A Shaggy Dog Story of Karmic Jusitce

How you read your gas gauge depends on two factors, your current economic condition and your level of life experience. If your pockets are a little light in the change and folding money department you tend to read an analog fuel gauge, you know one with a needle that runs from E to F in nanometers. With a little jingle in your pockets you tend to fill up at a quarter of tank as opposed to when you are running on vapors. How experience factors in is that if you have never run out of gas you may be willing to run a little closer to the E mark than you should. In early 1986 these two factors became a bit of a perfect storm for my wife and me, and for one officer the Wilmington Delaware police department as well.

On May 4, 1985 my wife and I were married in the cloudy moist South on the eastern coast of Florida. Rain and grey marked our day. However the inclemency was not an omen or a portent of ill to come for we are still married 23 years later. By the fall of that year we had pulled up stakes moving from Michigan for the Atlantic coast. Oh we got married in Florida because it was neutral spot, our families lived respectively in Florida and New Jersey and our friends lived in Michigan. Two of the three groups would be travelling so why not make it a Florida vacation for those two groups. It was because of my desire to live closer to my recently widowed mother that we commenced living in Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington was about 10 miles as the crow flies from where I had grown up, 10 miles and a whole social stratum away from where I’d grown up.

Weird town Wilmington, the place is very obsessed with status and anything that carries the hallmark of old money. Remember Delaware is the place where someone just paid three quarters of a million dollars for a low license plate number because of the perceived high status owning such a plate carries. A lower number is found on an older plate, a plate colored black as opposed to blue and gold. A lower number implies a longer time in the state and more political and social standing. Three quarters of a million bucks so you car had a number of less than 10 on it, oh-my-gawd.

Wilmington was all abuzz with economic activity at the time. It was a boom town filled with yuppie scum. The feds had popped the cap off interest rates and Delaware long the bastion of corporate America had abolished usury limits completely. As the big money flowed in following these miraculous events Insurance companies and credit card companies were opening headquarters all over town. Walk into a bar like O’Friel’s on Delaware Avenue and throw a Heineken in any direction and you were sure to hit a young middle manager from one of these emerging powerhouses of capitalism squarely on one of their flat right leaning heads. In Brooks Brother’s suits with discrete tattoos over their buff upper torsos that said “Eat the Poor” they were going to rule the universe. Ugh.

Having moved back with the hope of being a good son, something that really didn’t work out well for me, a close relative had found me a job. With a little jostling here and there I found myself working for an insurance company, Alico, one of the AIG Group of companies. I was a corporate attorney but I really didn’t fit in. I wasn’t making much money either for despite television depictions corporate lawyers working in house for financial companies don’t all make wheelbarrows of money. Maybe it was because I was just nuts, or maybe I didn’t have the desire for status or the overarching lust for power that seemed to be the hallmark of the place, I was always the odd person out. I so didn’t fit in to the corporate world that when I left the company I got a plaque that said, “Some men travel to the beat of a different drummer, you travel to the beat of a drummer from the Far Side.” I liked it.

While I was indentured in corporate servitude my wife was working as a freelance writer. She was drafting things like college catalogs for small Midwestern colleges. Freelance work required long hours just like being a corporate attorney. We both worked weekends and often we worked late into the night. We lived in first floor apartment that was carved out of an old row house. Row house that is what we called these three story brick units as kids. By the time Francie and I moved in these buildings were being called townhomes. Status you must remember causes people to do weird things, even to rename building styles; Wilmington was all about status. Too bad we drove a Ford Escort.

When you are young and living in this environment you do foolish things. You go out and eat at four star restaurants but you buy economy gas and have no furniture. You dash about always and you sleep very little but you very definitely try to go to the right places. Sometimes things just get away from you and so it did that night on hill in front of the Wilmington police station.
The start of the actual story was that my brother whom I had not seen in some time was in town. He and a mate were staying at the Hotel DuPont, a very gracious and grand hotel. The Hotel is at 11th and Market and takes up the entire city block. Many major corporations book the theatre in the hotel for their annual meetings. My brother, his friend, Francie and I had met and had dinner at the hotel in the Brandywine room. I always loved eating in the Brandywine room because we would often sit below an original N.C. Wyeth rendering of an island painted with the most exquisite of blue colors.

