Sleepers

We are few in numbers, but if you pay close attention the next time you’re at the local strip mall or driving through a busy industrial park in the middle of the day, you might notice one of us. At first glance, our cars or trucks appear empty, but if you come close enough, you might see the top of a balding head or the silhouette of an open mouth and tilted nose.

We are sleepers. We are the people who don’t get enough nocturnal rest during the work week, and thus must revive our brains every day with a quick nap in a local parking lot. I know this because I’ve been one of them for the last nine years. Being a sleeper is tricky business. You don’t want anyone in your office to know what you do every day at lunch time. It would be extremely uncomfortable if your co-workers knew that you crashed and burned five days a week.

I have a rotation of three parking lots that I use, all within five minutes of my office. There is nothing scientific about choosing locations. First, you look for privacy, because the worst thing for a sleeper is to be awakened every five minutes by someone slamming their car door or pushing a squeaky shopping cart past your resting place. Second, you look for shade. Even with your air conditioning on full blast in the dog days of summer, it’s almost impossible to get a fitful forty-five minute nap with the sun beating down on your head and face. The final key is safety. It’s very hard to enjoy your nap if you have a nagging suspicion that you’re going to be carjacked, or about to have the Son of Sam put a 44-caliber slug in your head.

My favorite place to snooze is in the parking lot of a local shopping plaza. Because of the slumping economy and high rent, the plaza is three-quarters empty and the parking lot offers the perfect opportunity to catch a quick nap without distractions. After I’ve pulled into the preferred spot, my routine for my daily siesta includes determining if the sun is going to be a factor, quickly scanning the area for any annoying distractions (construction equipment, teenagers with skateboards, lawn mowing crews, just to name a few) and most importantly, putting my car's gearshift in park.

When I first started my journey of lunchtime snoozing, I was amazed to notice that there were other people parking in the fringe-areas of the asphalt lots. Initially, I thought the handful of people that were edging in on my turf were just making a cell phone call or eating their lunch, but after time, I realized that I was wrong.

They were sleepers, too.

At first this freaked me out just a tad bit (almost as if I thought I had become a unique, single subspecies of the human race), but over time I came to accept these tired people as my compatriots. I had no clue who these people were, what they did for a living, or why they didn’t get enough sleep every night to get through their day without a nap. But they seemed like normal people, and most importantly, they never parked closer then two spaces from my car.

After several months we even began to acknowledge one another with a slight wave of the hand or a quick smile. My most consistent companion was a balding gentleman in his mid-fifties who drove an enormous Dodge pickup truck. Another regular that I saw on a weekly basis was a forty-something guy who always wore sun glasses (even on cloudy, stormy days). My partners in slumber were joined on occasion by several other men over the years, however, they tended to show up infrequently, and we regulars looked upon them with suspicion because of their lack of consistency.

It wasn’t until early 2005 that we had a female member join our little group. She just started showing up one day in February (I remember the month because we were forced to park in a smaller area because their was so much damn snow piled up in the lot). She was a pretty brunette, maybe in her early thirties, and she drove a blue Camry. For the first couple of months she was aloof, parking in an adjacent lot that used to be home to an ice cream shop, but after she got used to seeing us several times a week, she eventually took the plunge and joined us in our parking lot neverland.

With the slumping economy shuttering almost every factory in the area that makes anything, we are back to just me and the balding pick-up driver. Mr. Sunglasses stopped napping in the lot last spring and I haven’t seen Miss Camry since September. I assume that they got laid off, or even better, hit the lottery jackpot and are snoozing on some sandy beach in a tropical paradise. As for me, I’m still napping three days a week in the parking lot, my heater turned on high, my mind briefly shutting down and recharging before heading back to the grind of trying to make a living…