Unkindest Curb Cut

I have been in a bad mood since New Year’s Eve, when my mailbox contained two thin, identical envelopes from the Adjudication Division of the NYC Department of Finance. At first I took the thinness for a sign of innocence: no return envelope, ergo no fine. But I was wrong. The judge in the case of the curb cut (see post of Oct. 20th) found me GUILTY and said that my evidence—a photo of the Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist, the only church so designated in the metropolitan area—was “not probative.” As if I would send in a picture of just any old curb cut and not the one I was parked at when accused of obstructing a driveway.

I had purposely kept my defense succinct in order not to waste anyone’s time, but since that didn’t work I sent an appeal that runs to 736 words, written at white heat, as well as seven pieces of evidence, including a series of digital photographs designed to locate indisputably the Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist. In the course of my research, I discovered that there used to be a fire house at that address, which accounts for the curb cut. Unfortunately, I had to enclose payment ($190) with my appeal (grrrrr).

As if that were not enough, in mid-December I received another communication from the Department of Finance, saying I hadn’t paid yet another ticket, one that I’d never received. I went online and found a copy: it was for allegedly violating a “No Standing—Commercial Vehicles Only” sign on November 15th, at exactly the time that I was bragging about the spot I found on K Street where, if I wished, I could stay until Martin Luther King Day (which is upon as at last). The ticket was written completely in error by a blockhead who conflated the street number with an avenue address, and didn’t see which way the arrow points on the “No Standing” sign. I confined my defense to a single scathing typewritten page, and included four photographs to document the exact location of the sign with reference to local landmarks (I couldn’t take a picture of the address on the ticket, because it doesn’t exist) and printouts of relevant passages from two blog posts. All this took hours, and it still makes me mad just to think about it.

The only good thing to come out of it is the above photo of the Birdman of K Street, taken, totally by accident, I have to admit, while trying to document the legality of my beloved parking spot.

Meanwhile, alternate-side parking has been suspended for weeks, to facilitate snow removal and garbage pickup, and there has been delicious coverage in the Times, including this great story on how car-owners in the neighborhood of Boston known as Southie reserve dug-out parking spaces by placing things like lawn chairs in them, and then doing violence to any car that dares to park there. (I hope it doesn’t come to that in New York. They play mean in Southie.) There was also this piece, about the longest-ever period that alternate-side has been suspended in New York: 56 days in the winter of 1978, the year after I moved here and junked my ’65 Plymouth Fury II.

To Pay or to Pay More?

Uh-oh. I got back into the city two days after the blizzard and, following a brief, half-hearted tour of my usual parking haunts (featuring mounds of snow with cars beneath them and people standing on the roofs of cars, shoving the snow off), I went to my old garage, where I hoped they would take me in. And they did, for a price: $36 a day. I called the management office, to see what kind of monthly rate I can get, and the best they can do is $303.04. That's almost twice as much as I paid in this garage two years ago. And yet when I hung up the phone both the man at Icon (Jose) and I were convinced that I was going to go to the garage tonight and fill out the paperwork and leave a check. What to do? If I leave the car in the garage till Saturday, I'm up to $180. And out on the street again.

I may wait a few days and see if my friends in Rockaway want the car for the winter or not. It came in handy for them, but then, misfortune: they had to go to a funeral in Brooklyn and got a ticket for parking at a bus stop. Parking is probably worse right now in Rockaway than it is in Manhattan.

Or I could try one more option: the new Automotion lot near me. "Park Swipe Leave" is their motto. At least it would be novel.

Clockwork

Picture a Swiss clock with an alternate-side-parking theme: At 7:30, a little door opens and St. Francis of Assisi toddles out, sprinkling birdseed; sparrows surround him. At 7:50, the street sweeper drives through a big door, flashing and beeping, and cars scramble before it; the Broom completes its rotation, the cars return to their slots, and a cop pops out to write a ticket. If you are a Swiss clockmaker, I urge you to run with this. Each clock could have its mechanism set for the alternate-side-parking regulations in a specific neighborhood.

This morning, alternate-side parking was not as precise as a Swiss clock. For one thing, I kept popping out of my car. First I said hello to the birdman, who showed me what he feeds the birds (ordinary birdseed, orange and green) and pointed out the patch of evergreen where the sparrows live (the pigeons roost across the street). Then a woman in a black BMW drew my attention to a proliferation of orange traffic cones farther down the block. It seemed there had been an addendum to the No Parking Saturday sign. I trotted down the street to check it out, and sure enough: a No Parking Thursday sign had appeared, and was already in effect (5 A.M. to 6 P.M.). “The cones are all over the place,” the woman complained. “They’re filming ‘Nurse Jackie.’” There were no cones where we were, but how could we be sure Nurse Jackie would stay at the far end of the block?

