Just Lucky
To tell you the truth? I kind of knew better. The signs were clearly posted: no parking without a permit, violators will be towed.
But it was late on a Saturday night, and my daughter Meredith and I had just spent six hours: sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, driving in pouring rain, getting lost in south Boston. My daughter Rachel, whom we’d come to visit, came down from her fifth-floor walk-up to meet us, and we pulled into the driveway next to her building because there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to pull over.
As it happened, that driveway led to a perfectly charming and practically empty parking lot.
“Do they tow?” I asked, eying the signs posted at regular intervals around the perimeter.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting towed.”
“It’ll probably be okay for the night,” I said, “but we’ll have to move it in the morning.”
And it probably would have been okay if I’d moved it in the morning. And it did occur to me, however briefly, before we took the T downtown for lunch.
Walking back from the T hours later, I could see her building on the corner and, through the trees, the parking lot in which my white Subaru Forester was no longer parked.
“Guys,” I said to the girls, “they towed me.” In unison: “Oh, no!”
Oh, yes. It’s funny now--now that I have my car back and I’m back home in New York. But at the moment, all I could think about was the hell I was pretty sure my afternoon was going to turn into. “The good news is, it’s early,” said Rachel. We had hours of daylight left to try to find my car and get it out of hock.
As luck would have it, just as we were turning into the driveway to go see where the car wasn’t, a tow truck came barreling down on us. It didn’t have my Subaru or anybody else’s in tow, but it seemed like a safe bet that the big guy with the shaved head sitting in the driver’s seat would have a clue. We flagged him down.
In a Boston accent as thick as an Irish sweater: “Yep. We towed it this morning. Don’t you people read signs? It says it right there, monitored 24 hours.”
I asked him what I had to do to get my car back. He shook his head. “You’re gonna have to take a taxi all the way to Brighton,” he said. The girls and I looked at each other in dismay. Brighton? It couldn’t be that far, could it?
He radioed his base. “I got the lady who owns that white Subaru here, and she wants to know how much it’s gonna cost her.” He turned back to us. “$136, and you gotta pay cash.” Ka-ching. The cost of my little weekend jaunt to Boston was adding up.
“Will I be able to find my way back here?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. He shook his head. Two or three times. “I can give you directions, but it’s tricky.”
And then he looked at our three sorrowful faces and took pity on us. “Tell you what—throw me a little extra, and I’ll take you over there. I’m not supposed to let anybody ride in the truck, but what the hell. I’ve gotta go back over there anyhow.”
He promised to take me to an ATM along the way, so I climbed into the cab and waved goodbye to my two lovely daughters standing forlornly on the curb. “She’ll be back in an hour and a half,” he told them, “two hours tops.”
I had a flash of anxiety—what was I doing? Wasn’t Boston the town where there were massacres and stranglers and things like that? I tried to pay attention to where we were going so I’d be able to find my way back, but it became obvious within minutes that “tricky” was a euphemism for “damn near impossible” unless you were a native or equipped with GPS. Coursing down parkways, zigzagging a maze of streets, whirling through roundabouts—I postponed worrying about getting back for later.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly we human beings adjust to misfortune? If you’re in a car accident and your car is totaled, you feel “lucky” to be alive, and somehow you overlook how unlucky you were to get in an accident in the first place.
So now I was feeling quite fortunate and grateful to my bald companion. In the game of getting my car back, he’d advanced me at least three or four moves and saved me hours of aggravation.
“You think this is a good job,” he accused me, “it’s not. People get mad at us. All the time. One of our guys? Got assaulted last week. People should read the signs. It’s private property. How would you feel if you were paying $300 a month for parking, and you came home, and somebody was in your spot? You’d be pretty pissed off, right?”
“Right,” I agreed. He said he’d be lucky to break $25K this year, said fortunately he was living with his girlfriend and only had to pay half the rent, said he wasn’t complaining—he was glad to have a job.
“Have you lived in Boston your whole life?” I asked him.
“My whole life,” he said. “Fact, I’ve only been out of the state one time.”
“Really!” I said. I mean, that’s a pretty amazing fact in this migratory day and age. And the next question was obvious—where’d he go that one time? I imagined a hunting trip in the Poconos or a pilgrimage to Disneyland with the wife and kids.
“Don’t get scared or nothing,” he said, which of course got me a little scared. “Ten years. Federal penitentiary. Near Plattsburg.”
