Engineering of the lunar biosphere began in 2173 (Gregorian calendar). After a protracted bidding war which resulted in 353 casualties, the engineering contract was awarded to Quad Bionetics of New Sydney, Australia.

The first stage was the construction of mass producer engines hundreds of meters below the surface in order to increase the density of the lunar body. In 2177 (Gregorian calendar), human error led to a density overflow causing massive tidal waves on Earth which led to more than 450 million casualties.

All lunar biospheric engineering was halted until 2250 (Robotic calendar) when the Council for a New Tomorrow began the effort anew. Apex BioCore Design of Phoenix, USA, was given the task of correcting the gravitational damage caused by the previous attempt to engineer the moon, while Generic Organization Robotics of Berne, Switzerland, was charged with custom building a team of scientific engineering robots to further develop the lunar biosphere.

Since then, long-term biospheric processing has been on-going, principally through layer ionization which is expected to continue until at least 2900, after which it is hoped ecopoiesis can commence. Currently, the most noticeable change to the lunar environment is an increase in surface gravity (approximately one quarter of Terran gravity), though strangely this has had more of an effect on solid matter than liquid or gaseous.

Freddy was 20; he had been living alone in New York for almost three years.

In all that time, he had not let anyone see where he lived – a roach and rodent-infested flat in Brooklyn, sparsely decorated, a futon in each of its three rooms. It was incredibly good rent for what he was getting but he didn’t realize it until much later when he lived in worse.

The flat had only three windows, two in the living room which looked out on to the street, their surfaces stained with monoxide grime, and another in the tiny backroom which looked out over the small wooden deck. None in the kitchen, no sun in the bathroom, a viewless bedroom.

It was in the tiny backroom where he did most of his writing – words and ideas coming down upon him like a lost parachutist landing on his deck, doubling over, dying and releasing a bounty of gold.

The worse part of his living arrangements was his landlord, Kostas, a Greek restaurateur who always seemed to be angry (far more than the Portuguese family at the corner store.) His friends called him Gus… so nobody called him Gus. He was short, more stout than fat. He had a Buddha belly but could hardly be called a tranquil man. Short black hair circled his head drawing attention the shiny bald dome on top. Sometimes he had a full moustache where there had been none the day before.

His restaurant, a dark dank greasy spoon populated with local hobos, tramps and wanderers, was directly below Freddy’s flat, no doubt equally as infested with pests.

Gratefully, Freddy only ever had to see Kostas once a month to hand him a rent check. He was the most intimidating man Freddy had ever met, hardened by years of short-order cooking for two-bit bums and five-dollar whores.

Once, on the first of the month, Freddy went down there to Kostas’s “New Gold Restaurant” to deliver his rent and pick up his new phonebook and yellow pages. He asked for the two books and Kostas replied, “Yeah sure, I got your books. You got my money?”

“Yeah right here,” Freddy said, offering him the rent check. Kostas looked it over then disappeared into the back room. He emerged a moment later with the yellow and white and slammed them down on the counter in front of his tenant.

“Here ya go.”

“Thanks,” Freddy muttered politely, slightly confused by the seeming sordidness of an ordinary exchange, as if these two volumes of names and numbers were stolen, rare or worth dying for. The rental of the flat seemed almost secondary. He had paid for the two phonebooks. That was the first time that Freddy thought, “I’ve gotta get out of this place.”

It was a jungle, his home. He’d set out mousetraps to eliminate the pests; within days, he’d killed one mouse; the snare snapped its spine in two across the mid-section, unholy bulging black eyes that no longer knew the fear of death, embraced.

Another mouse had almost gotten free with the peanut butter bait but its front leg was snared, broken, useless. It jittered the trap on the floor, stirring Freddy at two in the morning. He went to the kitchen as the dying creature flushed its bowels at the hint of mortal doom.

Its captor/killer couldn’t stand to see it in pain and he’d once heard that the most peaceful way to die (if there was such a thing) was by drowning – once the lungs fill with water and the body’s violent reaction waives. Freddy had heard it was comparable to the effects of LSD.

He picked up the trap; the mouse dangled, squeaking, terrified; he took it to the bathroom and held it deep under the surface of the toilet water. The mouse shook, scraped, tried relentlessly to be free and alive, slowly, less, going under, until it moved no more, floating lifeless beneath the world.

