One day my car was stolen. I went to the precinct to file a report. The desk sergeant was very helpful. “Oh, it hasn’t been stolen. It’s been impounded.” He had a computer you see.

Where I live now (Queens) you can park on top of a fire hydrant and nothing happens, but this was when I lived in Brooklyn, and they have this thing called rule of law there. Apparently, I was in violation. I could swear that the car was fifteen feet from the hydrant, but maybe it was fourteen feet and ten inches, or eight inches, but per the NYPD it was fourteen feet and not enough inches. Getting your car impounded is a New York rite of passage. In other tribes you have to sit on a fire ant hill for an hour or hang from a tree by leather thongs run through your chest or hunt a lion with your bare hands but here we know the true meaning of pain.

I was initiated into the rite years before when my friend’s car had been impounded. Danny had this habit of buying a car that was half dead and then killing it completely. This particular embarrassment was a dull brown Malibu classic. It might have been another color in its youth, but the rust had effaced its joie de vivre. I was with him when he acquired it. As we were driving it home green smoke began to pour out of the dash board. I really thought it was going to explode. As acrid smoke filled the car I yelled for him to pull over.

“No. No, I see a Thursday spot,” he said and began to execute an illegal U turn. I say began because the car died evenly in the center of Metropolitan Avenue right on the double yellow line, smoke pouring out of it like a carrier on the losing side of the Battle of Midway. For some people this would have been enough but he actually kept this car for a while, enamored of its ugliness. He christened it “The Love Boat” It was about as sexy as a suicidal slug.

This was the car that the NYPD hauled away one fine day. To extricate a car in such circumstances you must pay the fine, the towing fee, and rental to the pound for each day your car is there. In Queens there was an extra bonus round. The place you paid all of this was on the opposite end of the borough from the pound itself, and since you obviously had no car, you had to take busses to get to these charming destinations. You’d better pack lunch, and dinner. Danny figured the cashectomy of this transaction would be two weeks’ salary, which was two weeks more than “The Love Boat” was worth.
“Let them keep it,” he said.
“It doesn’t work that way,” his father replied. We were at his dad’s apartment. His father sat on his Barcalounger and took a draw on his pipe as deliberately as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland drew on his hookah.

I think his dad took a certain sardonic pleasure in the mishaps of any of his five sons. It was his revenge on them for living. “They have your car. They know who you are. They will let it sit there and accrue debt for a few months, then they’ll sell it at auction, for scrap in this case.” He drew another puff. “Then they will bill you for the difference and throw in a few legal fees for abandonment and being a bad person. If you don’t pay they will garnishee your salary. If you duck that they will garnishee your social security. If you die before that they will dig you up and sell your organs.”

Like a good fried, I drove Danny to his destinations of pain. It took all day anyway. The pound itself was an education in unpleasantness. Every car there was damaged. They could not ALL have been that way on the street. People complain about the city being inefficient and slipshod, but they were very thorough here. Not one car was spared.

So, it was with considerable trepidation that I set out to extricate my car. It was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a place neither I, nor my car, nor the impound, nor a Rockefeller could afford now. (Although if the impound was still there you could get artisanally crafted doughnuts for only $45 while you waited.) At least the offices to pay the fine and the car prison were in the same place. Brooklyn is a little more organized.  Even so it was a process. You had to stand in a long line to get the forms required to stand in another long line to actually pay all the fines so that you could stand in another long line to get your car.

I was doing this carrying my fourteen month old daughter, Cezanne. Nobody ever says her name right, even in France.  She was in her car carrier since, being an optimist, I expected to drive out of that place the same day. A baby in a car carrier gets heavy after a few hours, but that was not my biggest concern.  She was teething, and nothing was more inconsolable then Cezanne when she was teething. She’d get this look on her face like she was mad at God – which she was. Then she’d cry. Then she’s really rev up and start bellowing like a volcano on a bad day. I’d been on flights where they threatened to land the plane and arrest me if something wasn’t done. As any parent knows, there is not a lot you can do. But a lot of people are not parents and they just glare at you like you beat the kid from dawn till dusk. She had fallen asleep on the bus to the pound and I was in mortal terror during the long hours waiting in line that she would wake up and go off like Vesuvius and I’d get arrested and be put in jail with my car. So there I am on this endless line with this perfectly quiet ticking time bomb.

We got through the first line to get the forms without incident. I bore up like everybody else and got the occasional compliment about what a cute baby I had. Single gentlemen listen up. If you can rent a baby, do so. They are like a magnet for women. Once the ice is broken, you can explain that you are an uncle or you found it or something. If she woke up it would be THE END but so far, so good. It was on the second line that I encountered a New York icon, the next superhero in the Marvel franchise – Mr. Irate Crazy Frothing-at-the-Mouth Taxi Man.

