Originally published in Apartamento magazine issue #34
I rented a 10-foot U-Haul to move to a tiny studio with a shared kitchen in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn in 2022. The apartment was $1,410 per month and about the size of the inside of the truck. I had to pay my deposit and first month’s rent in cash, which I extracted, sweating, from a constellation of ATMs in Trinidadian restaurants, because all my money still sat in a small credit union in New Mexico, where I grew up. It was OK, though. A few months prior, I had received an email telling me I was being kicked out of the house where I had just taken over a room because the owners were selling it for $1.5 million. I was only happy to sign a new, year-long lease, seeing as it was my ninth rental home in four years. And this place was right around the corner from not only a convenient subway stop, but a grocery store with a reliably wide variety of expensive, misted herbs.
Did you know that, in 1869, John Wesley Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers explored the last great unknown within the continental US? My U-Haul told me that on the side of its cargo box, underneath an illustration of three men in a wooden canoe slicing through rough canyon waters. At the top of the decal was the word WYOMING. In 1988, U-Haul started plastering SuperGraphics on its cargo boxes, each one depicting some icon related to a US state or Canadian territory; since the company’s 1997 rebrand campaign, ‘Venture Across America’, the decals have advertised more obscure fun facts about the places, the illustrations sometimes charmingly dissonant with the locations’ public personas. ‘We could sell this space to corporate America, but U-Haul believes we must give something back to the communities we serve’, the website copy reads. ‘To this end we say, “Thank you, North America, for the mysteries you have revealed to us”’.
I wasn’t thrilled with the Wyoming truck, which lacked the charming flora and fauna of so many others: Tennessee’s red panda, or North Carolina’s Venus flytrap. But it wasn’t too bad according to my long-developed taxonomy. In college, I lived near a Stop & Shop that shared a parking lot with the local U-Haul rental facility. I would walk by the idle vehicles—so much like sleeping horses in a barn—and see one with the New Mexico decal: a chartreuse alien lurching out of the frame, a UFO downed on a desert landscape in the background. Roswell, the site of an alleged Air Force cover-up of an alien visitation in 1947, is one of the few things people bring up about my home state. But if the vast majority of facts about my past were always going to be flattened into two-dimensional associations by my interlocutors, this truck did the same thing, gracefully. The alien shone in the drab lot. I looked forward to seeing it while I aged, with each second, away from the place it depicted. That was me, that decorated box. A satisfying placeholder, parked in one place.