“Sorry, pal,” Freddy said to it, the corpse, as it came down from its short-lived acid trip. He carried it to the kitchen, put it in a bag, tied it shut, took the bag downstairs, outside, tossed it in a dumpster. Dust to dust.

The same year, Freddy woke one morning to find a dead calico cat on his wooden deck, frozen in the morning dew. This was a conundrum to him. He had to dispose of it somehow but could not simply toss it in the dumpster like a mouse.

The cat had been someone’s pet; it had a name to which it would respond. Freddy did not know what to do.

He called Animal Control for a solution and they told him to “wrap it up, pack it up and put it on your door step; we’ll come by, pick it up and dispose of it.” He gave them his address then got down to work.

He already had a roll of duct tape. He purchased some industrial-strength garbage bags and gardening gloves at the local corner store run by the Portuguese family that always seemed angry, yelling and cursing in their native tongue.

Freddy stood on his deck, looking down at the corpse, one of its front legs outstretched as if it were reaching for the bright white light at the end of a long dark hallway, not quite making it all the way. Its paw was curled like a hook, retreated at the tip. Freddy donned the gloves, took a deep sigh and picked up the creature.

It was stiff from rigor mortis and its body shifted not an inch out of form. Thank God its eyes were closed and Freddy didn’t need to look into the glassy darkness of its empty windows to the soul. With his left hand, he shook open the end of a garbage bag; it resealed itself with its natural static cling.

He tried again, using the cat’s hooked paw to hold one end. But different parts of the creature kept catching on the outside of the bag, missing their mark, and the bag kept resealing itself.

“Come on, get in there,” he said to it. “Wouldja please – come on! Wouldja let me –”

Frustrated, after several attempts to stick a dead cat into a garbage bag, Freddy put the feline down, shook the bag vigorously, billowing air into it, laid it on the deck (allowing gravity to hold one end) and slipped the cat into it horizontally. He folded the bag over, put it in another garbage bag, folded it, put it in another, taped it along the opening, put it in another and taped it along every seam it had, until he had what looked like a care package he’d once received at summer camp.

He wrote the words “ANIMAL CONTROL” on a blank sheet of paper and taped it to the package, the Shroud of Morris. It still wasn’t enough. So he wrote the letter R-I-P on the label as well.

Satisfied, he took it into his flat, down the front steps, to the street and placed it beside his front door, waiting to be picked up and taken away and disposed.

A few hours later, Freddy went back down to see if it had been taken – it had. Blessed be the folks at Animal Control. He wanted to thank them for their expedient processing; never before had he encountered such care from a government body.

He phoned them back and was informed that they had yet to send anyone by to pick up the dead cat. And that left Freddy with a question he didn’t necessarily want answered.

When it came to unsanctioned pugilism, Freddy had been cheated.

Though he had not been taught hand-to-hand fighting skills, received any training in grappling strategies or a hint of competitive spirit for such an arena, he did have one quality to his name that could occasionally prove beneficial in physical confrontation.

Thanks to the irregular frustrated smacks from the burdened hands of his older brother, Freddy had developed a high threshold to pain. However, when he reached his terminus, he lost control of his pacifist (or pacified) temperament. He would become enraged, in a defensive tantrum, his arms flinging out at any opponent within his nine-year-old grasp. After experiencing several of these counterattacks, Gordon found that he could still easily tackle his younger brother to the ground and threaten to drool on him. As Gordon allowed a cord of saliva to creep from his mouth and descend to within scant inches of the boy’s writhing face, Freddy slowly regained his dominated composure. Not once did Gordon’s slime ever make contact.

In the fifth grade, Freddy had been challenged to meet Vince, a minor league player in the sport of bullying, in the yard after school. As he walked down a school hallway that had already been vacated of classmates wishing to ensure a good view of the match, Freddy was in a dream-like state of mind; the only after-school fights he’d seen were in after-school specials on the local ABC affiliate. He didn’t even know what had sprouted his conflict with Vince, who had set the stage with the threat, “You’re dead, kid. After school, you’re fucking dead.” Freddy seriously doubted whether Vince even knew his name.

