Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Holding Pattern - repost



1980.

Right after college I had a job as a security guard on the graveyard shift at The Fayette Shopping Mall in Lexington Kentucky. With my B.A. in art, this was the best I could do at the time. I suspected it was possibly the worst job ever, but didn't have much to compare it to. One night, just before Christmas, I found a bottle of Wild Turkey Kentucky bourbon in my mail cubby in the security office at the mall. A little tag said Merry Xmas, from the management. I made it about halfway through that shift without touching it.

One of my most dreaded obligations as a mall cop was investigating cars that had been left overnight in the parking lot. Usually these cars were parked way off in the darkest stretches of the lot, near the railroad tracks. They often contained people having sex. It was my duty to ask them to move along. If the cars were empty I was supposed to affix a giant day-glo sticker that read PARKING VIOLATION to the driver's side window. I discovered right away that people having drunk sex in a mall parking lot in Kentucky are not super welcoming to a kid with a badge, a flashlight and a can of mace. Certain that they had better weapons than I did, I took to doing this part of my job as the sun was coming up, when most of the cars were gone.

One night after a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the cineplex, I found a bag of weed on the floor near the theater exit doors. I made a gift of it to the guys who ran the cleaning service, who I knew to be stoners. In return, I enlisted their help with my parking lot woes. They had a large vacuum sweeper truck which was used every night to scrub trash off the lot. This truck had lights all over it and the vacuum motor was insanely loud. The cleaning guys were in the habit of sweeping the lot at a troublingly high speed, probably because they were bored out of their skulls. That's where I got the idea to have them use their truck to gently intimidate anyone they might happen upon in a parked car. They took to this task with relish. It was as if I had just given them a promotion. Needless to say my trouble with parkers went away pretty quickly.

About half of my nightly rounds took place outside the mall. This involved creeping around the dumpsters in the loading bays behind all the stores with my mag light. After being startled out of my wits a couple of times by dumpster divers, I took to finding ways to make enough noise that the mall's nocturnal fringe dwellers would have a chance to scatter, and I could avoid confrontation altogether. Around this same time, inexplicably, a saxophone showed up in the Mall's lost and found. After weeks of eying it and hoping no one would claim it, I decided to borrow the horn. I bought a fresh pack of reeds, certain I could teach myself to play. I really wanted to be in a band, and this was back when everyone was adding horns to their rock bands. So I took to playing the borrowed horn at work, figuring I could use it both as a warning device on my rounds, and to stave off the mind-numbing dullness of being alone and awake in a mall at night.

My supervisor surprised me one night when I was sitting in the information kiosk practicing scales. He never said a thing about the horn, but that was likely because I had some goods on him that he was eager for me never to mention. One night I'd gotten to work a little early and caught him having sex with the manager from the Orange Julius on the black vinyl couch in the security office. He'd swung his one free hand at me as if to bat me away. I left quickly, but took the time to re-lock the door on my way out. I went and sat in my car until exactly midnight. When I re-entered the office to start my shift they were gone. I propped the office door open to air it out. I don't know if it needed airing out because I wasn't breathing through my nose. I wasn't taking chances. The Orange Julius lady never looked me in the eye after that, and I never said a thing to anyone. I enjoyed thinking my chances were pretty good at landing the next open slot on the day shift. That was until I was caught with the horn, and knew I'd been trumped.

The night I found my holiday gift of bourbon the skies opened up with a deluge that was weeks overdue - the kind of rain that stalls cars in underpasses and makes traffic lights blink red. I needed to start my rounds, but stood in the doorway waiting for the downpour to let up, feeling stuck, in more ways than one. I had recently admitted to myself that I was hopelessly trapped in some sort of holding pattern, without enough velocity to escape. Most of my friends from school had found jobs elsewhere or moved back home with their parents, while I stayed behind in the small college town and tried to imagine how to be an artist. I had spent a year at the mall and only had a folder of bad poetry and some rudimentary horn skills to show for my effort. Not to mention a reputation at the mall as an utter freak show. By day, I was attempting to carry on making paintings, exactly like I had just spent four years doing in school, but the handful I managed to complete looked exactly like an amalgam of my former professor's work.  Discouraged, I took to translating rock lyrics into french, a language I'd studied for three years but knew I'd never travel enough to really use. By the time I finished translating all the lyrics for Supertramp's "Breakfast in America" I knew something had to change. I had set my sights somewhat randomly on Chicago, and had pinned all my hopes on moving there to pursue the life-creative. I'd only visited the city twice before, and had no friends there, but was certain I wanted to live there. I knew the city would wake me up, if I could just scrape up enough money to get there. In preparation, I had already started dressing like an artist. I was wearing intentionally ironic suits from thrift stores. I stopped listening to Supertramp and Genesis in favor of Talking Heads and Patti Smith. If I wasn't yet an artist, I was damn sure going to do a good impersonation of one. There's some wisdom in the cliché, "fake it till you make it," and that was as close as I came to having a strategy.

The rain never did let up, and I knew it wasn't going to. Not that night. So I twisted off the cap on the bourbon, took a big gulp, stashed it back in my mail cubby, then headed out on my rounds. After all, I was 22 years old, and in charge of the entire Fayette Mall in Lexington Kentucky. I had a flashlight, a can of mace, it was raining, and I had a saxophone. I knew what to do.