There was a grubby blue Crown Victoria with Pennsylvania license plates double-parked ahead of me at 7:30 this morning, hoping for a spot on the Tuesday-Friday side of the street. I lucked into this spot on Sunday, when I rushed home from Rockaway to meet my sibling Dee. I’d left the Eclair in Rockaway for almost two weeks, on a street of houses that are still new enough for the city not to have put up any signs yet. The car's mildew problem seems to have cleared up a little. My cousin, who visited a few weeks ago, when the problem was so bad that you could smell the car from a distance, had the brilliant idea of spreading kitty litter on the floor of the back seat (after removing the mats), to soak up the moisture and alleviate the odor. Over the weekend, I rolled down all the windows, and even parked the car perpendicular to the breeze, in a beach parking lot, to air it out. I keep meaning to take a box of baking soda out there. By the end of the summer, I hope to be able to once again offer a ride to my friend M.Q., who sold me the car, and who I know would be troubled by the mildew.
The Crown Victoria moved along when a cop cruised by and stopped to ticket the car in front of me, a silver Lexus S.U.V. The cop was still writing the ticket when the S.U.V.’s owner showed up: a young woman with a little white dog. She looked disconsolate as she climbed into the car with her dog and her orange parking ticket. Busted. I heard the Broom on the avenue behind me at 7:37 and started up the car, but instead of turning down the street, the Broom continued through the intersection: false alarm. The woman in the Lexus, having thought it over, got back out of the car with her dog, tucked the ticket back under the windshield wiper, and left.
“The ticket says seven-thirty on the nose,” she said to me as she passed. “She couldn’t have waited one minute?”
I sympathized. “She turned the corner right on the dot of seven-thirty,” I said.
“Whatever—I’m leaving,” she said. She had already gotten a ticket for not being there—what was the point of staying?
The Broom arrived a few minutes later. I was the closest car to the corner, and I got out of its way. It went around the Lexus, and then gave the whole stretch of cars ahead of it a free pass. So who prevented the Sanitation Department from doing its job today, the demoralized Lexus owner or the overzealous cop who provoked the Lexus owner into blowing off her civic duty?
I was glad to have scored a Tuesday-Friday spot this week, because I went out with Dee on Sunday night, and I didn’t feel so good on Monday. Dee is in town to play a show on Wednesday at Le Poisson Rouge, formerly the Village Gate, on Bleecker Street. (She got an excellent writeup in The New Yorker: scroll down to Poisson Rouge.) We went over there after dinner on Sunday to check out the venue and see Rickie Lee Jones. I say this as if I knew who Rickie Lee Jones was. All I know now is that she is female, blond, and her show was cancelled.
What to do? Dee, who is using a cane these days (bad back), remembered that her friend Andrew W.K. had opened a night club at 100 Lafayette Street, below Canal, so we hobbled over to Lafayette and headed downtown. It has to be cool to have a friend who owns a night club, right? When we arrived, the club wasn’t open yet: they were still setting up the bar downstairs. But Dee learned that Andrew would be coming in, and they gave us a drink and we sat in the conversation pit of this big black box of a space, which gradually filled up and turned into a disco, mirror ball, strobe lights, deafening music, and all. The first one there (after us) was an older gentleman, wearing a gray T-shirt with a black squiggle on it that looked like an upside-down backwards comma (O.K., it looked like a sperm). He hailed the disc jockey as he came in, and informed me that this was the best d.j. ever, who had worked at Studio 54 back in the day. The elderly man looked like someone’s boss at an insurance company: come nine the next morning, he would be back at his desk in the underwriting department, but tonight he was a dancing queen.
I understand that disco is back. There was a piece in the Sunday Times about Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons, and a band called Hercules and Love Affair, recording a disco song that has been a huge hit in England. But Sunday night's music all sounded the same to me: heavy drums, a screaming diva, and the occasional police whistle. The gentleman in the sperm shirt danced by himself mostly, waving his right arm around as if winding up a lasso and not moving his feet much. He was occasionally partnered, whether he liked it or not, by a somewhat ungainly-looking woman in horizontal stripes who wore white latex gloves, the better for the strobe light to show her windmilling around on the dance floor.
