The Escape From New York

Originally Here on Substack.

My family and I made it out of New York City and into Texas. 

Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

We started planning in August of 2022. 

We had a house and a buyer in November, 2022

We moved into the house in Texas in April, 2023.

You may be wondering: What the Hell took so long? 

Hell, I expected to be in Texas in December. I planned where to put the Christmas tree: maybe next to the fireplace? Yes, an actual fireplace. No, I don’t know why there are fireplaces in Texas … or at least I didn’t until I saw the weather fluctuations. Apparently, the seasons are Summer, Spring, and Deep Freeze.

But, the New York Department of Buildings declared that we didn’t have a Certificate of occupancy for the house in Queens. And we hadn’t had one for 30 years.

Apparently, we had some work done on the house in the 90s, and the people involved didn’t close out the permits.

In every other state in existence, this would lead to an automatic closing after a while.

But New York City, though, that’s an OPPORTUNITY. An opportunity for MONEY. So the permits become “dead,” but not "closed." The permits have to be reopened, THEN closed.

Do not ask how much money they demanded. We basically had to bet against the “profits” of moving to Texas versus the money New York City wanted. And they needed the money to get things approved… WITHIN 3-6 MONTHS.

Then we needed an expeditor … my father assumed that meant “fixer” who knew who to bribe.

Oh, yes, and since our house in Texas was “new construction” the builder wanted us to close in a timely fashion. And we thought we’d be closing in December. He started getting anxious in January, and we weren’t much better. Because there’s only so long he can hold onto a house, even with a down payment on it.

But it turns out that the NYC Department of Buildings wasn’t even holding us up. The expeditor did her job…

Because THEN there was the bank. Not OUR bank, no. Our bank was fine. They had nothing to do with it—they came later. We were taking money from the sale of our house and using it to buy in Texas. Reasonable, right?

It’s not reasonable when the buyer’s bank says “This will be approved in 45-90 days” in mid-November … and said bank DOES NOT SHOW UP with an appraiser until day 95, in mid-February.

So even without the Department of Building nonsense, this became a race to see exactly how screwed we were. Every conversation with our real estate agent became Lucy with the football.

Meanwhile, New York became more dangerous all around us. We have a friend north of us who was stalked, even assaulted, by a neighbor who is suffering from dementia, and no one to babysit him. We had friends East of us on the Island who had a neighbor pounding on their apartment door while holding a large kitchen knife. He was off his meds, and lived down the hall.

Our neighborhood? Between the schmucks baking in their cars all night, the screaming fights in the middle of the street, and the frequency of the cop cars blazing with lights and sirens every day…

So, yeah. Not fun.

And the apartment complex one block over from us? It was being turned into a homeless shelter. A really big homeless shelter.

Then my father died in the middle of all this.

Two days before the Saturday funeral, the buyers said “Hey! The loan has been approved. We want you out of the house on Monday. This Monday.”

Yes, really.

Our real estate lawyer told them politely that this was an unreasonable expectation, and to bugger off.

The weekend after his funeral was FantaSci. I was invited to apply to FantaSci by a Mister David Cleric when I was at FenCon last year… 

Then Mister Cleric died, before the con.

My schedule became

• March 18: Funeral for my father
• March 20: My Birthday! Yay! I’m 42! Fun!
• March 22: Fly to Texas for a walkthrough of the house in the morning. I’m scheduled to fly back that evening. (Thanks to an incompetent cab driver, we missed the first flight, which made us late for the walk-through, which made us miss the second flight. So I fell asleep on Moira Greyland’s couch, and flew back to New York on the 23rd.)
• Marc 23: Fly to NYC 
• March 24: Fly down to FantaSci.
• March 25: The movers arrive in the morning. They’re supposed to arrive on the 26th. My family who are in New York cannot track these idiots, who proceed to trash the house and literally pack garbage into boxes.
• March 26: I fly back from FantaSci in the afternoon. I discover the movers won’t / cannot move OR disassemble the two dozen bookcases in our basement library. Within a few hours of my arrival, they upped and disappeared, leaving us with a lot of stuff they didn’t take and they were supposed to. We spent the night in a motel.
• March 27: Part 1. We’re trying to clean the house as best we can. We had a lot of stuff thrown out, and a lot of stuff thrown into a POD. (We were going to pack a POD with our books. But the books were too heavy for the POD truck … we had the movers take the books. We were going to tell the POD people to stuff it. We ended up throwing everything remaining into the POD and ran for it).
• March 27: Part two. We were going to close in the morning, be on the road. But the buyers wanted it in the afternoon. (Funny, they wanted to be in the house so damn fast….) They try to extort money from us because “We didn’t get rid of the bookcases.” Miracles happened. Long story.
• March 28: My wife and I are on the road. My 77 year old mother and my sister decide to fly down ahead of us. Which is lucky because…
• March 29: Apparently, we needed someone in Texas to close on the house on the 30th. On this morning, we met with a friend in his Deli and ordered food for the road: corn beef and Swiss on Rye. Mmm.
• March 31. My wife and I arrive in Middle Earth (er, Midlothian). The house has not been closed on, despite the papers being signed. Our bank did not deposit A CASHIER’S CHECK from the sale of the New York house because “It needs to wait a week. It’s policy.”
• April 1: The Movers call. They already arrived, even though they’re supposed to be showing up on the 3rd. But we don’t have a house for them to move into.
• April 2: Wait
• April 3rd. Wait
• April 4th, Wait.
• April 5th, the check is cashed. The money goes through. The house is closed on. A miracle has happened.
• April 6th, the Movers arrive, dump everything on us, run away.

Speaking of miracles…

Around Virginia, going down 81, my car started to shake. Violently. Last time it vibrated like that, my tire blew out in Missouri (It’s a great place to blow out. The cops were nice, changed the tire, directed us to the nearest tire center. It was awesome.) so I was nervous. My wife, with her anxiety disorder, was more so. It happened at 75 MPH… then 70…. then 65…

We had seed boxes in the truck that weighed over 200 pounds. I figured that was the problem.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: But it was not the problem.

No, the problem was that the treads were stripped off of my driver’s side, rear tire. Eight inch parallel stripes were ripped right out. The wires of the steel belts were poking up. It was scary. But I can only conclude that God was looking out for us, because we drove halfway through Virginia, all the way through Tennessee, Arkansas and from Texarkana to Dallas on that danged tire.

As of today, we’ve been in this house nearly two weeks now. And frankly, Texas is everything I ever thought it would be.

I just wished dad would have been here to see it.

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