Rehearsal had been going well. I’m kind of slow when it comes to picking up choreography, so I was really pleased that we’d knocked out most of the moves for “Sh-boom” as performed in Crybaby. I ran down to my car to grab my Drag Bag, which had a CD so that we could bring the music to the open-mic drag show we’d be performing at. I ran back upstairs.
“Either you’ve gotten me very high without me knowing and I’ve forgotten where I parked, or my car’s been towed,” I said, a bit incredulous.
“Shit, son,” current said. Margaux, who lived in the apartment we were using to rehearse, asked me if I had parked in their parking lot. I confirmed, and she told me that sometimes they did tow. I had parked in the lot because I’d done so a few weeks back, for almost six hours, with no negative consequences.
Margaux and I went back out to the parking lot, and I retraced my steps; indeed, my car was no longer parked in front of the row of electric meters I’d used as a landmark. I called the towing company advertised on the placards around the lot.
“Yeah?” some guy answered.
I gave him my name and asked if they’d towed my car. I described the car. I told them the name of the apartment complex from which they might’ve towed. Then, the most mortifying thing happened: silence. Probably ninety seconds of it. At this point, my brain kicked into overdrive, and fears boosted my thoughts like nitrous. Oh no. What if they haven’t towed my car, and it’s been stolen? That’d suck. I wonder how one goes about filing the appropriate paperwork. This is going to be such a pain.
The sound of the man taking a dip brought me back to the conversation. “Yeah, yeah, we got that one just a little bit ago. You want an address?”
I thought he was asking for our address, so I asked Margaux, who was standing next to me in the space that my car had occupied a few minutes before. The man on the other end of the phone got impatient and reiterated that he would give me an address, “because if I give you directions, you’ll get lost.” [For the record, the directions merely needed to be: "we are between the blahblah and yadayada exits on the northbound side of suchnsuch highway," so I don't know what his issue was.] I got the address, and we went back upstairs.
We made a few phone calls to line up a ride to the tow yard; I called my roommie and my roommie’s girlfriend, but they were at a fancy dinner, and I didn’t want to take them away from it. current called our friend Jessie, who acquiesced.
We climbed into Jessie’s car and headed off, and I was all-too-aware of the $200 in borrowed cash sitting in my pocket. We gave our driver directions, and she told us amusing stories as we rode towards my ransomed car [named Luna], which made me feel less-stupid about what had happened. I made horrible bitter jokes, which I figured were better than getting aggressively angry.
We pulled up to the tow place, which was essentially a parking lot ringed in razorwire with a reinforced bunker on one corner. The dipping man sat in the bunker behind bulletproof glass and controlled the gates in and out of the towyard. I clambered out of the car, feeling just a bit sick at the financial ramifications of my screwup.
There was [what appeared to me to be] a straight, white, middle-aged couple already at the window. The man, who looked like a strange hybrid between a guy that I work with and my cousins’ grandfather [the one that I don't share with them], was decked out in his UT regalia, and it quickly became apparent that they’d been at the game.
“Two hundred fockin dollars!” the man said angrily. I wanted to bitterly correct him, tell him that it’s actually $193.50- $150.0o for filing and reporting, $20.00 for towing, $20.00 for impound, and $3.50 for taxes- but decided not to.
“This is fockin ridiculous!” He was slapping money down with the bitter resignation of someone who’d lost a bet they were sure they’d win. “Do you know how fockin many beers this would buy? I mean, we were in the stadium, so only like three there, but otherwise! Otherwise do you know?!” I felt like I was back at the QPR game, listening in on the fans in line to buy pints and chips and brats.
His wife smiled and asked him not to be rude to the man behind the bulletproof glass after her husband said that the man was “a fockin dirty filthy fockin vulture”. Her husband responded by getting even more aggressive, telling the man behind the glass that he’d hunt him down, or find him on the street, blah blah blah. I wondered how many times the man behind the bulletproof glass had heard that, and how many times he’d had to call in the police on assault charges with folks who got too aggressive. I wondered how many times the dipping man had been shot at. The man behind the glass looked completely nonplussed.
“It’s not his fault,” the man’s wife said. She looked vaguely like the matron of the first family I babysat regularly for, which was comforting to me. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.
“I’m having this same conversation in my own head,” I said. She smiled an exasperated smile and told me that they’d debated parking without a permit or paying what seemed at the time an exorbitant rate to park in a lot.
The knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade popped into my head to inform me that we both had chosen poorly. As if I didn’t already know. Thanks.
The grumpy man slapped down the rest of his money and waited for the dipping man to fill out some paperwork; they played a game of passing little bits of paper and plastic back and forth throug hthe little slot under the bulletproof glass, a sort of cubby that dipped under so that anyone irate enough to take a shot at the dipping man wouldn’t have an opening like they would at a cinema ticket window. The dipping man buzzed the couple through the little gate to the towyard, and as they passed through, the grumpy man turned back and yelled a string of insults which ended with, “…fockin vulture faggot queer.”
Anyone who knows me knows that I can jam my foot pretty far into my mouth pretty quickly. I yelled after him; “Sir! Neither faggot nor queer are insults! Pick different ones!” I yelled largely because there was a grumbling towtruck right next to us, purring as it lined up its next kill for the evening. I repeated the gist of what I said again, though before I could finish, Jessie was right next to me, leaning over me [even though I had to stand on a raised platform to talk to the dipping man].
“Eli!” she hissed at me, “I could hear you from inside my car! Repeat after me: I will not get gay bashed at the tow yard. I will not get gay bashed at the tow yard.”
After that, I paid up, stumbled around the lot with Margaux looking for Luna, found Luna, and drove off into the night. I pulled out money to pay current back, and when I paid her back she backed out of the show due to feeling extra sick. We ended up getting to the show an hour late. I went on ten minutes after getting to the club [with my friend Artie Chokehearts, doing a number to "Bowie's in Space" by Flight of the Chonchords], with the most slapdash facial hair I’ve ever done [which still looked pretty alright].
I think I kept my cool relatively well, and didn’t really get all that upset about it. Also, this is pretty much the worst thing that’s happened to me for a while, and I’m totally alright with that being the case, because it was small beans.
