Meter Maids Eat Their Young: A Love Story

by EJ Knapp

  I rolled out of bed as best I could and waited for the pain to hit. To my surprise it didn’t. Just a dull ache at both ends of my spinal column. I made my way to the kitchen, limping, woozy, battle-scarred cats in tow. It was cold. The tile floor felt sticky against my bare feet and the room smelled of old cat food. I’d been neglecting my household chores again, something I am all too prone to do. The lines from an old Neil Young song drifted across my thoughts. Yeah. Like I could afford a maid. Or want one to see the mess I’d let the house become. I’d have to clean the whole place first to save myself the embarrassment. Weird how that works.

  I set water to boil and dumped six scoops of Peet’s into the French Press. There were a dozen small cans of over-priced, gourmet cat food in the pantry that I’d been saving for a special occasion. As saving my life seemed like a special occasion, I pulled them out, opened them up and dumped the contents on separate plates, one for each of my saviors.

  Leaning against the counter, not yet ready to venture beyond the kitchen to examine the mess I knew the dining room to be, I stared at the kettle, willing it to boil, thoughts of the previous evening giving way to thoughts of the dream. A pointless endeavor. I hadn’t understood it the first time I’d had it years ago and hadn’t understood a single version of it since. Having someone else in my bed was new, though. That someone being Jaz scared me a bit. And what did Robyn mean that today was the day?

  The kettle clicked off. I poured, gave the grounds about thirty seconds of the six minutes they should steep, and poured myself a cup. I am not a patient man in the morning.

  I knew that I should stop this line of thought, turn back to the task at hand. I was in the middle of a breaking story. My best friend was dead. I was being stalked. Last night I’d been attacked and nearly killed. My house was a mess and several of my cats were injured.

  Yet here I was, staring out the window, wondering about the dream. Why had it returned? Contrary to what I’d said to Jaz, I rarely think of Robyn anymore, much less dream of her. Nothing I’d consciously done had put her in my thoughts these last weeks. I hadn’t been going through the photo albums, listening to silly, sad, love songs, or reading through my old journals.

  It was being back in this town that was doing it, I decided. I was born here. Grew up here. Spent most of my adult life here. This whole place is full of memories, dark shadows everywhere I turn. What was hardest to understand was that my time with Robyn was such a small percentage of the whole, and yet I find her hiding in most of those shadows.

  Why was that?

  Why is it that I walk past the old movie theater, a place I spent every Saturday of my entire kid life, and all I can remember of it is the one time Robyn and I went there? I drive by Jilly’s lounge and think of all the times I spent there with her, never the years I spent there before her. The Coney Island place; the park; the fountain downtown; the camera shop; the Stonehenge bar. Hell, the ATM in the square, which wasn’t even an ATM when she and I were together, just some dumb plaza with bizarre black stone sculptures littering it. What was the deal here? I couldn’t be pining over a long-ago love, could I? I mean, how pathetic is that?

  No. Not happening. I loved her when I was with her. Mourned her when she left. Okay, so maybe the mourning went on a bit long. Okay, too long. But I got over it. Sure I did. Cat without Robyn is just ... well, Teller again. Which isn’t such a bad thing. For me, losing Robyn was like losing a part of your body that wasn’t absolutely essential to your day-to-day functions. You could go days, weeks, months, and not notice it gone. Then one day, you go to pick up a bottle with your left hand and it slips through your fingers because you have no thumb.

  But I’m happy enough with my life. Aren’t I? Sure it’s a little duller. It’s supposed to get dull after five plus decades, isn’t it? And yeah, it’s lonelier. But whose fault is that? It’s not like Robyn cursed me, or that the years transformed me into a hunchback gnome too ugly to look at. I’m a little weathered, perhaps, but not all that unattractive. So why have there been no significant relationships in my life since Robyn? And why, why, why is she still haunting me! You’d think we had broken up a week ago instead of ... instead of ...

