Race, Page 2

  “Try me,” Roberta Collecci said.

  Roberta is in her late forties and has been with the force for twenty-two years. She was looking at me with one-eyebrow raised.

  We were alone. I was cornered. I had to make something up. And fast.

  I lowered my voice, like a broadcaster: “last night, after I left here, I was driving and minding my own business when I see I’m out of gas. So I go into this gas station and park behind this Mazda. This is when I see this one kid.”

  “Just one?” she said.

  I eyed her suspiciously, “Were you following me?” I cleared my throat and lowered my voice again. “So this kid is sitting in his car while I’m pumping my gas, right. I could see the kid look at me through his rear-view mirror. He keeps staring. Maybe my uniform made him nervous. But I just keep pumping, when suddenly I see a second kid run out from inside. He jumps into the Mazda and they drive off. I knew something was wrong. So I dropped everything and I chased after them.”

  “You didn’t pay for your gas?” she said.

  My eyes narrowed. She was right. I didn’t pay for the gas.

  “I know the owner so it wasn’t a problem,” I said.

  “The owner was certain it was your car that drove away—in pursuit—of the robbers?”

  My eyes were now slits. “You were following me, weren’t you? Anyways, the robbers realized I was following them so they started speeding, going through red lights, and changing lanes with no signals. I did the same. I had no choice. I had to catch them. I drove like a demon. This divine force had control over my body.”

  She raised both her eyebrows.

  “Deep, I know,” I said. “So, here I was changing lanes, crossing over, edging past minivans, waving at little children along the way.”

  “You had time to wave?” she inquired.

  “Yeah, but I always kept one hand on the steering wheel. You know me, safety first. Anyways, we did this for almost twenty minutes, them crisscrossing lanes and me in hot pursuit, until, luck would have it—they got onto the highway. That that was my chance. I drove up straight beside them, swerved left and slammed into them, trying to push them to the side.” I placed both of my hands on the desk and demonstrated my daring heroics. “I ended up shoving them to the side and arresting both of them. My car is in the shop getting fixed.”

  “You’re a hero,” she finally said.

  Of course I was. No one appreciated me.

  “They should give you a medal.”

  “They should, but they won’t,” I shook my head as if I was being discriminated against repeatedly. “Politics, bureaucracy, you know how it is.”

  “So how much did they steal?” Roberta asked.

  “Who?”

  “The robbers.”

  “Uh, lots. I don’t know off the top of my head. Maybe five hundred, maybe more.”

  “So let me get this straight,” she started. “You damaged your car—”

  “—It was a piece of shit, anyways.”

  “Risked countless lives, just for a couple of hundred dollars—”

  “—It was probably in the thousands. Definitely in the thousands.”

  I took a big gulp. She had me.

  “Car towed again?” she said.

  I lowered my head and whispered, “Yes.”

  But she wasn’t done. “Isn’t it ironic the person who gets other people’s cars towed has his own car towed? Tragic.”

  “Not for long.” I smiled. “If the Sergeant listens to me I’ll be out of Parking Enforcement as soon as permitted.”

  “Jonny, you keep bugging him. Sooner or later it will happen. Now back to work, hero boy.” She smiled.

  Roberta Collecci was like my guardian. She had taken the responsibility—a very hefty one, if I may say so, to watch over me. She kept me out of trouble.

  ***

  I decided to meet the Staff Sergeant, but first, I needed to get dry. My light navy blue shirt had dark blue patches all over. I headed for the men’s washroom and inside allowed the hand dryers to blow over my body.

  It was surprising for some to enter the washroom and see me dancing sensually in front of the dryers. I just smiled and they quickly left.

  When I was all dried off I stood in front of the mirrors. My shirt was back to its original colour. My pants, which are black, stayed black but were more comfortable now. I placed my cap on my head and took one last look at myself. A handsome man looked back and grinned. I was grinning, too.

  Once ready I went through a set of doors and into a hall with rooms on either side. Important people had offices here. Not sure why I didn’t have one yet. I stopped and tenderly tapped at the glass beside the door.

  “Come in,” said a voice.

  I entered the office of Staff Sergeant James Motley, who was in charge of the Parking Enforcement Unit.

  “Jon, come in,” he said. Motley was unlike the sergeants you see on television. He did not have a belly, did not smoke a cigar, and he hardly ever swore. There was a book on spirituality sitting to the side, and last week he was reading Native history.

  How he ended up at PEU, I don’t know.

  “Sir, have you ever thought about watching those cop shows?” I said, standing.

  “Jon, what can I do for you?” he said.

  “It’s about any openings…” I let my words trail.

  Motley did not look surprised or interested. He knew I wanted to move on and gain other experiences.

  “Yes, I know, Jon. You have asked me six times this week and today is Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday?” I said, looking around. “Time drags.”

  Don’t get me wrong. I liked being a PEO but I felt I could better serve society if I were a detective or a lieutenant. Maybe even a commando, but that would mean joining the army. Discipline, hard work, and respecting authority were not my strong points. So the army was out.

  What about the navy? No, water equals sharks. Sharks equal missing limbs.

