Chinatown

The guy who works at the parking garage thinks I’m Bruce Springsteen.

“Thanks, Boss” he says when I hand him my seven bucks as I drive out of the garage.  Or maybe he thinks I’m his immediate supervisor.  He seems to believe that we have a relationship, a friendship, a connection.  Maybe he remembers me from last week?  The truth is, I need his advice. If he’s my fan, my employee, a colleague, surely he’ll help me.

I only want to pay three dollars and maybe he can tell me how. On Saturdays you can park all day if you have your ticket validated by one of the participating Chinatown merchants. Buy something for three dollars, have them stamp your ticket and parking only costs three bucks. Your total cost is six dollars instead of seven and you get a wooden backscratcher or a Chinese finger handcuff as a bonus.

How many backscratchers can one person use?  I only have one back, and it’s rarely itchy. I could use one backscratcher, though, since my daughter and her fingernails have gone away to college.

A finger handcuff is a handy thing to have, but once you’ve incapacitated your index fingers, it’s really overkill to apply additional units to the unincarcerated digits.

What are other possible three dollar purchases? Maybe the parking attendant who thinks I’m his boss could help me.

I could tell him what I’ve tried already.

The fortune cookie factory where the cookies are baked in a rotating oven where each cookie pops out of a die and a seated attendant places them on a wooden form while still pliable and jams a fortune inside before forming them into the familiar shape and allowing them to cool. The sign informs me that it will cost me 50 cents to take a photo and the supervisor further advises with an almost violent waving away gesture that (if I read his body language correctly) we don’t do any stinking parking validation here that’ll be three bucks for the cookies though.

The sketchy and not-so-clean Vietnamese restaurant with the oh-so-scrumptious Bon Me sandwiches – as long as you avoid the infernally hot peppers – that at $3.50 seemed the best solution and which was on the list of validating merchants but unfortunately the almost-nice but also strict and scary waitress had never heard about.

The bakery with the almond cookies that are sometimes given to you at Chinese restaurants along with fortune cookies, these being bigger ones, costing exactly three dollars with validation but filled with Crisco, not very tasty, but despite this forcing me to consume all of them despite my self-disappointment, before I arrived home.

Or the bakery with Dim Sum pastries and these fluffy pork buns that are my favorite with the tasty barbecued pork center, like the sweet filling of a Twinkie, buried in a white flour and sugar fluff which I also devoured, this time before even returning to my fan/employee/friend at the parking garage.

What should I do? I might ask him.

Buy something mundane each week, like a half-dozen apples?

Bring a soiled dress shirt to the cleaners and pick up last week’s clean one?

Purchase a Mao hat and present it to a different friend or relative each week?

Go to an herb shop, tell them what’s ailing me and have them select the items to brew in a tea that will cure me until next week?

Or buy a weekly backscratcher and, after keeping one for myself, give one away each week to the first homeless person I encounter.

This is what I would do, Boss.  One of two things – but whichever one you choose tells a lot about you. I’d either take the easy way out and pay the seven bucks. Or I’d make a game out of it each week.  Let the item find you – it’s out there waiting for you.  What kinda guy are you, Boss?

That’ll be three bucks.

One more bit of advice. Take that thing off your fingers before you try to drive home.

Boss.