Andrew W.K. showed up and said hi to Dee, but then he had to go to a meeting and he did not reemerge. We left at about midnight and walked home. All I knew about Andrew W.K. was that he played drums and electric bass (to fantastic effect) on Dee's CD "Safe Inside the Day." On Monday morning, back at my desk in the underwriting department, I googled Andrew W.K. and learned that he is (1) into heavy metal, (2) a huge commercial success, and (3) a party genius.
Back in my mildewed car this morning, I soberly tried to digest the fact that I’d paid forty-three dollars to fill my 11.6-gallon gas tank on the way back from Rockaway. I’d held out on till I got off the peninsula, thinking I could do better than $4.29 a gallon, and I did see a station on Woodhaven Boulevard where the gas was only $4.27 a gallon, but it hardly seemed worth changing lanes to save twenty cents. I have just thought of a way to get a fillup for twenty dollars, however: buy gas when the tank is still half full.
Showing posts with label gasoline. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gasoline. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Land of Lincoln’s Birthday
My car is marked today with salt and strain from the Land of Lincoln as it sits in the best of all possible parking spots (Tuesday & Friday 7:30-8 AM; I parked on Sunday and don’t have to move till Friday), after a weekend drive to Chicago, where I heard Baby Dee play at the Empty Bottle, on the same bill as a marching band called Mucca Pazza (Mad Cow). Chicago is the headquarters of Dee’s record label, Drag City. Carl Sandburg famously called Chicago “city of the broad shoulders.” I would call it city of the huge potholes.
Mucca Pazza is fabulous and funny—they play everything from tubas to triangles, and everyone in the band wears a different marching-band uniform; they have cheerleaders, too. Unfortunately, it took a marching band to be heard over the roar of the bar crowd at the Empty Bottle. Dee did everything in her power to put on a good show, and succeeded with a discerning group near the stage, but was frustrated, and even cut short her gleeful encore number “I Am a Kinky Grizzly Bear with a Thing for Mormon Underwear.” I hope she had an easier time in Minneapolis and Seattle. I’m sure she will be a big hit tonight in Portland. I found a review of her new CD in The Badger, the school newspaper of the University of Wisconsin, and an item about her in a blog by John Donohue, of the New Yorker Goings On staff (January 31st), with a link to a series of video interviews in Brainwashed.
Meanwhile, back in the car, I discovered that my 1990 Honda Civic gets 355 highway miles to a tank of gas, or about thirty miles per gallon. I was aided in this discovery by my odometer, my owner’s manual (gas-tank capacity = 11.9 gallons), and the valet parking service of the Ambassador East Hotel (motto: Taking Parking Personally). I had thought of getting a G.P.S. for this trip, because, though it’s easy enough to zip across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana on I-80, finding a specific address in an unfamiliar city, at rush hour, is one of my least favorite things to do in a car. But I had already made one auto upgrade: I had bought a portable CD player and an adapter that makes it possible to play CDs instead of cassettes on my car’s system and thereby opens a vastly wider repertoire of things to listen to on long trips, from the Traveling Wilburys to “The Confessions of St. Augustine.” Also I had a passenger: Alex, a young drummer from Glasgow, who was meeting up with Dee and the rest of the band in Chicago and was happy to serve as my personal G.P.S. by reading aloud the directions I had printed out from Mapquest. One generation of technological improvements at a time, please.
It was a long trip, through the sodden fields of northwestern Ohio and frozen corn stubble of rural Indiana and past the black smokestacks of Gary, but our arrival at the hotel felt abrupt. There was not even time to grab the doughnuts out of the back seat before the doorman, a Jamaican in a caped uniform, took my car keys and ushered us through the revolving door into the lobby. There, after a little while, I rendezvoused with a friend from Wisconsin, who had gotten us a discount at this fancy hotel by booking through the Internet. Alex went off to the Empty Bottle by taxi, and everywhere we went for the rest of the day we walked through the slush or took a taxi. I did not see my car again until the next morning.
