Transmission

I drove out to Rockaway last Saturday, and before I left, Dee, who was in town for a concert, offered to move her car into my spot in the Sanctuary to hold it for me. It’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done to support my parking obsession! I told her she didn’t have to, though, because my plans were in a state of flux, and I would take my chances.

There was an article in last Saturday’s Times occasioned by the overlap between Rosh Hashana and Id al-Fitr, by a woman with the wonderful byline Jennifer 8. Lee, which contained some interesting history about alternate-side parking as well as the excellent suggestion that alternate-side parking rules be suspended for the entire thirty-day period of Ramadan and the information that the only people who don’t like it when alternate side is suspended are the bosses in the D.O.T. who have to reassign the guys who drive the street sweepers. Surely they can think of something else to clean.

Also it was reported in the Wave that the American Princess, the ferry to Rockaway, blew her engine last Wednesday during the morning run. New York Water Taxi is putting another boat on the route, probably one of the yellow-and-black checkered catamarans. I would have loved to be on the ferry to witness this little maritime disaster: to see how the crew handled it, who towed them, where they got towed to, etc. I miss the ferry and the crew and New York Harbor. I even miss the faux waterfalls.

The New York Waterfalls, by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, are getting cut off next Monday, October 13. I found myself recommending them to some visitors from Italy, so I guess I like them, though I came to them from real waterfalls in Flores (below), worthy of King Kong. I am not ashamed to say that I am a waterfall snob, but I am also a big fan of plumbing.

In Rockaway, I intended to go on a historic bungalow tour that I saw a notice for in the Wave several weeks ago. (There was a typo in the headline: “BUNGLOW.” I couldn’t decide whether to pronounce it Bung Low or Bun Glow.) But then I remembered that I lived in a “bunglow” and I ought to be ON the historic bungalow tour. So instead of reporting on the historic bungalows, I offer this link to a cut of the documentary “The Bungalows of the Rockaways,” by Jennifer Callahan and Elizabeth Logan Harris. The filmmakers hope it will be shown on PBS in its entirety when it is done.

My first stop in Rockaway was the mechanic’s. I finally had to admit that the smell I’d been smelling, all across Ohio, of burning rubber or petroleum or something bad cooking, was coming from me and not from the guys spreading blacktop or making asphalt repairs who appeared by coincidence, for me to blame it on, everywhere I drove. It started on the L.I.E. a few weeks ago, when I felt a jolt—something pretty solid hit the right rear tire—but the car kept going and seemed to be all right. I told the mechanic, and I tried to describe the smell, but said I didn't know if there was any connection. He came out to the car, sniffed, and said, “I can smell it.” He opened the hood, and then crouched down under the car. (All the pens fell out of his pocket.) “What did you hit?” he asked. I don’t know, but apparently there were parts of it stuck under there (it wasn’t an animal).

While he was under the car, I thought to tell him that when I started up the car that morning, and pressed the accelerator to pick up speed, the engine didn’t respond. I had to pump it a few times. “That’s the transmission, isn’t it?” I said, and he said yes, he could see the leak. He couldn’t do anything about it right away (mechanics like to get out of the garage early on Saturday), but I gave him the spare key and said I’d park the car in the lot later. “Write this down!" he yelled to someone inside. "Tranny leak.”

Post-Thanksgiving

So I’m on my way to the Holland Tunnel for Thanksgiving dinner at my optician’s house in New Jersey (P. is actually a high-school friend who happens to be an optician, but I love the idea of being friendly enough with my optician to get invited to her home for Thanksgiving), and I glance at the passenger’s-side rearview mirror, and it isn’t there. How long has it been missing? My car was facing west, on the north side of the street, when last parked, with the passenger side at the curb, so I must have gotten sideswiped earlier and didn’t notice. A monster truck must have squeezed past while I was in that spot that I was so delighted to find when I got back from my winterizing mission. This will be the fourth time I’ve had to replace that mirror. (It does not bend in, by the way, or believe me I would bend it in.) Things like these make free parking very costly.