Amidst a circle of sixty fellow students, the bully stood, cracking his knuckles, waiting for his prey. Freddy stood inside the school’s side door, looking through the thick wired glass at the group that awaited him beyond the domed climbing apparatus. And before he could change his mind, Freddy found that he had already emerged from the school and was standing in the middle of the mob. A synchronous chorus around him chanted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

With fists clenched in anger and the thought of his drunken father riding his subconscious, Vince came at Freddy – a boy effigy at which he could direct the strains of the domestic violence he’d incurred.

Fear stuck a dagger in Freddy’s heart and, for the life of him, he could neither raise forearm in defense nor turn and scamper in shame. Vince’s eyes gleamed on the verge of tears; his crooked teeth foamed; every freckle on his body raged as if it had just endured an afternoon of Antarctic sunlight. Freddy could but witness his ferocious attacker’s swift approach.

Then.. God… or something else that Freddy would never comprehend… intervened.

An unforeseeable bolt of lightning struck from a cloudless sky and quite suddenly there was another participant in the fray. Freddy had the best view of a seventh grader who had been unaffectionately nicknamed “Gus the Bus”. His robust figure surged with unprecedented vehemance, his wiry hair mussing in the gallop, his Mediterranean nose a bowsprit guiding him to the next port of call. Gus the Bus was the only student in the K-8 school who had the ability to grow a full moustache.

It seemed that Gus the Bus also had a bone to pick with Vince. He broke through the chain of spectators and with the cliché force of a Mack truck, tackled the farm leaguer to the hard yellow grass, circumventing by a mere half-second the bruisin’ for which Freddy had been cruisin’.

Freddy witnessed the sack with all the wonder of seeing a baby being born.

Though stunned at first, the blood-thirsty audience of eight- to thirteen-year-old’s quickly recovered from the switch-up and continued their chorus of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

It occurred to Freddy that all they wanted was a fight, fight, fight. He looked down at Gus the Bus pummelling the shit out of his former sparring partner. And he could not help but feel cheated. His opportunity to atleast be placed somewhere on the ladder (if only at the bottom) had been whisked away. He turned, broke through the circle and walked home, wondering “How could this have happened to me?”

Freddy’s next opportunity came three years later, in the eighth grade, at a different school. This time, Freddy had been around the block long enough to acquire a few coaches in his corner. Whereas in his encounter with Vince, he’d simply been another nameless fall guy, he was now the underdog. For his competitor was the perennially malicious Eric Creighton. Though Freddy did not exactly have a large contigent of friends at school, Eric Creighton had a fundamental bridge-burning quality that verged on mad genius.

Despite crowd sentiment, Eric was almost eight inches taller than Freddy, his arm’s reach almost five inches longer. Freddy’s other, perhaps more primary, problem was that he still lacked basic skills in the art of the street fight.

He asked his bespeckled 13-year-old slacker friend, Leonard, “How do I make a proper fist? Do I put my thumb on the inside or outside?”

For a moment, Leonard wondered if Freddy was joking; then he stared at his trainee with concerned conviction. “No, man, if you put ’em on the inside, you’ll break your fuckin’ thumbs.”

“Okay, on the outside, thanks.”

A small crowd of spectators were sprinkled around the paved schoolyard outside one of the doorways. Eric was larger, stronger and dumber. Freddy was twelve-years-old and Gus the Bus had relocated to a juvenile hall in Sacramento, California.

“No hard feelings,” Eric said with as much sarcasm as he could muster.

Freddy took the first punch on the bone of his left cheek. A twinge of pain spread across his face. It shook his head, shocked the balancing liquids of his ears. He could no longer hear the cheers and jeers of the crowd; all he could hear was his own ventilation system.

Freddy shook off the impact and, testing his own punch against Eric’s chest, missed and stumbled to the left.

He took a breath – Creighton 1, Long nothing.

Freddy could see his trainer, on the other side of Eric; he didn’t hear the words that were being screamed at him, but he thought he might be able to read Leonard’s lips.

Eric took advantage of the distraction to lay a powerful blow to Freddy’s nose. It stunned him; he staggered backwards and tried to keep his legs from crumbling beneath him. The noise began to filter back into his ears —

“Kick him in the nuts, Freddy!!!” Leonard screamed.

Then, the others: “Punch him! Hit him! Get him!”

