The Parking Gods of San Francisco - Chapter One


The boot was bright orange, like the Golden Gate Bridge. When Wendy Mathers first moved to San Francisco in 1989 from Winona, Wisconsin, she’d made a special point of going to see the bridge, and was shocked to find that it wasn’t actually gold. It wasn’t even yellow. It was a deep, industrial orange that reflected the sunlight, or maybe the collective happiness of all Californians, and was quite striking, but not golden. It was the first in a long line of sobering truths about San Francisco – the reality of living here versus the carefully nurtured legend. Years later somebody pointed out that “The Golden Gate” referred to the mouth of the bay itself, not the bridge, but by that time she didn’t care that much anymore. She’d read somewhere that the bridge was painted continually, that workers started on one end and by the time they’d worked their way across the bay it was time to start again from the other side. That was a hell of a lot of industrial orange paint. The city must have tanks of it stored in some warehouse somewhere. It would also explain the particular shade of the metal boot currently molesting the front left wheel of her Daewoo.

It was mid-afternoon; the last Saturday in a grim January in which the marine layer never once yielded to the sun. The winds were picking up, bringing with it sharp spits of moisture that threatened to become all out rain within the hour. The few people still roaming the Inner Richmond shopping district on Clement Street were thus compelled to wrap up their shopping and get inside for the evening. Wendy took her time. She enjoyed weather, or what passed for weather out here. The promise of rain only made her dawdle.

Wendy was 26 and in full flower. Unremarkable height, but strongly built. She embodied all that was womanly circa 1880: a round, kind face, thick brown hair of the sort never meant to be styled. Wide blue eyes. A small mouth that gave way to a quick and chaotic smile. She was pleasantly busty, with a tiny waist, baby bearing hips and a butt with lots of upside potential. Black men, she’d discovered, appreciated this butt. So did the Mexican guys, who clicked and whistled approvingly as she swayed by en route downtown. She was surprised and delighted by their vocal attentions, since both ethnic groups were in short supply in Winona, Wisconsin. About time, she thought. About time she was appreciated for what she brought to the table.

She breathed in the wet sidewalk smell. She thought about Scott, her boyfriend of the past year, and wondering how and when to inform him gently that theirs was a love that did not move mountains. And she compared him to Dave, her manager at Caio-Caios, with whom she’d just started an affair, and who she’d probably have a quickie with tonight if her shift weren’t too crazy. The thought produced a pleasant pulsing between her legs, and she smiled to herself. She had just crossed Geary Street was feeling altogether fine when she spied something bright, something orange, clamped to her wheel.

She stopped.

The rain started.

She approached slowly. Maybe it wasn’t her car. A few more steps. Primer-gray Daewoo. Small menagerie of Beany Babies in the rear window. “I Luv My Silky Terrier” bumper sticker from the previous owner still affixed to her bumper, next to the red 1998-99 resident parking sticker that was supposed to make it safe for her to park on the street in the Richmond District. It was her car, all right. And on the left front wheel, the boot. A vile, crab-like thing.

The few families still hurrying to get home glanced at her as they passed, carrying pink plastic bags heavy with oranges or dumplings. They saw the boot and averted the eyes. The Chinese were embarrassed for her, she knew, and this shamed her even more.

Wendy hovered, waiting for the last of the families to pass before laying a hand on the car and admitting ownership. The boot covered the entire wheel, like a chastity belt that would not be unlocked until the master saw fit. It held her innocent car against its will with brutal force. And as if the boot itself weren’t enough, the Department of Traffic and Parking had also gone to the trouble of affixing a neon red notice to her windshield that declared to the world: THIS VEHICLE HAS BEEN BOOTED FOR NON PAYMENT OF PARKING VIOLATIONS.” The Scarlet Notice.

Wendy stood in the rain and looked at her car, bitterly regretting now her leisurely walk across town and the hubris of thinking she would simply drive herself to work. Now she was half an hour behind schedule. She still had to get home. Still had to shower and get dressed. Then she had to get to fucking North Beach from the Inner Richmond District, a good 30-minute trip under the best of circumstances.
Wendy reached forward and pinched a corner of the bright red notice until she had a promising momentum going. She pulled and a long jagged piece came off in her hands, leaving its backing firmly behind on her windshield. She began the six-block plod toward her apartment.

She decided she would try to let her problems flow over her. This, she’d read somewhere, was what Zen monks did. Resign yourself, she chanted over and over. It’s out of your control. Let it go. This was another way of thinking she’d picked up since moving to California. You couldn’t really control anything, could you? Well, it made sense to her, anyway. Maybe God wasn’t up there keeping score. Maybe it was all more karmic than that.

The clock on the wall on the Happy Donut on the corner read 5.05. She was supposed to be at work at 6.

