A man in full, p.32
A Man in Full, page 32
Then he realized what the problem was. His hands! His fingers were now so much wider and heavier and stronger, from working in the warehouse, he was constantly overlapping adjoining keys or else striking them too hard, causing the letters to repeat. He had lost the touch in his own fingers! Two grotesque musclebound strangers, his hands were! My own hands! He stared at them as if he had never seen them before.
The ticking of the timer seemed dreadfully loud. A minute had gone by, and he had produced a grand total of a dozen words, most of them mangled. Gingerly he placed his fingertips back on the keyboard, hoping against hope that it would all come back to him. It had to. He stared at the text: “most recent retail” … Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat … and he had written, pst recemt rwtsil … A burning panic … These hands of which he had been so proud just a few hours ago as he stared into the bathroom mirror—they were the paws of a dumb animal, of a beast of burden—he couldn’t believe it!—and all the while the humming of the IBM Selectric grew louder and louder … Okay, big boy, produce! I’m ready, I’m humming, I’m waiting—what about you? … and the timer went ticktickticktickticktick.
He plunged on, trying to batter his way through the text, since nothing else seemed to work, typing right on top of misstruck letters, x’ing out the totally hopeless mistakes and the repeats, letting the hair-trigger keys rat-tat-tat-tat-tat amok. Just get through it, that was the main thing.
In no time—ding!—the timer bell went off, and the girl, Carol, was in the entryway to the cubicle. Conrad stared at the piece of paper. Far from having produced the minimum of 150 words in five minutes, he wasn’t sure he had produced 90. With all the x’s, typeovers, repeats, and false starts, the tight little single-spaced patch of words looked like something small and black that had been run over on a highway.
“Well,” said the girl brightly, “how’d it go?”
Conrad was speechless. All he could do was shake his head. Her eyes shifted to the page.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” said Conrad. He lifted his hands—and was suddenly mortified that she might notice their size. He hid them in his lap. “I just couldn’t—I guess it’s been so long—I don’t know.”
In a low, confidential tone she said, “Well, do you want to try it again? I’m not supposed to, but I can give you another sheet of paper, and we’ll do it over.”
“Thanks, but it’s no use. I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Why don’t you go home and practice some and then come back. You want to? If you call ahead and let me know when you’re coming, I can get the desk to assign you to me. We’re not supposed to do that, either, but I’ll do it.” She gave him a sympathetic smile.
“It’s just—” He couldn’t complete the sentence. “I’ll try,” he said in a hopeless tone.
He thanked her and left without another word. On the elevator he held his hands up before his face. What had he turned into? The longer he stared at them, the bigger they seemed to become. My own hands! And she had tried to give him … everything! … on a platter … He could still see her smile, her dimples (the swell of her breasts, the curve of her thighs) … The most shaming part of it was that the ever-smirking Arda Otey had been right, more so than she could have ever even guessed.
Thoughts of Jill and her mother possessed him as he walked down the sidewalk heading for his car. It was a bright sparkling noontime, a fact that couldn’t have interested him less. What would they say when he told them? What would they think? Or did he have to tell them? Why couldn’t he just say he had had the interview and was waiting to hear back?
Scuffling along the sidewalk, his head down, he scarcely even noticed the knot of idlers and gawkers who had gathered near a truck until he was almost upon them. It was a high-riding flatbed truck painted a hot yellow-green and embellished with swash lettering and pinstriping and gleaming chrome. A sunburnt man wearing a cowboy hat and a leather vest appeared, a regular giant, 250 pounds if he was an ounce. The sleeves of his shirt had been cut off at the shoulders, revealing his huge fleshy arms. He walked to the front of the truck, stepped up on a chrome running board, opened the door, leaned inside the cab, emerged with a metal rod of some kind, and returned to the rear.
It occurred to Conrad, with a start, that whatever was going on, it was in the red zone in front of where he had parked the Hyundai. The gawkers blocked his view. He hurried forward and joined them. He found himself staring at the broad beam of the giant in the cowboy hat, who was leaning over, attaching a tow chain to a car that had both front wheels up on the curb, right in the middle of the red zone, barely a foot from the fire hydrant—
—and in that instant Conrad realized it was his car, his little Hyundai Excel. In the middle of the red zone! Up on the curb! Impossible!—and yet there it was. There was a ticket under the windshield wiper.