Freddy felt his nose and spots of blood appeared on his hand. His vision turned grainy. Spurred by the crimson drip of his olfactory cavity, Freddy quickly attained his emotional breaking point. With as much rage as he knew, his clenched fists flailing wildly, Freddy came at poor Eric, a non-stop pummelling which even startled the surveyors so much that some took a step back, afraid and amused. There was no concentration or talent in the barrage; it was punch, punch, punch, quickly, as quick as he could. Eyes, jaw, nose, ears – every feature became a target.

Then… Sweet Intrusia, the Goddess of Intervention, returned.

The whole fray came to an abrupt end when a large mitt of a hand (missing half of one finger and a smaller fraction of another) grabbed the back of Freddy’s collar and hoisted him away from his victim. It was Mr. Rose, the industrial arts teacher; trouble had heard the commotion and had come to investigate.

He kept hold of Freddy and grabbed Eric by the ear, instructing the mob to “Break it up! Go home! Or you’ll all be sent to detention!” He led Freddy by his neck and Eric by his ear (still stinging from one of Freddy’s blows) down to the Vice-Principal’s office.

Rose sat both boys down outside and went in to tell the Veep what had happened. A moment later, Rose emerged, grabbed Eric and yanked him into the office. As he awaited his own punishment, Freddy could hear the two adults inside berating poor Eric: “How could you let a little shrimp beat you up?! Don’t you have any guts?! You need to take a self-defense course! What the hell’s the matter with you?! You’re atleast a half foot taller!”

Then, finally, the Veep said, “Detention hall, room 203, Mrs. Burke is waiting for you, young man.” Eric emerged with Mr. Rose. The boy’s head was low with shame; Freddy averted eye contact as poor Eric was ushered off to the Satanic Mrs. Burke.

A moment later, the Veep popped his balding oversized head out of his office. “Young man, I don’t want to hear about any more fights with you. You should know better… Now go home.”

And once again, Freddy found himself walking home alone, wondering, “How could this have happened to me?” For the life of him, he couldn’t develop a bad reputation. That’s really the only kind, he thought; if you haven’t got a bad reputation, you haven’t got a reputation. The public showers more opinion upon the mean guy than the nice guy.

I work in a government office for the government. And I do general office labor for a certain set of fellow government workers. And one day, one of the other government workers asked me to send out one hundred and sixty booklets. And I was to send them to the four different regional offices, forty to each office. So I needed four boxes.

So I went to the mailroom and I told them that I needed four boxes to send four packages to the four regional offices. And they stared at me. And they said that I would have to go talk to Rodney, the box guy I guess.

So I went and found Rodney and I told him that I needed four boxes to send four packages to the four regional offices. You have to make it very simple for these people. So I asked Rodney for these boxes and he said, “Four boxes, okay.”

And then he started wandering around the office looking for four boxes. Like I couldn’t have done that myself.

So I stopped him and I said, “Look, Rodney, isn’t there a place where you would keep boxes stored?”

“Yeah, the storage room.” he said.

“Should we look there?” I asked him.

So Rodney took me to the storage room. And he went in and started looking around for four boxes. And I could see two boxes right down at my feet that were the right size. So I asked him, “What about these boxes?”

And he said, “I thought you wanted four.”

Now I didn’t want to pressure him. So I said, “Well, I’ll take these two now and you can get back to me with two more.”

“Two more? I’ll have to go downstairs to get them.”

“Okay, no problem, you go downstairs, you get back to me.”

“Okay.”

So I took these two boxes back and started getting two of the parcels ready. And then I realized that the booklets were already in two boxes, different-sized boxes, large enough for eighty booklets, but they would do. I didn’t need perfectly-sized boxes.

So I called Rodney back and I said, “Look, about those two other boxes, I don’t need them anymore. I already have the two boxes the booklets came in. So I don’t need any more boxes.”

“What?”

“I don’t need the two boxes.”

“Okay,” he said, “whatever.”

So I packed up the four boxes, two of the small size, two of the large. And I put them on the dolly, the large ones on the bottom because, you know, gravity. And I took them to the mailroom and I told them, “I need you to send these four boxes to the four regional offices.”

And as I was about to leave, the lady stopped me and said, “Well, they’re two different sizes.”

I said, “Yeah… so?”

“Well, they won’t fit in the bags.”

“And?”

“Well, we can’t send them, they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Well, you’re the mailroom; you know, the mailroom handles the mail. What am I supposed to do with them?”

