City Planners I Have Known (a short story)

(I wrote half of this in a coffee shop in 2007 and half in a car wash in 2008; both places were approximately two miles from my current home.)

The first city planner I knew was a cipher in the black bean heart of the sunset state I spent my days in, then. She had no skip to her step, only a swing to her shuffle. She worked as a planner for the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, the one-step forward/two steps back twin sister of Minneapolis, City of Water. Someone long ago had already planned St. Paul but there was still work for her to do - Carolyn with her New Urbanist dreams and her shake-shaky despotic fears.

She looked like she could kick the mayor’s ass if she had to but she never had to and I never knew what the mayor looked like because I lived far away, in the City of Water. On the day we met, however, I was in her town.

She said the park outside the office tower, next to the failing mall where we saw a sequel movie, was not her idea per se. But she did write some questionnaires that led to the data that inspired the decision to make diagonal walkways through the one-square-block park. “Like an X with a square around it!” This was a good plan. I liked it. We were looking at the park through the picture window on the dying mall’s mezzanine.

(Weeks earlier, I ran into an old family friend in the mall’s elevator. When I was a boy, my father suspected his father of making an under-the-table foot-related move on my mother. The two fathers, friends since high school, never spoke again. The other family moved to the other side of Pennsylvania. I hadn’t seen Omar since 1983 when I saw him in the mall’s elevator in 1997, 1200 miles from Doylestown. It was strange. We didn’t say a word to each other. A few years later, I tracked him down and invited him to my failed wedding. He gave us a four-slice toaster. I got it in the divorce and often use it for one or two slices.)

The first city planner’s air was weaker than sugar, weaker than outlaws on parole, weaker than just walking through the grass.

Carolyn spoke highly of love, of family, of art and pathways. She was a pretty city planner with flush-enough skin and a backpack of keepsakes. I never loved her, couldn’t bring myself to. But she praised my thoughts once. I hope she gets to be mayor some day.

The second city planner was also from Minnesota, the land of basements and abasement, water and land, cold and cool and warm enough for fucking slowly. But I knew her best years later, in an apartment community in Riverside, California, the city she was asked to save, to fix, to resurrect and “Don’t give us orange crate art, Linda! We can only get so far with orange crate art!"

She and her boyfriend hosted my then-girlfriend and me for brunch in an unassuming apartment on the college-cradled outskirts of Riverside where, it’s been said, the good girls live and the bad girls hide. In a quiet moment over ham and egg and orange juice in dusty glasses and coffee in shiny mugs, Linda said “Miguel and I are splitting up.” Seeing Miguel sit there and grimace and pout and grimace again while she told us she was in love with Miguel’s best friend was difficult. I had one overwhelming absent-of-everything-else thought: “Why aren’t we having brunch with the other dude? Why put Miguel through this?”

Linda would later marry the other man and now they’re happy in Sydney, Australia where she hasn’t found a job yet but if she were a planner there, I imagine days spent zoning harbors and designing opera courtyards. I also assume she curses orange crates and dust in the wind. Prairie wind or canyon wind, it doesn’t matter - Linda’s a rock.

Next I met a man named Gerald. He wasn’t a city planner when I knew him and he’s not a city planner now. One year ago, he died in a fiery crash on Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, more specifically between Baker and Barstow. He died alone on a momentous afternoon of heat and vistas all around. He died when a giant truck split in half and the smaller half crushed Gerald’s car and his body, 73 dollars richer leaving Las Vegas than it was coming.

Gerald had a band that sang songs of fruit pickers and angry jilted lovers, headmasters and old homeless ladies, pushing their cars down Sherman Way in the San Fernando Valley, near where Gerald grew up, the same street where Rollergirl kicked that guy’s face in with her skates in Boogie Nights. Gerald loved that movie, like he loved gambling and driving hundreds of miles on a dare.

He planned for Simi Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles he disdained but vowed to improve, no matter the transgressions he committed in the name of progress. He did what he could - one less strip mall here, one more small park with swings and see-saws there. He also liked the Virgin Mary and wearing black. He was a good guy.

I knew him 10 years earlier, in college. He loaned me a novel once, said it would change my life. It did.

If he had to die, it’s best he was in his car, ahead 73 dollars (after expenses) coming home from a weekend in Vegas, on his favorite highway, driving way too fast (a slower driver could have swerved.) But he shouldn’t have had to go so young.

The fourth city planner I have known is panicking this morning. Adriana is in Hillsboro, Oregon, a suburb of Portland. She works in Portland, her favorite city, the city she dreamed of planning when she was in grad school in Santa Cruz. She’s scared because she’s in an MRI machine, trapped, on the basement level of a sprawling medical complex. It all started when she slipped on some slick steps in front of her condo building in the Hollywood neighborhood of Portland. It hadn’t rained for weeks. The steps were slick from something she still hasn’t figured out – spilled beer or stray homeless urine were her two first thoughts. Weeks later, while running in the hills on the city’s west side, she felt the first of many lower back spasms. Her doctor suggested an MRI, to see if anything was broken from the fall. She assumed it was just from running too much.

That’s why she’s here, now, in Hillsboro. She’s never felt claustrophobic before but this is too much for her. The radiologist said it would take five minutes, seven tops. She thinks it’s only been three or four and she doesn’t know if she can go any further. There’s a button she can push, to call the whole thing off. She’d be pulled out of the machine, into the relatively freer confines of the tiny paint-odored below-ground room. They should really have a room with windows, Adriana thought, when she first came in the room, before they slid her in, roughly and firmly (that part, she liked.)

She decides to count seconds. First to 30, then to 60. She gets to 50 and the button which she imagines as red but is really black (she can feel it, knows where it is, can’t see it) is inches away from her curled up fist.

She finds the strength and keeps counting. She was once in love with Gerald. 55. She hopes it’s temporary, the back problem. She doesn’t want to quit running. 59, 60. Another 60 and she’s sure it’ll be over. When she met him at the planner’s convention in Tucson, she didn’t think she’d ever miss him this much. That’s why she stopped smoking, started running. He died and she had to get out of the house.

Adriana found out about it when I called her one afternoon at her office. I found the number online. I knew how she felt about him. I wanted her to hear it from me, not from a listserv or a text message. I wanted to give her room to breathe. I paused for her to collect herself, before I spoke of each detail. She asked me if Caroline knew and I said, yes, that’s who told me. She didn’t ask how Caroline found out. Neither did I.

I gave her the details – the truck, the freeway, the direction he was driving. I could hear her smile through the next set of words. She was probably smiling to keep from crying.

She’s thinking of the phone call right now. She realizes she’s not in danger anymore. They pulled her out, at 37, in her third count to 60.

They give her the results in the largest manila envelope she’s ever seen. She walks to the parking lot and drives east to the city. She wants to look inside but doesn’t. She knows topographical maps. She knows blueprints. She even knows X-rays. She doesn’t know MRI printouts.

When Adriana gets home, she throws the envelope with the MRI results on her small white square kitchen table. She likes how it’s plastic. She sits down on her couch and looks out the window and sees a light coming up through the skylight in the loft apartment across the street. She likes the way that looks, the way the light leaves the city and returns the sky’s favor. She could look at it all night. She vows to keep looking until the light disappears, until the person across the street (another woman, living alone; they talked once) turns it off. She falls asleep with the light still on wakes up and it’s still on but she can’t see it because of the sun.

Those are the city planners I have known. I don’t expect to know more. It’s all been an accident, my knowing them.