Standing on the sidewalk, right beside the car, following the tow truck operator’s progress, was a meter maid, easily identifiable by her uniform, a short-sleeved powder-blue shirt and navy-blue pants. She was probably in early middle age, so stout that the flesh of her upper arms stretched the hems of her sleeves. She held a walkie-talkie radio up to her mouth. She had a terrific set of Chinese-red press-on nails on her fingers.
Conrad approached from the side. He was scarcely eighteen inches from her, but she didn’t give him so much as a flicker of an eye.
“Excuse me!” he said. No response. Much louder: “Excuse me!”
The walkie-talkie still at her ear, she cut him a glance that said Don’t bother me.
“Miss!” said Conrad.
She gave him a withering look and said, “Can’t you see I’m transmitting?”
The terribly official-sounding word, transmitting, brought him up short, and he turned toward the tow truck driver. By now the big man had secured the tow chain beneath the Hyundai and was standing up, and you could see just how enormous he really was. He was a mountain of flesh with the sun-beaten, lard-grilled look of a roustabout, clear down to the immense ring of keys hanging from a belt loop beneath the bulge of his belly on one side of his jeans and the cluster of novelty key fobs on the other: a tiny wrench, a disposable butane lighter, a pair of dice, a plastic figurine of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse doing the tango, a miniature dueling pistol, and a little silvery skull with fangs instead of eyeteeth.
Conrad jumped between the fire hydrant and the fender of the Hyundai and over the tow chain and rushed up to him. “Hey!—sir!—this is my car! Whattaya doing?”
Scarcely looking at him, not even pausing, the giant said, “Towin’ it outta the red zone.”
He said it in a bored way that made it clear he had said the same thing, or something very close to it, a thousand times before, to a thousand other frantic, befuddled, and, above all, helpless automobile owners. He was now heading for the driver’s-side front door with the shaft of metal he had taken from the truck. It was a length of spring steel. Conrad recognized it immediately. It was a device known as a Slim Jim, used to slip through the window seals of locked cars to release the lock mechanisms from the inside.
“Wait a minute! Please!” But the giant was already inserting the Slim Jim between the glass and the frame.
“You’re gonna break the glass! I’ve got the keys right here! I can open the door!”
“Nobody’s breakin’ any glass,” said the giant in the same bored voice, without looking at him. In no time he had sprung the lock, opened the door, and was reaching inside, doing something with the steering wheel.
“Please!” said Conrad. “It’s my car! I’ve got the keys! I can move it!”
The giant didn’t even look at him. Utterly nonplussed, Conrad swung back toward the sidewalk to appeal to the meter maid. She wasn’t looking at him, either. She was writing something in her summons book. By now the knot of gawkers had grown into a real crowd. They were revved up, ready for some action, eager for the beano, now that the hapless owner of the automobile had materialized and was acting suitably dismayed, frightened, anguished, and frustrated.
This time Conrad yelled at the meter maid: “Hey! Miss!”
She looked up, and he jumped back over the tow chain and went straight to her. “Please—you gotta tell me what’s going on! This is my car!”
She began studying the summons pad and gestured toward the Hyundai without looking at Conrad. “Car’s in the red zone—and up on the sidewalk.”
Conrad raised his hands in frustration. “But I didn’t park in the red zone! I swear! Look, miss, listen—I was all the way back there, on the other side of the line!”
“Well, exactly the way it’s sittin’ right now, that’s exactly the way it was sittin’ when I called the dispatcher.” She said this in a reasonable-enough tone, but it inspired a couple of unh-hunnnhs and hegh-hegggghhs among the gawkers, and she became aware she had an audience. So she added, “And I never seen a car drive itself into a red zone yet.”
“Woooo-eeee,” said one of the gawkers, and another said, “Ohhhhhh yeah,” all in the eternal spirit of Let’s You and Him Fight.
