Jackpot … Not

I had a feeling Sunday morning about the Sanctuary, and I went out early—ten-fifteen, on the first day of daylight savings time, so it was really nine-fifteen—to see if I could find a better place for the week. I walked by way of the 7:30-8 block where I have often had good luck. What a bonanza! There were five free places. I hustled to my car, two blocks away. The cars on both side of it were different. And my car had a shattered rear vent window on the driver’s side, damn it. Someone had broken in, pulled out the ashtray and spilled the contents of the glove compartment. They didn’t take the chair in the back seat—the little Italian chair that still hasn’t made it to the caner—and miraculously they didn’t find my new CD player with its nifty adapters, or the cache of CDs, under the comforter artlessly flung on the back seat and covering the floor. Small triumph.

So I drove around the block back to what I used to call K Street, because my friend K lives on it. (I stopped calling it that because I’ve been mad at K. The truth is that he is not a good enough friend to take an interest in the car of a friend who parks regularly on his street. And he plays the ukulele.) The last time my car got broken into, a year ago Halloween, it happened on this block. I took the first free spot, just past the Muni Meter, but noticed that the alternate-side sign is gone (an ominous development). I did a shoddy job of taping an old plastic bag—two old plastic bags, one black and one clear—over the window with packing tape. I fully intended to leave it just like that, and go about my business, which was to take a walk down by the river. But now I had a pit in my stomach the size of a bowling ball: this is anger. Grrrr. It’s not hunger—I know because I had just eaten a hot bowl of oatmeal. Grrrr. It is the urge to kill tangled up with the urge to eat. Grrrr.

So I carried the Italian chair and my petite sound system and CDs back home, and returned to the car with a pair of scissors and a cardboard box top that I’d painted with the ravishing blue of my bedroom, for the long-winded purpose of taking with me if I should go visit a friend who has offered to make curtains, or maybe a bedspread, or pillow covers, for my bedroom. Luckily, I had recently bought a fresh roll of duct tape. I put a patch on from the inside, using half the cardboard, then I went around and peeled off the temporary plastic-bag patch. It was too shabby even for me. I’d found another clear plastic bag in the car, and I covered the other half of the box top with that and taped it over the window from the outside. I did not clean up the glass.

This has got me so pissed off. I am going to Rockaway this weekend, to get my sideview mirror fixed, and now, instead of taking the job to the mechanic, I will ask the guys at Far Rockaway Auto Glass to attach the mirror, too. This sounds very familiar. Lent seems to require a trip to Far Rockaway Auto Glass. Usually I take a break from the alternate-side-parking routine in winter, and now I have the definite sensation of having stayed too long.

But what a dazzling day. I went for my deferred walk, although as I was not feeling peaceful and serene it was more of a forced march. I couldn’t resist going by way of the Sanctuary, and there, right smack dab in the middle, like bitter gall, was the sweetest parking spot you've ever seen. In my thrill over hitting the jackpot on K Street, I had forgotten to check out the Sanctuary, where the Éclair would have been much safer. Where she is, a homeless person would be crazy not to sleep in her. I did take the comforter out of the back seat and stash it in the trunk, to make it less inviting. While I was feeling sorry for myself, waiting for the light to change, I turned around and noticed a little red car whose whole front end was held together by peeling duct tape. She was much worse off than the Éclair.

Parking Opera

Think of this as a recitative, one of those monotonous interludes accompanied by harpsichord in which lyrics that sound good in Italian turn out to mean things like "Won't you have a seat?"

[Thursday, 7:30-8 A.M., on the second-best of all possible parking blocks]

A cop pulls up at the foot of the street,
looks for cars without drivers, and goes away.
But behind me now red lights are blinking.

A cop car is just sitting there.
The sweeper comes, but has to go around it.
I can’t make my illegal turn
the wrong way onto the one-way street
with that cop car sitting there. So I block
the crosswalk on the other side of the street.

I claim my space!
But the woman behind me hesitates.
She has to parallel park,
and it’s tight.

All right,
Let’s make it easier.
I’ll pull into her place,
And she’ll take mine.

She’s in the crosswalk now.
“Once that cop car moves, we’ll all move back.”
(That’s the guy in back of me,
in the S.U.V. )
“What’s that cop doing there?”
“I think somebody got broken into.”
“That’s not good.”
“No.”

Later, after I lock my car,
I see a man back there
with a sheet of plastic
and a roll of duct tape.

I say the obvious: “Oh, no, you got broken into.”
“Yes,” he says. “They got my golf clubs.”

