The Car That Never Ran

                                             ©2018 James M. Carroll, All Rights Reserved

It was 1975, I was twenty-three, and had now moved to San Francisco from New York state. Having just finished college, I had planned on starting a new life in a large and exciting city. Despite arriving with little money, I did however have a free place to stay with a couple of very close friends from high school.

        Trying to find a job at that time was nearly impossible. It had only been a few months since President Nixon had been removed from the White House, and the economy was still reeling from his abrupt and scandalous departure. Even simple minimum-wage jobs drew scores of applicants by ten o'clock in the morning.

        But while in college I had studied the craft of stained glass and realized that the Street Artists Program — a municipal program which enabled artists to sell their handmade work in public areas — might allow me to make a living by selling stained glass of my creation. And so I applied for a Street Artists' license, bought a card table, and began to sell my stained glass work near Fisherman's Wharf on the sidewalks of San Francisco.

        Though my business sense was not good and sales were slow, I still persisted. With time I eventually found inexpensive housing but couldn't afford to buy a car with which to transport my stained glass and selling-table. As a result I had to carry a card table and a suitcase of stained glass back and forth on the bus whenever selling at the Wharf. The buses were frequently crowded, and their commuters were often annoyed by my heavy suitcase and bulky table. I desperately needed to find a place to store my supplies at the wharf, but everywhere that I looked the rental prices of storage spaces were exorbitant — much too high for a struggling artist in his first year. My transportation problems seemed hopeless.

        But then life would present an opportunity: one of my roommates decided he wanted to leave town, and he offered to sell me his car for only $15. Unfortunately the car wouldn't start, and its driving days seemed over. To make matters worse, he refused to leave the license plates on the car, and so I wouldn't be able to easily register the vehicle.

        And then I hatched a plan.

        Not easily daunted, I went ahead and paid the grand sum of $15 for a 25-year-old Rambler that was without license plates and was illegally parked on the street. However, I had often seen cars whose license plates had been stolen, and the owners had subsequently made cardboard license plates to inform the meter maids of the car's actual license plate number. If cardboard license plates could work for them, then they would surely work for me.

        And so after drinking a few beers that night, I went to work creating a fake cardboard license plate from the state of Maine. Then I walked to the car, removed the numerous parking tickets bearing the original license plate number, and placed my new cardboard license plate under the car's windshield, along with a note saying my plates had been stolen. Sure enough, on the following day I discovered that the meter-maids had believed my story, and had now begun writing new parking tickets using the fictitious number I had just created for the cardboard license plate.

        At this point, I finally had a vehicle that could hold my stained glass stock and selling-table, but unfortunately it wasn't at Fisherman's Wharf where I needed it. Though storage space at the Wharf was costly, it was however, cheap to rent a single parking stall within an apartment building's garage. After searching the neighborhood for a couple hours, I eventually found a sign that advertised a garaged parking-space for only $24 a month. And so I phoned the building's manager, said that I lived in the area and needed a place to park my car.