Race

at myself. A handsome man looked back and grinned. I was grinning, too.

Once ready I went through a set of doors and into a hall with rooms on either side. Important people had offices here. Not sure why I didn’t have one yet. I stopped and tenderly tapped at the glass beside the door.

“Come in,” said a voice.

I entered the office of Staff Sergeant James Motley, who was in charge of the Parking Enforcement Unit.

“Jon, come in,” he said. Motley was unlike the sergeants you see on television. He did not have a belly, did not smoke a cigar, and he hardly ever swore. There was a book on spirituality sitting to the side, and last week he was reading Native history.

How he ended up at PEU, I don’t know.

“Sir, have you ever thought about watching those cop shows?” I said, standing.

“Jon, what can I do for you?” he said.

“It’s about any openings…” I let my words trail.

Motley did not look surprised or interested. He knew I wanted to move on and gain other experiences.

“Yes, I know, Jon. You have asked me six times this week and today is Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?” I said, looking around. “Time drags.”

Don’t get me wrong. I liked being a PEO but I felt I could better serve society if I were a detective or a lieutenant. Maybe even a commando, but that would mean joining the army. Discipline, hard work, and respecting authority were not my strong points. So the army was out.

What about the navy? No, water equals sharks. Sharks equal missing limbs.

How about the air force? No, flying equals gravity. Gravity equals falling thousands of feet to your death.

Parking Enforcement? Hmmm, now that’s something I could do. Wait a minute? I was already doing it.

Motley leaned back in his chair and said, “Jon, I have my eyes open, you know that.”

“I just thought, y’know, I’d remind you.”

“If it were up to me, I’d have you transferred immediately.” He gave a short smile.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, about to leave.

“Jon.”

I stopped. “Sir?”

“If and when something does come up, you’ll be the first to know. I promise.”

That was the Sergeant’s polite way of saying “don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

I went down to the parking lot to retrieve my marked cruiser, a Dodge Neon parked in the corner. It was white with blue and red stripes across the sides. It had the words ‘TO SERVE AND PROTECT WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITY’ on the side doors, and ‘PARKING ENFORCEMENT’ on both front sides.

I eased the cruiser out from the parking lot and headed in the direction of my route. This may be a good time to explain what I do. I know, I know, most people think we, PEOs, just go around giving parking tickets. That’s somewhat correct. We do give a Parking Infraction Notice or PIN whenever a vehicle is illegally parked, but that’s not all we do. We help keep the streets safe and clean.

How? Whenever someone is walking around and they see a uniformed officer, be it a traffic cop, or even security guard, they do try to be on their best behaviour. Right?

If someone is about to commit a crime or is thinking about it, he or she will, at least, think twice if they see us driving by. We help deter crimes.

Not just that; without us the city would not move. Think about it. Why would anyone want to move their car if they didn’t have to? They could just park and leave it for the entire day. Imagine if someone had to take their grandmother to the doctor for a checkup after she'd had a hip replacement and they couldn’t park anywhere because some jerk parked his car on the street and gone to work. Now imagine if they had to park two blocks away and carry their dear old grandmother just because there was no turnover of parked cars. Now wouldn’t they be pissed off?

Our main job is to keep traffic flowing.

I parked behind a row of parked cars and pulled out my little black book.

I checked the first meter: seventeen minutes left.

Second: three minutes. I should see the owner any time soon.

Third: Fourteen minutes.

Fifth: Expired. Oh, goody. On the ticket I wrote down the date of infraction, time of infraction, license plate number, vehicle plate, checked off box with code number one, placed my signature at the bottom, entered the unit and employee code, and gently placed the banana-coloured ticket under the windshield.

Sixth: No fee deposited. Good, another one.

Seventh: fifty-two minutes left.

Eighth: broken meter. I wrote a fifteen-dollar ticket.

Whoa! The meter is broken! The owner should not have to pay for the ticket, right? Wrong. Parking at a busted meter is illegal.

Some people tamper with meters on purpose in order to avoid paying the fee. It’s quite easy to sabotage a meter. It can be done with a piece of paper, by jamming the mechanism and fishing out the parking fee with a paper clip. But I’m not going to say exactly how.

As I was on my twelfth someone ran up. “I was only gone for two minutes,” he said.

Sorry, sir. I see an expired meter,” I said and moved on. It’s always two minutes. The man muttered something under his breath.

I’ve been called many things: Meter Maid, Green Hornet, Vulture, and other lovely terms that I didn’t know existed in the English dictionary.

The first couple of days on the job were terrible. The things that were said to me left me scared. I stopped sleeping, and I love to sleep. I dreaded going to work and having to confront these types of people. The looks they gave, the upstanding middle fingers, the curses. Now, I’m immune to it. In fact, I think I’ve become cynical.

If they say, “Screw you,” I say, “Thank you.” That pisses them off.

If they say, “Kiss my ass,” I say, “Sir, it’ll take me a whole week to kiss all that.”

I keep smiling and that truly annoys them.

I remember once this nice lady placed a spell on me, saying I’d die a horrible death in ten days. That was eight months ago, and seeing that I’m still alive, the spell didn’t work.

Maybe someone has a voodoo doll of me. Every so often they poke needles into my head. No wonder I can’t think straight. Maybe…just maybe, they place a pillow over my head and…yes, now it makes perfect sense, that’s why I feel sleepy all the time.

I drove into a more upscale commercial street. This street had something that made all PEOs life easier: pay-and-display kiosks. Each of these babies replaced ten parking meters. Plus, these high-tech solar-powered kiosks were reliable and difficult to vandalize.

All I had to do was look at the receipt on their windshield, and if it was expired I gave them a PIN.

I drove to a public parking lot and made a quick round when I saw a car parked in the disabled zone. I scanned the vehicle and found a placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. I went back into my cruiser and contacted the communication dispatcher. Parking Enforcement vehicles are not mobile workstations, meaning we have no access to police information systems-at least, not yet. The dispatcher, linked to police systems such as CPIC (Canadian Police Information Center) and MTO (Ministry of Transportation of Ontario), responded to my query over the radio network.

This disabled permit was on the wrong vehicle.

Beautiful.

I wrote a ticket for three hundred dollars and placed it under the windshield. I was about to leave when the owner showed up.

“What are you doing?” he yelled from a distance.

I did not answer.

“Hey, man. I’m talking to you. What the hell are you doing?” He hobbled toward me.