I want to be clear that I did not ask Milo to do any of this.
I mentioned, in passing, on Wednesday night, that I had to drive through the Pass and Popp's Ferry intersection Thursday morning and had heard there was a signal outage scheduled. That was all I said. That was the full extent of my involvement. I was eating cereal. I was not soliciting infrastructure solutions.
By 5:45 a.m., Milo Vercetti was standing in my driveway with a whistle on a lanyard, a laminated card, and what he described as a "refined traffic facilitation schema" drawn in two colors of marker on the back of a Biloxi Box Set festival flyer. The trop-rock vibes of the front — a pelican in sunglasses, some palm fronds — did not prepare me for the sixteen directional arrows on the back.
"I'm going to direct the intersection," he said, "and I'll be standing right there when you come through, so."
"So what?" I said.
He did a small hand signal that I believe was meant to indicate romance.
The thing about Milo is that his plans are not crazy in the way that crazy plans are usually crazy. They're crazy in the way that if you squint and tilt your head, you can almost see the version where this works. He had done research. He knew the outage was scheduled from six to noon. He had thoughts about flow patterns. He used the phrase "natural human sequencing" three times on the drive over, which I know because I was in the car with him, which is how I ended up at the intersection at 6:08 a.m. on a Thursday, watching my boyfriend take his position in the middle of Pass Road like he was born for this.
It was already 82 degrees. The humidity was the kind that makes you feel like the air is wearing you.
For approximately eleven minutes, it was working. Milo has a very authoritative whistle. He's tall. He was making eye contact with each driver in a way that communicated, somehow, that he was a person with jurisdiction. Cars were moving. A man in a truck gave him a thumbs-up. A woman in scrubs nodded at him like he was a traffic cop and she respected traffic cops. I was watching from the shoulder, and I will not lie to you: it was a little bit impressive.
Then the heat arrived with intent.
By 6:25, his hair had gone fully horizontal on one side. By 6:35, the laminated card had developed a film of condensation and his hand signals were getting harder to read. A car misinterpreted the "proceed" signal as "stop" and another car misinterpreted the "stop" signal as "wave back," which Milo then did, losing his authority position in the exchange.
I got out of my car.
"Milo," I said.
"I just need to recalibrate," he said. He was sweating through his shirt. The whistle was fogging up between blows. The sky was already going gray at the edges, the way Gulf Coast skies do when they're planning something for the afternoon and want you to know.
"The city crews are literally right there," I said. I gestured at the two workers in vests who had been watching Milo for twenty minutes with expressions I can only describe as professionally neutral.
Milo looked at them. They looked at Milo.
"I was keeping them warm," he said.
One of the workers took a gentle step forward and Milo yielded the intersection with a dignity I found genuinely moving. He walked back to me, whistle swinging, schema flyer damp at the corners, and stood next to me on the shoulder of Pass Road while the professionals resumed their work.
"Did you see me?" he said.
"I saw you," I said.
"The first part was good."
"The first part was genuinely good."
He looked satisfied with this. Then he looked at me. Then he did the hand signal again — the one that meant romance, or possibly merge — and I don't know, something about the way he was standing there, hair ruined, whistle fogged, completely undefeated, made it land differently than it should have.
"There's a new Chick-fil-A opening on Pass and Nelson," I said. "When it opens, you could direct that intersection too."
"I would need a better schema," he said seriously.
"Yeah," I said. "You would."
We got back in the car before the thunderstorm had any ideas.