4 O'Clock yesterday afternoon, I walk out to my car to move it for alternate side of the street parking.
I find that my car has been broken into and that the passenger side window exists now only in a glass puddle on my two front seats. The contents of my glove compartment box are around, too. Swimming in the cracked beauty of the thick smashed glass.
Just as I made the discovery, keys hanging from my hand, a guy walks by.
"Oh..." he says.
"Yeah. Crazy right." All I can say.
"You gotta call the police."
"Yeah," I say. "Okay."
I didn't really want to. I don't really like the police. Besides, all I needed, on top of what had just happened, was for them to look up in the computer how many unresolved parking tickets I have. Goose=cooked. But, sigh,In my daze,I called. And I thought about it again. Man, maybe they would just take the car.
The cops showed up. Took a report. Said nothing about the tickets. Called what happened "criminal mischief."
They had asked me if anything was stolen. If you know my car, than you know there was nothing to steal. There was an atlas, a bad book about acting, a mess of papers and a coupla dumb hats my grandma gave me. My radio was still there.
No. Nothing that I can tell, officer. Thanks.
The thing I was the happiest about was that Luniper and Fuck Me were still there.
If you have never ridden in my car than you don't know the kids.
Luniper and Fuck Me, are a white cat and a purple hippo. They are my constant companions in the car. They were given to my roommate and I in New Orleans by a Vampire, a Lupine, and a Beanie Baby pusher named, Lenny.
They were ok. I was ok.
I had a meeting planned for that afternoon and I decided to keep it.
I called my pal and told him what had happened, but that I wanted to get together anyway. He's a film maker. He asked if he could shoot me. I told him I think maybe somebody should.
He showed up as I was taping a plastic Glad Bag to the now windowless window of my car. He helped in that cute, useless, man way, and took me out to dinner.
Suddenly, he's back into Magic Tricks. In the car, on the way to the restaurant, he told me about this documentary he's making about magicians with his friend, Jason. He kept doing card tricks on me and figured out a way for me to keep pulling the Queen of Hearts. I giggled like a four year old every time.
This morning I got up to deal with my car. My mechanic neighbor across the street got me a deal with his glass guy. Andrew is a life saver. He plows me out when it snows. Global Warming has been killing him though. He lost 10k this year.
I was standing in his garage, waiting for him, and looking at all the cutout pictures of supermodels and movie stars he has up on the wall, and I remembered my friend telling me that nine times out of ten when a woman is asked to think of a Royal Card, she picks the Queen of Hearts.
2 comments:
Oh sweetums that sucks.
at least it's not colder?
The police could care less about your parking tickets; they write 'em, they don't enforce 'em, they have enough to do unless you do something that warrants looking into your background, which being a victim doesn't count for.
Enforcement is up to the PVB, who if you rack up too many unpaid tickets and judgements for, will simply put your name on a list for some nice NYC Marshal or Sheriff to read, he in turn will invite a flatbed tow truck operator to come with him, locate your address from your license, then proceed in a spiral search pattern to find and tow your car.
You then will have to locate your vehicle using the system at nyc.gov/finance and either pay a Sheriff or a NYC Marshal's office the full balance of all your unpaid tickets. You should know that Marshals reside all over the city, usually in incredibly hard-to-access locations like strip malls tucked away in the middle of Staten Island.
You should enter your license plate in the search function at nyc.gov/finance and it will tell you EXACTLY what tickets are outstanding and how much you owe.
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