The key to a successful move.

All right, so I hate my moving truck company. I hate them.

I called them on Saturday to confirm my appointment on Sunday, and they tell me that the truck will be available at 1 p.m. I swear. So I tell Larry and David, who were helping me move, to come at 1 p.m. I really, really wanted the truck before that, but the moving company guy was confused on the phone, telling me that they opened at 9.

"So I can come between 9 and 1?" I asked the guy.

"1 p.m.," he said. Then he said, "OK," and hung up on me.

I called on Sunday at 10 a.m. because that phone call rubbed me the wrong way. The guy on the phone then told me that I could pick up the truck at any time. Seriously.

So I called my dad, told him that my friends weren't coming until 1 p.m. and asked him if he could help me get the truck. His golf game had been cancelled, so he offered to help me.

We arrived at the moving truck place about 11 a.m., then headed back to my apartment. My father, a former professional truck driver, drove the U-Haul. I drove my own car. When I got to my apartment, my father was already there. He was stacking my neighbor's - Busch Beer Man's - lawn chairs out of the way of the main door so that we could get the couch out. Then, we went to the other door and started pulling out the bedroom furniture.

Larry'd called me while we were gone, so I called him and told him that we already had the truck. He and David got on the road toward my apartment.

So I get off the phone, and I see this woman run out of Busch Beer Man's apartment to my visiting landlord. She doesn't live at the apartment with my neighbor, but she lives in the one in the back house. They chat a bit as he returned to his truck.

And I'm going in and out of the house, bringing things to my father in the truck.

"If you find a hole anywhere, put something in it," he said to me while we were loading the truck.

"That was my rule in college," I said to myself as I walked back toward the house.

After 20 minutes or so, there's a fire truck in the front lawn, and police car after police car starts pulling up. Officers keep going to the back house. More people come out of Busch Beer Man's apartment. (I ask one of them where he is, and that guy said Busch Beer Man was still asleep.) All the people coming out of Busch Beer Man's apartment technically live in the back house, where he used to live before he moved next door to me.

The woman who'd run out of Busch Beer Man's apartment was taken away in a squad car, and I asked one of the crowd of people gathering outside what was going on.

"They's manufacturing ice in the back there," she said. "Hadn't you ever heard them going at it?"

The couple in the back house did fight all the time. Apparently, they'd had a row, and the woman had ended up at Busch Beer Man's apartment.

The person I questioned told me that Busch Beer Man was involved in some sort of meth lab, too, which is why everyone in the back house was in his apartment when the cops arrived.

So the apartment that I'd nicknamed my "Buford Nouveau Crackhouse Apartment" really was a crackhouse. Ice, someone helpful told me, is like the crack version of crystal meth.

(At one point the vagrant lady from a couple nights ago showed back up lucid to talk to Busch Beer Man. She drove up in her red car, parked it, then went inside to talk to him. A couple hours later, her car was still there, and she, still lucid, was talking with a what looked like a hooker on a bicycle about getting home. Her husband, the vagrant lady said, had taken her car battery out while she was inside. I have no idea what's going on in that house.)

My father stopped me from asking the passerby anymore questions.

"Let's just get you moved before you get shot," he said.

Once the other guys arrived and the police left, this was my crew: my father, my 63-year-old English prof ex-boyfriend Larry and his life partner David, an electrician and independent contractor who is by far the most incredibly resourceful man I've ever met.

It was incredibly hot, and I don't have central air in my apartment. My air conditioning has very little power, and the fans could do little to keep us all from sweating.

So I assumed that the worst problem we were going to have was my father and my ex-boyfriend, who was older than my father. (Don't ask. That's a whole other story.) Only my father didn't know he was my ex-boyfriend. And no one told him. I may have been the only one who noticed that little piece of information was never discussed.

Instead, my dad just thought I had these great friends, which I do.

I would love to say that the whole move went off without another incident after we got everyone together, but I can't say that. At all.

My father has diabetes, and he's been diagnosed with it for about seven years now. Most of the time he's fine. I've never had a real emergency with him in regard to it, though I always keep snacks and juice handy whenever he's around my house just in case. He says that the worst thing diabetes has done, other than occasionally make him feel weak and run down, is that he's occasionally scatterbrained.

So it gets to be his lunchtime, and he tells me that he's going home to eat. The truck's nearly packed full of stuff, and David said it's fine, that we could all go get food when we hit the road.

"No, my father needs to go eat now," I said.

David understood, without me having to explain it to him further.

My father started toward his truck, saying he's feeling a little low. I ask him if he needs me to drive him to a restaurant or anything, if it's an emergency or if he's OK.

He said he was fine.

"OK, so you have the keys to the moving truck," he said. "I'm going home to get some food and take my shot."

"I don't have the keys to the moving truck," I said.

"What are you talking about?" he asked me. "I gave them to you when we first walked in the door and told you that I wasn't driving."

"No, you didn't," I said. "I haven't seen the keys."

"BENJ!" he said. "What are you talking about? I handed them to you in your bedroom."

"Dad, I've never seen the keys," I said. "You didn't give them to me."

"Well, I don't have them," he said.

I checked all my pockets. Keyring after keyring after keyring, for I appeared to have gathered an abundance of keys during the day. But there's no U-Haul key. The truck is nearly packed.

"Did you maybe put them in one of the drawers or boxes?" Dad asked me.

"No, Dad, you never gave me the keys."

David approached us, asking me what the keys looked like.

"I've not seen them," I said. "I haven't had them since we left the U-Haul office."