“Look, miss,” said Conrad. He struggled to find the right words, the compelling logic. “I’m telling you, I didn’t park in the red zone. Honest. And even if I did, would I put my front wheels up on the curb? Would that make any sense?”
The woman delivered a contralto chuckle deep in her throat and said, “They don’t pay me to make sense outta what the drivers do in this town. Couldn’t pay me enough to do that.” This brought such an appreciative round of unhh-hunnnhhhs, heh-heggghhhhhs, and woooo-eeeeees, the big woman felt uplifted, emboldened. Usually street crowds were against the meter maid, but she had won this bunch over with rhetorical brilliance, and so she headed for new heights: “My job is keeping cars from parking in the wrong place and getting them outta there when they do, and that car right there is parked in about as wrong a place as you can get. That’s a red zone, and that’s a fire hydrant, and that’s a sidewalk—and that’s a tow truck.”
Woooo-eeeeeee! Hegh-heggghhhhhh! Unhh-hunnnnhhhhhh! Oh yeah! That’s a tow truck!
Conrad was dumbstruck. In the next moment he realized what had happened. To squeeze into the small space on the legal side of the red zone, he had backed his car up against the bumper of the Chevrolet Suburban behind him. The driver of the Suburban had returned and, finding himself hemmed in, had bulldozed his way out by pushing the little Hyundai forward along the pavement. Conrad must have left his wheels turned toward the curb, so that the sheer brute force of the Suburban had shoved the Hyundai all the way up onto the sidewalk.
“But this isn’t right!” said Conrad. “The car behind me must’ve pushed my car where it is! Why else would it be up on the curb?”
His vehemence caused the meter maid to withdraw a little. She sighed, cast her eyes down, and shook her head. “I don’t know nothing about another car. Anyway, can’t do nothing about it now.”
“But why not?” said Conrad. “Please! I’m right here! It’s my car! I’ve got the keys! I’ll take the car out of the red zone!”
To indicate how compellingly logical his solution was, as compared to the official one now in progress, he threw his hands up in front of his shoulders in the gesture that says, “It’s so obvious, only a fool could fail to see it.” This did not help his case.
With a bit of a growl the meter maid pinned her eyes on her summons book and said, “It’s too late. Already wrote it up and called the dispatcher. Once it’s written up, that’s it.”
“Well—go ahead and give me the ticket. But let me take my car. I’ve got to have my car!”
“I told you it’s too late. Once the summons is made out and the dispatcher’s notified and the tow’s hooked up, then it’s a tow, and ain’t nothing nobody can do about it once it’s a tow.”
“But this is—not right!” said Conrad.
“Woooo-eeeeeee! Unh-unhhhh-unhhhhh! A tow is a tow!”
Conrad looked at the gawkers, whose merry eyes seemed to be saying, “Now what are you going to do?” He looked at the meter maid, who seemed to be reveling in her new role as street entertainer. He looked toward the tow truck driver—but he had disappeared into the cab of the truck and was getting ready to pull the Hyundai up onto the slant of the flatbed.
But this was—not right! On top of everything else—he couldn’t lose his car this way!
At that moment the tow truck started up with a great throaty roar, followed by the hideously loud and harsh grinding sound of the winching gear. The gawkers were suddenly quiet, thrilled to see that the drama was approaching its climax. The power! The authority! The mighty truck! Its yellow-green paint job shone from many coats of lacquer in which glittery particles were somehow suspended. Streams of pin-striping swept back from the hood and across the door of the cab. On the door a rollicking silvery script with a shiny black undershadow proclaimed: Three C Towing, Salvage & Repair. Conrad stared with his mouth open. Somehow the truck was the mechanical embodiment of the arrogance and imperiousness of the meter maid and the driver themselves.
The little Hyundai began to slide up the slant of the flatbed. In no time it was secured, trapped, in the piggyback position, and the truck was lumbering off. All the while the gawkers were watching him—him!—this helpless nonentity who could do nothing more than stand there with his keys in his hand as they, those with the power, took his car away from him before his very eyes.