  How about the air force? No, flying equals gravity. Gravity equals falling thousands of feet to your death.

  Parking Enforcement? Hmmm, now that’s something I could do. Wait a minute? I was already doing it.

  Motley leaned back in his chair and said, “Jon, I have my eyes open, you know that.”

  “I just thought, y’know, I’d remind you.”

  “If it were up to me, I’d have you transferred immediately.” He gave a short smile.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, about to leave.

  “Jon.”

  I stopped. “Sir?”

  “If and when something does come up, you’ll be the first to know. I promise.”

  That was the Sergeant’s polite way of saying “don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  ***

  I went down to the parking lot to retrieve my marked cruiser, a Dodge Neon parked in the corner. It was white with blue and red stripes across the sides. It had the words ‘TO SERVE AND PROTECT WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITY’ on the side doors, and ‘PARKING ENFORCEMENT’ on both front sides.

  I eased the cruiser out from the parking lot and headed in the direction of my route. This may be a good time to explain what I do. I know, I know, most people think we, PEOs, just go around giving parking tickets. That’s somewhat correct. We do give a Parking Infraction Notice or PIN whenever a vehicle is illegally parked, but that’s not all we do. We help keep the streets safe and clean.

  How? Whenever someone is walking around and they see a uniformed officer, be it a traffic cop, or even security guard, they do try to be on their best behaviour. Right?

  If someone is about to commit a crime or is thinking about it, he or she will, at least, think twice if they see us driving by. We help deter crimes.

  Not just that; without us the city would not move. Think about it. Why would anyone want to move their car if they didn’t have to? They could just park and leave it for the entire day. Imagine if someone had to take their grandmother to the
doctor for a checkup after she'd had a hip replacement and they couldn’t park anywhere because some jerk parked his car on the street and gone to work. Now imagine if they had to park two blocks away and carry their dear old grandmother just because there was no turnover of parked cars. Now wouldn’t they be pissed off?

  Our main job is to keep traffic flowing.

  I parked behind a row of parked cars and pulled out my little black book.

  I checked the first meter: seventeen minutes left.

  Second: three minutes. I should see the owner any time soon.

  Third: Fourteen minutes.

  Fifth: Expired. Oh, goody. On the ticket I wrote down the date of infraction, time of infraction, license plate number, vehicle plate, checked off box with code number one, placed my signature at the bottom, entered the unit and employee code, and gently placed the banana-coloured ticket under the windshield.

  Sixth: No fee deposited. Good, another one.

  Seventh: fifty-two minutes left.

  Eighth: broken meter. I wrote a fifteen-dollar ticket.

  Whoa! The meter is broken! The owner should not have to pay for the ticket, right? Wrong. Parking at a busted meter is illegal.

  Some people tamper with meters on purpose in order to avoid paying the fee. It’s quite easy to sabotage a meter. It can be done with a piece of paper, by jamming the mechanism and fishing out the parking fee with a paper clip. But I’m not going to say exactly how.

  As I was on my twelfth someone ran up. “I was only gone for two minutes,” he said.

  Sorry, sir. I see an expired meter,” I said and moved on. It’s always two minutes. The man muttered something under his breath.

  I’ve been called many things: Meter Maid, Green Hornet, Vulture, and other lovely terms that I didn’t know existed in the English dictionary.

  The first couple of days on the job were terrible. The things that were said to me left me scared. I stopped sleeping, and I love to sleep. I dreaded going to work and having to confront these types of people. The looks they gave, the upstanding middle fingers, the curses. Now, I’m immune to it. In fact, I think I’ve become cynical.

  If they say, “Screw you,” I say, “Thank you.” That pisses them off.

  If they say, “Kiss my ass,” I say, “Sir, it’ll take me a whole week to kiss all that.”

  I keep smiling and that truly annoys them.

  I remember once this nice lady placed a spell on me, saying I’d die a horrible death in ten days. That was eight months ago, and seeing that I’m still alive, the spell didn’t work.

  Maybe someone has a voodoo doll of me. Every so often they poke needles into my head. No wonder I can’t think straight. Maybe…just maybe, they place a pillow over my head and…yes, now it makes perfect sense, that’s why I feel sleepy all the time.

  I drove into a more upscale commercial street. This street had something that made all PEOs life easier: pay-and-display kiosks. Each of these babies replaced ten parking meters. Plus, these high-tech solar-powered kiosks were reliable and difficult to vandalize.

  All I had to do was look at the receipt on their windshield, and if it was expired I gave them a PIN.

  ***

  I drove to a public parking lot and made a quick round when I saw a car parked in the disabled zone. I scanned the vehicle and found a placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. I went back into my cruiser and contacted the communication dispatcher. Parking Enforcement vehicles are not mobile workstations, meaning we have no access to police information systems—at least, not yet. The dispatcher, linked to police systems such as CPIC (Canadian Police Information Center) and MTO (Ministry of Transportation of Ontario), responded to my query over the radio network.

  This disabled permit was on the wrong vehicle.

  Beautiful.

  I wrote a ticket for three hundred dollars and placed it under the windshield. I was about to leave when the owner showed up.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled from a distance.

  I did not answer.