“Well, you’ll have to go talk to Rodney about this.”

So I went and found Rodney again. And I told him, “Look, alright, I’m sending these four boxes to the four regional offices and the mailroom won’t take them because they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Why are you telling me?” he asked. “You should talk to the mailroom about this.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I took them to the mailroom. They won’t take them. They don’t fit in the bags. They told me to come to you.”

“Come with me,” he said. So I followed him… to the mailroom.

And then he started arguing with the lady. “These boxes are being mailed.”

“Well, they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Well, we’re trying to mail them.”

“But they won’t fit in the bags.”

“Why not?”

“They’re too big.”

“They’re different sizes.”

“Well, two of them will fit but those two larger ones won’t.”

“Can we send two?”

“Yes, two of them will fit.”

“What about the other two?”

“No, they won’t fit.”

Suddenly, in a fit of impulsiveness, Rodney walked off. So I was left alone with the mailroom lady.

“Look,” I said, “can I atleast put them in the mailroom? You know, this is the mailroom and these are mail. Can I just put them in here until we figure out–”

“Yes, fine, bring them in here.”

So I picked them up and they’re pretty heavy. And she guided me in and said, “Um… okay… um… put them… um… here!”

So I dropped them in the middle of the mailroom, wondering if in a few hours later, they would be covered with, with, with a tablecloth and a deck of cards.

And do you know what the mailroom lady said to me? Do you know what she had the gall to say? She said to me, “You know, we’re going to have to send these out regular mail.”

“Fine!” I screamed.

“Whatever!” I screamed at her.

“Send them however you want, you dumbfucker!” I cursed her.

“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know who I am?!” I asked her.

“I’m the Anti-Christ!” I informed her. “I’m the goddamn Anti-Christ!!!”

And then, that was when they fired me.

But that’s okay.

That’s alright.

Because now I’ve got a new job now.

I’m working at the post office.

It was 4:34 in the morning. Streaks of indigo were reaching from beyond the Eastern horizon to mix with the midnight blue still hanging over the Pacific. Two magpies were atop the neighborhood’s trees, calling out their morning duties. There was no snooze button to make them stop.

Freddy was sheltered from the natural alarm, inside his small dim bedroom, his body stretched out under two thick duvets, his head softly surrounded by four pillows, unconscious, dreaming of a message he would forget as soon as…

The phone rang.

James, Freddy’s roommate, would not answer the phone. James always disconnected his phone from its jack before going to bed.

In his dream, Freddy had been in the produce section at Rock’n’Roll Ralph’s, 7257 Sunset Blvd., tolling the number of pretty girls, when suddenly a head of lettuce began ringing. He looked at it strangely; he’d never heard lettuce ring before. He reached for the head of lettuce and suddenly found himself…

Awake, naked, standing at his desk, halfway between night and day, with a phone in his hand.

“Hello?” came a recognizable voice from the other end of the line.

“Hey,” Freddy replied, wiping the crust from his right eye. There was a pause.

“What the fuck are you doing?” It was Max.

“Hey, I was… uh… sleeping.” Another pause.

“Oh. What time is it there?”

“Four-thirty. Where are you?” The conversation ran at an octogenarian pace, as satellite communicated with satellite over the Atlantic Ocean and into two different sets of civilization.

“I’m at Heathrow.”

“Oh ya, you’re… in Britain, right?”

“Not for much longer, thank God. I fly into Kennedy today.”

“What’s wrong? You don’t like the rain?”

“No, I don’t like the cops.”

“Bobbies got you down?” Freddy asked, wiping the salt from his left eye.

“No, man, the friggin’ parking cops. Lemme tell you –”

“Hold on,” Freddy said, laying the receiver down on the desk, grabbing yesterday’s underwear from the floor and hoisting them up around his crotch.

He sat down on his wonky office chair, pulled a cigarette from the pack on the desk, lit it and returned to the long distance call.

“Go,” he told Max.

“So I’m here for four weeks, right? The production puts me up in this flat in Stepney, really nice place. Jacuzzi bathtub, a little balcony, great view, and, I was told by the production co-ordinator, I had parking so if I wanted to rent a car –”

“Right,” Freddy blurted in mid-satellite transmission.

“I could. And they would pay for it,” Max finished.

Freddy yawned. “So what’d you get?”

“An MG.”

