The Last Parking Space

The most precious and coveted parcel of real estate in an asphalt-paved world is a 10’ x 15’ parking space, especially if it’s the last one open.

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It’s Memorial Day weekend. The parking lot is a teeming mosh-pit of irritable shoppers. Common courtesy, like yesterday’s chewed bubble gum, lies melting on the scorching pavement. People move in slow motion like zombies. Silent heat monkeys radiate from tops of cars and dance in the hellish heat that sizzles from the black tar below.

Desperate drivers with frazzled nerves cruise up and down the rows. No empty spaces. Their roulette wheel of luck keeps spinning. Then suddenly, over there, a car backs out, a space opens. Two black behemoths with blacked-out windows both charge it. Who’s gonna get it? I perk up.

I’m parked in the shade under an oak tree with Bogey, our dog. We’re casual observers in this unfolding pageant, watching human nature play out its dance of chance in the crowded parking lot.

“Bogey, who will get that space?” He yawns.

A stalemate occurs. It’s a tight spot but that doesn’t seem to matter. They both want it. They inch closer, head to head, each eliminating the other’s opportunity.

With egos idling, they sit stewing in their urban tanks, hulking steel beasts that personify the perception of personal invincibility. They rev their engines like two hot-blooded blowhards shaking their fists in a schoolyard shouting match, arguing about nothing.

Hi-beam halogens flash ominously, a sign that says, ‘Back off.’

It calls to memory the schoolyard contests of the past, translating the equivalency of ‘one’s afraid and the other is glad of it.’ A lot of hot air is exhaled in schoolyards.

They inch closer, these lurching, menacing brutes. Their gleaming steel bumpers flash like medieval armor on modern-day gladiators, arrayed for battle, separated by an imaginary Maginot line. The impasse continues. Meanwhile, the empty space simmers in the stifling morning heat. Inside the airconditioned enclaves, safe with the doors locked, the unheard bombastic diatribes begin.

“Shove off, I was here first,” the Monster says, adding for emphasis the reference to a hyphenated anatomical body part.

The opposing Giant speaks, “Talk’s cheap, chump,” invoking ‘mother’ in the mix. The back and forth dialogues intensify over the concept of ‘who’s first.’

“I have right-away, you’re a yield. Are you dumb?” the Monster speaks, stressing ‘dumb’ by also adding its own anatomical reference.

“My blinker said I saw it first. Are you blind?” the Giant speaks, adding an adjective that ends with ‘ing’ to modify the noun ‘blind.’

With each rhetorical retort the mighty roar of exhausts from the supercharged behemoths bellow their boasts of first-come supremacy. The oleander flowers quake and quiver in the tense stand-off.

A crowd of gawkers gather. They choose sides. Wagers are made. Loud cheers erupt as the behemoths roar and shake their heft in the sultry heat. Wild shouts from the spectators energize the dueling behemoths. How great a matter over nothing a little fire can kindle.

The battle of ‘I-was-first’ escalates. Windows go down, arms go out and fingers go up. Chest thumping, emotional bluster and empty rhetoric electrify the spectacle with no resolution in sight. The last parking space still sits empty, making a mockery of the standoff.

The doors of the behemoths open. Legs appear. The warriors are shedding their armor in anticipation of a full-on square off. The crowd becomes breathless, anticipating a final resolution of the ‘who-was-first’ dilemma.

Then something strange happens. A sound is heard. It’s a grocery cart. It has slipped the grip of some thoughtless nitwit. Its trajectory centers on the empty parking space. It rolls slowly on wobbly wheels toward the arena of aggression, now mostly a shouting match of name-callin’ and dog-cussin.’

The vagrant grocery cart winds its wobbly way through the crowd. Like a deranged derelict stumbling between two gunfighters on the streets of Laredo, it wobbles between the aggressive behemoths and staggers to rest in the middle of the empty parking space.

Conflict averted. Game over. The crowd exhales, laughs and leaves. The behemoths do a final up-yours runup and keep circling.

And so it ends. Today’s dilemma of ‘who-was-first,’ resolved by a runaway grocery cart.

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Life has strange ways of resolving stupid conflicts. And while it might be just another casual observation, I’m pretty sure nobody will be fighting for the last parking space in the cemetery.


Bud Hearn
June 5, 2019