My Friend The Parking Lot Attendant - Analysis

A Friendship Built Out of Jabs

The poem’s central pleasure is the way friendship shows up as pressure: the attendant doesn’t offer warmth so much as a running commentary that keeps the speaker from getting comfortable in his own story. From the start he’s drawn as a performance—small mustache, sucking on a cigar, a man who lean[s] into cars—and that physical leaning becomes the social method too. He leans into the speaker’s life with teasing questions that are also tests: are you winning, are you desirable, are you legitimate?

The speaker plays along, but always a little sideways. When asked Ya gonna make a killin’? he gives Maybe, an answer that neither brags nor denies. When greeted as Ramrod, he shrugs: Very little. The humor is dry, but it’s also defensive—he won’t hand the attendant a clean target. Their rapport is a sparring match where both men keep asserting a kind of street authority: the attendant through audacity, the speaker through underreaction.

The Girlfriend as Scorekeeping

When the speaker arrives with my girlfriend, the attendant only grinned, as if her presence confirms something without needing to be said. The next time, he pounces: where’s the young chick? and then the blunt accusation she dumped you! The poem makes a small but telling point here: intimacy is treated like public evidence. The attendant reads the speaker’s romantic life the way he reads cars—visible signs that can be ranked, mocked, or used to prove a theory about the driver.

There’s a tension the speaker can’t quite resolve: he wants the attendant’s attention (he keeps returning; he keeps answering), but he also wants to stay unreadable. Even the line I left her at home…. has that trailing pause, as if the speaker knows it won’t satisfy a man who thrives on calling Bullshit!

The BMW and the Question of Deserving

The sharpest exchange arrives when the speaker drives a BMW and the attendant really leaned into the car. The physical move mirrors the social one: he closes the distance and makes the class accusation explicit. inherited your money, didn’t get this car, with your brains—it’s an attack on legitimacy, not just wealth. The attendant isn’t simply jealous; he’s policing the story that wealth tries to tell about itself, insisting that a man like this speaker doesn’t naturally belong behind that wheel.

The speaker’s reply, How’d you guess?, is a perfect Bukowski-style feint: it looks like agreement, but it’s really a refusal to defend himself on the attendant’s terms. He dodges shame by making it into a joke, yet the joke carries an uncomfortable undertone. If the attendant is right, then the BMW is not a reward but a kind of costume—and the speaker is caught wearing it.

The Sudden Absence, and What It Reveals

The ending turns quiet: I haven’t seen him lately. After all the swagger and contact, absence becomes the last fact. The speaker’s final guess—moved on to better things—sounds generous, but it also feels like an attempt to keep the attendant winning, to preserve him as a figure who can’t be reduced or beaten. The tone shifts from banter to a small, unexpected respect.

There’s a last tension lodged in that respect: the attendant may be a parking lot worker, but he’s the one who seems most mobile, most able to leave. The speaker, even with the BMW, is the one left waiting and wondering, as if the attendant’s real power was never money at all—it was his freedom to move on without explanation.