 When most people
think of our nation’s capitol, postcard images of the Washington
Monument or the White House come to mind. But those of us who reside in
the District of Columbia know its darker underside. Beyond the white
marble monuments is an entity of fathomless evil. It makes Dracula look
like just a guy who needed a good orthodontist and a vegan cookbook.
Lord Voldemort is a bitchy drama queen in comparison. Deep in the
bowels of D.C. lurks the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs,
or as it is better known, Doesn’t Care a Rat’s Ass. DCRA, for short.
I
was no stranger to the evil minions who inhabit the D.C. government
buildings. I’d jousted with the Department of Motor Vehicles and
learned the hard way that renewing my driver’s license would require a
week’s supply of food, emergency flares, and assurances from my
attorney that my Living Will was up-to-date. However, I had never
tackled DICKra until my recent move back to D.C. after living in
Colorado for a year. I hadn’t realized it, but my months in the
mountains had dulled my urban survival instincts. Simply put, I was
badly out of D.C.-shape.
In fact, I was so badly out of it
that I actually hauled my 9-year-old son with me to DICKapalooza,
blithely assuring him that this “shouldn’t take long.” This is what the
English soldiers no doubt told the King on the first day of what turned
out to be the Hundred Years’ War. “Done in a jiffy,” they had smilingly
promised him, just as I did with my son.
After all, all I
needed was a $19 permit to allow our portable storage devices to be
parked on the street for a mere 48 hours so that we could transfer the
17 million boxes of crap that we’d accumulated in Colorado and that
were stacked in the pods, into our tiny house that looks like Keebler
Elves built it. What we didn’t realize was that by cramming our little
row house with tons of cardboard containers, we would transform it into
the kind of place you read about in an article entitled, “Hermit
Hoarder Found Dead Among Boxes, Stacks of Newspapers, in House Dubbed
‘Hell-Hole’ by Investigating Officers.”
The consequences
of unpacking the pods aside, we were on a mission to get our pod
permit. But being told to take a number upon our entry into DICKfest –
and that number was 94 – set off a warning bell, sort of like blurred
vision and a tingling in your left arm is a sign that the old ticker is
about to try an entirely different rhythm. The woman curled up in fetal
position in one of the waiting room plastic chairs, whispering, “Make
the madness stop, make it stop,” was another “uh-oh” moment. But when I
saw an elderly man dressed in robes, carrying an hourglass and staring
hopelessly out the window with a “Hi, My Name Is Father Time” badge on,
and his number was 57, I knew for sure we were in trouble.
The
problem quickly became clear. Those of us seeking itsy bitsy pod
permits were tossed in with people seeking big-ass major construction
permits. Architects, building contractors, people hauling life-size
models of the buildings they wanted to construct – all were seeking
permits from the same two harassed DICKmen as were we pod peons. The
big guns elbowed their way in front of us into the permit guys’
offices. While we pod people sat. And sat, waiting for our numbers to
be called.
Time, as they say, passed. Nations fell. The
atmosphere warmed. Iceland melted like a giant cube in a mammoth
scotch. The seas rose, swamping Venice. Both Bush twins were elected
president with Chelsea Clinton as their surprise VP. The earth lurched
closer to oblivion.
It was then that the true nature of the
waiting room revealed itself. Of course! I had read about it years ago
when I was in college, in Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle at the
very bottom of hell, the canto Il DICKra.
My horrified
musings came to an abrupt end when a D.C. employee bellowed into a
bullhorn that in five minutes, the parking spaces on nearby streets –
where all us pod people had parked – would become illegal parking
places and our vehicles would be fined and towed away. If I thought Il
DICKra was bad, I could only imagine what Il Impounded Vehicles Lot was
like. I grabbed the bullhorn man and asked him what would happen if
number 94 was called while we were outside and he said, “Did you notice
the customers with numbers starting with seven-hundred?” Yes, I nodded,
I had. He leaned in closer to me. “They were here on Monday and lost
their place in line. They’ve had to come back and wait again for four
days now,” and he smiled just as Blackbeard must have right before he
pushed a sailor off the plank and into the shark-infested waters.
Praying
our number wouldn’t be called in our absence, we raced to the door,
careened out to the car, drove it at breakneck speed to a parking lot,
threw 20 bucks at the parking lot man, and dashed back up to the
Waiting Room of Doom just in time to see our salvation walk – or more
correctly, waddle – through the door. It was a very tired and VERY
tense looking woman in what appeared to be her three hundredth month of
pregnancy. Clutching her visibly contracting belly, she shoved a
blueprint wielding mega-developer onto the floor, stepped over him and
grabbed the permit guy by his tie and growled, “I need a pod permit
NOW.”
“So do I!” I caroled right behind her, “So do I,
and my son here was only a babe in diapers when we came in and now he’s
doing long division in his head!”
The permit guy looked at
my son who was right on the edge of turning into a screaming
bored-out-of-his-cranium monster-child, and looked at the
belly-clutching woman and paused to think. “My, my,” I commented
brightly, “did I spill something or did your water just break, ma’am?”
as I surreptitiously emptied my drinking water bottle onto the floor
around her feet.
That did it. Within moments we were the
proud bearers of a pod permit, which we were instructed to take to the
cashier to pay for. On the walls behind the cashier’s desk were those
inspirational posters that bear bracing messages of optimism and hope.
“Teamwork!” one declared, with a photo of a bunch of jets taking off in
formation. “Character!” asserted another across a background of giant
redwood trees. I studied these flaming lies as I tabulated the time
we’d spent in DICKlandia, and realized that 4 hours and 15 minutes had
passed.
I mentally designed a true Il DICKra poster that
should be plastered onto every wall: “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter
Here” would be its motto, emblazoned in burning red letters across a
backdrop of hopeless souls seated in plastic chairs, clutching their
numbers in a waiting room, caught in the lowest level of D.C.’s very
own Inferno.
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