Some months ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me, I moved to a little tenement house near where the tracks cross under the highway. I hoped the diesel exhaust might have a way of regulating my nervous system.
On Medford Street, it is said, there is no god but the billboard. Often god takes the form of Morgan (or his lesser brother, Morgan), who promises to seek justice for the sick and injured. At other times, the thin blue line of the Paw Patrol extends its watchful eye over the city. Well, maybe not the whole city, but definitely the vast parking lot in front of Target.
There are many late nights that I find myself walking around that gray expanse. And, in the dead of night, thinking that the great billboard was watching over me still, and wanting to shave a few precious seconds off my walk home, I decided to cut through the parking lot. That was the first time I saw him.
I am known to exaggerate, so it’s important to note that everything I’m about to say is true. Parking lots attract minor strangeness – people idling and eating fast food, smoking, fogging up their windows. They are a neutral zone for drivers with nowhere better to go. In high school, we’d end up at a parking lot for no reason at all. I remember my friend smashing a glass bottle in front of an Ihop; kissing a girl in front of a pet store; playing Frisbee by streetlight in front of a Dairy Queen – things that only seemed possible in parking lots long after the sun set.
A new strangeness that I have come to notice is the man. He drives a tall, compact street sweeper. He hardly ever sweeps. Mostly he drives. And it is loud, like an old lawnmower, sputtering and groaning, practically the only thing making noise at that late hour. He comes to Target late at night, when the lot is nearly empty and the streets are dead, and he drives. Some nights he does figure eights. Some nights he circuits the lot’s edges. He drives fast, too fast for comfort – 30, maybe 40 – and if you so much as glance his way, he will drive by you on his next lap.
You may think he is a street sweeper; that he is there to sweep. Only once have I seen him do so, and that was in the early evening, when the shoppers were still out. On late nights he is there only to drive. What the parking lot is to him is clear. What he is to me isn’t. Part of me fears him, I think, but most of me wants to understand him. The answer is probably mundane, like most things that happen in a parking lot. I wonder, though, is it mundane to him? Roaring down the center lane, making a fast break for the curb, the face on the billboard staring down at him, challenging him – don’t turn just yet! One more second! Keep your foot on the gas! Inevitably, he will turn the wheel and set himself back on his path. But the moment before, I want to know, does he look up? Or does he look down?
