One Ticket and No Ride

They say when you fall in you dreams you wake up right before you hit the pavement. Not me. Oh, God, not me. I was stuck in that hell every step of the way. I was still there when I landed. I witnessed the horrible surgeries, the rehabilitation and the long hours of mind-numbing therapy in the cold, fluorescent lit dystopia of an institution with Dr. Jones, the bastard. There was a point where I did realize how surreal this place was.



It was somewhere mid-surgery and I was thinking “Surely I shouldn’t be awake when the asshole is sewing my intestines back in. Yes…this has to be some sort of crazed nightmare. And I promise not to call you surely anymore.”

The whole thing had done me on both ends. It made me the fool of my own subconscious. And the terrifying vistas of reality were skewing endwise from my psyche. It was madness. Black was white. Up was still up, but in what context? Left was neither here nor there and when I finally made it out of that crazed loony bin I found that my next door neighbor had now resembled some kind of lemon flavored jellyfish. I don’t even have a fucking neighbor. I don’t think I even had a fucking house to live in.

Just when I thought I had fully adapted to this backwards assed Hades the lights turned on and I was being kicked awake by Eddie’s brother.
“Hey man, its street sweeping day. The truck just passed by your car, you’d better get off the couch and go move it”.
    “Move? From where?” I jolted. “I don’t have a house! You can’t put me back in that God-Fearing institution with those monkeys! I’m well, I tell you!”
    That didn’t seem to phase him any. I don’t think he knew about the murderous disease-like dream world that was festering in my head pocket all night. He repeated again, “Move your car before you get a ticket, dude. I’m just trying to help you”.
    “…Oh yea. Right. Ok, uhh. Where are my keys?”

But it was too late. A parking enforcer had already parked behind the Beast and I witnessed through Eddie’s window him pulling out his pen and ticket pad just as I had stepped outside the door. “Play it cool,” I thought, “Open the door like it’s not your car, get inside and make a dash for it”. I opened the driver side door and left it open. This was a good gesture showing that he had nothing to fear. I slowly turned the key one click just to turn the radio on and began fidgeting around for what I wanted the man to believe was my toothpaste. Make him believe that you don’t care where you’re parked because you’re the cock of the fucking walk. Then, when he least suspects it, blast off out of there like a bat outta Scottsdale, Arizona. Leave the bastard in your rear view mirror and be done with this mess.

Things were going well at first. The pig hadn’t seemed to catch on to my plot yet. But once I got the engine going he walked right up to me and looked me right in the eye. He was a tan, skinny little bastard. Totally flunked out of a REAL police academy, this I can tell you. “What a piece of shit” I thought. “I want to laugh at him and his stupid little badge that reads ‘Parking Officer’, but he may call for backup. He’ll probably stick that pen in his thigh and start shouting “OFFICER DOWN! OFFICER DOWN!” and there would be nothing I could do about it except sit there and wait for the meat wagon to take me away. So there we were, face to face. Myself holding back some drowsy, hung over giggles and him in a really pissed off looking mood.
    “If you drive away, I’m just going to mail it to you”.
      “Good luck with that,” I said, “I lost my house after I jumped. Can’t you see I’m a man who’s just been rehabilitated?”
That didn’t seem to move him any. I was too strapping of a lad to have looked like I just jumped 15 stories. Maybe if I had slashed my face up a little with a steak knife before I went out to meet him he would’ve believed me, so I tried another approach:
“Listen. Piggy-…Parking-…What do I call you, anyways?”
“You can call me Officer,” he says.
“No…No, I’m not going to call you that. You didn’t win my vote, that’s for fucking sure. I wasn’t even aware of any election to make you an officer of the Parallel Arts. Anyways, how about I just get my hose and water down this whole mess your street sweeper seems to have missed? It doesn’t have to come out of anybody’s pocket. I can just pick up my things and leave. I’ll clean up the pile behind me, I swear.”

That, of course, didn’t seem to arouse his appetite for mercy either. The Piggy was steaming now if I pleaded my case the way I did to the system, the court would definitely be in his favor. He wanted to prove to me how big his pecker was, so he handed me his ticket and walked away. I greeted the ticket with a fresh loogie and proceeded to curse and stammer in a ravage and crude fashion: “You treat a rehabilitated man with a $32 street sweeping ticket!? What an asshole you must be! You’ll never achieve the rank of Sergeant in this day and age! You’ll be old and withered and your balls will shrivel up until there’s nothing left of you and you’ll never see your parents again, twig boy!”

I suppose that’s how things go these days. The law can’t be stretched, bended or twisted into a fashion where you can get out of a jam if you say the right words to the right kind of jury. You can no longer bite the law, but merely suckle it’s hard, jagged knob and ask the Judge and the TV to give you 3 years instead of 5. All the while, we’ve got pinhead cops throwing around their badge like it was daddy’s new gun and throwing kids into the flames before they can even light up. Lawyers are no longer professional speakers anymore but a vague shadowy figure who recites the law for you. And he always has to muddy up the fucking words so that everything sounds like you’re negotiating a record contract with some two-bit ass fuck from Argentina who can’t quite speak English. He knows the words, but he can’t understand what his own cases are. He doesn’t defend anymore. Instead he’ll negotiate with the system which prison is shitty enough for you. And down you go, like a sack of worms. You’re the asshole. You got played. You’re the miserable bastard who endangered so many lives in the process. One simple parking ticket and it’s all downhill from here. Shit, they’ve got you in the slammer the minute they take your driver’s license picture at the DMV. To hell with all that and to hell with the badge.

So I threw the foul-smelling piece of paper on my passenger side floor and there it will lie until they send me a 3rd notice of overdue payment. With a little luck, that ticket might not even make it to the bureau and any record of me ever being in Fountain Valley will have never existed. I went back into Eddie’s house to crash out for a few more hours on that leather couch of his. The liquor hadn’t quite left my kidneys yet and I wasn’t prepared to tackle the day. Now is the time to go back. Back to the dream of loathing and misery in the Nth Dementia, where incessant a-bombs loom in the distance and crudely drawn space-hippies regale you of their travels through the outer rim of the 1960’s. Maybe in the dream I return to they’ll find good use of my story and know when to tear up a parking ticket.

-Leo-