The dinner discussion was lively and surprising. While we were telling stories my brother’s friend and I discovered that we knew the same crazed liquor salesman from Detroit. It came about when he commenced a tale about a guy who was so pissed off at being locked in a parking lot after hours that he shot off the lock. I looked a Francie and mentioned it sounded like our old friend Vern. The friend then said Vern’s last name and we knew it was the same guy. Hearty laughs all around at the small world aspects of this.

Not wanted to end such a fun evening the decision post dinner was to head out to Buckley’s Tavern just up the road inside Pennsylvania for a couple of mid-evening drinks. To pull this off Francie and I needed to get some things. First there was money that had to be obtained for more drinking. This meant an ATM trip. Also our fuel gauge was not just near it, its needle had recently made its bed there and thus some gas was required meaning we had to make another stop at the nearest pump about 8 blocks away.

We hit the ATM first which was just a little jog aware from the hotel. Wilmington is a maze of one way streets. Thus there was no direct route between the hotel, the ATM and the gas station. After the ATM and couple of turns we were headed for the gas station. The street that we ended up on took us right past the front door of one of the city’s police precinct stations.

While not San Francisco the hill in front of the police station was substantial. You felt like you were on a 10 per cent grade. The street was three lanes wide all headed one way, uphill. It was at the top of the grade that we needed to turn left onto another one way street. Simple deal we were almost home free. I did mention right that I was an entry level attorney right? I did mention that my wife was a free lance writer and that no money had come in lately, right? As we reached the top of the hill the mighty Ford Escort the plebian mobile made a muffled choking noise and died. Stone dead from petrol starvation it was.

So to sum up what has happened so far, we are at the top of steep hill, we are in the left lane waiting to turn. The car has died. With the engine’s demise due to a fuel deficient diet the power steering had also died. Sitting in a dead car at the top of steep hill your senses awaken. You become aware of things that you never noticed before. In that clarity of vision moment we both took in the fact that each side of the street was lined with either black and white police cruisers or with what were obviously unmarked police cars. And as we have no gas and as we have maybe some outstanding parking tickets this It is a not good situation all around.

I was the passenger and it seemed to me that the best idea was to park the car. We could then hike the few blocks down the street to the Arco station, get some gas and get out of there as fast as we could. However we could not leave the car in the middle of the street. As luck would have it there was an open parking spot about two car lengths down the hill from us. This barren wasteland of blacktop was clearly visible in the midst of the unmarked cruisers that lined the left side of the street. I got out of the Escort and prepared to direct Francie as she rolled the car back and into the spot. Easy right? Nayh.

As I have noted at least once the Escort had power steering. When the power was out trying to steer that car was like trying to force limp spaghetti through the eye of a needle. It only took a yard or two of rolling to see that Francie would not clear the first unmarked cruiser because she had cut the wheel too tight. The tough box was getting tougher.

As luck would have a couple of detectives were coming out of the police station at that moment. As luck would not have it one of them was screaming “Don’t hit my car”.

Trying to be polite I explained to he two guys who had not formally introduced themselves to us yet our predicament. I asked if they might be able to get someone from inside the station to roll the first car back into the lower space and we could then roll into the upper space and go get gas and be on our way. One of the officers with his chest pumped up pulled keys out of his pocket and started to get into the first car. I said in what appeared to be a safe bet, “So you guys are police officers?” Detective braggadocio almost spat out the retort, “Nayh we are thieves, the police just give us keys to mark our jobs easier”.

In retrospect I can offer some opinions as to the attitude of this officer. I have spent about eight years now getting to know many local police officers. In my day in and day out routines I listen to them tell their stories and I gauge their demeanor and veracity. They, like any other group of people that hold power over another group of people, develop certain styles of exercising that power. Some people are calm and dispassionate and like that idealized parent exercise their power only when needed to correct a misguided course or when a firm hand is a necessity to curb just plain wrong actions. Others don’t seem to deal with the fact they have power well, maybe it is because that have never developed a stable sense of self worth before acquiring power. Others are just dicks from the get go. I think this officer was of the dick from day one of his sucking air on this earth variety. As I was standing there on the street humiliated by the lack of gas, and the attitude of the cop I wondered to myself how could this get worse? It only took a second to find out.

After Fearless Fosdick jumped into the cruiser he without turning on the gas threw the car into neutral and began to roll the car back down the hill. He was watching the Escort and maybe me and I was watching him. Francie was looking through the rear view mirror. At about the same time I came to a realization that made me bite my lip. Francie came to the same moment of clarity and put her head down on the steering wheel so here facial expression would not be visible. Fosdick’s partner and I saw at about the same time what Fosdick did not. As the cop car gained backward momentum, the other officer began to scream “Joe the doo……..r”. At the moment when I was drawing blood from my lip from biting it so not to laugh at all not even a little bit and the sound of crunching screaming metal came from the door of the cruiser hitting the telephone pole.

