Tuesday, October 04, 2011
A Tale of Tow City
When does a free concert cost nearly $600? Funny story:
We’d been in the park since 11 am, cavorting at the bluegrass festival. We’d seen six bands, several friends, countless crazinesses… we’d eaten and drunk, imbibed and reclined, danced and laughed, and scraped every penny of value from our (free) admission. The crowd was congenial and enthusiastic and even the honeybuckets were fairly well maintained. Everything went great from the moment we got there till when we left.
From before we got there, actually, since I’d pre-arrived at 8 am in a car packed with a cooler, blanket, chips and treats, and all we’d need so we’d never have to leave our little concert campsite. I staged the car on a street bordering the park, just outside the festival area and about 150 feet from a lone sawhorse at the corner with a “tow zone” sign on it. Then I hoofed it home again. Three hours later we all bused in as a family, retrieved our provisions from the waiting car, and walked a short ways to the locus festivus. Kelly even ran back once to get more supplies from the car. We’d had plenty of chances to notice any new “no parking” signs. There weren’t any. You can already see where this is going, right?
Flash forward from 11 am to 6:30 pm – the sky, still cloudless, is now crepuscular and darkening, the boys are bliss-burned out, and my feet are dog-tired. We’ve budgeted our energy so we have exactly enough left to walk back to the waiting car, load it up, and absquatulate back home. We arrive at our parking spot: no car. No – no cars. They’re all gone. The curb is vacant. The sidewalk, however, is richly populated with sawhorses all bearing handbills printed with odd colloquialisms like “no parking 3-6 pm” and “for towed vehicles call….”
All we could do was gape at each other in exhausted carlessness. It wasn’t that we hadn’t seen the posted signs – we’d looked, and they had not been there. Fair enough. Time for Plan B. We hiked four blocks uphill, toting our bags, blankets and cooler (not to mention our two wrung-out kids), negotiated a “they towed my car” discount fare for our home-bound bus, and got back pretty quickly under the circumstances.
Kel stayed behind to put the kids to bed. I took a few minutes to recharge my phone and look up some bus routes before heading back out into the night to un-pound my vehicle. As I waited at the bus stop up the block, several “not in service” coaches zipped past, giving me ample opportunity to assess my circumstances. Sharing the shelter with me were a few other dusty concert-goers, a couple standard-issue Richmond residents in babushkas and overcoats, and one person of particularly distinctive character: she strutted fiercely back and forth at the far corner of the bus stop area, a slim young woman all in black – black leather jacket, short black skirt, black leggings, little black ballet slippers. She flipped her long straight black hair and cocked a hip as she ostentatiously loitered, flashing sharp glances around at the others there. I felt her gaze lock onto me, and looked down at my boots with a sinking conviction. I didn’t know what she was up to but I was pretty sure I’d soon find out.
I lifted my eyes again and there she was, four feet in front of me, fiercer than ever but presenting somewhat ambiguously. Her clothes were in good shape but her face looked unclean – oily and dirty. Her hair was more greasy than glossy; her expression was masklike, Kabuki-esque. I was no longer convinced of her genetic femininity. She flipped her skinny hips from side to side, appraising me frankly. She seemed to make up her mind and inclined her chin toward me, gave me a little nod with a flick of her hair. It looked a lot like an invitation. I gritted my teeth, compressed the blood out of my lips, and shook my head briefly. Her eyes flashed, angry and questing. Planting herself squarely before me, hands on hips, she held up a flattened drinking straw in one hand, raising it high and cutting the air with it in quick slashing gestures like some crackhead conductor. Her lips were moving but I couldn’t hear her and didn’t want to; I just shook my head again with all the weariness I truly felt. With a derisive final swipe of her straw she stormed off again to her own side of the bus stop. But even from way over there she seemed not to have given up on me, extracting a couple of bags of chips from her jacket and waving them at me – suggesting the enticing possibility of an intimate Doritos party. As luck had it, I just wasn’t that hungry.
When the bus finally came she boarded from the rear and sat alone in the back; I could hear her conversing among her various selves as we cruised the dark street. I drowsed, rousing myself just in time to get out at Van Ness. The strawswiper got off there too and stepped toward me, but as I had merely stationed myself at another bus stop she muttered something, turned sharply, and stomped north up the boulevard, alone.
I had twenty minutes to kill before my next bus arrived, so I wandered across the street and looked in on the art college’s museum of classic cars. I lost myself in their curves and chrome; even the crude overhead tubelights were transformed in reflection on their lacquered paint into some kind of liquid magic. Cars that embodied speed, luxury, pure sybaritic style – automotive confections, pure motive power captured in suspended animation, as if a spell might break and they’d all race away like wild animals. As I eventually turned away from the big windows to resume my bus-stop wait, I couldn’t help but think that my dusty Soob in the impound lot was a creature from a different planet altogether.
The 47 bus to the Hall of Justice was a quick and boring ride. Tipsy teenagers and authenticated hipsters sat on separate benches and didn’t mingle. I got to 7th and Bryant without engaging my brains in any meaningful way and reached the AutoReturn facility feeling self-possessed and ready to resolve my little inconvenience with honed aplomb. This would be a surgical strike; I’d be back behind my own steering wheel in minutes.
