Exactly Now
Last night he left his car at a parking meter which was in effect, anon, exactly now, and he didn’t have any quarters and hadn’t had ever had any quarters. He dressed himself in brown corduroy, pink sneakers, and a white sweatshirt with no heraldry, and went out to see what was to be done. The morning was beautiful and reminded him of ones through which pterodactyls used to soar.
He espied a parking spot right outside the building, on the side he needed today, to be safe from the monster which did the street sweeping.
The spot was mostly an illegal spot, yet he’d have it.
Though he’d have to put his car up on the curb a bit in order to keep the ass end out of the street, where the city bus would hit it or if not the city bus then the firetruck.
He’d parked there a few times before; few people dared.
Sometimes less daring people left notes on his car.
The notes were from the same person, or at least, he suspected, the same kind of person, some unwitting adversary of happiness, always jotting much the same sentiment.
“THIS IS NOT A SPOT!!”
He’d received notes like this, which generally all said the same thing, since the dawn of time.
He walked past a collapsing castle of a church and two condemned buildings and saw a white car, a Toyota Camry, was about to try and park in front of him up at the parking meters. Or, more accurately, this Camry was about to try and jam itself into a spot that didn’t exist.
The parking meters are a complicated place to park because the city redid the sidewalks to make room for the rental bikes and eliminated more than a smidgen of the first spot with a concrete barrier. There are four parking meters but only room for three cars now, and sometimes extended cab/long-bed pickups park there taking up even more space—but listen: it doesn’t matter—the meters don’t mean anything, except you certainly can get two tickets on your car at once.
Some lucky days, Betty will give you three tickets, simultaneous.
He’d seen her do it to him.
They’d argued about it.
She’d gone in her little buggy and gotten out the measuring stick and she’d gotten out the babyblue book of rules and you know what, after being presented with her facts, he’d conceded, he’d laid down his armaments, he’d been prepared to love her like no other except these words he spoke, “Just because you’re right doesn’t make it right.”
“They teach that in kindergarten,” Betty said, “and apparently I’ll teach it daily, right here, all eternity.”
She bestowed up on him three more tickets never would he pay.
But this was long ago. His encounter with this meter maid had happened, what felt like, thousands of years ago, but much his life was that way. The encounter had made him flashback to the morning he had been a merchant walking down the road, with his trinkets and bells jangling, and saw the Roman soldiers had Jesu (new to him) (and a few others) nailed to crosses and he’d asked another merchant walking with his wares who those people were and the other merchant had had no idea and they kept walking towards the walls of Jerusalem like it was any other day, and it was.
He’d lead his ass into the city and there was much clamor on that day, the sky an ill color and quakes bursting fissures in the earth.
He hitched his ass to the usual post and began to untie his wares but from the shadows of an ill house he heard a voice call out, “Verily hitch not your beast here.”
He did it anyway.
Was his ass sucked into a chasm in the earth?
No. When he came back later that day, his ass was still there, only some adversary had painted a red ‘X’ on his ass.
What did he do?
Nothing. He left the red ‘X’ on his ass.
And the next day there was another red ‘X’ on a different part of his ass; this time, the ass’s ass. And so on. Until the punishments faded, much ado to the protective thought, “Ha, I’m not in trouble.” All leading up to exactly now.
With this white car with out of state plates backing up and no way whatsoever it would make it into this spot.
Even if he had not the endless experience he had in the world, he would know the white car would not fit, even as a newborn (newb) would.
But since he happened to be just about to move his car, he climbed in and just as he put his car into reverse, the Camry smashed into his driver side head light. Cracked the plastic casing. He flicked on his headlights and saw the bulb was still working but the white car was still trying to park even though he was standing outside now inspecting this damage. The white car then backed up and crunched his license plate.
All this crunching was part of the game of parking on the street and you’d have to be a madman to complain about anyone hitting your car when you were parked on the street, even if you saw them do it, especially if you saw them do it. You’d parked there. They were just trying to park. In parking there, you’d probably hit somebody else to get in. All the way back to Creation.
But there was a bigger problem.
Some spots cannot be had.
And a bigger problem yet. Some strivers will never accept a blockade.
He raised his hand in the air and said, “Wit ye well, you will not fit.”
The driver put down their window. “That’s what she said.”
“No, I mean it, you’ll not fit.”
“That’s what she really said.”
“Wit ye well, I am one of the greatest driver’s in the world and beside that, actually, the street-parker of most renown and most worship in this city and wit ye well, though your own worship and your own skill as a driver be unknown to me, I will aid you in your struggle now, not in mercy which you might take as insult to your own skill and prowess as a street-parker but in coincidence. Wait ye a moment, I happen to be leaving.”
The driver at first scoffed at all this but then said, “All right. Where you going?” The driver had seen this guy inadvertently glancing back over his shoulder and realized the guy had been looking at a parking spot back a block, in front of that beige building. The driver said, “Sa·yo·na·ra, Chief,” then did a high speed U-turn in the middle of the street and then another just past the beige building and took the spot
All this was fine. None of this mattered.
So the driver got his spot, and so he left his car parked at the meter and continued on with his errands. So what.
He walked down a steep hill towards West End Avenue.
On West End Avenue there was a new C-Town grocery.
His plan was to buy a bag of ground coffee with the credit card he believed to have adequate funds.