I think you would need the patience of Gandhi to remain calm as a taxi driver in New York. You never know who is going to get in your cab and even if ninety percent of them are reasonable the other ten percent are the ones who make your existence a living hell. On top of that it is always a hassle to get around in this town and even when normal people are trying to get from point A to point B, there is pressure. Likewise if ninety percent of the cab drivers are reasonable it is the other ten percent that make your ride a living hell. This was a cabbie to remember. I rather suspect that he was never part of the reasonable ninety percent. On top of that his cab, and therefore his livelihood, were impounded. On top of that he had been on the wrong line (the one outside to get his car) and only discovered this by starting at one end of the line and going to the other – a long process. He snapped. He stormed into the room and cut all the lines to confront the civil servants behind their bullet proof glass. By his logic, since he had been waiting on the wrong line (and would have to wait on it again later) he should just get served now. He went from one window to another, blustering and frothing in at least two languages and scaring the bejesus out of whatever unlucky citizen happened to be in front of the window.

In my experience, belligerence may work in the private sector, where no matter how unreasonable, the customer is always right. Civil servants are under no such misconception. They do not aim to please. Special orders do upset them. One needs an act of congress to get one dismissed, so they are basically unassailable.  If you are very nice to them, they may deign to take care of whatever petty and completely unimportant problem that you in your imprudence may have acquired. Then again, they may not. In this case they continued their operations very slowly and deliberately, completely ignoring crazy taxi man. They were after all, behind glass. We weren’t. He eventually gave up his direct attack on the civil service citadel to turn his fury on the people in the line, especially the person at the front – me.  He wanted my spot. He wanted it with foam coming out of his mouth. If I refused him there was a distinct possibility of violence. In that turn of events I would have to put Cezanne down or throw her at him. I am aware that some readers might raise an eyebrow even at the suggestion of using a baby as a weapon, but have you considered that a baby in a hard plastic carrier is a pretty good weapon? With that handle you could get a nice angular momentum going. At the very least I would have had the element of surprise.  I weighed the possibilities, but somehow Cezanne had managed to sleep through this whole thing, and this strategy might wake her. At end of the day I was more afraid of her then of him. So baby cum artillery was out and caution was adopted as the better part of valor. He had already taken the first spot so I let it go. The next window came free and up he went.

I had been dubious about his approach all along. Is there that much difference between cutting by going to the window and cutting by seizing the front of the line? But one never knows in a city office so I looked on with real curiosity. By chance the next window to free up was the manager’s window. The cold, imperious look in her eye gave me to suspect that this was not going to be the taxi man’s day at all.

When he came over she said, “You again. You have cut off a whole room full of people and that man with a baby.” He started to sputter and bluster again. At that moment a cop walked in. Since he didn’t have any business of his own there I figure she must have summoned him a few minutes before.  She continued, “Arrest that man for disrupting civil servants in the performance of their duty and being a general menace.” The constable approached the bench. This had a marked effect on the demeanor of the cab driver. He started begging for mercy with the same incoherent ranting with which he had been threatening Armageddon.  She put up her hand to silence him and pointed to a chair in the back of the room. “Sit down there!” He sat down in the chair and considered the floor, whimpering softly. She addressed her minions. “No one attend to that man until everyone else is taken care of.” They all nodded. “Officer, thank you. You may go.” Then she said “Next,” very slowly and quietly so that you could hear every letter in the word.

It was with not a little apprehension that I approached the window. All my papers were in order. I’d checked them three times, but there is that arbitrary nature to all doings in the municipal government that fills one with a nameless dread in such situations. You think you’ve got it all covered but then some unseen calamity strikes you down; the parking ticket that you paid and they didn’t get, the back taxes that you owe when you actually don’t, the registration problem with your car, the regulation that took effect sixty seconds ago, or that expired sixty seconds ago, the fact that you are breathing. It could be anything. And of course it’s none of those things, it’s something you didn’t think to worry about. I put my time bomb down very delicately and pushed all my paperwork and my driver’s license and my receipt of payment and my passport and my birth certificate and my old boy scout badge and a letter of dispensation from the Pope under the window. I would have pushed Cezanne under the window if I thought she’d fit. The public servant scanned it all and her eye stopped on my driver’s license.

She looked up at me for a long moment and said, “Your photo ID does not look like you. Are you sure this is your license?” My heart stopped.
I let out a nervous laugh. “Well, of course it’s my license.”
“I see now. You do have a dimple when you smile,” she said. Without looking down she took her stamp and affixed it to my freedom. “You may go. Have a nice day.”

Under stress I often become forgetful, but I did remember to collect all the papers and the baby before I walked out. Extricating the car proved easy. It wasn’t even damaged! I cleared the gates of the Navy Yard feeling very much like Odysseus – right into downtown Brooklyn rush-hour traffic. We inched along. I began to hear a rumble from the back seat. Well, it would have been too much to ask the gods to get all the way home. My little volcano was awakening. Babies have to be mounted backwards in the back seat. If I was a baby, I wouldn’t like that arrangement very much. Very boring. (There are so many weird things about babyhood I don’t know how anybody gets through it. It must be like being stoned all the time. Everything is unfamiliar and novel and exciting and crazy and intense and disorienting.) She woke up crabby, and teething. She started to rev up. I couldn’t get home. I couldn’t pull over. The only thing I knew would work in such circumstances was putting my finger in her mouth so she could gnaw on it. So on we went, her happily gnawing away, and I driving left handed in the rush hour with my body bent over like an abstract sculpture. Could have been worse. Car could have been a stick.