“Oh, my,” I said.
“I used to do stickups,” he said cheerfully, “banks, grocery stores.”
“Wow,” I said, thinking that the upcoming stop at the ATM might be less routine than I’d imagined.
“Yeah—the last time, five minutes after the stickup, I was in cuffs. Turned out my girlfriend at the time was an informant for the FBI.”
His two-way beeped and he picked up the handset and launched into a Click-and-Clack routine with his boss about a mechanical problem with one of the trucks in the fleet, in the middle of which my cell phone rang. I answered it—it was Rachel—but meantime he was gesturing vehemently at me to silence the phone. It took me a minute to figure out that I wasn’t supposed to be there, and if his boss heard me, he’d get in trouble.
“Mom?” said Rachel, very earnest, “Now, don’t argue. Meredith and I talked it over, and we want to contribute to the cost of the towing, so—“
I cupped my hand around the cell phone and whispered hoarsely, “Rach—I…can’t…talk…right…now.”
“Mom? Are you okay? Mom! What’s the matter?” I glanced over at my bald friend. “I’m…okay,” I whispered, “can’t…talk.” And closed the phone, and then, with a little prayer to a god in whom I don’t believe, turned it off. I just hoped Rachel wasn’t calling the cops to report a kidnapped mother.
When he got off the radio with his boss, I asked him how he got into a life of crime in the first place. “I was always bad,” he said breezily, “from the time I was a kid. Foster homes, juvi. I straightened out for a while. Had a pretty good job, working over at the Gilette factory, pulling down $75K. I had a wife, three boys.” He was telling me all of this stuff in the same tone of voice that I might use to explain how I made some not-so-great decisions during the dot-com bust, sort of a “that’s life” tone. “But then I got into cocaine. That’s when I started doing stickups. Part of the problem is I like danger, see. The sound of sirens gets me goin’. I had a bulletproof vest, the whole thing.” He swerved over and pulled up in front of a Chase bank. It took me a couple of seconds to remember that I was supposed to get out and use the ATM.
We hadn’t specified what was meant by “a little extra,” and I don’t have any sense of what’s expected in situations like these. How much do you tip a former bank robber who’s doing you a big favor? So I asked him, “Is $20 going to be enough?” figuring his face would tell the truth. He looked perfectly satisfied with that, happy, in fact. “Sure!” he said. So I got the dough, hopped back in the cab, and off we went.
He told me that after he started robbing banks, he quit his day job at Gilette and cashed in his 401K and gave half to his wife. “I knew I was going down. And I just wanted to be able to look back and say that I did at least one thing good. So I told her to take the money and get away from me, and get the boys away from me. Told her to find a decent guy and get a new life. And she did. She moved out to Wisconsin where her sister lives, met a guy. The boys are doing good. Two of them are in college, the youngest is still in high school.”
“Do you ever get to see them?”
“Nah—it’s better this way. I was a bad influence.”
By now, we were in a peopleless area with derelict warehouses and scary-looking industrial buildings, the kind of place where they shoot the really disturbing episodes of Law and Order SVU. He pulled over and pointed up ahead to an opening in a cinderblock wall. “See over there? That’s where your car is,” he said. “Go in there, pay the girl in the booth, and when you come out, you can follow me back. I have to go back over there anyway.” I gave him the $20 and thanked him. Profusely, I hope, although I can’t really remember what I said. I was too busy imagining myself walking through that gap and getting mown down by James Gandolfini et al.
But sure enough, there was my little white car, in amongst the Land Rovers and BMWs whose owners were no doubt freaking out trying to track them down. When I pulled out of the lot, my bald friend was waiting up the street. I never would have been able to find my way back to Jamaica Plains without him. I would have had to stop somewhere and buy a map, or put the girls on speaker phone and let them google-map me back. I followed him through Brighton and Brookline to Boston, where he pointed out my daughter’s building and waved goodbye.
Obviously, he hadn’t needed to go back to the towing lot, because he didn’t do anything there but drop me off. He probably didn’t need to go back over to Boston either. I don’t think it was about the $20. Maybe he was just bored. Or maybe he just had a streak of goodness in him that years of craziness hadn’t managed to eradicate.
As for me, I counted myself lucky. I could have had a boring afternoon, sitting around acting motherly. Instead, I got this great story. $156, and worth every penny.