But it really did happen.
Friendos, this originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 4, Issue 1, March 1998. That’s a long time ago. This is an absolutely true tale of what I experienced after my car was towed in New York back in The Day.
The fucking New York City Police towed my car the day after Christmas and I travelled to 38th street and 12th avenue to pay $150.00 to get it back. I wasn’t happy to be paying $150.00, but I wasn’t in full-postal mode because it was just after Christmas and I was resigned to the perpetual screwing the universe was handing out to me on a daily basis anyway. Once you get resigned to the screwing, as any prison bitch will tell you, it really stops bothering you. That’s pretty much the definition of resigned anyway.
So I wandered into the tiny, unwindowed, bunker-like DOT office on December 26th and immediately read and comprehended a big 3X6 poster on the opposite wall which explained the proper way to collect your car. It read:
1. REMOVE PANTS
2. BEND OVER AND PLACE PALMS FLAT AGAINST WALL
3. WHEN WE ARE SATISFIED WE WILL LET YOU KNOW
4. BE POLITE! IMPOLITE BASTARDS WILL BE CHASTISED WITH MORE SCREWING.
This seemed pretty straightforward to me, and I removed my pants immediately. I’m used to going pantsless anyway. There were little outlines of hands on the wall, showing you where to put your hands so you’d be in the proper position to handle the stress and general wear-and-tear of a DOT screwing. I waited patiently for my turn.
One guy however, had obviously not woken up to the sad fact of his general powerlessness in the universe. He’d been at a far window (where the supervisor sat in what appeared to be a gilded throne, eating wings from an endless bucket of fried chicken) arguing when I’d walked in, and was ordered back against the wall for the aforementioned MORE SCREWING as I took my own position. He wasn’t happy about this. He started making trouble, trying to cut in line and limit his own screwing as much as possible. When the black guys at the front of the line told him to take it like a man like the rest of us, words were exchanged, but nothing I didn’t see or hear at work every day so I wasn’t alarmed even as voices were raised.
And then, this woman wearing what appeared to be a dead cat on her head strolled into the office with her two teenaged sons and immediately began to hyperventilate.
“Oh my gawd!” she screeched in what I usually assume is a brooklyn accent even though I am always wrong, “Let’s not start a race war in he-yah! I don’t want to get shot!”
This did not sit well with the black men, who knew pretty well who she thought might be packing heat in this scenario (hint: it wasn’t me) and didn’t like the implications of that bit of stereotyping. Her two sons dropped dead of embrassment right there, on the spot, and I must admit I spent the rest of this adventure partially curious as to how long the DOT was going to leave two dead bodies in the middle of the floor.
Now, I thought that the big 3X6 poster with its simple instructions was pretty clear, but this lady had become disoriented and tried to cut in line as well to get her screwing right away. The workers behind their hopefully bullet-proof windows rolled their eyes and feigned seizures and pretended to not speak English and claimed not to even work there and basically tried every trick in the book to make this madwoman take her place and await her screwing like the rest of us, but she would have none of it. The first guy, the guy who still hadn’t accepted the DOT as his personal higher power and started in on the twelve steps to getting your wheels back, saw a partner in madness and they started preaching to each other:
GUY: What a great city this is!
LADY: HALLELUJAH!
GUY: It’s like Nazi Germany!
LADY: YOU TELL IT, BROTHER!
The rest of us, afraid to move for fear of getting MORE SCREWING and of being noticed by these nutjobs (whose sight, like the T-Rex, is based on movement), glanced at each other as bravely as you can when your pants are down around your ankles and prayed silently for the hell to be over.
A few seconds later, the guy started singing “America the Beautiful” while the lady asked us all if we were in the USA or communist Russia, which had, as everyone knew, re-located to the New York City DOT under the gleeful care of Mayor Rudy. The answer obvious, the brownshirts emerged from little rat tunnels in the walls and dragged them, screaming, into the rank inner-levels of the DOT.
The rest of us breathed sighs of relief, relief which lasted about three seconds, at which time we all remembered where we were, and that we each had MORE SCREWING to look forward to.