Cars, Cops and Guys in Trucks

So Brooklyn. I feel like I just twirled myself around in your mouth and now you have spit me back out.

Lemme tell you what happened.

So the midget. For those of you who don’t know, she is my miserable tiny car. (Please buy it from me. Please? Fine.) Anyway. The front license plate disappeared off the midge a few weeks ago. I only discovered this weeks after the fact, apparently, when I came to my car, post-monsoons, only to move it because of crappy alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules. There it was—the orange sign of impending doom, the piece of nearly destroyed paper that makes me want to cry, die, lie, etc. A ticket. Fine. Fuckers.

I need to get to the DMV, which, as you know, if just not where you want to be when you are juggling school and various jobs and mental health or, just living.

So I get. Another. Fucking ticket.

Fine.

Today I fly out of the house to discuss the situation with a traffic cop I see from my fourth-floor window. She’s coming. I felt her coming. So I nab her before she nabs the midge. We talk. Or, she gives someone else a ticket, barely acknowledges me, and tells me to get to the precinct.

Fine.

Oh, but there’s no parking over there, so, “Take the bus,” she says to me.

Fuck no.

I get in the midge and park about a block from the precinct, which, pleasantly, has those lovely old-school green lamps on the outside, illuminating what I think is white marble, or at least limestone. Anyway. I seem to only have two dimes and a nickel, which, it seems, does not work in New York City parking meters these days. I’m asking a young woman in a bright green coat if she has a quarter when a guy shouts from a Hormel Ham truck—“You need a quawtah? I got a quawtah.”

We make the exchange. I plonk it in the meter, and I attempt to cross the street. That’s when the jerkoffs in a garbage truck nearly take my head off when, instead of slowing down, they insist on turning directly in front of me.

I make a graceful, dancerly “fuck you” gesture, with arm fully extended and finger erect.

“Dickheads!” I shout.

“Yeah! You tell ‘im!” shouts Hormel Ham truck guy.

That leaves me laughing and happy. I like guys in trucks when they are that encouraging.

I make my way between oversized “scary” Halloween figurines lining the steps and the hallway of the precinct, with skull masks for heads and purple cloth for “bodies,” and between “scary” humans also in the way, with mullets for hair and plaid shirts for “clothing,” and explain why I’m there to the beautiful African-American cop behind the high, dark-wood counter.

I love that about police stations. When the cops sit on high, making you feel short and small and in need more than you are. No, I do. I feel comforted when they deign to address my problem. Think what you will.

The pretty cop sends me to a side room in full view of the “gun locker,” which has a list of instructions pasted to it, like “Keep your hand OFF the trigger.” The actual lock on the gun locker is weaker looking than the Master lock I use for the gym. Anyway, I explain to the pretty lady that I only had one quarter to feed the meter, which gives me only half an hour for them to stop bickering about who is less busy and can fill out a report for me? In the meantime, I’m picturing local traffic cops nailing the midget because it a) doesn’t have a license plate and b) is at an expired meter.

She seems relatively concerned about my situation.

Then I do battle with a large woman with a stunningly hair-sprayed coif looped around the top of her head; it looks like brown, stiff ribbons, and it riffs off the bland brown lines of her trench coat. She was here first. Okay, you were. Sure. Maybe. Parking meter…parking meter…

I try to overhear what property she is reporting stolen. It happened at what I think is the only mall in Brooklyn. The young cop not in a uniform asks the woman if she knows the address of the mall. (Who knows the address of a mall?) Course she doesn’t.

All this happens while the woman making the report and I stand. Nobody offers either of us a seat, and there are none in the area. I’m noticing the clock on the wall is stuck at 8:45, even though it’s 11:38, and I’m examining the fake-looking gun on a nearby detective’s waist. It looks plastic. But it still makes me shudder.

Young cop takes my report.
Tells me to get myself to the DMV, cause no license plate? “That’s an easy one.”

Whatever. Can I face the DMV today after spending the morning at my local precinct?

Stay tuned. Or do something more interesting. At least, these are my choices.

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