Today’s soundtrack: bigger and better and faster and wetter
Today at 8:02pm: “Counseling” a friend whose girlfriend is treating him like shit. I swear there’s something in the air


Keeping a car in Manhattan is no easy task. Free street parking on weekdays is like the G-spot--you’ve heard it exists and you might have passed it once or twice, but no one’s actually seen it. So a couple years ago I coughed up the dough for a monthly garage space. It’s similar to when the doctor asks you to cough in that they’ve both got you by the balls.

Weekends are a different matter. Saturday and Sunday I can leave the car on the street right outside my house and often do, just making sure I drag it back to the garage before Monday morning.

Today was a Tuesday and I overslept as usual. I ate my pineapple, suited up and on my way out the door, I noticed my car keys sitting on my bureau. That’s interesting...how can they be here, when they’re sitting in the ignition of my car parked at the monthly garage?

...Fuck.

I run downstairs, dreading the pile of tickets I’m sure to spy sprouting off my windshield like bright orange fungus. How could I fucking forget and leave the car in a weekday-illegal spot for two fucking days?

I get outside, frantic. The good news is there are no tickets. The bad news is there’s no fucking car.

From work I call the New York Sheriff’s department. Can you believe NYC has a sheriff? I’ve never seen the bastard but apparently he’s in charge of towing cars.

“Yup, we’ve got it,” says the helpful woman on the phone. “It’s at the impound lot on 38th Street and 12th Avenue.”

“What’s it gonna cost to get it out?”

“Lessee...” says the woman, typing something. “Says it was towed at 11:45am Monday. So if you pick it up before 11:45am today it will be $185. If you pick it up later, it will be $200-something with the extra storage fee.”

I look up at the clock: 11:01am.

Trying to get across midtown Manhattan in a taxi is like being stuck in a crowded parking lot that moves a few feet every minute. I make it to 12th Avenue by 11:30am, stressed that I had to ride in a taxi. Those guys are my mortal enemy.

The New York City Pier 76 Impound Lot is one of the shittiest structures you can imagine. It’s a big-ass corrugated tin warehouse, the kind of thing they blow up in low-budget TNT action flicks starring Treat Williams or Richard Chamberlein.

The waiting room is done up in disgusting late 1960s rec-room wood paneling and worn vinyl seats with ominous stains on them. There are six bulletproof windows for the clerks, but only one is being attended. Waiting before me is a construction-worker type, a clean-cut businessman type and an old-school Brooklyn taxi driver, apparently accompanied by his mother. The taxi driver keeps muttering “Dey set me up, Dey set me up.”

The worst part about having to wait was listening to the taxi driver rip into his mother, who seemed about 90 years old. She would ask questions about what happened to the car and he’d start yelling at her going “Dey set me up! How many fucken times I gotta tell you, you don’t unnerstand.”

You have to wait forever. First they take your application to get your car back and then you fucking wait. The woman processing mine was a total DMV-style bitch and I found myself wishing something bad would happen to her when, all of a sudden, something did.

She fucking fainted.

I didn’t actually see her faint--I was sitting on one of the cumshot-covered chairs--but there was this commotion behind the windows and I see people scurrying around back there going “She fainted, she fainted, someone call EMS.”

All of us in the waiting room let out a collective groan. There was no way this was gonna speed things up.

The ambulance comes, and the EMTs roll a stretcher back into the clerk area. I can’t see what’s going on back there but after ten minutes they came back out and the stretcher was still empty. I wasn’t sure if that meant she was dead and they were waiting for the coroner or if she magically got better. I hoped she magically got better so she could process my fucking application and I could get the fuck out of there.

As they wheeled the empty stretcher out of the room, I thought it would be funny if they suddenly picked up the taxi driver’s mom and just threw her on there, wheeling her out without a word.

Nearly two hours after I’d arrived, they called my name at the window. Tried to charge me the 200-something but I raised a fuss about how I showed up before 11:45am. I almost said “It’s not my fault the clerk died” but once I got up to the window I saw she wasn’t dead, just sitting back there looking dazed and taking a rest. Which is probably what she looks like when she’s “working.”

They ended up charging me the $185, then gave me an official-looking slip of paper. “Take this around back to the garage. Give it to the attendant and they’ll take you to your car,” they explained.

I hand my slip of paper to the attendant, who’s super-friendly. “Do you have your key, sir?” he asks.

Faaaaaaaaack! I left the key in my bag, back at the office! You can’t make this fucking shit up.

Back in a taxi, headed back across town towards The Corporation. I take the elevator upstairs, enter my office, grab my bag and rip the key out of it like I’m trying to start a lawnmower. Take elevator back downstairs, hail third taxi of the fucking day and head back, back, back across town.

The light at the end of the tunnel was that by the time I got back, the super-friendly attendant was gone, replaced by a moderately hot super-short Latina woman with big brown eyes. “I’ll take you to your car,” she said, and proceeded to walk me across the lot. I bet her hair smelled nice but wasn’t close enough to tell.

She looked at the slip of paper. “It’s all the way at the end,” she said. The lot was huge so we had a long ways to go. I thought about what I would say when we finally reached my car. Something along the lines of “Hey, let’s just get in my car and drive. We’ll head up to the George Washington, cross it and never look back. I’ll take you out west where we can forget all this municipal bullshit and just start over, you and me.”

Instead when we got to my car I said, “Do you want a lift back to the booth?” and she said “Nah, s’aright.”