My apartment building has a parking garage but there’s no gate on it or anything. Occasionally people just wander in. Case in point:
Yesterday morning I went down to my car at 10:00am and noticed that there was a homeless man sleeping on a cot that someone was storing in front of their parking space. I decided not to say anything to him since he was sleeping, and hobos are notoriously stabby when rousted from their Schlitz induced slumbers.
I returned home at 10:00pm to find that the hobo in the exact same place, except that now he had company. A car had been parked in the space next to the cot. This was not the car that usually parks in that space, and I did not recognize the people inside. The occupants of the car – a man and a woman – were sleeping the sleep of ages in the front seats. Were it not for the fact that the passenger door was propped open, and there were no visible bullet wounds, I would have assumed that these people were dead.
I thought about walking over to the car and knocking on the window, but it then occurred to me that maybe something supernatural was going on in that corner of the garage that caused people to pass out, like in Village of the Damned. Even if this was not the case, I still feared accidentally activating the hobo’s stab cycle, so I decided that the best course of action was to go inside and think nothing more of it.
This afternoon my roommate (who had also seen and been puzzled by the sleeping strangers) sent me an email saying that in the wee hours of the morning (sometime after 3am) the police raided our garage, guns drawn, and after a short scuffle, arrested the two nappers from the car. After the couple had been hauled off, and the guns holstered, my roommate went down to talk to the cop overseeing the removal of the car. Apparently, the car was stolen. I guess that kind of activity really tuckers you out. 5-0 had been doing a sweep of the neighborhood when they found the vehicle. I imagine they didn’t have too much trouble sneaking up on the thieves.
Perhaps having ventured too close to the nap vortex in that corner of the garage, I slept through all of the commotion, including the helicopter that circled our building for half-an-hour this morning. But let this be a warning to all criminals out there: my apartment building offers no quarter for criminals, regardless of how sleepy they are.
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3 comments:
Did they arrest the tramp (hobo) or did they let him sleep on?
The cops let him run off. Later, the hobo told the cops that the male jacker had told him to scram. How rude!
When "Amy" and I were down there initially, we tried knocking on the window of the jacker car, and succeeded only in waking up the hobo. Who was very nice and said he'd leave right away -- he said that he found another shelter? I don't know.
This is all going to make for such an excellent magical realist short story! A series of townspeople are all mysteriously drawn together by their intense, unexplainable desire to take a siesta beneath your apartment building! I expect to read "The Napping Place" in The New Yorker very soon.
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