There is intimacy in the smell of an Ichiro Suzuki dining table. 

As furniture delivery men, we are bonded to the glitter kingdoms of the Pacific Northwest. As middlemen in service of big brands like Diva Group, Olson Kundig, and B&B Italia, we make stealth entry into the sacred interiors of the guarded estates of the Eastside, where decor and design equal seduction. Worlds we have come to know through wood and fabric.

My compatriots are Vinny, Sunny, Hugo, and Shamarki—an assemblage from Vietnam, First Nation Nez Perce territory, Mexico, and Somalia. Rotations of down-and-out men in a warehouse full of custom-made and design-brand furniture. Men who express words in flesh and who steal themselves away from our own hard homes to perfect someone else’s. 

Together and alone, we have slipped into the embryos of shrink-wrapped yachts to install their cushions. We have hoisted priceless antiques over the sides of mansions and into bedroom windows, snuggled in another’s luscious dreams. We have heaved heavy riches on our backs maneuvering hundreds of thousands of dollars in fine furniture in the palatial compounds of the Gold Coast at $17 an hour. We have given our bodies to families with names like Nordstrom and and Bezos (which sounds like the Spanish for “kisses”), and everyone in between and below, bench-pressing monstrous tables into elegant positions and power-cleaning armoires up countless flights of steps. That is, until the kiss of death kills our back or ankle and sends us looking for jobs elsewhere, as so many before. 

Until then, we inhabit all the luxury we can, living different versions of high society as voyeurs. We do battle with anacondas shouldering rolled-up rugs through precarious spaces. We witness the fights and endure the scoldings and travel to faraway lands. We have looked into the future, gazed on the many stunning panoramas of tech visionaries and suffer only little because of it. Our life is in the here and now.

Today we touch down in Medina (named for the Arabic “city of the prophet”) bearing heavy marble inside a box truck. We alert one worker sleeping on furniture in the back of the truck to wake because “La Rusa,” or the Russian, as we call her, emerges from behind the Ferraris, eager to lay her hands on one of our charges—a limited edition of a Taschen that we too wish to touch, embody. But we are lives apart. She sets it on a stand near the vestibule and invites us to the allure of its pages in slow motion, where “nudity, complicity, voyeurism and exhibitionism” are stated as “essential ingredients of happiness.” This book is to set the tone of this place. What we workers exhibit is for another edition.

We get to work moving the world for her, laying out carpets and staging furniture, teetering between the extremes of labor and luxury. On days we choose not to know English, we hear more clearly. We contort ourselves, trying to control the objects we move, but like Sisyphus, we can’t. We fight to make homes for others when some of us live inside our cars. We are dominated by the forms of so many other homes, and still do not know what forms ours will take. The days are always long.

When we’re finally free of this feverish mirage, we come to inside our warehouse, which is always in disarray and where rats scurry between mounting crates and boxes. Before we break for lunch, we offload trucks and see them off, drawing with our fingers onto their dusty panels—images that are our own form of SOS message, driven across the country. In furniture, labor and luxury are one. Perhaps, each exists because of the other. One of us takes his power nap in our secret den within the scaffolding of furniture. Sunny, always busying himself from drink, unravels a homemade whip for target practice over furniture we sometimes blemish with drips of blood. Tomorrow he’ll bring his hand-carved ax. Myself, I wait out the clock for the end of shift and an end to this show. I climb the scaffolding hidden from view and collapse like Frasier Crane onto an Eames lounge chair and ottoman to live in elegance again with exquisite dreams of riches in my mind.

Noé Álvarez is the author of Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land (2020) and Accordion Eulogies: A Memoir of Music, Migration, and Mexico (2024).