  “Hey, man. I’m talking to you. What the hell are you doing?” He hobbled toward me.

  “I’m giving you a ticket, sir,” I said. What I really wanted to say was: don’t mind that, that’s just a flyer.

  “You can’t give me a ticket,” he said, waving his hands.

  I hate people who abuse rights that are for the disadvantaged.

  “Can’t you see my foot?” he said, pointing to his right foot.

  I looked at it carefully and I didn’t see anything wrong with it. It looked like any other foot. Maybe it was shorter than the other one, but I didn’t want to mention it.

  “It’s broken,” he said.

  “Sorry to hear that, but that placard is not registered to your vehicle, sir,” I said.

  “The permit belongs to my aunt and since I broke my leg she lent it to me.”

  “That’s not how it works,” I said.

  “What do you want me to do in this condition? Park at the end of the lot and walk?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I’m just enforcing the by-laws.”

  “You can’t do this,” he said. He was in my face.

  “I just did,” I said.

  Veins popped up in his forehead.

  “You can’t do this,” he repeated. “I know my rights. I’m gonna take you to court.”

  There was a crowd gathering around us. This was going to get nasty.

  A woman carrying way too many shopping bags said, “This man is hurt. There should be a law against you guys.”

  Everyone approved.

  I wasn’t about to start a verbal tennis match with the woman, so I pulled out my cell and dialed a number. I said a few words and turned to the violator.

  “All right, sir,” I said. “Please follow me.”

  I led the man away from the crowd. He hobbled alongside me. We stopped at a spot where, in the distance, his vehicle was clearly visible.

  “Now, sir,” I said. “I think we should discuss this in a civilized manner.”

  “Yeah,” the man said.

  “How did you break your foot, sir?” I asked.

  “I dropped a bowling ball.”

  “Sorry to hear that. It must have hurt. Shatter your toes?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, broke your foot terribly?”

  “Yeah, hurt like hell,”

  “I bet it did, sir. I’m just doing my job. I checked the permit records and it does not belong to your vehicle.”

  “Yeah,” he began to stumble. “It belongs to my dad.”

  “You mean aunt.”

  “Yeah, aunt. She’s actually my dad’s aunt. After I broke my foot she lent it to me.”

  I nodded.

  “I was gonna get my own, y’know,” he said, as if he could walk into any store and pick a disabled parking permit off the shelf.

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  He cleared his throat after seeing I was willing to compromise, which I was not. I was simply buying time.

  “I don’t think I should get the ticket,” he said.

  “You want me to take back the ticket?”

  “Yeah. I got witnesses and I’ll take you to court.”

  He would do that, after he saw I’d given him a three-hundred-dollar ticket.

  I lowered my voice and leaned in. He got closer, too. “Sir, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to keep that ticket and you’re going to pay it within fifteen days.”

  Veins popped up in his forehead again.

  “And sir, you’re going to run. Run as fast as you can.”

  “What?” he said perplexed.

  I turned and looked in the direction of his vehicle; he instinctively did the same.

  A tow truck was getting ready to haul his car.

  The man forgot about his injury and dashed. I never knew someone with a broken foot could run that fast.

  Now let’s see those witnesses.

  Some days my job was so much
fun.

  ***

  I went to a fast-food restaurant, the one with the golden arches, but I’m not saying which one. I sat in my cruiser and ate away at my chicken burger. We’re not supposed to eat in our vehicles, but who would know, right?

  What else do PEOs do? Give tickets every minute of every hour? No. Like I mentioned earlier, we deter crimes. We’ve recovered stolen goods, assisted police officers in arrests, and even prevented robberies.

  A few months back I had chalked the tires of a vehicle parked in a non-metered space. I recorded the time and a short while later, when I returned, I saw a kid trying to break into the car. He had slid a metal coat hanger through the side window, and was, unsuccessfully, trying to unlock it.

  I walked up beside him and watched. He was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, definitely not driving age. I knew what he was after, as I had scoped it out before: a brand new Yamaha five-disc car stereo, with two-hundred-watt speakers and subwoofers that were powerful enough to shake this car and the ones around it.

  The kid was sweating and he was becoming impatient. He would slide the hanger down the window slit and fish it up and down. When he wouldn’t get the desired result he would pull it out and curse.

  The kid wasn’t even looking up. He was focused on the task at hand. After a few long minutes he had the door unlocked. I could tell he was glad. So was I.

  I placed my hand on his shoulder and spun him around.

  “All right, son,” I said imitating my father’s voice. “You’re under arrest.”

  He didn’t wait. He darted. I went after him. We raced, maybe a block and a half before I finally caught him.

  “Why bother running?” I said out of breath. “I saw you break into the car.”

  The kid just shrugged.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  During our walk the kid kept his head down.

  When we got back I saw the car’s door open and the stereo, speakers, and everything else of value missing.

  The kid looked at me and said, “I didn’t take nothing.”

  I had been duped.

  The kid was a decoy and I was the bait. While I was running after the kid his buddies cleaned the car.

  Obviously, I didn’t see the kid take anything, so the Judge gave him some community time. He and his buddies got away with thousands of dollars worth of goods.