The Airborne Sectional Event
Bad ideas with Brian
It was already dark when we arrived at Chad’s house. Brian backed his trusty red Mazda B2200 pickup into the driveway and we met Chad and his wife, Shelly at the door. This was an exciting day. Chad didn’t need the ratty sectional any longer because Shelly had taste, and they were getting something nice and new like newlyweds tend to do. Our new bachelor pad desperately needed a bigger couch to hide some of the bottle caps and other filth that were already decorating the carpet. And for seating purposes.
We carried the monster out of Chad’s house and struggled to arrange the giant, heavy pieces so that they would all fit in the minuscule truck bed. Brian and I prided ourselves on being fucking great at truck Tetris, and today would be no different.
We finally managed to perch the corner piece upside down, on top of the rest of the piled-up couch and lit up some cigarettes while we admired our handiwork. Chad brought us each a Miller Genuine Draft to celebrate his successfully pawning off the old piece of junk. His beer of choice, not ours.
Now, Brian and I had been friends for a long time at this point, and we had a way of doing things. He came up with the bad ideas, and I thought of the safe or smarter ways that we could execute the bad idea without killing ourselves or getting in too much trouble. Brian was a risk taker, and I was the cautious over-thinker. He was the devil on my left shoulder and I was the angel on his right. We were a good pair of idiots because he kept me from being boring, and I kept him from being dead.
I stood back and took a pull on my Player’s light, eyeballing the heavily laden truck, and thought about how we should fasten down the couch to secure the load. I wondered whether Brian brought any rope or ratchet straps. The old truck’s springs were sagging under the weight, and the couch was sticking out over all sides of the box. It looked more than a little precarious.
Then Shelly opened her stupid mouth.
“Aren’t you guys gonna strap that down? That thing’s gonna fall off as soon as you start driving!”
“Don’t need any,” Brian answered a bit too quickly. Challenge accepted. He stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and hiked up his shorts. They were always falling off his skinny ass. He walked over to the truck, grabbed hold of the couch and shook. The whole truck shifted with each movement, and for a brief moment, the corner piece on top seemed to teeter, but then it settled nicely.
“No, seriously. Are you guys stupid?” Shelly protested.
Shelly didn’t realize that neither of us liked her at all, and this wasn’t helping her cause. In fact, we thought she was pretty much a miserable cow at the best of times.
Brian dug his heels in. “It’ll be totally fine, Shelly. Right, Chad?”
Chad took a swig of his beer, looked cautiously at his wife, and decided that discretion was the better part of valour. “You probably wanna tie it down, Bri.”
“Wh… Chad?.. didn’t you see how solid that stacking job is?” Brian shook the couch pile again.
Now that Shelly had started a battle, I had to side with Brian. It was part of the code. “I think it’ll be fine Shelly. We can always pull over if something seems sketchy.” Always the peacekeeper.
“C’mon, you’re gonna fucking kill someone!” Shelly said stubbornly.
Brian did something surprising then. He relented. Or, he seemed to. He grumbled and reached into the cab of the truck. He rooted around and came out with a single bungee cord. He reached up and hooked one end of the bungee around the upside-down leg of the corner piece. He made a show of pulling the bungee nice and tight and hooked the other end to the truck bed. The corner chair visibly shifted as the bungee was pulled taut.
“There, see? It’s strapped down now. You happy?”
Shelly scoffed and walked back into the house, muttering something about idiots.
We finished our beers with Chad and hit the road. Brian drove, and I repeatedly looked back at our precarious pile of couch. The old Mazda hit 60 then 70 kilometres an hour as we headed down Steveston Highway, but the couch stayed put. Brian was usually a pretty safe driver even when he was doing unsafe things. We pulled onto the on-ramp to the George Massey Tunnel and Brian started accelerating, trying to build up to proper highway speeds. The old four-cylinder struggled with the combined weight of the massive couch and our two bodies, but it slowly gained speed.
We finally hit 80 as Brian pulled out of the tunnel and changed lanes toward our off-ramp. Then the corner chair disappeared.
“Fuck, Brian! Stop the truck, the couch is gone!” I panicked.
Brian didn’t stop, he accelerated. “Are you kidding? I’m not stopping.”
“Bri, what about the couch? What if we caused an accident?”
“That’s why we’re not stopping. I don’t think I see any headlights swerving behind us. We’re fine. We’ll come back for it.” Brian tried to sound sure of himself.
I bit my tongue. Sometimes, there was no convincing Brian when he’d come to a stupid decision, and this seemed like one of those times. I looked back and strained my eyes, but I couldn’t see the corner chair anywhere, and we were easily several hundred meters away at this point. We’d have to turn around at the next overpass and maybe we’d be able to see the couch from the opposite side of the highway. Brian didn’t head for the overpass, he drove us home. I was a ball of stress as we unloaded the remaining pieces of couch. There was a noticeable hole in the centre of the couch as this wasn’t the type of sectional that was designed to be used in separate sections.
We took the back way to the highway and drove slowly toward the location where we suspected the couch disappeared. At first, we couldn’t see it, because we were looking in the wrong direction. We were scanning the shoulder beside the right-hand lane where we’d been driving at the time but with no luck. Then we spotted the corner chair. It was sitting upright, beside the median in the centre of the highway.
I tried to wrap my brain around the physics of it and mostly failed.
The chair had gone airborne off the back of the pickup at 80-plus kilometres an hour from its upside-down position, flipped in the air, travelled over three highway lanes, and landed nicely on its feet beside the median. The chair was completely undamaged. The bottoms of the feet weren’t even particularly scuffed from landing on the asphalt at highway speeds. It didn’t make sense, and we couldn’t believe our luck. We bundled the chair into the back of the truck like we stole it, still refused to strap it down, and bombed home as fast as we could before the cops could show up to give us some kind of ticket.