As someone who generally parks on the street, I am naturally suspicious of valet parking. A total stranger takes your keys and your car and leaves you standing there like a fool, staring at a piece of salmon-pink paper that says “Claim Check.” It cost $41 to park overnight in Chicago. After settling the bill, we gave our claim checks to the Jamaican doorman, who called the garage. In a little while, a valet pulled up in my car. I left it idling while we waited for my friend’s car. She was now my G.P.S.: the idea was that she would lead me through the streets of Chicago to I-90, where I’d go east and she’d go west. But when her car was delivered and I got in my car, ready to follow her, it wouldn’t go. I turned the key in the ignition, and it started, and then stalled. “Something is wrong,” I said, waving madly at my friend to stop. The valet parker got in and gave it a try, and it started jumping all over the place. “Stop!” I said. Something was terribly wrong.
“You’re out of gas,” the valet parker said.
“That’s impossible!” I said. “Could I be that stupid?” I’d been congratulating myself on how in tune I was with my automobile. I had totally mastered the settings on the heater, for instance: temperature dial on warm, fan on low, air on recirculate, vents aimed at feet and hands (except when all systems were trained full blast on the windshield for defrost). And I had developed a delicate touch for the windshield wipers, as well: intermittent for drizzle, low with a squirt of windshield-washer fluid for normal rainy highway spatter, high in heavy rain, and high with two or three squirts of windshield-washer fluid when a truck barrelled past. I still hadn’t gotten the side-view mirror on the passenger’s side fixed, but I’ve ordered the part. I was even thinking of extending my stay in Chicago to make an appearance at the Chicago Auto Show, which had just opened to the public that morning. I was really feeling quite knowledgeable about my dashboard.
“Do you think somebody was joyriding in it?” my friend asked, and even in my diminished and humiliated state (I had found the key to the hotel minibar, and a nightcap of cashews and Honkers Ale had given me a restless night), the idea of a dark-gray, sober-looking 1990 Honda Civic four-door sedan being chosen for a joyride by anyone—unless it was a couple of nuns—was hilarious to me. But the car has a new idiosyncrasy: the lever that pops open the door to the gas cap isn’t working; I have to pry open the door with my Swiss Army knife. I now demonstrated this skill for the doorman and the valet parker, suggesting how easily someone could have siphoned the gas out of my tank. “Gas IS expensive,” my friend said, loyally. “My garage has video cameras,” said the insulted valet parker. “I will get a wire,” said the doorman.
The gas gauge did indeed register empty, and the doorman’s wire hanger came up dry. The reservoir of my memory, however, began to refill. I had last looked at the gas gauge at a rest stop in Angola, Indiana, when it had been half full. I’d gotten excellent mileage in Pennsylvania, which is a lot wider than Indiana, so I assumed I would be O.K. And I had been O.K. How likely was it that I had had exactly enough gas to get from Cleveland to the front door of this hotel in Chicago? I could not help it: I was outraged.
Still, the only thing to do was to put gas in the car and see if it went. “Think of it this way,” the doorman said. “You couldn’t have run out of gas in a better place.” I didn’t have a container for gas, and neither did my friend. The driver of a minivan service to the airport had a two-gallon container, full of gas, which he sold me for five dollars. The Jamaican doorman flung back his cape and applied the gas container to the tank, but the nozzle wasn’t angled correctly and the gas spilled onto the street. I had an attachment for a gas can in my trunk, left over from my motorboating escapades of last summer, and that worked. “It was thirsty,” the doorman said.
O.K., so I was out of gas. It still didn’t prove that the gas hadn’t been siphoned. I drove off, with very ill grace, behind my friend, who led me to a gas station (the doorman had given her directions), where I filled the tank. Then we took an inadvertent tour of Chicago’s craterlike potholes and, at I-90, parted ways with a toot of our respective horns. We spoke by cell phone a little while later, when I told my friend that I had figured it out: the only way for me to prove that I wasn’t so stupid as to run out of gas was to see if I could get all the way to Cleveland without running out of gas again. “Good luck with that,” she said.