  ‘Today is the day, Teller.’

  My coffee cup tilted downward, sloshing hot coffee over the counter and onto the floor. Onto my bare feet, but I didn’t notice it. I set the cup down. Unhooked my finger from the handle. Turned. Stared at the calendar on the wall. It was the end of May. Ric’s Americana Café. The day the earth opened up and swallowed me whole.

  ‘Today is the day, Teller.’

  It was twenty years ago today that Robyn and I broke up.

  Not So Public

  “I see you’re still alive, Teller,” Jaz said.

  I looked up, startled to find myself on the porch. The sun was up. Market Street was clogged with cars. I looked at the Zappa clock on the wall. It was a quarter to nine. Nearly three hours gone. Instinctively I looked around, expecting to find empty bottles surrounding my chair. Except for ashes, cat hair, and a few scattered leaves, the space around me was empty.

  “Lose something?” she asked, taking the chair next to mine.

  I sat back, closed my eyes, a wave of relief washing over me. I hadn’t gone to the liquor store. Where I had gone was questionable, but at least I hadn’t gone there. I ran my fingers through my hair. Damp. I had even managed to take a shower, change my clothes.

  “Did the kick to the head relieve you of your voice?”

  “Huh? Oh. Sorry,” I said. “A lot on my mind this morning.”

  “You promised you’d tell me about it.”

  “Tell you? Oh. Last night. Right.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Teller?”

  “Yeah. Fine. Hurt a little. Nothing major.”

  “So, last night?”

  Staring through the screen at the park across the street, not really seeing it but seeing last night instead, I gave her the story, pretty much as I had to Marion.

  When I was through, I looked over at her. She was wearing a pale yellow blouse with matching skirt. It looked good with her blue hair. I remembered that in my dream she had been in my bed. Something fluttered beneath my rib cage and I turned away. Robyn, Jaz. Jaz, Robyn. This was all too emotionally complicated.

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s pretty amazing about the cats. I mean, I know a dog will defend its master, but cats? I’ve never heard of that before.”

  “Yeah, me neither. I couldn’t have been more surprised but I sure am thankful. Pity I didn’t get it all on tape. They could be stars of the World’s Weirdest Videos or something.”

  “You think he was here to kill you?”

  “I know he was. He said as much, anyway.”

  “What was he after?”

  I considered telling her about the tickets. Decided against it.

  “I’m being followed,” I said, staring out at the cars that inched their way up Market Street. “Or was until last night.”

  “And?”

  I looked back at her, said nothing.

  “Do you think it has something to do with the Mangler?”

  “Do you mean do I think the Mangler followed me around, trashed my place and tried to kill me? No way.”

  “Why not?”

  I resumed studying the cars.

  “I think the Mangler wants the same thing I want. He wants to know what’s going on at that place you work. I think Harrison wanted that, too. Following me around, trashing my place, it’s counterproductive. No point. Worse, it interferes. No. It wasn’t the Mangler.”

  “So who set this guy on you then? DPE?” she said.

  “That’s a safe enough bet. No way to prove it, though. Not yet.”

  There was a long silence. I looked over at her. She was staring out the window, watching the cars as I had been. I decided to shift gears.

  “I asked Research to get me some info, yesterday,” I said, shifting in my chair to face her. “Should have been routine, you know, public
record and all that.”

  “And?”

  “Well, apparently it’s not so public.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I explained what I had asked Lynn for and how the links to the information I was looking for were screwed up. I debated telling her about the additional probing Lynn had done but I wasn’t sure I could explain it. I didn’t tell her about the tickets I’d found in the waste container. I needed more time to consider what they meant and, though loathe to admit it, I was beginning to wonder just what Jaz’s involvement in all this was.

  “Bottom line,” I continued, “none of the financial information on the department was accessible.”

  “But that can’t be,” she said. “All that information is public record. There’s a small room filled with filing cabinets and a long table where the public can come in at any time and examine the records. Not that anyone ever does.”