A cop strolled by, and the BMW woman got out to ask her advice. I joined them; something about parking makes me unusually sociable. The cop knew nothing—she said we should park at our own discretion. I charged down the street again to ask some guys who were maneuvering a dumpster into position if they knew anything. One of them referred me to a car wrangler, sitting in a truck, who confirmed that Nurse Jackie needed only one side of the street, which I interpreted as only the far half of the block. I reported to the BMW owner that I thought we were safe—at least, until Saturday at 5 A.M.

Just then, a spot opened up on the Tuesday-Friday side of the street. Should I take it? It meant I wouldn’t have to sit here till eight o’clock and could get to the pool early and would be on time for a doctor's appointment at 9:45. Unfortunately, it also meant I would be out here again at seven-thirty tomorrow morning. But today had dawned so beautiful and clear that it was a pleasure to be out and about, enjoying the sight of the early light hitting the tops of the buildings. Plus it looked like the No Parking Saturday sign might not apply to this little strip of the street, maybe five car-lengths, on the Tuesday-Friday side. And I would rather get up at seven-thirty on Friday than bestir myself at 5 A.M. on the Sabbath.

So I moved. But once the car was in place, it was as if my body had been set for parking. There I sat with a cup of takeout coffee and a banana. I thought of crossing the street to explain my action to my new friend in the BMW, but why would she care? I peeled and ate the banana. The coffee was already getting cold. At 7:45, before the Broom could make its (irrelevant) appearance, I snapped out of it: I broke free of the spell of the Swiss clock and altered my parking routine.

Flurries

I was going to take the car out to Rockaway last weekend, but it wasn’t exactly beach weather, and besides, I didn’t want to give up my parking spot. I had begun to wonder how long I could stay in this fine spot on K Street—perhaps till March? It has been extremely convenient, even with no alternate-side-parking holidays falling on Monday or Thursday until Martin Luther King Day, on January 17, 2011. After sitting in the car for a half hour, I have time to walk over to my health club by the river and get in a swim before work twice a week. Who knew that having a car in the city could be such good cardiopulmonary exercise?

Last night, a Sunday, I happened to pass K Street on foot, and noticed, at the far end, an ominous salmon-pink sign that said “No Parking Saturday.” It wasn’t clear whether it meant the Saturday just past (December 4th) or the Saturday to come (December 11th). If the former, I might arrive at my spot on Monday morning, with my swimming gear, only to find that my car had been towed. I did not sleep well for the suspense, awaking at about four in the morning with the sensation that my inner lining had become hypersensitive to Turkish cuisine.

But this morning the car was there, innocent of parking violations. What’s more, the pigeon fancier showed himself. He is an old man, bald and shambling, who emerged from my friend K’s building at 7:30 with a plastic container (as for hummus) full of bread crumbs. The pigeons were waiting for him. Behind me was a motorcycle. I watched in the rearview mirror as its owner arrived and suited up. He laid his gloves on my trunk, got his helmet out of the space under the seat (that helmet must have been freezing), and tucked himself into a sort of lap robe—a combination windbreaker and potato sack—before starting up and riding off.

There was a long piece in Saturday’s Times about the city’s plan to crack down on parking scofflaws. The person with the most unpaid tickets is a guy in the Bronx who owes $57,526. He said a friend of his racked up those tickets while using his van to make deliveries. The van has since been repossessed, and the friend has fled to the Dominican Republic. “I learned my lesson,” the scofflaw said. “Don’t trust your friends.”

The Broom appeared at 7:50. I left the car running awhile after moving, and even turned the heat on briefly (today’s weather featured the season's first snow flurries). On my way down the street to the pool when my time was up, I took a closer look at the "No Parking Saturday" sign. In fine print, someone had added the hours that No Parking would be in effect: 5:30 A.M. to 6 P.M. I have to get up on Saturday at five to move the car? This is sterner discipline than I have come to expect of my alternate-side-parking exercise routine.

Guerrilla Book Marketing

Of all the subtle beauties of my current parking spot, chief among them is its position: first in line after the sign dividing commercial parking from alternate-side. When the street sweeper comes, the car in this position has the best chance of getting its spot back, with the minimum of anxiety. It helps that there is no parking directly across the street: only a curb cut leading to a door that opens like a portcullis, admitting cars one at a time into a big elevator cage. So when the Broom comes, as it did this morning at 7:45, I have only to start up my engine, back up a bit, pull out as if into a diagonal spot across the street, leaving room for the Broom to pass, and then reverse back into position before through traffic can get tangled up with the parkers and foil our enterprise.