It was risky, not to say stupid, but it did add interest to the drive through Indiana and Ohio (yawn) to see how far the car would go once the gas gauge registered empty. (By the way, “The Confessions of St. Augustine” has a very good bit about stealing pears, but it lacks narrative momentum.) Slowly it dawned on me that I could actually be proving myself wrong. I made it all the way to the gas station in Cleveland where I had filled up the day before, popped the lever, unsheathed my Swiss Army knife, and pried open the door to the gas cap. Then I checked the odometer (355 miles) and watched the meter on the gas pump as I filled her up. She was empty, all right: the pump registered 11.9 gallons, to the ounce.
With abject apologies to the doorman on duty last Friday morning at the Ambassador East Hotel and the valet at G.O. Parking of Chicago, from the mucca pazza who ran out of gas.
Mucca Pazza is fabulous and funny—they play everything from tubas to triangles, and everyone in the band wears a different marching-band uniform; they have cheerleaders, too. Unfortunately, it took a marching band to be heard over the roar of the bar crowd at the Empty Bottle. Dee did everything in her power to put on a good show, and succeeded with a discerning group near the stage, but was frustrated, and even cut short her gleeful encore number “I Am a Kinky Grizzly Bear with a Thing for Mormon Underwear.” I hope she had an easier time in Minneapolis and Seattle. I’m sure she will be a big hit tonight in Portland. I found a review of her new CD in The Badger, the school newspaper of the University of Wisconsin, and an item about her in a blog by John Donohue, of the New Yorker Goings On staff (January 31st), with a link to a series of video interviews in Brainwashed.
Meanwhile, back in the car, I discovered that my 1990 Honda Civic gets 355 highway miles to a tank of gas, or about thirty miles per gallon. I was aided in this discovery by my odometer, my owner’s manual (gas-tank capacity = 11.9 gallons), and the valet parking service of the Ambassador East Hotel (motto: Taking Parking Personally). I had thought of getting a G.P.S. for this trip, because, though it’s easy enough to zip across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana on I-80, finding a specific address in an unfamiliar city, at rush hour, is one of my least favorite things to do in a car. But I had already made one auto upgrade: I had bought a portable CD player and an adapter that makes it possible to play CDs instead of cassettes on my car’s system and thereby opens a vastly wider repertoire of things to listen to on long trips, from the Traveling Wilburys to “The Confessions of St. Augustine.” Also I had a passenger: Alex, a young drummer from Glasgow, who was meeting up with Dee and the rest of the band in Chicago and was happy to serve as my personal G.P.S. by reading aloud the directions I had printed out from Mapquest. One generation of technological improvements at a time, please.
It was a long trip, through the sodden fields of northwestern Ohio and frozen corn stubble of rural Indiana and past the black smokestacks of Gary, but our arrival at the hotel felt abrupt. There was not even time to grab the doughnuts out of the back seat before the doorman, a Jamaican in a caped uniform, took my car keys and ushered us through the revolving door into the lobby. There, after a little while, I rendezvoused with a friend from Wisconsin, who had gotten us a discount at this fancy hotel by booking through the Internet. Alex went off to the Empty Bottle by taxi, and everywhere we went for the rest of the day we walked through the slush or took a taxi. I did not see my car again until the next morning.
As someone who generally parks on the street, I am naturally suspicious of valet parking. A total stranger takes your keys and your car and leaves you standing there like a fool, staring at a piece of salmon-pink paper that says “Claim Check.” It cost $41 to park overnight in Chicago. After settling the bill, we gave our claim checks to the Jamaican doorman, who called the garage. In a little while, a valet pulled up in my car. I left it idling while we waited for my friend’s car. She was now my G.P.S.: the idea was that she would lead me through the streets of Chicago to I-90, where I’d go east and she’d go west. But when her car was delivered and I got in my car, ready to follow her, it wouldn’t go. I turned the key in the ignition, and it started, and then stalled. “Something is wrong,” I said, waving madly at my friend to stop. The valet parker got in and gave it a try, and it started jumping all over the place. “Stop!” I said. Something was terribly wrong.