  “And not that they can at the moment.” I explained what Lynn had told me about the public viewing room being under construction.

  “Construction? There hasn’t been any construction in that building in ten years. But even so, the information has to be available on the Internet. I know because I set up the online part of it. Took us over a year to convert all the paper files to electronic ones. How can it not be available?”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy, Jaz” I said. “But trust me, if Lynn says it’s not available, it’s not available.”

  She turned away, her fingers nervously tapping out a silent tune on her knee. She mumbled something under her breath that sounded like “What are they up to?”

  A Softer Gig For Mercenaries

  “Tell me about Forest Forrester,” I said.

  “Forest?” she said, a note of surprise in her voice.

  “He headed the DPE before he died.”

  “I know who he is, Teller. I worked for the man for seven years.”

  “So tell me about that, what it was like, how things changed after he ... after Cooper took over.”

  She shrugged, leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Forest was a sweet guy,” she said. “A bit too OCD for me, at times, but it didn’t bother me as much as it bothered his previous assistants.”

  She laughed nervously. It sounded like china tea cups rattling in an earthquake.

  “I was hired in mid-October and he’d already gone through three that year. His style of micro-management could get on your nerves real quick if you let it. Everything had to be labeled just so, with the right color label, the right heading. Oh, and did that man hate odd numbers.”

  She sat forward, chuckling as the memory came.

  “He would actually count the files in every drawer,” she continued. “And if there was an odd number, he’d rearrange them until they were even, even if he had to add a blank file to make it that way. Forest was a hoot.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard he was a bit quirky.”

  “Quirky doesn’t come close but he knew what he was doing and, once he saw that I wasn’t going to up and leave him in the lurch, he started increasing my responsibilities. Between us, we made that department happen. We hired good people, bought good equip.m.ent. We had an efficient system going, one with heart, I might add. None of this mercenary bullshit you see now. That was Cooper’s doing. Six months after he took over, nearly all my original crew were gone.”

  She went silent for a while, shaking her head and then turned to me.

  “Where the hell he gets those people is anybody’s guess,” she said. “Prison, maybe? The local insane asylum? Former mercenary types looking for a softer gig? Who the hell knows? They stalk about town in packs of twos and threes like rabid wolves seeking prey, marking their kills with white sheets of paper fluttering beneath windshield wipers. The number of tickets the department issued doubled and doubled again. There was so much money flowing into the city coffers, from the meters, from the tickets, the council members were falling all over themselves like birds at a ripe Pyracantha bush. It was sickening.”

  “I spoke with Tom Philo the other day,” I said. “He filled me in on the money angle.”

  “Tom?” she said, looking away again.

  “Yeah. Philo. You know him?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Not well or anything. Not really. But everyone, you know, knows Tom. He used to be very active in this town. Never up front. Never ran for office or anything like that. He started the Downtown Merchants’ Association, though. I think that was the first year I moved here. Anyway, he headed it for five years or more and was a key player in the renaissance the downtown area went through.”

  “Renaissance? About the only renaissance I’ve seen is that they remodeled the old Jewel Theater. Turned it back to what it was when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was a porno place when I moved here.”

  “That’s what it was when I left,” I said. “Debby Does Dallas, Deep Throat, Behind The Green Door. Definitely not your Disney kind of place. So what’s this renaissance you’re talking about?”

  “Well,” she said. “There was a time not that long ago, when a lot of people would come downtown to sit in the coffee shops or stroll through the little boutiques, book stores and card shops that existed down there.”

  I considered the downtown area that I knew. There weren’t a lot of shops there. It was mostly walk-up coffee kiosks and take-out restaurants catering to the office worker crowd, places where you could get your caffeine and calories to go. There were a lot of empty buildings. A lot of ‘For Lease’ signs. No bars and boards on the windows such as there were before I left but, that I could see, it wasn’t a whole lot better now than the slum it had been. Prettier was all.

