a chair and a couch

I used to shop in thrift stores on a weekly basis. My sister got me into it, and we would drive as far as an hour away to hit the best places. We’d roll up our sleeves and dig through the racks, ignoring the smells and making each other laugh by putting on ridiculous stuff. We’d mostly buy clothes, with the occasional wall-hanging or incense burner thrown in as well.

In the Spring of 95 I moved into a dumpy little house in D.C. with a bunch of friends. Since I had found the place, I got the coveted first room choice and took the basement. There was a tiny room in the corner (just big enough for a mattress and a pile of dirty laundry) and a little bathroom, but other than that, the basement was a big, square carpeted room that needed to be furnished.

I knew a little thrift store in Northeast D.C. that had great seventies furniture, so I headed over to see what I could scrape up. That day I scored two great finds: a brown corduroy couch with floppy, attached cushions for $12.12, and a round, swiveling, thin-striped cushioned chair with a wood-paneled back for $7.07.

After setting up my drum kit in the corner next to a stereo, I now had the ultimate basement lounge. Almost every weekend we’d have parties, highlighted by our band playing in the basement. The most coveted seats for these performances (often just one extended jam) were on the couch, which had by this point been dubbed "The Low Rider," due to its absence of any support mechanism under the bottom cushions. Sitting on The Low Rider, you hovered about six inches above the floor, and getting up took tremendous effort.

A year later I left to spend the summer working at a performing arts camp in Michigan and stored the chair and the couch in my parents’ garage. They stayed there the following semester while I lived at home and studied Jazz Performance at the local community college.

In the winter I left for Berklee, and had to break up the tandem, electing to bring only the chair. On sleepless nights during my tumultuous first semester, I’d sit in the chair and stare at the Prudential building, swiveling back and forth, listening to music.

The following summer I rented a Uhaul to bring a bunch of old drums and the couch up to Boston from my parents’ house. In what remains to this day as my greatest feat of strength, I single-handedly dragged the couch up four flights of stairs and down the hall to the kitchen/dining room/living room.

When two of my roommates and I moved to the bad side of Mission Hill in the Fall, I brought the couch and the chair. The chair stayed in my room, while the couch sat in the living room, serving as somewhere for my roommate Jeff’s friends to crash, many of whom are now touring and performing all over the world.

A year and another apartment later, Julia and I moved in together and she put her foot down: the chair could stay but the couch had to go. This was fine by me, since it had gotten to be a little embarrassing by this point, like a Steve Miller Band Greatest Hits album or a Corona baja.

Before I moved out of what would be my final group-living situation, I dragged the couch out of our building and flipped it over the railing of our front porch, where it landed awkwardly wedged against a fence. In any other city at any other time of the year, this would be seen as littering or dumping, but in Boston on Moving Day (9/1) it meant one thing: this is up for grabs. It was gone in an hour.

Like an old cat that won’t die but kind of fades into the background, the chair just kept hanging around. When we left Boston it stayed in Julia parents’ garage for a few months, and then surprisingly made the cut and accompanied us to Iowa. It held a prime spot in our living room next to the bookshelves and underneath the wandering jew, where the late afternoon sunlight seemed to hang forever.

Two years later it yet again proved its staying power, avoiding yard-sale status and making the trek back to the East Coast and into a storage facility, where it sat amongst the usual suspects of books, records and drums.

Now married, a few months later we moved to Brooklyn and brought the chair, along with enough furnishings for three apartments, with us. A huge couch that couldn’t fit through the door had to be left on the corner, where I would dump many of our possessions in the middle of the night over the following week. Despite the intense negotiations and accusations that only a move can bring on, once again, the chair was spared.

A year later, the chair made the journey across the great Gowanus Canal to a brownstone in Carroll Gardens. Somehow, within the coming months we decided it was time to let it go. We didn’t even put much thought into the decision, which seems odd now. I think we eventually decided that it was either the chair or Julia’s grandmother’s chaise lounge (a piece of furniture that has since served as little more than a piling place for Julia’s clothes) that had to go, with the chaise lounge winning out via the sentimentality factor.

I gave the chair to my lifelong friend Gabe, who lived with a few people in Park Slope. It joined a mismatched collection of chairs and couches in a common room. Fitting that the thing would live out its twilight years around a large group of people where it could get a lot of attention.

I never really took the time to appreciate the chair’s lifespan until today, when I was prompted by a friend’s blog entry about a chair of his. It’s pretty incredible how many phases of my life that thing saw me through (five apartments, four states, two garages, one storage facility), and how many people from those phases enjoyed it’s swiveling comfort. Best $7.07 I ever spent.