Tales of the Valet Parking Stand

Sometimes if you can’t write about a thing, you can write around the edges of a thing.

Today, while I was waiting outside the hospital for the valet parking guy to get my car, I espied a huge man clad in all white sitting in a wheelchair a few feet away. He had blond hair but was older and had a face that had piles of years, decades, folded every which way. He was enormous, so much so that where his limbs began and his torso ended couldn’t be determined. His feet were bandaged, letting only his long yellow toenails see the light of day.

“I was at the hospital for two hours. The doctor said I’d die if I left but I’m outside waiting for my ride.” He held his cellphone to his voluminous cheek. I imagined that the phone had gotten stuck there, swallowed by the whaleness of his face.

I didn’t know who he was talking to, I didn’t want to listen that carefully, but the man knew I was looking at him and when I wasn’t looking at him, I was thinking about him. I was thinking about how monstrous he was, fierce in his massive weight, scary in the look given from under his thick eyebrow. Who are you to look at me? To listen to what the doctor said?

And then I chastised myself for my unkind revulsion and tried to imagine the man as he might have appeared in his high school yearbook. He would be sitting up straight, maybe with a white shirt and tie, his hair would be parted on the side and combed to one side. His mom would have ironed that shirt for him while the sun was still coming up. Where was his mother now? Was she gone? Would she come fetch him?

It was not my place to wonder about his life, nor to look at the giant man a single more time. When the valet pulled up in my car, I gave him $5 and told him I’d see him tomorrow. I never looked back. I don’t know if the man was looking at me. He might have been.