The Moving Sale (or How I Finally Found the Cursed Anal Beads)
Part I: The Beads
When I turned 25 I had a quarter life crisis. 9 months prior, my boyfriend of 3 years unceremoniously dumped me for what were, in retrospect, extremely valid reasons related to my partying and general lack of direction in life. Devastated, I went on a unfortunate 9-month bender that produced both some of the funniest moments of my 35 years of existence, but also some pretty low valleys far too dark to post on what I’ve decided will be a comedy publication. Needless to say, one day when I was drunkenly skulking in the bushes across my from ex’s apartment near Tomkins Square Park, I had a sobering “what the FUCK are you doing?” moment of clarity and decided it was time to get my shit together.
I quit my crappy receptionist job at the hedge fund (and my gigs at the speed dating and bar trivia companies), and enrolled in a rigorous graduate school program after a few months of intense prep. I said goodbye to my old roommates and our party apartment in Soho, and all its mice, rats, ants, centipedes, and the black mold thingy that lived in the ceiling tiles in my closet and gave me some pretty fun night terrors (or as I like to think of them: free customized horror films). A month or so prior to the start of the academic year, I moved into a lovely, sun-drenched 2 bedroom in a residential part of Astoria with an awesome chick I met I off craigslist (yes, my lockjaw blowjob roommate).
I didn’t own any anything of value at this stage in my life and I was also broke, so I did what any clearly non-mentally ill woman would do: I signed up for a Comenity Bank credit card using outdated income statements, walked into the Columbus Circle West Elm, and purchased every single item in one of their staged living rooms and bedrooms. The entire transaction took less than 15 minutes from start to finish, though it did cost me $8,500.
The sales associate was dumbfounded when I told her I wanted to buy everything, but I really couldn’t be bothered to personally curate a respectable adult-domicile from scratch. As a self-admitted trash person, I wouldn’t even know where to start and just thinking about it stressed me out. When the furnishings finally arrived, I carefully moved everything in line with the pictures I snapped from the store. Afterwards, I spent a good hour just soaking it all in. It truly looked like a serial killer lived there. It was perfect.
Shortly after I moved in, I petitioned my ex-boyfriend for reconsideration of our relationship. After all, I was better now. I was doing well in school, and finally had a “career path.” I also now lived in a West Elm showroom. Not only did I own furnishings that had known no other master but me, I had a sofa and dining table that had aristocratic white people names like “the Dalton” and “Lilia.” Most importantly, however, I had significantly cut back on my drinking and partying. I recall him being visibly impressed when I mentioned that I hadn’t drank a coldbuster (a cocktail of vodka, seltzer, and a packet of emergen-C that I used to drink whenever I felt under the weather) since we broke up.
I made my case for getting back together and he calmly responded “alright.” I’m not sure whether I had convinced him that I had changed, or whether he was just bored/lonely/missed me, but whatever the reason, I just took the W and did not ask why.
One weekend after we got back together, I found myself cleaning out my closet. While rummaging through one of the clothing piles, I unearthed a relic from my bygone heavy partying days: an unopened package of hot pink anal beads. I vaguely recalled going to a Rebel Bingo event a few years prior and winning them as a prize. I must have taken them home and, in a molly-fueled haze, chucked them in the back of my closet.
Overcome by the sheer whimsy of them, and I snapped a photo of the beads and texted it to my boyfriend with the question: “Thursday? ; ) ” It was kind of a joke — just a random/funny thing to do for the sake of doing it, but I also felt an irrational need to actually use them. Growing up as a lowly poor fundamentally shaped who I am as a person, and I simply cannot resist a free item or experience. I used to wait tables at an Italian joint in college and whenever someone would order a pizza and not finish it, I’d take home any slices that were in the “safety zone” (i.e., bookended by other slices that had not been eaten). I love free things so much that if you put a half loaded revolver on a table and left a sign that said “free bullets” in front of it, I would take the gun and spin the cylinder, put the barrel to my temple, and play at least one round of Russian roulette just to feel like I took advantage of the deal. This is why I felt compelled to stick the beads up my butt at least once.
Thursday eventually came and it was finally time to make good on my sex promise.
While my boyfriend was in the shower, I spent a good 10 minutes just trying to open the packaging. The first red flag (which I ignored) was that the beads had no brand name / company associated with them. The generic package just had big letters that said “ANAL BEADS” and then (second red flag) a disclaimer that said “Warning: for novelty use only.”