  “Are we talking about the same town here?” I said. “I don’t recall there being boutiques, book stores and card shops downtown.”

  “No,” she said. “There aren’t. Not anymore. Cooper and his parking meters changed all that. Do you have any idea why strip-malls are so popular, ugly as they are?”

  “I don’t know? Cheap jeans? Parking, I suppose, since that’s what we’re talking about. Plenty of parking.”

  “Plenty of untimed parking,” she said. “The key is untimed. You can park there as long as you need with little or no worry.”

  “Right,” I said. “Philo mentioned that. He talked about turnover. In the malls, that wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Right. But in the downtown area, parking is at a premium.”

  “So you need turnover,” I said.

  “Right,” she agreed. “But it has to be a reasonable turnover. There has to be enough time for people to shop, drink their coffee, eat their food. The meters we put up gave everyone two hours. More if you went back and fed the meter. Cooper replaced those with half-hour ones. And, when your thirty minutes were up, you couldn’t just feed the meter again. You had to move on. Who can eat a decent lunch, browse through a room full of books, or find that perfect card for Aunt Tilly in Twin Falls, all in thirty minutes? Especially with your eyes flicking back and forth to your watch, knowing full well that ten seconds after the red violation flag surfaced, a meter maid would be there slapping a forty-buck ticket under your windshield wiper. It was ridiculous, Teller.”

  “I imagine so,” I said.

  “And,” she continued, “should you get there just as the meter maid is finishing the ticket, well, you might as well be confronting The Terminator for all the good your pleading will do. You don’t bargain with cyborgs, Teller. They have no conscience. And, you could end up maced and hauled off to jail if you protested too much, let anger get the better of you. The meter maids always won. It wasn’t like that when we ran the show. The meter patrols were very loose, very forgiving. If you happened to return to your car ten minutes after the meter expired you weren’t likely to find a ticket fluttering beneath your windshield wiper. And, if you and the meter maid arrived at the same moment, no ticket was issued, even if the ticket had been completely filled out. The meter maid woul
d just tear it up, issue a friendly verbal warning and move on. Likely as not, the car owner and the meter maid would stand around talking about the weather or the local sports scores. It was a very convivial atmosphere.”

  From my experience over the last four months, I couldn’t imagine a car owner and a meter maid doing anything together, other than try to pummel each other.

  “And things changed,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Oh, they changed all right,” she said. “Big time. Because of the decrease in parking time, the number of shoppers willing to shop downtown declined. As the shoppers disappeared, so did the shops. For a while there, it was looking like a return to the past; shops boarded up, the homeless returning to the stoops and doorways, litter everywhere. It was a real mess. Then, the city council passed an ordinance forbidding the boarding of shops. They could stand empty, for lease forever for all the council cared, but they had to look pretty or you found yourself hauled into court and slapped with a huge fine.”

  “But what about the tax base?” I said. “It doesn’t make sense to drive people away from businesses.”

  “Not unless there’s more money to be made elsewhere. You talked to Tom. He gave you the money angle. Think about it. The sales tax is state based. The city gets a portion of that at the beginning of the fiscal year; they’ve got to fight tooth and nail for it and more often than not, end up with less than they need. Parking meter revenue, though, that’s city based. The city gets it all.”

  I thought about the hundred and twenty mil. It made sense in a perverted sort of way.

  “Tom lost several businesses down there,” she said. “Did he mention that?”

  “No,” I said, suddenly very interested. “He didn’t.”

  “Yeah. Really hit him hard. That little coffee kiosk up the street from the Coney Island place? The café behind it was his. Featured local folk, bluegrass bands, poetry readings on the weekends. It was a great little place. Tom owns that whole row of buildings, from what used to be the Bountiful Boutique to that little bakery next to the theater. And there’s a little electronics shop, down next to what’s left of the photo shop, that’s his as well.”