At least I assumed the car had been towed. After all I had parked her in a faculty spot, albeit at a time when the only faculty members about were probably of the Hogwarts-dark-arts variety, combing the campus’s underground tunnels for rat droppings or communing with opossum. Moreover, I couldn’t imagine the prospecting car thief that would have tiptoed up to the window of my 160,000-mile-veteran of a Nissan Sentra, with broadening spider-web cracks across its windshield, a factory-installed, cassette-devouring stereo, and its backseat littered with crumpled fast-food wrappers and dirty gym clothes, and thought to himself, “Avarice compels me to steal this gem.” No, she must have been towed.
Thusly reduced to pedestrianism, I trudged back into the library and looked up phone numbers for a few local towing companies. The first number I called belonged to the offending company, as the early-morning receptionist, who announced herself as Rhubarb or something, confirmed on the other end of the line; and now I had a name toward which to channel my resentment. Secure in knowing the whereabouts of the Sentra, I resolved to finish the paper before I dealt any further with Rhubarb and her goons.
Fueled by persistent thoughts of vengeance, I furiously drummed the keys until the paper achieved the required length. I printed out this masterpiece of incoherence and walked across the campus to drop it off at the professor’s office, sliding it under the door. On my way out of the class building I grabbed up a copy of the school’s daily newspaper, which that morning focused on the upcoming student government election, and tucked it into my backpack.
I boarded a university bus that would deliver me to within a quarter-mile of the towing lot, sat down against the window, and retrieved the newspaper from my backpack. The front-page election article listed the website where students could find all the candidates, their desired offices, and what they hoped to achieve if elected. The ridiculous removal of my car from an empty parking lot had stirred my passions; when my car was restored to my rightful possession, I decided, I would devote myself to the public weal by running for elected office. My only campaign policy would be to advocate the banishment of these vulture towing companies that plagued our glorious campus.
But first there was the matter of recovering the Sentra, so I throttled my political ambitions for the time being. The bus had ventured decidedly off-campus by the time we reached my stop. I descended the steps onto a street that bisected a landscape of rusty, barbed-wire, overgrown weeds, and a number of long-since-closed garages in various states of decrepitude. People were strewn about the broken sidewalk, some huddled in groups, others wandering alone and conversing with the gremlins that tormented them, all of them with an eye, I guessed, to examine the contents of my backpack. Keeping my own eyes trained on the ground, I powered down the sidewalk in the direction, I hoped mightily, of the towing company.
A couple blocks down the street I spotted the faded logo of the scoundrels that absconded with my Sentra, and then I saw her. Even through the gaps of the chain-length fence, she stood out among the unwanted and abandoned clunkers of the town, all matte maroon paint bejeweled with gleaming avian deposits. While I was relieved to have found her, inside I raged at the audacity of the tow-truck driver who plucked her from harmless repose in the middle of the night. I found my way to the double-wide trailer that apparently served as an office, climbed two cinder-block steps and opened the door, preparing to unleash upon Rhubarb a verbal barrage born of justified indignation.
She sat behind a makeshift desk, comprising two filing cabinets with a sheet of plywood lain across them. Among the items cluttering her desk were a redwood tree’s worth of pink and yellow invoice slips, a cash register that was probably a relic from the Kruschev-era Soviet Union, and an oil-soaked napkin holding some crumbs from Rhubarb’s heart-smart breakfast. Some bits that hadn’t yet reached her mouth lined the folds of her stretched-out tee shirt, and still a few more were camped out at the corners of the orifice, momentarily spared. I, too, felt thankful to have missed the feeding.
“Hello, I’m the guy who called about the Sentra,” I said with poorly concealed disdain.
She turned her immense head to peer out the trailer window toward the lot. “Yep, we got it,” she replied. “It’s gonna be $125 to get it out. Cash or credit?”
“Oh, you don’t take checks?” I asked. “And here I already had one made out to ‘The bastards that kidnapped my car.’”
She smirked, releasing a morsel from a crevice near her mouth. “Cash or credit?” she asked again.
“Do you guys really have nothing better to do than drive around in the middle of the night, looking for innocent people to terrorize?” I countered.
“Was your car not parked illegally?” she asked.
“Well, technically, yes, it was, but…”
“Then cash or credit?” she demanded a third time, interrupting me as I was about to launch into a diatribe about the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. Rhubarb clearly would not submit to reason. And since I would likely have been smothered and eaten on site if this disagreement escalated into a physical altercation, I begrudgingly reached for my back pocket.
Newly unencumbered of the contents of my wallet, I followed Rhubarb out of the trailer’s back door and into the gravel lot. While she moseyed over to open up the gate, I found my car, unlocked the driver’s door, and sat down behind the wheel. I ignited the engine right away, but then took an unnecessarily long time poring over the interior to make sure nothing had been removed. When finally I saw that Rhubarb had grown annoyed at waiting, I put the car in gear and did a protracted lap around the lot before pulling through the gate. She glared at me as I drove by, and I back at her.
(to be continued again.... I swear I'm getting to the 'political career' referred to in the title....)
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