subterranean parking garage dwellers

I drove downtown last week and was faced with the whole parking dilemma that plagues most downtown areas. The ‘choice’ lots are always full, and you often find yourself reduced to parking in a cavernous hole underneath an aging building. This is where I ended up leaving my car. Miles underneath the ground, after carefully directing my car around looping curves that were barely the width of my car, I found a place to park.

As I got out of the car, I noticed a lady and her two young kids come out of a nearby stairwell. And even though she looked harmless enough, I double checked that my car doors were locked. For I all knew, those two little ‘kids’ were secretly midget henchmen for the Russian mob.

She caught sight of me and, looking rather frantic, called out, “Thank god I’ve found somebody! We’ve been wandering around in this parking garage for ten minutes and I can’t find a way out! Do you know how to get out of here?”

Little did the lady know that my sense of direction is terrible, and is based solely upon the little arrows that you find on every map. Thus, my direction logic states, whatever direction I’m heading toward is automatically North…because when you’re looking at a map, the arrow pointing forward is always North. Obviously, this means that to go South, one must either walk backwards or hold the map upside down, both of which are clearly stupid ideas. Therefore, I’m always heading North. If I make a right turn, while initially this means I’m going East, after going straight for a while, this direction also defaults into becoming North. Though, this rule of thumb is superceded by the sun. Driving into the sunset means West. But once the sun sets, you can pretty much guarantee that wherever I’m headed, it’s going to be North.

With no sun reaching inside of the parking garage, every direction seemed to be pointing North…but while my sense of direction stinks, my ability to read isn’t too bad. So when I noticed a sign that pointed to an underground walkway that promised to deliver us to the Fifth Avenue exit through the Hyatt hotel, I decided to put my trust in that little sign and gallantly led the way. Because that’s how heroes walk, ‘gallantly’. And I led this poor damsel and her children to safety, right through the Hyatt and out onto Fifth Avenue, just as the little sign had promised.

As I held the door open for her…because this is what heroes do…the lady’s little daughter looked up at her and asked, “Mom, are we ever going to be able to find our car again?” And in the split second it took her mom to reassure her, I noticed a fleeting look of fear flash across her face.

In that moment, I realized that I may have been witnessing the birth of a new race of people. A mother and children, doomed to live out their lives in an underground parking garage, surviving solely on forgotten French fries that have slipped between the seat cushions of mini-vans whose owners failed to lock the doors.

And perhaps, years later when a motorist pulled into space 5C, he would unknowingly be parking right above the skeletal remains of a family of three…a family whose car still sat, cold and probably with a dead battery at that point, somewhere far below the Earth.

Either way, I wasn’t feeling hero-ish enough to actually make sure that the lady got back to her car safely. One heroic act a day is more than enough to sustain me.