GUEST COLUMNIST: Intro Psych, a $3 parking ticket and Thelonius Monk

I got my first parking ticket on Day One, freshman year. It was September 1962. I'd been driving around before class in my tan 1963 Rambler station wagon, checking out the neighborhood. Suddenly it was seven minutes before Psych 100's first meeting, and the only spot I could find was a few feet shorter than my car. I was forced to straddle a sign that read "No parking here to corner," on the north side of 36th and Chestnut streets. Today, fines for that and similar stationary-vehicular crimes range from $15 to $43 each, depending on your specific misdeed and how promptly or late you atone for it. Back then, the punishment was $3 if you sent your money to the city on time, with a $5 penalty tacked on if you were tardy. Both then and now, the cost of such an indiscretion equaled that of a nice lunch. I slid the ticket into my glove compartment and promptly forgot about it. Like so many other Penn students of that era, I learned not to worry about parking tickets. The reason was something called lack of reciprocity. In those pre-computer '60s, not many local governments honored parking warrants from other states. It simply was too much trouble to coordinate all the necessary information by hand. So most students whose cars were licensed outside of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania simply ignored the tickets. They became a tan badge of courage, and I saved mine in a rapidly growing stack in the glove box. The semester wore on. Gleitman mesmerized us with reports of his original research and with his beautiful, science-friendly German accent. The Sunday before midterm exam week, a Psych classmate, my pal Jim, approached me at the Quad's main entrance. "Hey," he said. "Monk's in D.C. Tonight's the last night." There was only one Monk. Thelonius. The jazz genius whose piano work you either loved or hated. We loved it. Something about the way he made the simultaneous playing of adjacent notes sound good. If you or I tried it, listeners would think we were playing the keyboard with our butts. When he did it, it sounded like your ear was throwing a party for your brain. But the next day was Monday. Our Psych midterm was scheduled for 10 a.m. "We can make it," Jim said. "If you don't know the stuff by now, cramming tonight won't help. Let's go. We'll be back in plenty of time for the test. Hey, it's fucking MONK!" Ten minutes later my Rambler was heading to Washington. We figured we'd get to the club in time for the last set, listen for an hour or so, then turn around and get home by 2 a.m. That left more than six hours for sleep. Piece of cake. What we didn't figure was getting lost. Washington, it seems, had this love affair with one-way signs and late-night traffic. A single missed turn and it was 45 minutes before we could get back to the right street. We finally reached the club, parked -- only slightly illegally -- in front and rushed inside. The guy at the door took $5 cover charge from each of us and for another $2 tip sat us at a table near the piano, where Monk was already playing. We ordered a drink -- another couple of bucks -- and sat back to listen to our keyboard idol. Monk ended the song in about 30 seconds, stood up and left the stage. "Thank you all for coming," a guy in a tuxedo said, and the dozen or so other patrons in the club got up to leave. I looked at Jim, whose eyes had just frozen into an "omigod" stare. We had traveled more than two hours, gotten lost and then paid seven bucks and a tip for a watery drink and a half-minute of piano playing. We returned to the car -- yes, I had gotten a ticket -- and headed back toward Philadelphia. Neither of us said a word for a half-hour. Then I looked at the dashboard. "Crap." "What?" "We're almost out of gas." Now, this was 1962 -- before the nation's well-lighted, emergency phone-every-half-mile, service-stations-up-the-kazoo interstate highways were commonplace. We were on a dark, virtually deserted four-lane road. No car had passed us in either direction for 20 minutes. And not a gas station in sight. "I've gotta turn off this road and find some gas," I said. "It's one in the morning," Jim said. "We're screwed." But l had no choice. The engine was already sputtering. I made the next right hoping for I-don't-know-what. The wagon died about a hundred yards later on a stretch of road so dark we could have developed film on the hood of the car. Jim looked up the highway. I looked in the other direction. Nothing. "So," I said, "you think Gleitman will give us a make-up?" Just then, I saw two headlights coming toward us. I jumped out of the car and started waving my arms. A dark, four-door sedan slowed and then stopped. I walked up to the passenger side and looked in at the smiling faces of four nuns. The one in the front passenger seat rolled down her window. "Hi," I said. "We're students from Philadelphia and we've run out of gas. We have an exam tomorrow morning. Do you know of any gas stations that are open near here?" "Hop in," she said. "It's just a mile down the road. We'll take you and then bring you back here." I couldn't believe the luck. I raised a finger to indicate I needed a second to talk to my friend. I ran over and told Jim what was going on. He stayed with the car as I rode off into the darkness with these four servants of God. They said they were returning to their convent after a conference in New York and that I was lucky because normally this road was pretty deserted past midnight. We reached the station in a couple of minutes. The attendant pumped a gallon into a metal can, the kind that has a screw-on top that hides a pull-out spout. I gave him a dollar, which covered both the cost of the gasoline and a deposit on the can, and the nuns U-turned back to my waiting car. Jim and I thanked them. "God bless you both," they said in unison and disappeared, Twilight Zone-like, down the road. I unscrewed the car's gas cap and reached into the can with a finger to slide out the spout. "Uh-oh," I said. "No spout. We're gonna have to be real careful." He walked over to watch. I tilted the mouth of the can so that it kissed the opening on the side of the Rambler. A stream of gasoline started sliding down the side of the car. Not a drop was getting into the tank. I tried using directional force, thrusting the can toward the car. I hoped enough of the fuel to get me to the service station would fly from the can into the car. But the engineers at Rambler apparently had not anticipated such an emergency. They'd designed an intake you couldn't pour anything into without a spout. The more I tried, the larger the wet spot got on the ground. "Isn't there anything in the car you can use?" Jim asked. We looked. There was a blanket in the back seat, and a jack and crowbar with the spare tire. That was it. And then I remembered. "What are you smiling for?" Jim asked. "Just watch," I said. I opened the glove compartment and got out my inch-thick stack of parking tickets. They were exactly the right size. I overlapped three or four and rolled them into the most beautiful funnel either of us had ever seen. The remaining fuel -- a half-gallon, perhaps -- made it into the tank and we were on our way to the gas station, then to our dorm for some sleep, and then to the Psych midterm. Life today in Philadelphia is so much more straightforward. You get a few tickets and you pay them or the Parking Authority computer gets you and you find a Happy Face-colored lock on one of your wheels one morning and you have to take out a second mortgage to get on the road again. And that's the good news. The bad news? You'd have to drive a lot farther now to hear Monk in person.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.