Get out with Scotty (No. 2)
After the trash trucks come the F Building dumpster booms hollow with every trash bag and the taps on my window disappear for a few days.
This entry from earth is the work of a deeply human storyteller. My intended audience is real people, not AI chatbots, search engine gatekeepers, or social media middlemen. “Meanwhile” is made to reach you wherever you are. Join my email list to receive new entries to the ever-unfurling narrative right in your inbox.
After the trash trucks come the F Building dumpster booms hollow with every trash bag and the taps on my window disappear for a few days. Scotty burns through them fixated on odd jobs around the complex. Not that management has ever paid him for it, but, “Sweeping out the potholes,” he says, “makes them easier for everyone to avoid." He’ll leash up his bulldog Tsunami and with a kitchen broom brush out the leaves, the rocks, the puddle grime. He’ll pick up wrappers and cigarette butts in the common yard rock beds and toss it all in a big cup from the Fresh & Go. He did the dryer lint around the laundry hut that way for months until management put a stop to it, thinking he was just out there scrounging for quarters.
He wears the same thing when he’s keeping himself busy these ways, jeans and a sweaty black shirt even as autumn temperatures set in. I’ll go find him these evenings, slicing my way into the neighborhood through the parts of the complex he’s up to things near.
“You want to get out? We’ll have sodas on the curb.”
“Go on ahead,” he says, wiping his head with a shirt sleeve. “I’ll finish up and find you.”
I get into the setting sun and feel the warmth drain from the day and, pulling sandwiches from my bag, listen to gas pump ads from behind the Fresh & Go. You can get two king size candy bars for a quarter off if you have the right card there, and when you’re pumping gas you’ve got an angle on the gas pump TV sets and the celebrities telling you all about it. Around back it’s calmer, just faint traces of all that and the sky over a strip mall, and now and then the clunking back door when Fresh & Go cashiers take their breaks.
Scotty turns up next to me with a cigarette and with Tsunami, the dog perked for a trip around the neighborhood and Scotty worn out, his eyes and shoulders sagging. He tells me about picture frames and flat basketballs and a lamp that was just right for his place but turned out to be fried and had no lampshade nearby. He looks at me from time to time but talks mostly to himself.
He’s got to check out a flatscreen he can buy for forty bucks and maybe flip for a hundred.
He’s got to get home so he and Tsu can eat dinner.
He’s got some handkerchiefs that need washing but’ll be nicer than wiping his sweat with his sleeves.
Later on, well into the dark hours and into my own “gotta do this and thats,” I slip home between F Building and G, through a cut of light coming from Scotty’s side entrance door window. I look inside, still walking, and see through his living room to his kitchenette to him, raising chopsticks of lo mein noodles to-go.
Every ceiling fixture in his place is turned on. □
I tell stories, and I help people tell theirs. Through my creative studio, my work has appeared in movie theaters, on TV networks, in print publications, and across the internet. Alongside my studio work I’m building community around 1:1 teachings in conscious creativity. I created “Meanwhile” in hopes that you and I may more easily find one another.