That disclaimer sent me absolutely spiraling. For novelty use only? Isn’t everything you stick up your ass a novelty? What could it mean? Were these just joke beads? The Groucho Marx glasses of sex toys? Were they made out of asbestos? If I used them, would I suddenly find myself starring as the lead plaintiff on a schlocky mass tort commercial for Butt Mesothelioma (the rarest and most lethal of mesotheliomas)? Were they cursed by the gypsy grandpa from Stephen King’s “Thinner” so that they would make my butthole looser and looser until my entire body simply collapsed into my sphincter and I imploded into myself? And if so, where does one go when they implode into their own prolapsed asshole? Some liminal space between dimensions? Ohio? These were the questions that raced through my mind as I struggled to release the beads from their laminate plastic prison.
I finally pried the beads free from the packaging and was immediately struck by the noxious synthetic plastic smell. My only thought was “I CANNOT stick these up my ass.” I know it seems a little prissy to not want to shove a piece of plastic up your anus because it smells bad, but my god, these things would have made the inside of my colon seem like the Gucci Bloom commercial where Florence Welch and Anjelica Houston are dancing around a secret garden like faeries.
They were neon pink — basically the same otherworldly color as the sauce you get with a bad take-out order of sweet and sour chicken, which everyone knows was the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space” about the menacing meteorite goo. As I examined them further, I was shocked at the absolute lack of craftsmanship. These anal beads were the sex toy equivalent of the glass-shelf prizes at Chuck-E Cheese. They were basically a 10-ticket spider ring except you were expected to shove it up your lubed-up adult ass instead of jam it on your greasy pizza child finger.
Each of the spheres was so poorly constructed that they all had a jagged plastic seam where the two halves were molded together. The seam became more serrated as the beads grew in size, and the largest bead — the gigabead — had three giant PVC snags designed to absolutely annihilate someone’s sphincter.
When I heard my boyfriend finally turn the shower water off, I started to panic about actually using the beads. These were no ordinary sex toy. They were an instrument of torture from a Cennobite’s boudoir, transported here after someone accidentally unlocked the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser. I alone knew their true nature, but to the ignorant man in my shower, they just radiated pure sex. How could I deny him such eros after planting the idea in his head? To re-trade at this point seemed cruel, like some demented version of a fake-ball throw to a golden retriever. I couldn’t back out now, so I convinced myself that everything would be fine with some good lube.
In an effort to keep this story G-rated, I’ll omit the real sex details but naturally we get to the point in the night where he’s like “WHERE ARE THE BEADS!?” and I had to break them out and lube them up, jagged edges and all. In all seriousness, the weird excess plastic bits actually didn’t seem like a huge deal to me when I was handling the beads, but let me tell you: the rough seam was magnified 100x when they were being inserted through the portal to my body. To make a long story short, we got halfway into the fourth bead before the jagged little seam absolutely destroyed my butthole, at which point I snapped, said “ok i’m done” and then violently pulled them out like a parachute ripcord — an act which I would include on my “top 10 life mistakes to date” list without hesitation.
No exaggeration, but I couldn’t shit right for a week after this. Anyone that has ever received a small cut or scratch on an action zone like the corner of their mouth, a knuckle, or elbow knows it’s painful as hell. To this day I cannot look at a photo of the Onix pokemon without having a full blown trauma response from the beads.
I spent the entire next week in a funk. How could such a shoddy product be made? What cruel, late-stage capitalist god allowed it? And more importantly, why was I fucking dumb enough to papercut my own asshole?
At this point, I had not yet met the therapist who would eventually give me with the tools necessary to train myself out of toxic thinking patterns not grounded in reality. So, in response to this particular incident, I spent several hours trapped in a recurring hate-fueled daydream envisioning the dystopian factory that pumped out these demonic sex beads by the thousands. I imagined small children being forced by masked bureaucrats to shave off the excess plastic ridging on the bead seams with a small pairing knife because their slender fingers were more suited to the task than the giant steel automatons. I saw a small girl faint just as my batch arrived to her tiny work station. Before her limp body could be replaced by an identical (but conscious) child, the beads were whisked away for final assembly without further quality control.
I thought that maybe if I were to melt the beads down, I’d find some tiny scroll suspended in the gigabead with the coordinates to the factory and instructions on how to rescue the tiny labor force trapped inside. But instead I snapped out of it like I always did, washed them off and threw them into the back of my dresser where they lay — forgotten by time — for exactly 2 years and 8 months.
Part II: The Moving Sale
Fast forward to fall of 2014. I graduated and had a job lined up to start in November. A few months earlier, my roommate sadly informed me that she was done with the city and intended to move back to her native Baltimore. When I told my boyfriend she was leaving, he politely suggested that I move into his apartment. Without much thought, I said yes (because it seemed like what I should say) and then began the painstaking process of moving out of the apartment I had grown to love more than anywhere else I have ever lived in my life.
You basically have four options on how to handle your worldly possessions during a move: 1. bring them with you, 2. put them in storage, 3. sell them for cash, and 4. offer them to the void (donate or trash them).
