A Pettiness

 I was pulling back into the parking garage this afternoon, after running a few errands, when I confronted a jarring incongruity. There, in the parking spot I paid for each month as part of my rent, was an unfamiliar vehicle blocking the way. I had to drive back and forth a few times to make sure there was no mistake. There was none. Some stranger was occupying my space. 

Gladly would I have shared it; but here we were faced with a zero-sum proposition. This space was quite literally not big enough for the two of us. 

I pondered what to do. I hated to be the person to call the towing company. I had been on the other end of such a transaction myself, and I knew how keen the pain was likely to be of walking back to one's car and discovering that it was missing; then facing the fact that a private towing company had absconded with it and was now holding it for ransom, all with the blessing of the law. 

I therefore considered parking elsewhere: but I could think of no place else where I would have permission to park, and I refused to end up getting towed just to spare a stranger the same ordeal. I thought of driving off and running a few more errands in town, hoping that when I returned a second time they would be gone. But I had no guarantee they would be; and if I came back and they were still there, then I'd just have to leave again to wait for the towing company to arrive and do their evil chore. 

At last I realized there was nothing else for it: I would have to invoke the authorities. I grabbed my parking permit from the dash and snapped a picture of the offending vehicle's license plate. At this stage of the process, I was still galvanized by enough jealous rage that I took pleasure in my actions. They will pay, I crowed; they will pay! I showed the picture to the people at the front desk, and they placed the call to the towing company for me. 

I then drove away to occupy myself with a few more errands, while I waited for the ugly transaction back home to be complete. It was only then that my conscience truly began to bleed. What had I done? Why had I brought down the coercive power of the state on people who had done nothing worse than I had done myself plenty of times in the past? 

I tried to conjure my rage again by picturing the perpetrator as some rippling blond Aryan college student parking his vehicle with a brazen sense of entitlement, and who was now about to get what was coming to him... but instead I kept picturing some nice elderly midwestern couple visiting their children, or staying at the hotel next door, who had just been confused about the parking rules. 

And my brain began to ramify infinitely all the potential horrible consequences of my deed: what if the $100 towing fee was this couple's last dime on Earth; what if they could not afford the taxi or Uber to go to the impound lot? What if their car was a rental and I had just opened them up to some vaster web of inconvenience and liability? What had these people done to me to deserve such a fate; and was I any better than them, that I could bring it upon them in good conscience? 

"I think again of men as innocent as I am," as Hugh MacDiarmid wrote in a poem about capital punishment. A similar sentiment appears in one of A.E. Housman's poems on hanging. I guess it amounts to nothing more than the old chestnut: "there but for the grace of God...." For had I not myself known the pain of extortionate towing? Why then had I knowingly brought it upon a stranger, someone no worse than myself? And why was I hiding behind the selfish and mean law of property, of all things? 

I was suddenly disgusted with myself: for the deed, and then for the craven flight; for here I was, avoiding the confrontation itself, waiting for my hired goons to do the towing for me. Did I not even have the courage to look my victim in the face? I felt then as Bertolt Brecht describes in a poem, when he recounts a night he turned down a homeless hitchhiker asking for a lift: "I suddenly took fright at this voice of mine/This behaviour of mine and this/Whole world." (Constsantine/Kuhn trans.)

I remembered that D.H. Lawrence had some apt line about this, in his poem on the "Snake." What did he call it again? A smallness? An ungenerosity? I looked up the verse again, and there were the apt closing two lines of the poem: "I have something to expiate/A pettiness." Lawrence is describing how he drove a venomous snake from a water-dish, and was racked with guilt afterward for the gratuitous meanness of the deed. And yet: could it not be said—there was not room for two of them at the bowl? 

I felt myself in the same position. I too had something now to expiate, for I too had committed a petty act. Perhaps it was a necessary one. Perhaps society—the society that is composed always of a majority of sheep, who will turn to the right at the day of judgment, and who will never therefore fault you for casting out a goat—perhaps that society would not condemn me for my actions. But I knew it had been a smallness nonetheless. An ungenerosity. A pettiness. 

Then, as I walked about in the park waiting for the ghastly towing to be over so that I could nurse my moral injury in peace, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I answered—Hello? It was the front desk person from my building again. She told me that the alien car had now left the space. It was vacant again. The driver or drivers had departed on their own. No towing necessary. 

Oh light! Oh peace! Oh relief! There had been no harm done! I had committed no injury! They were free, and I was free. Oh blessed day, when this guilt passed from me! May the necessity of towing never come upon me again, and may all the cars drive free and escape, while there is still time!