About halfway down the hill he saw a man coming towards him whose face looked exactly like a man—a fishing buddy—he had known fifteen hundred years earlier, but had lost touch with.
That fishing buddy, though he’d hardly believed it to look at him when they first met, had once been a robust king, undeniable to all maidens, prestigious at the hawk hunt and beseen marvelously to lodge arrows in hare no matter how magically guarded; but this once robust king, just a few years before their acquaintance as fishing buddies, had been wounded in battle and lost the ability to walk, and to do any of the other lusty things he had loved to do, and could no longer continue his lineage and so his kingdom was slowly unraveling while he spent most of his time sitting idly in a boat, trying to catch a fish with an empty hook. To even get to the boat, this wounded king used to have to be carried by four servants down to the water and all day he would just cast that empty hook into the water; but then again, it’s always sad to lose one’s dick in the war.
The man walking down the hill towards the man walking up the hill could not make sense of the face he saw. Here was his old fishing buddy the king and somehow his legs were working.
Though he had the exact same face as the Fisher King, there seemed to be no recognition in his eyes.
This was not the Fisher King at all, it was just one of his neighbors.
The man on his way for coffee surmised he had 291,657 neighbors.
And this was just another neighbor, wearing a leather bucket hat and a chain wallet too.
He kept walking down the hill and when he got to the grocery store he found the steel roll up doors were still padlocked and no matter how hard he kicked and called for the doors to be opened, his quest was impeded. He usually didn’t care about time but he cared now because it seemed the grocery store wouldn’t be open for another few hours and he wanted to buy a bag of French roast. There was nothing to do. There were no other stores within range. He went walking back up the steep hill and now the sun was blinding him.
Crossing into the shade of a sycamore, he saw the the man who looked like the Fisher King leaning against a wrought iron fence, smoking from a glass pipe all the colors of the rainbow, and he couldn’t help but laugh at this man, because he remembered fifteen hundred years earlier, when he’d been fishing with his doppelgänger and had pulled countless fish out of the river because he had had the sense to bait his own hook, and all the while his inept fishing buddy had kept tossing a useless hook into a futile river!
He stopped and stood in the shade of the sycamore and accosted this modern look-alike.
“You look familiar to me.”
The man set the pipe on a row of brick behind him and they talked for a moment and yes, the man’s mannerisms were the same ones he had known fifteen hundred years earlier when he’d been fishing buddies with the king but the man misunderstood and seemed to think they only knew each other because they were both regulars at New Park Tavern, which was the bar at the bottom of the hill.
“There I do imbibe, yes.”
Though they had never talked to each other there, he had seen the man and the man had seen him there. They’d almost entered a game of darts as opposing partners in a two-on-two situation (and even then the man had been puzzled as to why this stranger to him looked so familiar) but a false fire alarm had gone off and after the evacuation the game was forgotten.
These men stood awkwardly a moment in the shade of the sycamore and then the man picked up his pipe and said to the other, “Well, I’m sure I’ll see you again at Park Tavern one of these nights. Say hi, all righty?”
Before he went into his building he stopped at the top of the pavilion and introduced himself in a galant manner as Bobby Fischer, and then bowed and added with a smile, “And no, before you ask, I won’t play chess.”
And anon he continued up the hill, and walked out of the shade and the sun was back in his eyes and he had no idea what to do with the rest of his day except around one in the afternoon, Betty was going to arrive in her little buggy and he thought he would wait for and have her pull out the measuring stick and the book of rules and together they could debate all that was still babyblue.
It hit him then.
Perceval, that insufferable freshman, who’d been on an impossible quest to find the holy grail in order to heal his fishing buddy, must have succeeded.
He’d always wondered about that. Writings of those deeds had ended mid-sentence as if the scribe himself ate the big one.
Inexplicably, Perceval had triumphed. Let the book say it now.
There was no other answer.
Perceval must have found the grail and he must have used it to heal the wounded king’s junk. Hallelujah. And then the wounded king must have have had a son and then the son must have had a son and then the son must have had a son and then that must have happened seventy times or more and here we were, exactly now, one of the king’s descendants lived just down the hill from him and it was a shame he and Bobby Fischer could never talk about it or everyone would think he was crazy and threaten to take action yet again. They were good for that every other century or so, weren’t they.
The man was delirious with joy and though he would never be able to talk to Bobby Fischer about the particular details of any of this, he would be sure to buy him a glowing, fizzing, undulating cup later that night and give him the most knowing-of winks.
He crossed the street into the shade of his own building and his eyes dilated and became flowers again.
He saw something else that made him bend even further over in laugher and was stopped there in the middle of the street with the traffic already honking at him though they were very far up the avenue.
Here is what he saw:
Someone was putting a note on the white car that had taken the spot he’d wanted. The person writing the note looked perfectly normal and he wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a crowd long as he lived, but they had a small gray dog on a plaid leash.
The dog was obviously a Scottish terrier.
Though the man himself knew hardly anything about dog breeds, he was able to identify this dog as a Scottish terrier because not only was the doggie wearing plaid booties but he also was wearing a full one-piece tartan playsuit complete with a turtle neck that pushed his amble beard into an aggressive fan of gray fur tufted north east west and south.
There had never been a more Scottish looking dog in the history of the world and now it was barking at him.
And the owner?
The note-writing adversary?
The man could have been anybody. The man was anybody. And the note he left on the white car was identical to all the others notes forever would he leave until end of days.
Dig the chivalry, Bud!