I was moving into a fully furnished 600 sq. ft. apartment which severely limited what I could take with me. Even if I wanted to bring my serial killer furniture, it wouldn’t particularly fit in my boyfriend’s apartment (both spatially and stylistically). I therefore endeavored to sell what I could in the month before moving, give away anything I couldn’t sell, and then lug the dregs out to the curb where it would surely disappear into the abyss within a few hours.
1 Month Before Move Out Date - Slow But Steady Progress
Over the course of three days, I listed all of my big ticket items on craigslist at reasonable prices. I received serious inquiries, but also a crazy amount of scam emails and calls. It is truly amazing the lengths people will go to try to scam you out of a $400 bar cart. Instead of disappointing me, these scammers reaffirmed my faith in humanity. I actually got phone calls about the furniture from people who clearly currently lived in Africa. Their crackled, disjointed voices sounded like they were phoning from 10 years in the past, as if they could only make contact with the present when a rare comet passed and chose that opportunity to scam on craigslist instead of contact loved ones for help. It was beautiful, and I always became a little maudlin when I had to break it to them them I wasn’t willing to ship my furniture overseas in exchange for a counterfeit money order.
I sold the West Elm stuff fairly quickly to normie buyers without much drama. But with each piece of furniture sold, I started getting more and more anxious about moving in with my boyfriend. I had never cohabited with a romantic partner before, and my relationship had been, until this point, fairly casual. I started getting cold feet thinking about everything that could go wrong, and the unshakeable feeling of impending doom grew the emptier my apartment became.
1 Week Before Move Out Date - Manageable Chaos
At this point, I had successfully sold all of the large furniture items except a small baroque dresser I used to store my lingerie. It was a favorite of mine, and I was unwilling to part with it for less than $200. A little old latina lady came to look at it and offered me $100 while gushing how it’d be perfect for her 2 y.o. grandaughter’s new bedroom. I told her I’d give her a call if I couldn’t sell it in the next few days.
As my CL sales died down, I spent more time and more time reflecting on the move. I admit, I am not the easiest person to live with. I am slightly messy. I play disturbing films as background noise while I do menial work. I put completely empty containers back into the fridge and cabinets so it tricks you into thinking you still have some left when you don’t actually have anything left. And last but not least, I am an absolute nightmare when I’m not sober. I once woke my roommate up at 4:00 a.m. by shaking her and saying “Wake up! there’s an INTRUDER in the house!” But by “intruder” I meant cockroach, and by “house” I meant our George Foreman grill where I was drunkenly trying to make a panini after getting back from a house party in Brighton Beach.
While my partner was certainly not blind to my flaws, he had never been exposed to them more than 2-3x times a week and I couldn’t help but think it would be too much for him to handle, he’d dump me, and then I’d find myself right back at that West Elm manic-buying a coffee table named “Hawthorn.”
48 Hours Before Move Out Date - Absolute Bedlam
In an panicked effort to move the remaining inventory before my drop-dead date, I edited the craigslist ad to read “EVERYTHING MUST GO - BEST OFFERS.” The post now oozed desperation, attracting the attention of molepeople from all over the city. This was probably a bad move in retrospect, but whenever I received a response to the ad, I texted people my address and simply told them to show up between the hours of 2 and 8 p.m. This caused crowds of random people to descend on my apartment like a swarm of rabid cicadas. It was really something else to watch what remained of my West Elm catalogue living room be slowly dismantled and pillaged by hoards of strangers. The only thing I can say is that the final days of my “moving sale” made the last scenes of Aronofsky’s “Mother!” seem tame in comparison.
In the biggest power play ever, a middle-aged man offered me $100 for my computer desk chair via text, but when he arrived, he lowered that offer to $20 after wheeling it ALL over my apartment while mumbling “hmm…hmmm…it not go smooth” in a mysterious accent. We eventually settled on $40, but before he tendered me the cash, he asked if he could my bathroom. Of course I said yes thinking the guy just had to take a quick piss because 1. I’m not an asshole and 2. I almost died from a very resilient UTI that spread to my kidneys (that I nicknamed Beyonce, which my doctor did NOT find amusing) during a very short ho phase in my life so I’m sensitive to bladder-matters. But instead, this man absolutely BLASTED my toilet with exotic food shits before emerging to pay me for the chair in wet crumpled $1s and $5s. As he slowly dragged the chair out of my apartment, he briefly paused in the doorway before muttering something about whether I still had a toaster. I said no, which was a lie.