Dad said the keys had a giant orange U-Haul insignia attached with them on the keychain.

"Benj, how can you lose something that looks like that?" my dad asked me.

Then we went through the blame game song-and-dance again.

Dad had me call the rude U-Haul office to get their spare set of keys. Surely, you know, this sort of thing has happened before.

"Dude, what do you mean you lost the keys?" the helpful man at the U-Haul desk who had given me the wrong time at one point asked me.

"Do you have a spare set of keys?" I asked.

"Um ... no, we don't have a spare," he said. "You're going to have to call a locksmith and have him make you another key."

And he hung up on me again.

A locksmith. Specializing in automotive work. On a Sunday. In suburbia.

"What do you mean they don't have spare keys?" my dad shouted.

"The truck's got Arizona plates, Dad. They drive them all over the country."

"Well," my dad said. "That's just stupid."

My dad reiterated that he had to go, then he jumped into his truck.

"Call me when you find the keys," he shouted as he drove away.

So the last person who'd actually admitted seeing the damn keys to the truck was leaving. The room where this key exchange had apparently occurred was now empty of furniture. And U-Haul didn't have a spare set of keys.

My moving truck wasn't moving.

Larry looked at David and said, "I told you something stupid was going to happen."

"What's that?" I asked Larry.

"Something stupid always happens anytime I try to move anyone, even myself," Larry said.

David climbed into the back of the truck to go through all the drawers we'd packed. The bedside chest was the first thing my father and I had packed, so David stepped behind the mattresses and the couch in order to go through the drawers as best as he could.

I didn't want to completely unload the truck.

"Do you see anything?" I asked David.

"I see a box of condoms and film and an 8-hour videotape," David said. "But no key."

Larry started going through garbage bags. I mean, he went through every room, every windowsill.

I was calling locksmiths. My phone was acting up, disconnecting on me.

I was almost crying. I was yelling obscenities.

Kacoon called me in the middle of this to ask how things were going, and I practically bit her head off when I thought she chuckled at me.

I figured, if we didn't find these keys, it would be possible to solve this problem, but it would be expensive.

No locksmiths in the area did that kind of work. None of the 24-hour ones I spoke to had anyone they could recommend to me.

So I called U-Haul again to see if they had a preferred locksmith.

The person who answered the phone then was not the person who kept hanging up on me. He helpfully suggested that I call the U-Haul emergency line to see if they could tell me how to handle the problem. (This information would've been helpful during the first call to them, I thought to myself.)

I was on the phone to them when my father arrived again. He said he hadn't found them since he left and asked me if we'd had any good news.

It'd been an hour and a half since the keys had gone missing.

David was going through the shelves again. I was losing my mind. My father jumped on the back of the truck to help David search, then he started unloading the truck on to the patio in front of Busch Beer Man's apartment.

I called the emergency line. My phone died. I called them again, spoke to someone named Devin who gave me the key code and was about to tell me more information when my phone died again.

I had Larry use his phone. He was able to get the full information. The U-Haul people told Larry to give the staff at our U-Haul Rental Center this special number, and they would have a replica key.

Larry walked out to tell me how we were going to solve the problem when my dad shouted out to us, "FOUND THEM!!!"

He held them up to the sky.

"WHERE WERE THEY???" I asked him.

"Between these lawn chairs," my dad said.

"I told you ...," I said. "I TOLD YOU THAT YOU'D NEVER GIVEN THEM TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I was screaming. It wasn't pretty. But, damn, was I happy.

"You were stacking those chairs when I got here," I said.

My dad had put the key down when he was clearing space by the main door. We'd looked everywhere for those keys, except inside a stack of someone else's lawn furniture.

"I love you, Dad," I said to him. "And that's the only thing keeping me from killing you right now."

"I love you too, Benj," he said.

My dad apologized to everyone. We reloaded the truck within five minutes, determined who was driving what and got the hell away from the crackhouse. (God, there's a phrase I never thought I'd write.)

My new apartment in Buckhead is now loaded with more furniture than I know what to do with.

The couch, because that's always the hardest thing for anyone to move, was successfully transported by strapping it to a handtruck and rolling it down a hill. (David, brilliant and resourceful, came up with that trick.)

It took several hours, but everything is sufficiently done. I owe Larry and David a large, expensive meal for everything they did and everything they put up with. And I will repay them.

With everything unloaded about 6 p.m., Larry and David headed home.

I drove the evil U-Haul truck back to the rental center, almost hitting two cars on the way while attempting to change lanes. Oh, and I ran a red light because I didn't want to get stuck on Lenox Road in a truck I couldn't see anything out of. My dad followed me in his truck.

At the rental center, my dad hopped into the U-Haul, drove it to the gas station and filled it.

Then, we drove back to the rental center, locked the doors, dropped the keys into the night deposit and headed toward his truck.

I was exhausted, and he was driving me home.

"Oh, looks like I left the lights on in the U-Haul," he said.

Seriously.

I called the emergency line again as he drove me back to the crackhouse, but there was nothing we could do.

My dad said his mind's not been the same since he was diagnosed with diabetes, and I have to believe him.

I went inside, took a shower there, put another load of laundry into the dryer that my mother is picking up later this week and decided that I needed to go out.

I had chicken fingers at a restaurant, the first food I'd actually eaten eall day, and I caught a late movie - because that's how I reward myself.

After the movie, in the otherwise empty restroom where I was washing my hands, I thought about what else I had to do that night - and the Atlanta apartment where I was going to be sleeping.

I smiled to myself in the cinema bathroom mirror and said aloud something really great.

I said, "I did it."