That sense of capability and strength evaporated as soon as the rancid stench of the towyard shed entered my nostrils. I’d brushed past a few tough-looking and angry-faced characters outside the door without a second thought, but one whiff inside that little waiting room refocused my thinking. I was in a troubled place and it looked like I’d be there for a while.
The waiting room was designed to induce claustrophobia – a long narrow triangle with the sharp point cut off. The back wall was lined with chairs, on which sat several irritated towyard patrons; the opposite wall was draped with bulletproof glass into which six service windows had been cut, of which five were not in use. A “take a ticket” kiosk by the door was out of service, and a number of people stood milling around impatiently but without focus. Several more people were jammed against the constricted end of the room in a big frustrated knot. The place was like a stress funnel, and I was about to pour myself into it. What choice did I have?
From the one functioning service window, I heard a tiny voice saying “next”. No one moved; no one heard it but me, I think. Things seemed poorly organized. Some preppy-looking guy who came in just before me was looking for the end of the line; I asked a couple of people where I should sign in and what I should do. A woman came to me with a legal pad and asked me to sign up if I’d been towed from the festival, as most of us apparently had been, so she could organize a protest; I gave her my name and asked what to do next. She had no answer. The lady behind the security glass peeped “next” again. Preppy boy and I stepped over to her. She asked him for his driver’s license and the crowd erupted.
Well, not the whole crowd – one guy, who seemed to take it upon himself to speak with the whole crowd’s voice. In outrage he bellowed at us that there was a line, people had been waiting, why were we stepping in front of them, can’t we use our heads, don’t we think they’d waited long enough, don’t be disrespectful… I cut into his harangue to explain: the lady had said “next” and no one had moved, I didn’t know where the back of the line was or how things were set up, I just wanted to get checked in and no one I’d asked had told me what to do. Oh, he rejoined, he’ll tell me now, it should be obvious, it starts there and it ends there (accompanied by vague arm waving)…. He wore orange plugs in each earhole and his voice was booming in the small room; all other eyes were cast down. His face was florid as he berated me. Wait, I asked, it starts here? Ends there? No! That’s the end! You start there! He pointed to the most crowded and narrowest part of the room, nearly spitting with rage. Okay, I conceded as I made my way deep into the narrow room, I got it now, don’t want to get in anybody’s way, no one gave me any direction, I’m here to cooperate…. The line monitor started chewing me out for presuming that he had any duty to help me with anything so simple as waiting in a line; a blonde woman near me at the back of the line facepalmed and begged the floor to make us all stop yelling. By then I had assumed my proper place at last, so her wish was granted.
It was about this time that I figured out what was making the horrible odor I was smelling in there: someone who’d been milling around when I had first arrived had taken the place behind me in line, and there was something stinky about him. He was a plus-sized guy, about 5’7” but almost spherical, wearing a nice tie-dye and fancy embroidered knickershorts and a pair of the raunchiest shoes I’d seen in quite a while. They were dusty and splitting and tied in a way that made me think that he hadn’t taken them off for a very long time. In general he was pretty well-maintained, as well as most of us there were anyway – but his pedal extremities were extreme indeed. With so many of us crammed into that tight little windowless space there was nothing to be done about the stink, so I tried to think of a fresh ocean breeze and breathed through my mouth. That didn’t help much – my imaginative faculties were inadequate to the task, and mouth-breathing just meant I could both smell and taste his noisome pods. I settled in for the duration and tried to find my inner zen garden. The one that hadn’t been freshly manured.
The line monitor had taken his seat again, but kept jumping up to tell people how upset he was and to chastise the clerks at the window for not having more people on staff. At one point he took a phone call and complained volubly to whomever about the injustice, the wait, the facilities, how he had his hands full just keeping people properly in line (at this the blonde woman shot me an embarrassed smile, which I returned with a resigned nod)… But his turn eventually came too. He took a few parting shots at the hapless clerk and then disappeared into the night.
By this time three service windows were open and the line was moving faster. The guy with the funky feet was still at my shoulder, occasionally muttering about his fate, as we all were. Someone said something about how all of us just wanted to go home; the big guy mumbled that he’d like to but they’d towed his home. That made an impression on me, so when he told me his phone was dead and asked to borrow mine, I let him. He tried two numbers but neither seemed to be working. His night seemed to be going even worse than mine. He was just stepping up to a window as I was concluding my own business, and I heard him learning that the redemption fee for his truck had gone up to about $500 while he’d been waiting in line. He somehow actually deflated as he stood there, clutching four $100 bills and a wallet full of tattered papers, stammering sadly.
I didn’t get to see how that situation resolved itself. Instead, I promptly paid my ransom and went out to find my car in the lot under the scenic central freeway. The fellow working security there was good-natured and sympathetic. He said he’d seen 120 people with my tale of woe between the two weekend nights, and he encouraged me to file protests for wrongful towing and ticketing. I thanked him for his help, found my car, climbed in, drove off. By the time I got home it was about 11 pm on an unusually long and fully-packed day. I had paid nearly $500 for a free concert, plus three hours of my time – and I suspect I’m not done paying yet. The stories, however, I’m crediting as free of charge.