Just when I was reaching my pain threshold with the craigslist mutants, I got an email from some dude that just moved in on my block. He and his college buddy had just moved to the city from Minnesota, and they were in need of basically everything. My roommate and I decided to use these two Minnesota bros to liquidate anything and everything remaining in our apartment so that we didn’t have to lug it down the stairs and put it on the curb. We gave them our plates, utensils, plunger, toilet brush, pots, pans, bedding (gross!), shelves, clothes hangers, whatever. One of the guys asked about the dresser and I mentioned I had promised to sell it to a grandma for $100. He balked at the price, but something about these two dudes just resonated with me so I told him to just take it, much to his delight. Once these boys had cleaned us out, all that was left to do was collect my remaining personal belongings, say goodbye to my roommate, and leave.
24 Hours Before Move Out Date: Just Grief
And just like that, my entire existence was once again reduced to 5 large black trash bags — exactly what I had when I moved with three years earlier.
I know everyone says “moving is traumatic” but goddamn there is something so depressing about the final days of a big move. You get rid of a bunch of shit you know you don’t need anymore, but can’t shake that nagging feeling that the stuff is somehow important, either practically or sentimentally, and that you’re making a grave mistake by letting it go. Then you feel like an idiot for caring about a thing because it’s just a thing, and you’re more evolved than that. Then you stand in a big empty space, and you see all the dust and dirt and grime that clearly always had been there, and you feel absolutely disgusting for living amongst it all of these years.
Your few meaningful possessions are thrust into bags and boxes, and all of a sudden it’s just you and the roving tumbleweeds of under-the-couch trash that you always meant to clean but never did. And you look at your stripped-down home and realize it’s just not a home any more, it’s just another place in time. Then you look at your wire pile (just a bunch of random cords sitting in the corner that you have no clue what they’re for but you KNOW you need them) and you say “ha ha, looks like it’s just you and me, bud!” And then your old roommate comes in and says, “oh, my cords!” and takes your pile away.
And then you’re all alone.
D-Day
The New York City housing equivalent of the aurora-borealis is what I like to call “the contemporaneous exchange.” This where your legal move-out date is the last day of the month at 11:59 p.m. (ET), and your shitty landlords signed a lease with a new tenant with a move in date of 12:00 a.m. the next day. I’m not sure it happens outside of poor circles in NYC, but what often occurs is that the moving tenant finally gets their remaining shit out at the very last minute while the new tenant simultaneously starts to move their shit in, because they also had to be out of THEIR shitty apartment at 11:59 p.m. (ET). It is wild, and should not happen at all since landlords are typically required to professionally clean and paint each apartment before re-renting. But this is NYC and people would live in a hollowed-out whale carcass here if the price was right and the neighborhood was cool.
And so, our replacements — a couple in their late 20s — waited patiently to drag their black garbage bags into the apartment while my roommate and I dragged our black garbage bags out of the apartment. Once outside, I hugged my roommate for the final time. She had become one of my closest friends over the last 3 years. Mid-embrace, I laughingly apologized about the roach incident, causing her to tear up which in turn caused me to straight up cry like a little bitch. It was the end of an era for both of us, and I still miss her, though we still keep in touch.
When I got to my boyfriend’s apartment, I passed out and slept for 15 hours. When I woke up, the place seemed as foreign as it did the first night I slept over so many years before. Nothing was mine, and I missed my neighborhood, my roommate, my local dive bar, and the homeless guy named Coach that would ask for smiles on the N/Q train. I had a bad case of the post-move doldrums, and the only thing that made me feel even marginally better was eating onion rings while watching a “To Catch a Predator” marathon. Later that evening, however, I got a random text from what I realized was one of the Minnesota dudes. It was just the following photo with no accompanying message:
I cracked up as soon as I saw the pic. I had totally forgotten about the demonic anal beads entirely. In fact, I hadn’t seen them since the fateful night I threw them into that dresser in a fit of rage. The picture made clear that they somehow fell out of the dresser drawer and got stuck in the frame, which 100% explains why I could never find them in nearly 3 years. I’m ashamed to admit that I actually thought my roommate’s dad stole them when he visited. The only other reasonable explanation for their disappearance would be that they got raptured to sex toy heaven, which I know couldn’t have been the case because these beads were manufactured in, and belonged to, hell.
That guy’s text sucked like 80% of the depression out of my body. I immediately texted back, he responded, and I screenshotted the exchange for posterity. We never spoke again.
Part III: Epilogue
I was never a true believer in the saying “everything happens for a reason” until that day. I still think about how easily I could have sold the dresser to the latina grandma for her granddaughter’s room. I also like to think my random act of kindness with the Minnesota dudes saved a life: imagine rushing your 2-year old to the ER because she went full sword-swallower on some toxic craigslist anal beads when no one was looking. Deep down, I know I prevented that from happening and that makes me feel like a good person. And, who knows, maybe someday that little girl will grow up to be the next Sarah Connor or Dolly Parton — two equally important women in American history.
As always, congrats if you read this far.
This was tremendous. I laughed so hard throughout. I'll never look at Onyx the same way