“You’re out of gas,” the valet parker said.
“That’s impossible!” I said. “Could I be that stupid?” I’d been congratulating myself on how in tune I was with my automobile. I had totally mastered the settings on the heater, for instance: temperature dial on warm, fan on low, air on recirculate, vents aimed at feet and hands (except when all systems were trained full blast on the windshield for defrost). And I had developed a delicate touch for the windshield wipers, as well: intermittent for drizzle, low with a squirt of windshield-washer fluid for normal rainy highway spatter, high in heavy rain, and high with two or three squirts of windshield-washer fluid when a truck barrelled past. I still hadn’t gotten the side-view mirror on the passenger’s side fixed, but I’ve ordered the part. I was even thinking of extending my stay in Chicago to make an appearance at the Chicago Auto Show, which had just opened to the public that morning. I was really feeling quite knowledgeable about my dashboard.
“Do you think somebody was joyriding in it?” my friend asked, and even in my diminished and humiliated state (I had found the key to the hotel minibar, and a nightcap of cashews and Honkers Ale had given me a restless night), the idea of a dark-gray, sober-looking 1990 Honda Civic four-door sedan being chosen for a joyride by anyone—unless it was a couple of nuns—was hilarious to me. But the car has a new idiosyncrasy: the lever that pops open the door to the gas cap isn’t working; I have to pry open the door with my Swiss Army knife. I now demonstrated this skill for the doorman and the valet parker, suggesting how easily someone could have siphoned the gas out of my tank. “Gas IS expensive,” my friend said, loyally. “My garage has video cameras,” said the insulted valet parker. “I will get a wire,” said the doorman.
The gas gauge did indeed register empty, and the doorman’s wire hanger came up dry. The reservoir of my memory, however, began to refill. I had last looked at the gas gauge at a rest stop in Angola, Indiana, when it had been half full. I’d gotten excellent mileage in Pennsylvania, which is a lot wider than Indiana, so I assumed I would be O.K. And I had been O.K. How likely was it that I had had exactly enough gas to get from Cleveland to the front door of this hotel in Chicago? I could not help it: I was outraged.
Still, the only thing to do was to put gas in the car and see if it went. “Think of it this way,” the doorman said. “You couldn’t have run out of gas in a better place.” I didn’t have a container for gas, and neither did my friend. The driver of a minivan service to the airport had a two-gallon container, full of gas, which he sold me for five dollars. The Jamaican doorman flung back his cape and applied the gas container to the tank, but the nozzle wasn’t angled correctly and the gas spilled onto the street. I had an attachment for a gas can in my trunk, left over from my motorboating escapades of last summer, and that worked. “It was thirsty,” the doorman said.
O.K., so I was out of gas. It still didn’t prove that the gas hadn’t been siphoned. I drove off, with very ill grace, behind my friend, who led me to a gas station (the doorman had given her directions), where I filled the tank. Then we took an inadvertent tour of Chicago’s craterlike potholes and, at I-90, parted ways with a toot of our respective horns. We spoke by cell phone a little while later, when I told my friend that I had figured it out: the only way for me to prove that I wasn’t so stupid as to run out of gas was to see if I could get all the way to Cleveland without running out of gas again. “Good luck with that,” she said.
It was risky, not to say stupid, but it did add interest to the drive through Indiana and Ohio (yawn) to see how far the car would go once the gas gauge registered empty. (By the way, “The Confessions of St. Augustine” has a very good bit about stealing pears, but it lacks narrative momentum.) Slowly it dawned on me that I could actually be proving myself wrong. I made it all the way to the gas station in Cleveland where I had filled up the day before, popped the lever, unsheathed my Swiss Army knife, and pried open the door to the gas cap. Then I checked the odometer (355 miles) and watched the meter on the gas pump as I filled her up. She was empty, all right: the pump registered 11.9 gallons, to the ounce.
With abject apologies to the doorman on duty last Friday morning at the Ambassador East Hotel and the valet at G.O. Parking of Chicago, from the mucca pazza who ran out of gas.
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