Also, I think I have lost steering fluid or something. I know I have lost power steering. I was bouncing along some street last week when I hit a pothole. The next time I turned my steering wheel to get out of a parking spot, it made a ratcheting sound, a kind of tick-tick-tick, instead of turning smoothly. Parallel parking is hell without power steering. When I parked the car on Thanksgiving night, I leaned over to open the passenger’s door to see how far from the curb I was, and it wouldn’t open. Whoever took off the mirror had also dented the door badly enough that it doesn't work.

The spot I found that night unfortunately compelled me to be up and in the car at 7:30 on Friday morning. It is an interesting spot, though. Because it is across the street from a hotel zone (No Parking Anytime) and the curb was clear, when the broom came everyone pulled across the street as if they were parking diagonally at the hotel, and then reversed back into position: a new step in the alternate-side ballet, and a blessing for someone who needs all her strength just to turn the steering wheel—I felt like I was trying to hoist the Titanic—and cannot simultaneously twist to look over her shoulder. While I was sitting there, having regained my spot with great effort, a tiny Volkswagen slalomed down the street, checking out the hydrant on the left, an illegal spot on the right, a driveway farther down on the left. He went around the block and paused, as did a Mini Cooper, to see if he could fit in front of me. I had a nice allowance of space, but with my reduced steering capacity I was worried about getting squeezed in. Both cars gave up and looked elsewhere.

A lot of times, those spots that aren’t quite big enough for a car end up being taken by a motorcycle or a homeless person’s shopping cart. I recognized, in my rearview mirror, the souped-up shopping cart of the homeless guy who sometimes parks his possessions across the street. And there before me was the homeless guy himself, packing up after spending the night on the sidewalk, alongside a heating vent outside Staples. He collapsed two umbrellas, folded a comforter, and piled it and his pillow onto the cart. Then he flattened several big cardboard boxes and stored them methodically, along with a sheet of plastic, next to the building, propped behind an orange cone. He hobbled off for a day's scavenging with a cane and a backpack.

On Saturday, I forsook this interesting spot and drove to my mechanic in Rockaway. “Sounds like a belt,” he said, when I described the steering problem. The car also needs winterizing, and I asked him to see if he could get the passenger’s door open, and mentioned that the Check Engine light had gone on again . . . and, please, take your time, I said. I was in no hurry to get the car back. The next alternate-side-suspended day is December 8th, the Immaculate Conception, which falls on a Saturday and is therefore of no use to me (sorry, Mary). And then there is nothing till December 19-21, Idul Atta, another Muslim holiday. In the meantime, I think I will take a little walk and see if any of those parking garages—the ones I learned about when I called the number on the flyer I was given on the Upper West Side—appeal to me. One more winter on the street and the Éclair is going to be scrap metal.

Escort

I secured my same spot this morning, as did the car owner from Washington, D.C., in front of me (it's a woman). The strategy of backing up into the hydrant space worked great, but a school bus and stream of taxis followed the street sweeper, so we all had to wait on the other side of the street till traffic cleared before backing into our spots. By 7:42, all was well. I got in and out on the passenger side today, humping it over the gear shift. With the seats back and the seat belts disengaged (they're the kind that automatically try to strangle you when you start the engine), even with my new winter coat on, it wasn't so hard. I wonder if there is a Pilates exercise that targets one's getting-into-the-driver's-seat muscles.

I have been leading a blessed parking life of late, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get tired of this business. It can get pretty cutthroat. Once, I parked someone in. By that I mean not that I double-parked and someone couldn’t get out but that I parked so close behind him (possibly to clear a fire hydrant?), and he had parked so close to the person in front of him, that he couldn’t get out. I knew it wasn’t nice and that I shouldn’t do it, but it was a highly desirable spot and I was desperate. Maybe the person in front of him would move. I walked away thinking, After all, what can they do?

Slit your tire is what they can do. At the time, I was driving a 1985 Ford Escort, a horrible, unmaneuverable little vehicle that I called the Death Trap. It was a dull dark blue, like a policeman’s uniform. It had been given to me, third hand, by a friend. In its earliest incarnation, it had belonged to a policeman. I think my friend said she’d bought it from his widow. There was still some kind of plastic gold lion’s head stuck on the side of it that would have been a signal to other policemen. My friend had tried to pry it off, but it wouldn’t come.