“Oh, no. I'm sorry.
It happened to me once."
Then I saw on his front seat
a pair of golf shoes.
"Were they showing?”
He nodded ruefully.

“This street is safe,” he said. “Fucking crackheads!
It sucks.”
He was insured, he said, at least for glass.
But not for golf clubs.

At least they didn't take his shoes.

Hallelujah Chorus

(Low-key secular version)

On Saturday, the day before Easter, I finished getting my figures together for my income-tax return, got in the car, and delivered the package to my accountant in Astoria, who later said that he thought we’d make the deadline. Hallelujah! This is no small triumph, as once you’ve filed an extension, as I did for the past two years, it’s hard to make the deadline ever again.

Then I got on the Grand Central Parkway and drove out to Far Rockaway Auto Glass to have my cracked windshield replaced. I got there just before three o’clock, with all the necessary documentation from my insurance company. Turns out I have something called a glass waiver, so not only was I covered for a windshield cracked by an act of God but there was no deductible. Hallelujah! God is good, and so is Geico. It’s the first time I’ve ever benefitted from having car insurance.

I was a little bit curious about how they go about replacing a windshield (I trust it does not involve the use of a sledgehammer); mostly I wondered how they get the registration and inspection stickers off the old windshield to paste on the new one (steam?). But I got the feeling that the autoglaziers wanted to work without my supervision. “Come back in an hour,” the boss said.

I still had the Google map I’d printed out the last time I visited Far Rockaway Auto Glass, when my car was vandalized. (It didn’t occur to me to call the insurance company that time. I labor under the impression that whenever you use the insurance, they raise the price.) The last time, I walked straight to the ocean, and saw some swans in the inlet at East Rockaway and talked to some fishermen. This time I was leaning in the other direction, toward Jamaica Bay, but I needed a destination. There on the map was Gipson Street, where my plumber lives. I had ridden out to his house on my bicycle once last summer. And beyond Gipson was a street called Granada Place, with its evocation of the Alhambra, and a nearby street called Sunnyside, which was the name of Washington Irving’s cottage in Tarrytown. I set off.

The plumber, Jimmy, looks Oriental but talks like he’s from the Bronx. He spends the winter in Florida. His house is a narrow two-story white stucco house squeezed in among other houses on a street that ends at the bay. I started stalking him last summer, just to see how he lived. If he had an ostentatious villa with a swimming pool, I would know he was overcharging me. But his house is modest, and in season (plumbing season, that is—Jimmy’s and my plumbing season) his driveway is lined with the vans and cars of someone who runs a plumbing business out of his home.

Gipson Street ends at a basin of Jamaica Bay that features a cement plant to the east and a Keyspan power plant to the west. Low-flying planes were coming in for a landing at Kennedy Airport. On the shore among the flattened spongy reeds was an orange upholstered loveseat. The Manhattan skyline is in the distance. I tried to hug the bay as I went west, up and down the prongs in the fork of streets, but KeySpan, which delivers natural gas to Long Island, makes a big chunk of the waterfront inaccessible.

I went back down to Mott Avenue and trotted over to Sunnyside. There was a big gracious house on the corner, the kind of place I was glad my plumber didn’t live in. I was just going past it to find the turn onto Granada Place when my cell phone rang: Far Rockaway Auto Glass calling, to say my car was ready. It was twenty to four, and I knew the autoglaziers were eager to close the shop and go home, so I decided to save Far Rockaway's Granada for another day (chances are it would have been a letdown) and found the most direct route back to the garage on Nameoke Avenue.

One of the men was just parking my car on the street when I arrived. It had orange tape holding the beautiful new windshield in place; the registration and inspection stickers had survived the operation. I signed a form for the boss, and asked him when to take the tape off (tomorrow) and how the street’s name was pronounced. (Gipson, I figured out, does not have a hard G, like Gibson, but a soft G, like Gypsy.) Nameoke could be a stately two syllables like Holm Oak, or it could rhyme with Mammy Okie. “Nammy Oke,” he said, solving for me one of the mysteries of Queens. Hallelujah.

Back in Manhattan, I found a spot, with no cruising time at all, on my second-favorite parking block. Hallelujah! Easter Sunday was very peaceful. I steered clear of the Episcopalians, and was tempted to go outside only when it snowed a few absurd large flakes in the sunshine. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Alternate-side parking was suspended Monday and Tuesday for Passover, so I don’t have to worry about the car till Thursday, and then only for a half hour between seven-thirty and eight in the morning. Hah-LAAAY-LOOOO-yah.