2005-04-01
Sealy, God of Mattress
All this longing to go to Higgins reminded me of....
*********************** The Mattress Story ************************
We have a cottage up north which ends up being the final resting ground for all The Old Furniture No One Wants Anymore. This includes beds.
Because this was my grandparent's cottage, who grew up in the Dick Van Dyke era, the only thing that comes close to a bed large enough for two adults -- two adults who like to play footsie now and then without doing so over the 5 foot gap between beds -- is two single beds jammed together with a king size mattress draped over the top.
This mattress is old and feeble, so our friends, D&G, who also love and use the cottage, offered up their Hand Crafted Designer 18 Gazillion Dollar King Size California-Kitchen Mattress because it was too firm for D. A firm mattress draped over two single beds might mean that no one has to sleep in the Valley of BackDeath, so I hella yes accepted. It weighed about 400 lbs, I swear to God as my creator and The One Who Gets Me Out of Situations When I Have to Pee Really Badly.
Getting said mattress up north was a major fucking fiasco which took months. And, this just in. It never "quite" made it up north. Here's why.
First Attempt: My friend Burd borrowed his Dad's truck and we trekked over the D&Gs. The mattress would not fit unless we removed windows or major parts of the truck bed, like all the sheet metal from the driver's side back to the license plate.
Second Attempt: HB and I borrowed another friend's larger, meatier truck with Big! Monster! Wheels! (and we all know what that means about the owner....) but again, that mattress was having none of that "bendy bendy" thing and flipped us off -- by literally flipping onto the muddy driveway. We heaved it BACK into the garage where we let it sulk in the damp darkness for another month. Bitch.
I was beginning to hate the mattress, but dammit, it was free. And firm.
Third final Attempt: HB dusted off his fine "trailer" -- this homemade contraption that looked like it was thrown together from stuff Cletus found under the porch and behind the double-wide -- two feeble wheels barely supporting a plywood flatbed surrounded by 2 foot plywood walls.
I don't know how it ended up that we had two cars, but we did. HB met me at D&G's, we flopped that bastard into the back of the trailer, had a nice dinner and 2 or 3 or 10 drinks, and then started our long journey from Ann Arbor to Detroit to put it in the garage until the next time we went up north.
At least we'd have it in our possession at this point right? Uhm... yeah. That was the plan. This plan looked exquisite on paper. Fool-proof, even. Unless you're us.
I followed HB, keeping an eagle's eye on the mattress, which was draped casually in the trailer, one side hanging over the edge of the plywood wall, because, of course, the mattress would not fit all the way in the trailer because even after months of solitary confinement in D&G's garage, bendy-bendy was still out of the question. This was a mattress on steroids.
"I am SEALY, God of Mattress," it seemed to say.
We crawled through town toward the highway, and the mattress seemed fine. I was very nervous, my hands slippery on the steering wheel, because I had a gut feeling that it was going to pull some evil trick on us to prove its mattress Godliness.
We started to enter the highway, which required driving something slightly faster than the 14mph we'd been doing through town, and as we got on the busy overpass merging into the right lane to get on the freeway ramp, HB gunned it up to 25mph.... and...
Aerodynamics. Happened. I missed that day in Physics class, but I did recall making an innocent blonde-like inquiry about "tying it down" in D&G's driveway before we ventured home, to which HB scoffed disgustedly.
"That bitch weighs a ton. It's not going anywhere."
It took only a small amount of wind under it and suddenly that 600 lb mammoth floats up and out of the trailer like the Forest Gump feather.
*SWOOOOOSH???* (floats up)
*SWOOOOOOOOOSH......* (floats to the left)
FWUMP (lands smack dab in the middle of the go-like-hell lane)
Sealy, God of Mattress, had been dethroned.
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEL !!!
A passing Sherif's van narrowly missed the mattress, going up on two wheels on the shoulder to avoid hitting it. He kept going, but he looked kinda harried as he grabbed his two-way.
At this point we were pulled over on the right shoulder, standing there gaping at the mattress helplessly. We knew we at least had to get it out of the highway, lest it actually KILL someone, and maybe, just maybe, if it wasn't too dirty we could salvag.....
THHHHHHWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWACK!
RIP!
FWACH....
POOF!
silence
Sealy, Once Mighty God of Mattress was unmercifully eviscerated by a large 1968 Cadillac, probably the only nemesis it had. The car went right through the center of it, and now the highway was littered with mattress guts. HB and I just stood there with our mouths hanging open so wide our tennies were getting damp from drool.
The fact that a Sheriff's van had been the first to arrive at the scene of the crime did not go unnoticed by HB, and the fact that he hadn't stopped led us to believe he may have had prisoner's in transport (thank GOD for criminals or we might have been in that very van on our way to TossMySaladBitch City in Jackson ourselves). The Cadillac seemed unscathed, and as a result of the brutal execution, the mattress was now in the left hand lane shoulder where it continued to seep mattress gunk all over the highway. There was nothing more for us to do but get into our respective cars and drive home.
I wish I could say I felt smug satisfaction at the GOM's demise, but I didn't. I was pissed at HB, grieving the loss of a Good Mattress up north, and worried about how I would break this to D&G. So I cried the entire way, in between succumbing to screaming bouts of Tourettes syndrome, directed at HB, the Physicist.
The moral of the story is: anything that goes into a trailer, and ESPECIALLY A MATTRESS, should be tied down. A lot. Don't ask questions -- just tie that bitch down. I don't care WTF it weighs. Tie it with lots and lots of rope. And bungy cords. 20 hundred times. Jesus didn't give us bungy cords because they were fun to snap your brother's thigh with. And no, having your child/sister/mother/grandmother LIE ON TOP of the mattress will not work either. Do not try this or you'll find yourself with a roommate named "Butch" who calls you "Bitch".
Definitely one of those tragedies that makes for a good story, but go ahead and guess who sleeps in the gully on the increasingly mushy, squishy bed up north. Here's a hint:
not.
fucking.
me.
xquzme at sometime today