I know the conventional wisdom is Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and I didn’t, but I should have. If someone is giving away a car or, say, a vacuum cleaner, chances are it doesn’t work very well. Chances are it is a piece of junk. Chances are you’ll be driving down the road one day and you’ll hear—or even feel—an ominous ka-chunk and smell something that could be a tire fire big enough to alarm the entire Rockaway Peninsula. Or it could be you.

I got the car fixed that time, to the tune of seven hundred dollars. The mechanic, a Pakistani at a Mobil station in Rockaway, suggested over the phone that the car was of an age that I should consider not fixing it. It was also due for emissions inspection. But if it would pass inspection and I could get it fixed for just seven hundred dollars, I’d have wheels for the summer. The mechanic inspected it while I was on hold, and it passed. So I went for it.

The car didn’t feel right on the drive home. It was more unmaneuverable than ever. I took it back, they agreed that something was wrong and realigned it, and I drove off again. But it still didn’t feel right. The action of the steering wheel wasn’t smooth; it had a hitch in it. Stopped at a light on Woodhaven Boulevard (the main road through Queens out to Rockaway), I turned the steering wheel to the right, then I turned it to the left and returned it to center. When the light changed and I pressed on the gas, the car wouldn’t go anywhere. I got out and looked: the right front wheel was aimed straight ahead, but the left was pointed sideways at a sixty-degree angle. No wonder it wouldn’t go anywhere.

I didn’t have a cell phone, thank God, or I would have been tempted to sit in the car while I called Triple A. I put the flashers on and crossed over to the sidewalk, where there was a pay phone. While I was on hold with AAA, a car came racing up the road to zip through the green light, and smacked into the back of my car. Not far behind it was a tow truck licensed by AAA. I settled with the guy who had hit me. I think he gave me sixty dollars, and wanted something in writing to the effect that I wouldn’t pursue him or contact his insurance company. I didn’t give it to him, but he needn’t have worried. I was fuming about the garage that had sent me off on the road in a dangerous vehicle.

I had the car towed back to Rockaway and they fixed it again—told me it was defective parts—and they were mad at me, because they’d had to replace additional parts at their own expense. Then I was in a bit of a bind, because, on the one hand, who wants to patronize people who have done this to you? And, on the other hand, if it was an accident, or at least not a deliberate attempt on my life (don’t mechanics take some kind of Hippocratic oath?), they would have to be really, really good to me. I continued to drive the car, though I did put in a call to “Car Talk,” to ask Click and Clack if I should get rid of it; “Car Talk” did not call back, leaving me to draw the obvious conclusion. Meanwhile, I got a new mechanic. This was not long after 9/11, and it had occurred to me that the Muslim mechanics might be part of a terrorist cell dedicated to killing off capitalist car owners, one infidel at a time.

But back to the flat tire. The one time I had been parked in, all I had been able to think of to do by way of reprisal was to spit on the offending car’s windshield. I had had calluses on my hands by the time I got out of that spot. (Did I mention that the Escort did not have power steering?) After all I’d been through with this car—it frequently refused to start in rainy or cold weather, and I knew it was just something about the connections, but I always got ripped off for a new battery or a new starter—that flat tire almost sent me over the edge.

By the time AAA came and put on the doughnut and I limped out to Rockaway, I’d resigned myself to the price of a retread. We went on for a while longer like that, the Escort and I. Most of the time, I left it parked out at the beach, on a street with no parking restrictions—basically, I would drive it over the edge of the asphalt into a ditch. It gave one more ka-chunk in the autumn of 2003, and this time the mechanic advised me against repairing it. The back end was so rusty that if I stopped short one day the whole car might break in half. I put it back in the ditch and found a charity to donate it to, and was sitting in it a week or so later, having salvaged my evil-eye worry beads from the rearview mirror, when the tow truck came to take it away. It was a huge relief to know I wasn’t going to die in that car.

I have never parked anyone in again.

MJN/NYC