M AY 2 0 1 8 1 0 1 Fiction adobe stock The Pickup Artist By Hank Garfield I work at the State Fair, in the park- ing area on the infield of the track. It’s a boring job, but it’s only two weeks of the year, and besides, an artist can always find a way to make even the most tedious tasks interesting. We park them in sections, cordoned off by string, two rows of vehicles in each sec- tion, facing each other. Five of us, plus a su- pervisor, ensure that everyone parks in an orderly fashion. There’s a handicapped sec- tion, closest to the grandstand. My job – well, my self-appointed task, more accu- rately – is to separate out the big pickup trucks and park them in their own sections. People love those big pickups, especial- ly people who come to the State Fair. Your Dodge Rams, Toyota Tundras, Ford Four- by-Fours. They come in all colors, and they’re all huge, with a full back seat be- tween the cab and the bed. After Dick, the supervisor, saw what I was doing, he grudg- ingly agreed it was a good idea to give them their own section, away from the less im- posing SUVs and the small cars that used to be considered normal. Dick’s been working the fair for twenty years. He’s got the routine down pat. There’s a big rush at the beginning of the day, then a lull in mid-afternoon, and then it picks up again as people arrive for evening events like the demolition derby or the hot dog eat- ing contest. Mostly we park them as they come in, filling in open spaces when people leave. There’s no particular order to it. Or at least there wasn’t, until I came along. He put me in charge of parking the pick- ups. I waved all the other vehicles on, and steered each behemoth truck into a spot be- side the next, all in two neat rows. But this too became boring after a while. To amuse myself, I began parking the pickups by col- or. I assembled a section with dark trucks on one side and light ones on the other. Then I did a section with one side in col- or and the other in black, white, silver and gray. One day I had five red trucks in a row, but then I took a pee break, and Andrea, the young woman who relieved me, parked a red truck on the opposite side, totally oblivious to the pattern. We got into a bit of an argument until Dick came by and told us to get back to work. I got more refined. One day I had red, white and blue trucks alternating in a row. I had seven or eight of them lined up like that. Meanwhile, I was making the black and dark green and sepia and silver trucks park on the other side, and I’d opened up a new section to handle the overflow. “Just park him next to that red one,” Dick said when he saw me wave on a family in a black Ford. “Can’t,” I said. “That’s the Americana