My car!
He had not merely been wronged, he had suffered a dreadful, shameful, humiliating defeat, with this bunch of trifling idlers as his audience.
He could barely control his voice when he asked the meter maid how much the fine was for parking in a red zone and what he had to do to get his car back. She answered him in a reasonable and even courteous way, which somehow made it all worse. Her roughshod victory, her humiliation of this young man with his protestations and his this-is-not-right’s, her subjugation of Conrad Hensley, was so complete, she could now throw him a morsel of civility.
All the while he knew he had a still more humiliating audience to deal with. In a broken-down little duet in Pittsburg his wife and her mother, they who had already indicted him for worthlessness, hopelessness, joblessness, and the wrong parents—they were now waiting for him and his car. Jill’s mother’s car was in the shop for repairs, and he was supposed to pick her up when he returned, to fetch it. Surely even he, the otherwise hopeless one, could manage a simple thing like returning from Oakland in a timely fashion and taking Mother over to the garage—
He dreaded the telephone call he would now have to make.
The ordeal began before he actually made it. A telephone … He looked all around on this busy street in downtown Oakland, and there wasn’t a telephone to be found. He started walking … Three blocks he walked before he finally found one. It was the type that required a quarter to initiate a long-distance call—but he didn’t have a quarter. In his pocket he had five twenty-dollar bills, a five, and three ones. The bills, thank God, would be just enough to retrieve the car. According to the meter maid, the fine for parking in a red zone was $30, and the towing fee was another $77. But right now he needed to change one of the dollar bills and get a quarter. But where? He looked all around … Nothing but office buildings and the kind of shops you didn’t just walk into and ask for change … He walked some more … Finally he spotted a candy stand in the lobby of an office building on Broadway. The proprietor, a swarthy man, apparently Asian, didn’t even deign to answer his question. He just gave him a dour look and kept pointing to a crudely lettered sign on the candy counter: No CHANGE WITHOUT PURCHASE. In his way he was as humiliating as the tow truck driver … dealing in a bored, contemptuous manner with a question he had already heard from a thousand other urban vermin.
The cheapest item was a newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, for fifty cents. But by now Conrad was starving, and so instead he bought a Schotter’s HDL (for High Density Lipids) Chocolate Health Nut bar for sixty cents, yielding him the quarter he needed, plus a dime and a nickel in change. This decision he would soon regret, even aside from the fact that the candy bar sliced a thin blade of hypersweetness into his stomach and quelled his hunger for all of ten minutes.
He walked the three blocks back to the pay telephone and placed his call to Pittsburg, collect. The telephone was supposed to return his quarter but ate it instead. Jill accepted the call. She repeated everything he said, slowly, loudly, so slowly and loudly she seemed to be mocking him. After a few moments he realized it must be for the benefit of her mother. When he reached the part about finding the car up on the sidewalk in a red zone, Jill started saying:
“You left it in a red zone? Up on the sidewalk? You—left—it—in—a—red—zone? Up—on—the—sidewalk?”
No! No! No! he protested. He had found it that way, upon his return!
“In—a—red—zone? On—the—sidewalk?”
Not even the meter maid had been quite so contemptuous. Suddenly she asked him how the job interview had gone. Conrad stammered out a few words to the effect that he might have to take the test again. Might—have—to—take—the—test—again? At this, he dropped all defenses and circumlocutions and just started telling her what had happened. She cut him off in the middle—as you would anyone who was so predictably hopeless and pathetic that the details of his latest failure simply didn’t matter.
“Conrad, I want you back here with that car right away. My mother’s stranded, I’m stranded, the children are stranded, everybody’s stranded until you—get—in—the—car—and—come—back—here.”
When he hung up, he felt feverish, as if suffering from some insidious infection (called inevitable failure). It was a good little hike down Broadway to reach the Parking Violations office at 150 Frank Ogawa Plaza, where you had to go to pay your fines before retrieving a towed vehicle. The meter maid, the giant with the cowboy hat, the gawkers, and now the swarthy man at the candy counter—he felt feverish.
