through the open windows. After a couple hours of that I started to feel like a woman in a bubble bath with candles all around so I decided to get up and watch some TV. I watched three MTV shows and three “other” shows and started to get bored (you can only watch so many “other” shows before you start to cramp up). And then there was a knock on the door.

G: What are you doing?

B to the…: Nothing, just took the day off.

G: Do you want to go out bumming around?

(bumming around?)

B to the…: Sure. Let me go and get changed.

G and I swung by Menards to return some items he had bought there. Then we browsed through Walmart like a couple of little old ladies. The last stop: Verlo, the mattress company.

Apparently G had purchased a new mattress and box spring and wanted me to help him with it. We had his van with the rack and ladders on the top and we were going to put the mattress on top of them. Being the only one who could reach the racks I was the one who had to tie everything on. The shop had twine available and G had some bungee cords. I just tied knots where G said and everything looked peachy.

The Verlo guys had said that we shouldn’t take it on the freeway. As we pulled out of the lot I started offering up routes back to G’s house that would be nice and slow.

G: Minimum speed on the freeway is 45 mph, we’ll be fine.

Two miles later…

B to the…: Ah, G, it just fell off.

G looks out both of his mirrors, now 2.5 miles in…

B to the…: Ah, I wasn’t kidding. It fell off.

G, pulling over: I didn’t think you were serious. If I had been watching and it fell off I would have been yelling my head off.

I heard the snap, saw it fly off, saw the semi veer over five feet to avoid it, and watched as it settled on the side of the road. G backed up the half mile down the freeway to the point of incident. He picked up the bungee cords, I picked up the mattress.

With the mattress leaning against the van G tried to reattach the box spring. We untied the twine and configured a new method to keep it down. We had the right hand side of the van done when G called from the left side.

G: B to the…, come over here and tie this.

I walked over to the corner of the van.

B to the…: But there are cars on that side.

G: Just stand close to the van, you’ll be alright.

Dude, fuck that! Do you honestly think I’d stand on the side of the van where semis are passing mere feet away from my feet? I saw the way the turbulence was whipping his shirt and hair around, surely one good blow could knock me off balance and into the oncoming traffic. And I’ve seen those cop videos where they have someone pulled over and another car barrels into the officers. There I am standing next to G’s van one second, the next my face and chest are smeared down the length of the van leaving red streaks and flesh that may or may not be eyeballs hanging off of what used to be the mounting bracket that held the side mirror on. Dude, fuck that!

So after I had finished the left hand side G realized we only tied on the box spring and not the mattress. I had to do it all over again.