Tow

I had never gotten my car towed before. Parking tickets? Plenty. Dozens. The city government seemed to move at a snail’s pace when it came to every other damn thing, but when it came to parking tickets they moved with the efficiency of an ant colony.

I also rarely went out for a drink after work. After every shift my coworkers all flocked to this shitty dive nearby called Bob’s so they could spend their cash tips on well liquor and domestics. I liked my coworkers well enough, didn’t have a problem with them, but the job maxed out my social battery as is. However, that night I gave in. I drank too many warm tequila shots at Bob’s and sang an ear-splitting, karaoke rendition of “Hand in My Pocket” before sloppily calling my boyfriend to drive me home. In a fateful protest against drunk driving, I left my Camry parked right out front and the next day it was gone.

“Oh yeah there’s a sign on the front door saying no overnight parking. Did you not see it?” my coworker Cloyd said the next day.

I seethed with the special kind of anger that is borne from regret and stupid decisions.

“We thought you knew.” Cloyd felt genuinely bad, I could tell, but I still raged. “Or else we would’ve warned you.”

The towing company was located in an industrial area of town, inhabited only by U-Haul lots and sketchy-looking auto body shops and long stretches of railroad tracks. My boyfriend accidentally passed the building thrice, both of us cursing each other, ourselves, the universe. How dare the universe make me pay hundreds of dollars for something so inane. What was my crime? Leaving a car in a parking lot for a few hours? It’s not like it was a live baby, or a bomb. Who’s to say where you can or cannot leave a car? What kind of fucked up system have we humans erected for ourselves? It’s a con, I tell you! A con! My boyfriend finally parked and put a gentle hand on my leg which was his way of saying “Please shut up, you’re rambling again.” I sighed and left him in the car while I ventured forth alone.

The waiting room was small and empty, dimly lit by mustard-yellow fluorescents. They flickered lazily. The only other thing in the room besides me was a pop machine with a 1980s Pepsi logo sun-faded on the front.

I approached the small, grated window on the wall ahead of me and peered through. The interior room was massive, at least three times larger than the one I was in. But like this one, it was also strangely empty and poorly lit. I locked eyes with someone at the back of the room.

“Hello?” I called out but there was no answer. “Hello!” Then my eyes adjusted and I realized it was just a cardboard cutout of Dale Earnhardt Jr.

I couldn’t believe how bare the room was. It had an abandoned quality, like the place had been raided and left to rot. A Snickers wrapper laid like a corpse on the floor. The only sign of life was a giant glass terrarium that ran the length of the left wall. Vibrant green ferns and moss erupted inside, and the walls were wet with condensation. I tried to catch a glimpse of whatever creature lived in there. I thought I saw a couple leaves parting, maybe a hint of a long tail…

“Can I help you?”

“Jesus!” I jumped.

A person had appeared from some side door and walked toward the window. The clerk, I quickly theorized, wore huge oval glasses and her hair up in a messy bun. She couldn’t have been older than me, maybe mid to late twenties.

“I’m here to pick up my car.”

“License and registration.”

“My registration is currently in my car so I can’t really get that for you, now can I?”

She was writing something and didn’t look up. “We can get it for you.” A steel latch on the window opened and the clerk slid a paper towards me. “Sign this. I’ll be right back.”

I almost wanted to yell out, “No wait! Don’t leave me here!” as if that side door she entered through was some kind of unstable portal, and she might permanently disappear if she crossed it again. The whole place had the unsettling quality of being completely outside of time and space. It was like a dream—the details only add up if you don’t try to describe them out loud.

I took another peek around the room. A sign to the right of the window that I hadn’t noticed before. It read:

HOUSE RULES

PAYMENT MUST BE MADE IN FULL FOR VEHICLE TO BE RELEASED.

DRIVER’S LICENSE AND REGISTRATION MUST BE PRESENT.

ABSOLUTELY NO YELLING, CUSSING AT, OR THREATENING CLERK.