“Nice,” Freddy commented.

“They were paying for it,” Max continued, “so I figured, ‘What the hell? I’ll go all out.’ Now this parking space is actually a pad, y’know, a little area in front of the flat. Used to be grass and dirt, now it’s interlocking bricks.”

“Yeah, I know what a parking pad is.”

“Okay, so I’ve got the MG parked down there and the second day I have it, I go down to drive to set and I got a ticket. They call them Penalty Charge Notices. The infraction says I was parked on the boulevard.”

“Were you?”

“No, the pad is small but the car fits. I wasn’t blocking anything. It’s not even a fucking boulevard; it’s a road. So I figured the ticket weasel made a mistake for some reason, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s in his nature. Anyways, I go to work, come back, go to sleep, wake up, next day, I got another ticket. Same infraction: parking on boulevard.”

“What the –”

“I’m like ‘What the fuck? I’m not on the boulevard. I’m on my parking pad.’ I go to work, come home, I leave a note for the prick on the dashboard: ‘Warden Gupta, Stop giving me tickets for parking in my parking space. Your truly, Max Rasche, Resident, 49 Old Church Road.'”

“Did it work?”

“Yeah for about a week. Then I get another ticket for parking on the boulevard; this time it’s from Warden Smythe-Roy. They switch them up, huh? To keep it fresh.”

Freddy ran his hand over his face, seeing where circumstance was taking his friend.

“So I changed the note. ‘To All Parking Wardens, I am not on the boulevard. I am on my parking pad. Inquiries can be addressed to Simpleton Lanes Productions…’ And I left the phone number for the production office.”

“Right.”

“Anyways, another week goes by, no tickets. Then third week, Monday, I get a ticket for parking on the boulevard, Tuesday, I get a ticket for parking on the boulevard. Wednesday, I wake up. I go downstairs, fully expecting to see a ticket for parking on the boulevard. Guess what?”

“Car’s gone.”

“They fucking towed me. Out of my parking pad! And the only way they could have done that is by trespassing on private property. So I was just fuming. But I had to get to work so I put off all those emotions, got to work late, finished early, luckily, took the tube back home – and what a joy that is. You want proof that dental care in England is non-existent? Take the subway.”

“So what happened?”

“I get home. I open up the phonebook and start looking for who I should call about this – the Transport Committee. I call the number. They say, ‘Oh no sir, we handle the parking meters.’ I call the next number: ‘No sir, we handle the parking lots.’ Third number, parking enforcement – these are the pricks. I get the guy on the phone, I say, ‘I’m trying to find out if my car’s been towed or stolen.’ I give him the plate number. He goes away, comes back a minute later, tells me that the computers are “on the blink” and he doesn’t know if they’ve towed my car or not. So he gives me the phone number for the towing company.”

“Jesus.”

“Right, so I call the towing company, give the lady the plate number. She comes back ten seconds later, ‘Yes sir, we have your car, that’ll be 120 pounds and I’ll need to see your license.’ I’m like, ‘Whoa! Whoa! Slow down, Speed Racer.'”

“She probably didn’t get that reference.”

“No, you’re right, they never had Speed Racer over here. But I was at a loss. One second, I have a car; the next, someone else has taken it and is demanding 120 pounds for me to get it back. I was about to go off, y’know, I was ready to lose it. But then I realized, ‘Y’know what, this lady is just another wage slave, getting rammed by taxes which eat up fifty percent of her income. The towing company is outsourced by the municipal council; there’s nothing she could do for me even if she wanted to.’ So I got the address of the impound lot and hung up.”

“120 pounds?! That’s like 250 bucks.”

“Yeah. But even if I got the car out, I still didn’t have anywhere to park it. I wasn’t gonna park downstairs again and get towed tomorrow and rack up another 120.”

“I don’t understand why they wouldn’t let you –”

“Oh it gets better.”

“I’m listening.”

“So I needed to find a parking spot. And the neighbors across the street, they have a parking pad just like mine and they aren’t getting any tickets. So what’s so damn special about my parking pad? So I called parking enforcement back, the guy with the computers on the blink. Someone else answered, a real prick, he was really short with me.

