Mercy From A Machine
No taxation with procrastination.
I once left my Bronco at a downtown parking meter for two months. That's how long it took them to tow it away. The sign said violators would be subject to a fine and towing, but I never was a great listener, and that kind of thing seems more challenge than warning to me. So, there it stayed. A defiant and rusted middle finger stuck squarely in the eye of Big Parking Lot.
Every week or so, I walked by to see how the old boy’s struggle against capitalism fared. He’d racked up three dozen parking tickets before the end. It was a great spot, right in front of the Opera House and all those tickets sitting on the windshield probably made a few folks feel feelings. Until one day, it was gone. Where they towed it, I don't know. I left the damned thing there for a reason. It wouldn’t start and I was finished owning a gas-guzzling lemon, anyway.
As a 1984 Ford Bronco II in 1999, any good days it might have had were long behind it. Unlike any pursuers. This thing wasn't winning any high-speed chases. Nor high-profile chases. O.J. Simpson, an actor beloved by all for his portrayal of Detective Nordberg in the 1988 film The Naked Gun, once took a very public spin in a Ford Bronco. But he didn't escape, and I figured if not even O.J. could get away with it, I had very little chance at all.
It's a shame. If O.J. had never taken that drive in his Bronco, he'd still be remembered as the peerlessly talented actor he was, without blemish on an otherwise spotless legacy. But history is cruel. So, he’s remembered as a lawbreaker, which I guess, he technically was. Running from the police is a crime.
I was a criminal too. Those tickets were piling up and I couldn’t afford to pay a single one of them. The situation was dire. All of my money was tied up in other ventures like getting blasted at the bar a block from my car.
So, like O.J. Simpson, I ran. I ran all the way to Seattle. I was moving there anyway. I drove a U-Haul with my kitty-dude Jubei in a box on the passenger seat screaming his adorable gods damned head off through three hundred miles of Washington State blizzard. In Snoqualmie Pass, my knuckles were whiter than President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. Sure, there was some coloration, but they were all stiff and fraught with legal trouble they hoped to outrun.
Astute readers of The Traveling Cynic will note this is the same time I fled a pushy judge from Grant County. These stories are true, you know.
Alas, once upon a time I was enjoying a day off at my Seattle home. Well, Day Twenty-six off. Every day is a holiday when you’re unemployed. I spent it hunting for work online in between hunting for movie downloads online. My life at that point afforded me Top Ramen and dial-up internet as amenities, making a download of anything a rather rough affair. It took forever and any interruptions were final. Worse, sometimes even if the download showed as complete it was corrupted. It often wouldn’t open, even after a day's download. Worse still, it might not even be the right movie, anyway.
Aside from the long download times, there also existed a tiny issue occurring if someone called your houseline while you were using it as an internet connection. The line would ring, conjuring an involuntary howl of despair as you knew you were about to lose what little internet connection you could squeeze out of a telephone line to begin with. Back in the day, I would call friend’s houses whenever I suspected they might be masturbating, which was mostly between the hours of all day.
And on that day off, my line rang loud and proud.
I groaned. I was ninety-eight percent through a download of Kenta Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, and I'd been enthusiastically working myself into a lather of excitement over the idea of watching it. Now, with the infernal call coming in, the download was hosed. But I wouldn't know for sure for a few minutes. Not until I tried to open it like that Greek chick Backdora, or whatever her name was. I learned about her in high school. I think, anyway. I wasn't really listening.
Stupidly, I answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hello,” a nice lady’s voice came through, clearly unaware she was interrupting an enthusiastic film pirate. “Am I speaking with Robert Lamb?”
“Yarrr,” I agreed before correcting myself. “No. I mean noooo.”
“May I ask who I am speaking with?”
“Noooo.”
“Mr. Lamb,” this lady-of-death began. “I’m calling from Spokane Municipal Court about several unpaid parking tickets.”
“I'm not this Mr. Lamb ye be looking fer,” I protested. “But he sure sounds like a dead-beat do-badder.”
“Don’t we know it,” she deadpanned in my ear. “But we’re letting you know you have to pay these tickets off before you can renew your driver’s license. There are over thirty violations here. Impressive, really. Like that Seinfeld episode.”
“Thank you,” I panicked, not really listening and slipping out of character, forgetting I’d just renewed my license a month prior. I needed my license if I wanted to get a job to pay off my parking tickets, buy ramen, and continue to own a shoddy internet connection. “If I ever get to meeting this sonofabitch, I’ll make sure to let him know the law would like a word.” Saved it. She totally bought it.
“Thank you, Mr. Lamb. Goodbye.”
My pirate-ass was cooked if I didn’t get those tickets paid off. But I could only handle one problem at a time, if that. So, I also hung up the phone before cooking up a bowl of Oriental flavor Top Ramen to slurp. What the hell is “Oriental” flavor anyway? Soy sauce, parental pressure, and a bit of green onion? I pondered what “Occidental” flavored Top Ramen would be. Lettuce, disappointed fathers, and ketchup, maybe. Maybe that’s just R. B. Lamb flavor.
I double clicked the downloaded file on my desktop. Corrupted file. Drat! I knew the dangers. I expected this. Oh well. I could just spend another day downloading the same link and watch it the day after. I kicked off the download then played Final Fantasy X until passing out in my own filth.
The next day, my download was finished, and my anticipation was working towards a climax. I hurriedly made another bowl of ramen, slurped with one hand, and clicked the file with the other, hoping for a cult-classic film. Instead, I got the gayest man-porn available at the time. I assume. Still, I took it in progressive stride, spitting my noodles all over my monitor as I frantically closed the movie. It was a bit too French for my tastes. And loud. I wouldn’t be enjoying Chiaki Kuriyama after all, it seemed.
Years passed, almost four of them, actually. It was time to renew my driver’s license again. So, I drove my Chevy Cavalier, purchased for $250, up Aurora Ave to the Washington Department of Licensing. I renewed my driver’s license without a single complaint by the state and I didn’t think twice about the whole thing.
Only a month later did I bolt upright from bed in the middle of the night and recall, dimly, how four years earlier Spokane Municipal Court had threatened me over the phone. How a nice lady had told me I could not renew the license I had just renewed until paying off those tickets I certainly never paid off. They told me this in certain terms. And yet, I’d avoided this legal crisis somehow. I had to know how.
I leaped from bed to my computer, flinging Jubei straight up into the dark above the bed. These days, I had a fancy cable internet connection thanks to a regular gig leading a team of Xbox certification testers. I could afford the upgrade thanks to paychecks and scoff-lawing parking tickets. That's Seinfeld for, “I don't pay them.”
I brought up the Spokane Municipal Court website. A tired old thing, it had lots of yellow and green on it like most websites did at the time for some reason. Across the top of the page, a banner somewhat shamefully exclaimed the following inadvertent amnesty:
“A recent computer glitch has resulted in the loss of data between the years of 1999-2001. Lost data includes but is not limited to traffic and parking tickets accrued during that time.”
My first thought was God must have called Spokane Municipal Court while they were accidentally downloading gay pornography and corrupted their database. I’d grown up there. It was a plausible explanation. Spokane was the wildest small town around.
My second thought was a bit more sober. I had actually learned about this kind of thing in high school. The old Greeks put it in plays. They called it Dude Sex Machina or something. I think, anyway. I’m not really sure. I wasn't really listening.
Sic vivitur.
“Dude Sex Machina” hahaha