ANY AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR WILL RESULT IN US KEEPING YOUR VEHICLE FOR ANOTHER 24 HOURS OR MORE.

WE ACCEPT CASH OR CHECKS ONLY. NO CREDIT CARDS. NO VENMO!!!

I began to wonder if such a disquietingly quiet place ever got rowdy enough to warrant those rules when a man burst through the front door.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” He motioned towards the window. I stepped aside for him and he promptly began pounding on the grate. “Hey! HEY! Come out here and give me my car, you fuckers!”

The clerk reappeared. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, I need my fucking car back now.”

“There is another customer ahead of you, but when I am done helping her it will be your turn.”

“No, I want my car now. Right now. If I don’t get my car in the next five minutes, and I swear if you idiots did anything to it, even a scratch, I’ll—”

“He can go ahead of me,” I said. “If that’s ok.”

The clerk didn’t sigh or roll her eyes or even look up at either of us. She just looked at the man’s ID and flipped through some papers and said, “We haven’t processed that vehicle yet so it will be $467 right now. Or you can come back tomorrow and it will be $247.”

The man laughed, a cheap little laugh that grasped at whatever power he thought he had left in this situation. “You’re joking, right? You've got to be joking. Surely you wouldn’t just rob innocent people like this?” He banged on the grate again and let out a string of obscenities. The clerk didn’t flinch. Two men in t-shirts and work pants came in and grabbed the man by each arm and whispered in his ear and led him back out the front door.

Without missing a beat, the clerk turned to me. “I found your registration. It will be $247.68 to release your vehicle.” Like a hostage, I thought.

Listen, I had this whole stupid scene planned out in my head. I was so pissed, and for months I had been saving all my one dollar bills and not depositing them into the bank because for some deep-seated puritanical reason I didn’t want the bank teller to think I was a stripper. It’s not that I even think it’s bad to be a stripper, it’s really hard and it takes so much athleticism, but maybe I have more internalized misogyny than I realize. Also, one of the tellers is the sister of a girl I went to high school with and she was kind of a bully, and I just know her sister would say to her, “You’ll never guess who’s a stripper now. Isn’t that sad? Hope the money’s worth it.” So I had like three hundred one dollar bills and I thought it was be a real go-fuck-yourself to the towing company if I paid it all in ones. But that was before the man banging on the grate and the giant terrarium and Dale.

A shot of fear ran through me as I grabbed the wad of cash from my purse. What if this pisses off the clerk and the guys come to get me too? What if I never see my car again? I placed the cash on the window ledge and willed myself not to say sorry. I had to regain some sense of autonomy in this whole ordeal.

The clerk stared unmoved at the huge stack of crumpled bills in front of her. “You have to count it with me,” she said with such neutrality that I wondered how often this happens. Or situations even worse than this. Has someone come in with only quarters? “Stacks of ten please. Then I’ll recount them.”

So we counted. Working together now as a team. I tried to tell myself I didn’t mind counting money, I did it all the time at my job and by now was very quick with it, but the winner was still clear. She bested me. She saw my trick coming from a mile away.

We counted in silence for a bit before I broke it: “So what’s in the terrarium?”

She glanced back at the glass box. “A Lesser Antillean albino iguana.”

“What’s its name?”

“Peter.”

“Why?”

“Why’s it named Peter?”

“No, why is it here?”

“The owner is a huge lizard guy. He used to keep Peter at his house but his wife made him bring it here because he kept escaping. Also she thought the tank looked ugly in their living room.”

“Oh.” I counted out the final seven bills. “Why is his name Peter?”

“Like from in the Bible. The sixty-eight cents?”

“Oh right.” I fished around in my purse and found exact change.

“The guys’ll bring the vehicle around front for you. You’re lucky, they haven’t tagged it with the paint yet. You can’t get that shit off with jet fuel.”

“Thanks,” I said, then turned to leave. I hesitated, looked back at the clerk. “Do you think I could see Peter?”

She cast a cursory glance at his home. “He’s sleeping right now.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, defeated, before walking back out into the sunlight.