“I said to him, ‘Listen, I’ve got these five parking tickets plus the one waiting for me at the impound lot and they all have the same infraction – parking on boulevard – but the thing is I’ve got a parking pad in front of the place–‘ He says, ‘You’ve got a pad?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘It exists, right now?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it exists, I’m looking at it, right now; there’s the road, there’s the sidewalk, there’s my parking pad.’

“He says, ‘Well sir, the boulevard is our enforceable area. It’s ten meters from the middle of the road.'”

“Metric bastards,” Freddy piped up.

“But here’s the thing – ten meters from the middle of the road is actually inside the house! So if I was to sit on the sofa for too long – say I’m watching Braveheart – they could give me a ticket. Y’know?”

“Right.”

“So he tells me that if I want to park there I’m gonna need a permit. I’m like, ‘Why do I need a permit to park my car on my parking pad?'”

“What’d he say?”

“‘Because it’s the law, sir.'”

“That doesn’t answer your question.”

“I know! Then he starts in, ‘Without the law, sir, anarchy, anarchy –‘”

“Aw Jesus.”

“So I hang up on him, I look in the phonebook again, I find the phone number to call to apply for a front-of-house parking permit. I call the number, out of service.”

“Typical.”

“I call the main parking permit number. They tell me I have the wrong number. I’m like, ‘Yeah I know, your other number is out of service.’ She asks, ‘Did you get it out of the phonebook?’ I say, ‘Yeah I did.’ ‘Well that’s the wrong number, sir. There’s a typo in that number.’ So she gives me the right number, it’s one digit off the number in the book. I call them – the front-of-house parking permit people.”

“Finally!”

“Yeah, y’know that feeling you get when you go through this bureaucratic bullshit and you get the last number and you know this is the number that matters. Whoever answers this number is the man or woman who can actually do something for you. Well I got that feeling. The lady answered and I was the nicest guy in the world, ‘Hello how are you today? How is your day going? I have something maybe you’d like to help me out with.’

“I give her the address, she goes away for a minute, she comes back: ‘Well sir I have some bad news for you. We can’t let you park there, you can’t apply to park there and you can’t appeal this.'”

“What?!”

“Yeah, they won’t let me park there, they won’t let me ask them to let me park there and they won’t let me complain about not being able to ask them to let me park there.”

“Their ass is covered and their hands are tied.”

“Exactly. So I said, ‘But the neighbors across the street –‘”

“The Joneses.”

“Right. ‘The Joneses across the street have the exact same pad and they park there fine and dandy.'”

“You used the word ‘dandy’?”

“Yeah. I was speaking her language.”

“So what did she say?”

“She said, ‘Well sir, they probably got their permit before the Road Traffic Act was passed in 1991 and your local council took over parking enforcement.’ Apparently, one of the councillors in Stepney thought it would be a brilliant idea to ban parking on all front-of-house parking pads from then-on-in.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?! Maybe he’s a fan of unobstructed interlocking brick. So I said to her, ‘Let me see if I understand correctly… According to the City of London, according to the Grand Dame of the Western hemisphere, I’m screwed?'”

“What’d she say?”

“‘For lack of a better way to put it, sir, that is correct.'”

Freddy laughed and butted out his cigarette, “That’s classic.”

“So for the past week here, every time I’ve left the flat, I’ve had to look at a car-sized waste of space.”

“You didn’t go get the car?!”

“No, I didn’t have anywhere to park it. Plus I couldn’t have gotten it out anyways; it wasn’t in my name. Plus the international driver’s license I’ve been using is hot. I bought it off one of the P.A.’s on the first day of shooting.”

“So the car’s still impounded?”

“I dunno. I told the co-ordinator what happened and she said she’d get someone to take care of it. So I dunno. I’ve been taking the tube to work for the last week.”

“So you don’t have to pay for anything?”

“Oh I have to pay. Y’know what I have to pay for?”

“What?”

“All the local fucking phone calls I made to try to find out why the municipal government here sucks royal ass. They charge you for local phone calls here! Can you believe it?”

“What a rip-off.”

“I fucking hate this country.”

Bing-bong, Freddy heard in the background of the line.

“I think they’re boarding me now.”

“Alright, well thanks for waking me up,” Freddy said, yawning again. “You’re back in New York tonight?”

“Yeah, this afternoon, New York time.”

“Have a good flight home.”

“Thanks. I’ve got a couple prescription muscle relaxants from one of the other actors so I’m going to have a very good flight home.”