Wading in the Velvet Sea

My history with furniture is spotty, at best. Not so much a “love/hate” relationship so much as I hated that I couldn’t buy furniture I loved. I didn’t spend the last 29 years sitting on egg-crates (though that would have been an improvement on a few pieces over the years, let me tell you), mind you. I just never actually bought a new piece of furniture. Ever. Either my folks hooked me up with a hand-me-down (totally nice of ‘em) or hooked me up with someone selling pieces en masse.

In college, I had this really old, really comfy couch that had suffered the slings and arrows of a decade of me and my brother re-eancting scenes from “Superman” and “All-American Wrestling”. Clark Kent and Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka impressions left their mark on this piece of furniture. In the dorm, it functioned as the place where people played Super Techmo Bowl on the old-school Nintendo system. Sat right under the stuffed ram’s head. Don’t ask.

By my senior year, I had a single, and the couch soon became known as the “Couch of Iniquity”. I’d love to say I had something to do with this name change, but somehow, I didn’t. Most of the undergraduates at Harvard seemed to get some on that couch, and yet I was hardly ever involved. One morning I woke up to find a half-naked girl sleeping there. No idea how she got there. And when I woke her up and heard her scream, I learned she had no idea how she got there either. (Turns out she lived one floor above me, went to the bathroom while completely wasted, and somehow managed to walk out of her room, down a flight of stairs, and into mine on a weird form of auto-pilot. Ah, college.)

Gave the couch to a friend for the summer after I graduated. After all, I was moving home since my lazy ass hadn’t bothered to look for a job. Classy. Anywho, in a tale that resembles the lead story of a Texan newcast, the couch was lost in a flood. Seriously. Big ol’ monsoon ripped through Boston and flooded the basement in which the Couch of Inquity was stored. Thus endeth a Great Age of Man.

In my first apartment, I couldn’t even really have furniture. My apartment consisted of one room without closets inside a large house. At any given time there were 5-8 strangers in similar situations. So, just me in a room with a lock with people that came and went with a frequency that went past “alarming” into “Jesus, I need to break this lease” fairly quickly. Somehow I managed to wedge in yet another inherited couch (which lost a leg after it fell off my dad’s car on Route 93, aaah, more good memories) and a futon. Which my mother paid for. Since I had only recently gotten a job. Again, an a-hole am I.

Got out of that situation with my life and that futon intact, albeit barely. As I’ve mentioned before, I once came home to have one of the housemates ask me if the clothes in the storage closet were mine. When I said yes, he replied, “Cool…I was trying on some of your jeans, and they fit really well…could I borrow them sometime?” The phrase “off the map” was invented for situations such as this. To this day that guy haunts my dreams.

The next place featured a three bedroom apartment out in Arlington. Once again, Mom to the rescue. Buys me a bed and hooks me up with a friend who’s looking to sell her living room off. We pay into this price, and soon have a living room full of furniture. Part of this set included THE MOST COMFORTABLE RECLINER IN HISTORY. When The Commander and I had finished taking turns sitting in it, we both agreed that, in case of fire, that chair would be the first thing we would save.

The set also featured a coffee table, two end tables, and a matching chair/sofa set. Now, I don’t want to be cruel, but this set smelled like grandmothers. Looked like something your grandmother would own, too. If she were insane. I mean, it wasn’t comfortable, but at least it was ugly. Then again, when you get the whole kit and caboodle for $200 and you’re 22, well, you know what they say about the intrinsic relationship between beggars and choosers. We were happy to have the space filled up, and we were even happier to never sit on it. (The picture to the right shows, quite accurately, what this couch looked like, assuming we had dipped the top half of it into a vat of Kool-Aid.)

Added to this mishmash was a loveseat. A loveseat that somehow weighed less than my femur. Not that I pulled out my femur to put both on a scale. Stop being so literal. Still. To get the loveseat, I had to go to a UHAUL, which meant I spent more to drive the loveseat to my apartment than I did for the actual loveseat. And the lesson, as always, is that I’m an idiot. So, a chair that doesn’t match the love seat that doesn’t match the futon and none of them match that sofa/chair which sadly both match the wall treatments in Hell. Welcome to a young male twenty-something’s apartment. The women are nodding and rolling their eyes, and the frat guys are drooling and wondering how they can break themselves off a piece of this living room. Or a piece of the nodding women. Either one.

There were minor tweaks in the ensuing years, but nothing too noteworthy. Basically, that brings us up to date in terms of my furniture world. When The Girl and I decided to move in together, we figured out who had what, and decided that people might actually want to NOT sit on the floor in our impending living room and therefore, furniture might be a decent notion. All the cool kids are doing it, you know. We initially thought we could find a good deal on Craigslist, but the only thing scary than the Craigslist personal ads (“I am so effin’ lonely---M29”) are the sofa ads. Good. Gracious. Right around the zebra-print chaise we gave up. Some of the more horrific fabrics and stains of unknown origin you’ll ever come across can be found here. It’s like a snuff film for furniture.

So, buying new became the option, and while I’ve been saving up (I’ve come a long way from graduating from college having forgotten to look for employment), I hardly had enough in the ol’ sock drawer to go down to Jordan’s Furniture and say, “Gimmee.” Though that would be amusing. It couldn’t help but throw off a furniture salesman if you answered every question as, “Gimmee.” I’d wager 8 utterations would be enough to send him or her running for their life. Anywho, we found a deal, did the math, and, with a little housewarming present from Dad, walked out with a newly purchased set.

Weirdest part about the whole thing was walking to buy some wine afterwards, and thinking, “Hrm. I should feel different now. But I don’t.” I mean, it’s a decently big step. Not to assign something as trivial as a living-room set to one’s station in life, but for better or worse, it does mark an improvement over the current “using the same futon stand as 1999” situation I currently have going on. And I guess it’s good I am not a shopaholic, because it’s disgustingly easy to spend an obscene amount of money in the most mundane way possible. The card doesn’t really care if you’re swiping $12 or $1200, I suppose. I felt like Alec Baldwin in “State and Main”: “Well, that happened.” About all, really.

Next step: paint buying. Then, priming and painting the place. Then, furniture installation. Then, I start wearing my pants around my nipples and complain about all the racket these young whippersnappers listen to today on their MTV. It’s the natural course of things. This is the road I’ve chosen.

And it’s paved with coordinated linens.