KarenUhOh

Park Und Lock It

I drive to work. Something about sitting for 90 minutes twice a day to/from my suburban manse inspires the pastoral bent; to survey the lawns from my porch, watch the hounds excrete upon the parkway footpath, listen to F-250s peeling out robustly from the stop sign, their sinewy drivers secure in the knowledge that Sammy Hagar planted the flag of Cultural Eminence over our last half century—these reassure my tangled soul that a life in the collar counties sure did collar me.

But, when I get here, I have to park. I have to shell $20/per for the privilege of serving the Master who, why, just yesterday, was exhorting the confidence I instilled: “Don’t piss on your furniture, either. We plan to let the next guy use it.”

Yesterday, when I leave the office, still tingling from this inspirational exchange, I reach my vehicle in the $20/per lot to find not one but two cars idling directly behind it. In #1 is a woman who speaks no English, has wild red hair, and hangs a deodorizer that looks like a crest of Kaiser Wilhelm on her rearview. She is waving her arms around as if she’s drowning in two feet of water, and laughing.

I don’t speak very good German, but it’s obvious her bemusement is directed at vehicle #2, immediately to her left—that of a volcanically pissed African-American woman with bruising biceps in a Honda Odyssey. I don’t speak very good Volcanic Piss, either, but it is instantly apparent these two are in negotiations for my parking space.

Since I arrive in this lot ridiculously early (6:30 a.m., and if you think I enjoy it, give me your number, and I’ll call you when I get up tomorrow), I have El Primo Spot: right by the exit, where the machine eats your ticket so you have to press the button to wait ten minutes for the paint-huffing dork to come out and manually code it so the plastic yellow arm will raise. These competitive souls have spotted me on approach, and they want my E.P. spot. Even though it’s late in the afternoon, and by now there are 20 open spaces within eyeshot. Only they’re at least forty feet further from the exit.

I watch them argue for a while. The German lady continues to wave her arms and laugh. The A-A lady glares and occasionally bruises the horn with her biceps. Meantime, since we’re all right by the exit and the paint-huffing plastic-yellow-arm-raising dork, there’s also now a line of a half dozen or so angry commuters backed up, waiting to get the fuck out of the lot so they can sit in traffic and pick their noses.

At some point, the German lady decides to start waving her arms at me. I don’t speak very good German, but she is waving, “Come out!! Come out of ze space!!” at me, all the while continuing to laugh and grin. But it’s clear she’s had her face in the plastic-arm-dork’s paint, because her car—I mean, like the entire center of her car—is 18 inches behind the rear bumper of mine.

I don’t speak very good German, but I laugh and grin and wave my arms back, in the International Sign for, “Move your fucking car!!” Then I notice the bruising-biceps A-A lady, who is speaking very good English, and she’s using it to speak “Move your fucking car!!” at the laughing German lady—and at me. Who is parked between a concrete wall (6 inches away) and a laughing German lady (18 inches).

Then I look up the ramp, at a bunch of angry faces—in fact, a couple dozen now, all leaning into their horns in the International Sign for Move Your Fucking Car. Only they’re supplementing that by yelling at me, too.

I’m not overly excited; not just yet. I’m a trained negotiator by profession. I do million dollar deals for breakfast. But then I remember I heard some guy say that in a movie once, and after he said it, some laughing German didn’t wave his arms and put a bullet through the guy’s forehead.

So I exit my vehicle. I reason with the two ladies parked behind me. I put my hands in my pockets, wrap myself inside a reassuring (but not at all smug) grin, and explain, “But you see, I have nowhere to go! You have completely backed me in!”

They respond by telling me to move my fucking car. And ten other people up the ramp, half of whom are out of their vehicles, and looming closer, also tell me to move my fucking car.

Whereupon I bring all my mediation skills to bear and start screaming.

‘WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?! ARE YOU FUCKING OUT OF YOUR FUCKING LAUGHING GERMAN AND BRUISING BICEPS MINIVAN MINDS?? I CAN’T MOVE MY FUCKING CAR!! ARE YOU FUCKING BLIND? OR JUST FUCKING BORN STUPID?? HUH? WELL HOW BOUT IT HUH?? YOU CRAZY FUCKING BITCHES DON’T YOU MAKE ME LIE RIGHT DOWN HERE ON THE PAVEMENT AND PEE MYSELF!!!”

The cacophony from the ramp halts. Everyone kind of looks at me—in admiration, I’m sure, at my skillful deployment of C. 17 of Successful Negotiation Strategies, “Utter Freaking Meltdown.” Things are all set to play right into my deft hands, to where I can get my ass out of there, onto the expressway and headed home to the bucolic micturating dogs and whomping woofers of the F-250s.

And then it happens. From the elevator, a small man, also grinning, in what I immediately make as a 34 Short from Jos. A Bank, emerges, gets in the car just to the left of me, backs out (nobody’s parked him in) and leaves. Grinning German lady waves her arms and reverses about a foot and a half, to protect her positioning for my space. I start backing and filling and genuflecting my car so I can extricate it with minimal damage, and with one last laughing, waving, not-very-good German and really teensy bicepped shout of “FUCKERS!!” I roar out of that awful parking lot.

I have no idea which one of them ended up in my space. I don’t know if they came to blows, arguing over the just and equitable assignment of parking. I don’t know if there was an International Incident and Embassy Intervention. And there was nothing in the Sun-Times this morning about “Laughing German In Brutal Bruising Biceps Homicide/Soccer Mom Probed.”

But I got the same space this morning.