Fuck zen. It was time to panic. What could she do? Wait for Muni? At least 45 minutes. Call a cab? Spend $20 to get to work and maybe make just that in tips? Maybe Scott’s car was working this week and he could drive her…no, he was working a double shift and couldn’t leave the shop. She could walk. In the best of circumstances she’d be at least 40 minutes late. No. Clear the mind. Think about nothing. Think about snow. She remembered snow. It was beautiful and serene. And silent. Snow got gray very quickly, however, especially in cities. Gray like her car.

Her car. Her pathetic, overworked piece-a-shit Daewoo. She’d bought it from a friend of a friend five years ago, and even then it was dinged and ugly. But it was the perfect city car: small. Too banged up to be of any notice to car thieves, and reliable. A turn-key car, her dad would have called it if he’d cared to call any foreign economy car anything but God damn Jap boxes. Her car had been good to her, as cars went, and it didn’t deserve to be desecrated as it had. And why had it been booted in the first place? She only had three outstanding parking tickets. When did they start booting cars so quickly?

Astrid was sipping tea and reading the Bay Guardian when Wendy shuffled into the kitchen.

“You’re home early.”

Wendy sat heavily in a chair. “I can’t get anywhere. They booted my car.”

“Who’s they?”

“Them. The parking people. The Department of Parking and Traffic.”

Astrid grimaced. “Didn’t you pay those tickets?”

“Those tickets aren’t so old. I only got one reminder notice!” Wendy waved her hands around as if addressing an audience. “I was just waiting for my next paycheck and I would have paid them!”

“Well, they don’t joke around at the D&PT, you know. My rule of thumb is always to pay a parking ticket the day I get it.”

“You don’t have a car,” said Wendy.

“When I did have a car,” said Astrid, “I paid my tickets promptly.”

Blank mind. Blank. White. Pure. Snow. Snow. Wendy got up from the table and went into the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind her without asking first whether Astrid would need to use it in the next ten minutes, in flagrant violation of the roommate code of honor. She just didn’t give a hoot right now.

It was dark and raining heartily when she emerged from her apartment, dressed in her black and whites and resolved to find a cab. She ran down to California Street, splashing her nyloned shins in hidden puddles. Her plan was to hail a cab, if she could find one, while simultaneously waiting for the #1 California, which would take her close enough to North Beach to run into work. A two-pronged attack. It was a grim omen indeed when a #1 California pulled up to the curb and began disgorging its payload of Chinese grandparents while she was still a full block away.

She willed her legs to pump faster. “Wait!” she bellowed, and, because she knew how pissy Muni drivers could be, added, “Please!”

For what seemed like minutes the bus idled at the curb, its door open and taunting. Wendy focused on that door, willing it to stay open until she reached its steps while also commanding her thick legs to propel her forward. She wondered dully when running had become such harsh fare. She remembered flying down her childhood streets with ease, never tiring, no fear of tripping. It must be the cold of the night making her legs so reluctant. And then the slight grade of this particular street, leading down to California Street. That and all the potholes.

But she was close. She was going to make it!

“Wait, please!”

She was 30 steps away when the driver shut the door and pulled away from the curb, so slowly and carefully that Wendy was able to swat the back end of the bus with her purse as it left. Breathing hard, she thought she could see the white teeth of the driver as he drove off, guffawing. But maybe it was just a reflection.

Nobody remained at the stop. She looked around, into passing cars, hoping to catch the eye of some sympathetic soul. Did you see that? She wanted to say to someone. That bus driver did that on purpose! And they wonder why nobody takes Muni. But there was no one to express this to. The car windows were steamed. Nobody had noticed anyway. She turned and looked at the disco of headlights pouring toward her up California Street. Surely there would be a cab among them.

Although San Francisco likes to think of itself as a world class city, much like New York, it’s more like New York’s pretty but vapid little sister. Take infrastructure, for example, and public transportation in specific: the Municipal Railway System, or Muni as it was known in town, was unreliable at best and dangerous at worst. Wendy herself had experienced a complete absence of scheduled trains during evening rush hour that left a fuming crowd of hundreds standing on platforms downtown. In New York, people who have to work for a living can choose to take a taxi cab to their destination. Not so in San Francisco. There are only four or five cabs roaming the city at any one time, and they always make a point of avoiding the inner Richmond district on dark, stormy nights like this one.

How long to wait for a Muni is another question for the ages, especially when you know that as soon as you get a block from the bus stop the bus you’ve been waiting for for 40 minutes will appear from nowhere. In cities with public transportation that worked, busses came every five, ten, or twenty minutes. Trains, also could be relied upon to be on time and functioning. Not so in San Francisco. There were whole parts of town, important parts of town, where the trains didn’t run. It wasn’t unusual to wait 30 minutes for a bus on a major line only to be greeted by three of them in a row, a convoy of busses, one of them completely empty. Nor was it unheard of to wait 40 minutes on a Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. with a gathering crowd of people waiting on a platform, wondering when the next N-Judah would arrive. Cabs were another wildcard in this town. How long do you hold out hope that in the next batch of cars a warm, available cab with a friendly, non-felon immigrant behind the wheel will arrive to speed you to work? Wendy was an optimist by either nature or her Midwestern upbringing, but even she had a limit.

