I've carried many things with me through various phases of my life, but I finally bade farewell today to one of the biggest. It's an ugly-ass blue plaid couch that my mom bought me back in the fall of 1990 after I moved into an apartment with my buddy Bryan. I'm guessing it was a combination birthday/housewarming present and it probably cost a couple hundred bucks from Sears. The apartment didn't exactly have wide stairwells, so we had to hoist the couch up through the living room window. Back then, I spent hours on that couch watching Bruins games, the first season of The Real World, The Simpsons, Cheers and whatever the hell else was on TV.
I lived in that shithole on Butman Street in Beverly for a year until the lease expired and I moved in with my girlfriend, and of course brought the couch with me to our apartment on Essex Street. We were there for about nine months and then moved across town to the very house I'm sitting in right now, renting the downstairs apartment. About 15 months later, we broke up and I moved to Middleton, where I rented a room in a house. While many of my other possessions (comic books and other stuff stored in the basement) stayed here, the couch came with me.
That place sucked and I was pretty depressed about my existence in general for nine months until I moved back to Beverly to an apartment downtown on Essex Street with three female friends of mine. Even though the heat didn't work in the winter and the upstairs and downstairs neighbors were annoying and/or psychotic, it was dirt cheap and there was a fair amount of room. The women all got married and moved out, but two buddies of mine moved in. My roommate John had this habit of sleeping on my couch every night instead of in his own bed; we eventually discovered his room looked like a bomb had gone off, with clothes and crap everywhere, so he chose not to sleep in it most nights. Eventually the couch started to smell like his cologne. When I finally moved out in the spring of '96, my other roomie Eric and I dubbed it Operation Couch Liberation.
I got my own apartment in Salem for a year. It was convenient for work but nothing else, and the basement aspect was kind of depressing. But the worst part was having to pay for all the bills on my own instead of being able to split them with roommates. I moved back to Beverly with my buddies Mike and Roger, sharing half a house. That place was terrific and we had many raucous parties there, no doubt to the consternation of our neighbors. Not too long after I moved in there, I met my future wife and in the fall of '99, we got engaged and moved in together on Lovett Street, near the ocean. It was a nice apartment and I figured we'd be there for a few years after we got married in 2000, but then we ended up buying this house on Roosevelt Avenue with Deb's mom just three months after our wedding.
Deb never liked the look of the couch (can't really blame her on that count) and got different couch covers to hide the plaidiosity of the thing. But it was a fixture in our living room for the last 12 years. We both spent plenty of time on it, watching TV, snuggling with our kids, finding Cheerios in the couch cushions. We finally bought a new couch earlier this year and moved the old one to the sun room, where we have another TV. Unfortunately when we were putting the legs back on it, the threads on one were totally stripped, making it impossible to screw the leg back in. We could stand the couch on it, but if you moved in the wrong direction, it would slip out. The girls didn't care and would hang out on the couch, but its days were numbered. We dragged it out to the street this week and I sadly watched it get eaten by a trash truck this morning.
I'm not trying to get overly sentimental about a friggin' couch, but it had traveled with me for 22 years and through many phases of my adult life. Farewell, you magnificent bastard.
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