Garage Boy

Saturday night

I was a teenager again, working for a publisher, or some such company. Our office shared space with a mechanic's garage. In other words, both businesses took up one city block; the publisher facing one way, the garage in back, facing the other. My bosses felt that it was important to keep the mechanic happy (in order to get discounts on their vehicles) so they lent me out to the garage sometimes.

At one point there had been a fire in the garage, so I was enlisted to help sort out hundreds of rusty, dusty spare parts and tools. I grouped them by size and shape and laid them out on the concrete floor. Later that day I came back and saw that many of the items I'd sorted cleaned up pretty well, and were still usable.

The mechanic and I got to know each other pretty well, and he'd ask me questions about my car. He wanted to know what kind of oil I used, and what some of the mechanical settings were inside the vehicle. I was clueless. My answer to every question was, "I dunno, medium, I guess."

One day a large truck showed up to make a delivery and blocked the entrance to our building as well as the entrance to the garage (through a side alley). The driver left his keys, so my boss asked to take the truck around the corner and park it on the street. I drove around the block, found a parking space, and left the keys where I'd found them -- plainly visible in the lock of the driver's side door. I started to walk away when I thought, "That's no good," and went back to retrieve them. It was bad enough that the driver wouldn't know where his truck had gone; I didn't want to be responsible for it being stolen.

*****

We finished watching "Goodfellas" last night. In the early part of the movie, Henry Hill reminisces about being a teenager, and how it was so exciting when the wise guys asked him to park their Cadillacs. Maybe that's why I saw myself as the teenager who was re-parking the truck.