Chile Verde

About a month ago I called in one of those big friendship defining favors: I asked MM to pick me up at the Los Angeles airport after my trip to Toronto. My original ride home had flaked and I either needed a shuttle or a ride so I called MM and he said he'd pick me up. Excellent.

As happens with these types of friend favors, they are locked away and stored until the friend needs an equally burdensome favor. MM called in his favor this weekend: he needed me and my truck to pick up a sofa his cousing was gettting rid of and bring it to his storage unit. The sofa was in San Fernando, about an hour's drive from my house, 40 mile from MM's. I thought to myself, "it had better be a pretty damned good sofa to drive 80 miles just to store it".

So we met Saturday afternoon and headed to the barrio of San Fernando. When driving down his cousin's street we even saw one of those cholos who wears knee-high socks with thigh-length plaid shorts and a low sitting Raiders cap. It was the land of Monte Carlos, mariachi and, yep, you guessed it, velour furniture.

We arrived at his cousins to find the sofa outside, a little wet, and covered in debris. To top it off, it was a dark green, velvety/veloury beast of a sofa. It probably came with a free velvet Madonna wall hanging and matching rosary when originally purchased. Still, we were there and we were taking it to storage for MM. I dubbed it the giant chile verde, it was loaded, and we headed out.

After a stop for some BBQ we made it to the storage unit. While I worried about how many dead bosies were hidden in the facility, MM pulled out an old scrap of paper with some numbers on it and I punched the code into the security gate of the storage facility. It didn't work. We tried every variation of the code to no avail. MM considered jumping the gate, only to notice the security code was needed to exit as well. MM called his sister, who shares the unit, to try to get the code. Of course, she didn't answer. Eventually, we left and decided I would leave the sofa in my truck until he got the code. So I've had this giant, green, velour monstrosity in the back of my truck all weekend. In fact, it's sitting in front of my office as I type this. As you can see, it looks like what you'd imagine your lawyer to be driving around in on a Tuesday morning:

We're taking it to the storage unit after work tonight. If the code doesn't work I'm just going to go park in the local barrio and let someone steal it.

At least I know where my next airport pick up is coming from.