If you’ve been to Park City during the Sundance Film Festival, then your car has been towed. During the time when the most people visit the town, that’s when the city decides no one’s allowed to park there. It’s like inviting guests over for dinner and then setting the front door on fire before they arrive. Sometimes Park City builds new parking lots just to declare no one can park in them.
For the record, I was not parked illegally when I was towed Friday night. I was parked in an officially designated Sundance parking lot. Allegedly, I was “blocking an entrance,” which I honestly do not understand, since I entered through the entrance, drove another 100 feet or so, and then parked parallel to everyone else. Perhaps what the tow guy meant was not that I was “blocking an entrance,” but that he “wanted to steal $170 from someone.”
I tried to explain to the tow guy, whose name was Gus (names have been changed), that my car should not have been towed. But I didn’t try very hard. For one thing, I feared explaining something sufficiently for a tow-truck driver to understand would tax the limits of my vocabulary and reasoning skills, since tow-truck drivers tend to be that unfortunate combination of 1) stubborn and 2) stupid. For another thing, never in the history of mankind has a tow-truck driver said, “OK, you’re right. We shouldn’t have towed you. There will be no charge, and I apologize for the inconvenience.” If a tow-truck driver’s brain ever even attempted to combine those words in that order, his head would explode. (Raise your hand if you would like to see this.)
Gus used airtight logic in explaining things to me. He said, “You must have been parked illegally, because you got towed.” In other words: “I towed you because you were parked illegally. How do I know you were parked illegally? Because I towed you.” Similarly, all tow-truck drivers smell like a combination of cigarettes, B.O., and engine grease. How do you know they smell like a combination of cigarettes, B.O., and engine grease? Because they’re tow-truck drivers.
But I have gotten ahead of myself. Before I even talked to Gus, I had to talk to the nice folks at the Park City Police Department. They believed the car to be in their possession, so I paid them the $80 and waited for an officer to arrive and show me where the impound lot was. Then we discovered that in fact, PCPD had turned the job over to a private company, Summit Service, and it was in their lot.
Fine. No problem. As long as SOMEONE had the car, I didn’t really care who. (Well, within reason. I wouldn’t want Drew Barrymore driving it, for example, or Hitler.) I called Summit on the phone and was told by Gus — you remember Gus — that since it was after hours, he could not release the vehicle. I would have to come back the next day, he said, and when I told him I had no place to stay in Park City overnight, he told me that, well, then, I shouldn’t have gotten my car towed. That’s when I tried to explain I hadn’t INTENDED for the car to be towed, and that it SHOULDN’T have been towed, but you know how far I got with that.
Mind you, Gus had towed the car only an hour earlier, so he wasn’t opposed to working after hours. It was working after hours when it might actually HELP someone that he was opposed to. Stealing a car, fine. Giving it back again, no.
(And it is stealing, by the way. If your kid were on my property without my permission and I responded by locking him in my closet until you paid a large amount of money — cash only, please, and the amount might change according to my whims — you would have me arrested.)
After much humiliation and begging and pleading on my part, I finally persuaded Gus to meet me at the impound lot and release the car. He told me to get my $80 back from PCPD, because I would need it to pay him. He sounded like he was the greatest martyr the world had ever known for doing this. He did not specifically SAY that he thought I should teach my children to pray in his name, but it was implied.
But there is more to the story. The $80 turned into a lot more, it was really cold outside, and Gus told me about his new bed. Join us Friday for the harrowing conclusion to this greasy story.