The water dripped off the tip of her sodden ponytail and joined the great river of water working its way through and down Wendy’s soaked white shirt. At the small of her back the river broke up and its tributaries either bore west, down one hip or south, toward the backs of her knees, and finally to the great final puddle she stood in. Wendy admitted defeat, and walked home. She was two blocks from California and almost to her building when she heard the rumble of a diesel engine and looked back down the hill at the #1 California bus, letting three old ladies off and nobody on.

Astrid was still at the kitchen table when she got back home. She glanced up from her book to see Wendy dripping in the doorway. “It’s raining, I see.”

Wendy said nothing. She made for the telephone in the hallway.

“Take off your shoes if you’re coming in here.”

Wendy kept her shoes on, squeaking across the kitchen to the hallway, where she snatched up the roam phone, charging pad and all, and took it back to her room. She closed the door, wedging herself between it and her futon and sat staring at the phone on her lap as she wiped tears from her eyes.

Astrid got up from her chair, an improbably tall woman with elbows and knees that could put out an eye. She could have been a runway model if she’d had a different upbringing (by celebrities in Paris, say, instead of by Quakers in Columbus), a lot more confidence and a better haircut. As it looked now her white blond hair hung in a severe yet uneven blunt cut at her jawline, suggesting strongly to the world that she cut it herself to save money. She favored tweedy wool skirts that smelled like damp dogs and pretty V-neck sweaters in bright colors. Her only nod to style were her thick black geek glasses, much favored among the digerati these days. Astrid had worn this particular pair since the ninth grade. Now she put the kettle on to boil and fetched Wendy a towel from the hallway closet. She knocked before opening the door and handing it to her.

“Thanks,” said Wendy, sniffing.

“Give me your shoes and I’ll set them by the heater,” said Astrid. “Hose, too.”
Wendy did as she was told, and also accepted the cup of Lipton tea in a chipped 1996 Bay to Breakers 10K cup a few minutes later. Astrid closed the door behind her and went back to her book, leaving Wendy alone to dry, sip, and be grateful that there was at least one adult in control here.

Astrid was the kind of woman who made one impression upon first sighting and another, more favorably amended one, upon first speaking. She managed the office of an executive recruiting firm downtown, Dunlopper Binch, but liked to commit poetry in her off hours. Every Thursday night she could be found at one of several dimly-lit Mission District bars listening to or participating in one poetry slam or another. She spent a lot of her free time scribbling in little notebooks, the hand-made sort that cost a lot of money at art fairs. She’d never offered to let Wendy read any of her output, a fact that relieved Wendy greatly, since she got the distinct sense that Astrid’s poetry was not the sort of verse that would stir her soul. For one thing, she enjoyed her corporate job way too much. She spoke of her database in lyrical terms, and described it as a work in progress. Wendy had often wondered why she didn’t just take a few computer courses down at City College and leave the roommate-living classes altogether.

Wendy closed the door to her room and sat between her bed and the door, wedging it shut with her legs. Deep breath, and she dialed. The phone rang five times before someone answered it. Not a good sign.

Finally, David’s breathless voice picked up. “Caio-Caio’s North Beach.”

Wendy smiled. “David! It’s Wendy.”

“Wendy? Where the fuck are you?”

“At home…”

“You’re scheduled for 6!”

“I know, and I’m having a little trouble getting down there. It’s really kind of funny…”

“Yeah? I love a good joke.”

10 years in California and Wendy was still never 100 percent sure when people were being sarcastic. She was still blinking and wondering about how to respond when David continued. It was Saturday night, he reminded her. And the line was snaking out the door. And he’d had to call Bonita and beg her to come fill in for her and thank God she had. And in fact, if Wendy couldn’t get here on time then she probably didn’t need this job at all so why didn’t she just forget about it tonight, and hell, every night.

OK, so it was sarcasm. But it wasn’t lightening the mood any. Wendy tried to recoup. “David, I’m sorry. My car got booted! I’ll call a cab and be down there in 15 minutes, OK? And I’ll buy you a drink after work…”

“Listen, it’s just not going to work out.” 

“What?”

“I need people I can rely on. I don’t have time for this chickenshit.”

Chickenshit?

She could hardly believe what she was hearing. Hadn’t he enjoyed her blow job last Friday?

“David! C’mon…”

“Listen, I gotta go, we’re fucking slammed. Come in Saturday and pick up your final paycheck.”

“I can’t believe this...”

“Believe it, lady.” David hung up, leaving Wendy to hyperventilate. How was it possible for a perfectly good day to turn so bad in one short hour? She wondered if being fired and dumped at the same time by the same guy counted as one or two pieces of shit, since shit like this usually came in packages of three. After an indeterminate amount of time, she decided that without clearer guidelines the prudent course of action was to wait for the potential third and final piece of shit to arrive from the safety of her own bed with three Advil in her system. But first she had to call Rachel, since she was, at bottom, to blame for all of this.