The noises which included the whine of stretching metal, the pat pat pat of little pelletized pieces of glass hitting the pavement and the crunch of wood from the telephone pole hung in space for a second. Then came the sound of a long bang as the driver’s side door hit the sidewalk. The unmarked car’s door was now attached to the vehicle by only one mangled barely connected hinge. Francie was banging her head on the wheel so as not to laugh, I was at this time about to swallow my lower lip and the other officer was screaming, “You idiot” at officer dick.

It was awkward but in that in this particular maneuver that what had been desired by Francie and I had been accomplished. The police car had moved one space down the hill. Sizing up the situation and thinking what was the best course of action for Francie and I, my thought was I should ask if the two policemen minded if we moved into the space previously held by the now mangled cruiser. The clearly agitated driver more or less screamed “Why the hell would I care what you two do?” So ever so gently, as the street was filling with other police officers (who were laughing their asses off as the non-driver was relating what had just happened) and with deftness motivated by fear and adrenaline, Francie pulled our little car against the curb and we skedaddled. As we jogged/ran to the gas station we were laughing so hard we almost pee’d ourselves. Karmic justice is a fun thing to watch.

Returning to the scene of the incident it was interesting to see all the police investigators combing the scene. There were tape measures out. People were taking pictures, lots and lots of pictures. Tablets were being jotted upon. Francie was required to produce her ID. The thing that was curious was that the cops were taking pictures of every angle of our car. When Francie asked why when we really had nothing to do with the actual accident this was occurring the photographer just walked away. Upon putting the gallon of gas I had just bought into our tank I asked the non-driving officer if we were free to go, he muttered an epithet so vile that I can’t repeat it here and just pointed down the road. We turned the engine over and were out of there. Given the way things were going that night we decided drinks and driving through Wilmington just didn’t add up. We cancelled the bar run.

Bill Cosby used to do stand up comedy. As a kid I would listen to records that had titles like “Why is There Air”. This was a riff based around the difficulty that Mr. Cosby, who when attending Temple University was a student aiming to be a teacher of physical education, had dating a philosophy major. He in his ever fluid voice would get agitated and say she was always asking questions, “Why is there air?” He was always answering (in a hyper excited voice if the record was correct), “So we can blow up volleyballs and footballs and basketballs.” One of his riffs on this record, if I am remembering it right was something to the effect that parking tickets were sort of an inverse savings bond. In his case he came to this awareness when he hit a patch of ice and banged up his old beater of a car. A good Samaritan came by and lit flares up around the vehicle in his words “lighting it up like a birthday cake”, and he was blowing them out so as not to have to go to jail over the glove box full of tickets.

In our case there was a reason for all of the “doofus officer” scene investigation, it was retribution. Wilmington had a policy at that time about parking tickets. If you had four tickets you were subject to the boot. If you had three or less tickets the parking authority would max them out quickly and just wait for you to pay. We lived in an upcoming neighborhood where you had to buy a parking sticker; our permit was in essence a hunting license for a parking space. If you found a slot in your zone that wasn’t otherwise prohibited you could park there all night. Our zone however ended right at our front door. We lived on a corner and so if the block was filled up you might have to park in the next zone. Depending on the zealousness of the meter maid you might or might not get a ticket for this. Well prior to the time of the out of gas car/police car without a door when had been holding at three tickets for better than four months.

Not the following morning, but during the next night subsequent to the door incident the parking authority exacted its revenge. We awoke to find the bright yellow boot of shame affixed to the driver side wheel. It cost $125 in 1985 money to get that puppy removed and the folks at the parking office took their time about it. When we went to the parking bureau no one would own up to the existence of the four ticket policy or that it had been abrogated in our case. Additionally no one was receptive to the, this was revenge, dialog I tried to engage in. Still, from the various eyes in the room that were focused on us, it was clear that ours was not a normal case.

Thinking back over all these years to the incident I chuckle. Yeah, it may have cost me $125 in hard to come by cash at the time, but at least I am not the person whom for the rest of my police career would be know as crash or door-less or eagle eye. Sometimes arrogance gets its due, especially when the arrogance served no purpose but to humiliate someone in need. WPD 0, Karmic Justic 1.