This is such a fine spot that I could sit here for a half hour twice a week and watch the seasons change. The pigeons were absent this morning, and the yellow leaves of the ginkgo had mostly fallen. In front of me was a silver-gray Dodge Charisma with New Jersey plates. I had not heard of the Charisma before, for a very good reason: when I looked again, I saw that the word formed by the chrome letters was not Charisma but Charger. I like Charisma better. (Detroit, take note.)

Over the long holiday weekend, I practiced the art of guerrilla book marketing. Curious about where the various bookstores have been shelving “Freud’s Blind Spot,” the anthology of sibling experiences that I contributed to (Simon and Schuster, $15; here’s the Amazon link), I went first to Barnes & Noble and asked for it at the information desk. It was in Relationships, on the third floor. I found three copies, shelved alphabetically under the name of the editor, Elisa Albert (how great that her name begins with "A"); I took all three downstairs with me and bought two (after placing the third strategically on one of the counters featuring new nonfiction paperbacks). I got some slight discount, because I am a member of Barnes & Noble, but I had a coupon for an extra fifteen percent off that I forgot to use.

Next on my list was Borders. There is no Relationships section at Borders, so I wandered around in Psychology and discovered a section labelled Anthologies, but no luck. I used one of the computers Borders has instead of employees, and determined that there were indeed copies of "Freud's Blind Spot" in the store. Finally I tracked them down in Literary Fiction, under Elisa Albert’s name. There were two copies, and I bought one (after finding a nice spot up front on a shelf that featured new nonfiction). I had gone to the trouble of printing out a coupon I received via e-mail, so I got forty percent off.

Third was the Strand. Here I did not know what to hope for: that there would be dozens of reviewers’ copies available (at half price) or none, because all the critics were busy consulting the book as they wrote rave reviews. Anyway, there it was downstairs, not among the reviewers’ copies but in the Literary Nonfiction section, which has recently been moved downstairs: three copies, under Elisa Albert’s name, at half price. I bought all three, feeling relieved that it had been shelved properly.

I suppose I could make a color Xerox of the cover and tape it to the window of my car, parked there behind the Charisma, where it might have a subliminal effect on passersby.

Bus Lane Alert

From my parking spot today, I saw a fleet of four pedicabs pulling mini-billboards that said “Bus Lanes Are for Buses—$115 Fine.” They were headed east, toward First and Second Avenues, where new cameras have been installed to catch cars violating the bus-only lanes. Like the red-light cameras, the bus-lane cameras, which go in effect today (Monday), will be another huge ka-ching for the city. This is from the online Wall Street Journal: “The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says ‘the city's 2.8 million bus riders have been held hostage for far too long by motorists who routinely block bus lanes.’… Vehicles will be allowed to enter a bus lane only to make the next available right turn or to quickly discharge or pick up passengers.”

Everything happens at once. The pedicab ads went by just as the Broom was passing. Though I backed up as far as possible last Monday after the S.U.V. in front of me pulled out, there still was not quite enough room for two cars, so a motorcycle had filled in the blank. Its scofflaw owner failed to show up. The street sweeper—the man, not the machine—seeing the motorcycle in front of me and a van in the commercial space behind me, knew that he wouldn’t be able to get in and out of my spot, so although I started my engine, in a show of good faith, he didn't make me move.

But as my head was turned, some urban Hansel and Gretel must have walked up the street, because suddenly the pigeons reappeared on the sidewalk outside my car door, pecking at microscopic breadcrumbs. Among the birds were some sparrows, and among the sparrows a blond. I seem to be parked in a bird-watching zone. Ahead was a ginkgo tree in full yellow.

Meanwhile, at Broadway and Twenty-third, there was a truck with the word Arctic on it. I thought it was a promotion for some freezing-cold beverage, and headed for the tent to get my free sample. Despite the fact that it is unseasonably mild today, there was snow on the ground and people were bundled up in mittens and mufflers and earmuffs. When I got to the kiosk, a man was turning people away. They were not giving away free samples. They were making a movie.

Sneak Preview

Chances are pretty good you'll be getting this for Christmas: "Freud's Blind Spot," edited by Elisa Albert, with an essay about Dee and me, out today from Free Press.