Boot Blaster

Jason Gerard, BootBlaster by Kenny Lyon On Tuesday Jason Gerard woke up angry. Getting home late Monday night he'd found a notice from the Parking Bureau in his mail. He went to sleep angry and he woke up that way. Jason was an artist, a sculptor. He lived and worked on a street where parking was allowed for only two hours. Every time the meter maid came along and marked his tire he had to drop his tools, run out, and move his car. All day long. And this was where he lived. Why? Why where he lived? The street had changed. Businesses had sprouted along its length: photo studios, design houses and garages; M.R.Quick Prop Rentals and the LAPD Auto Impound. Solid, money making ventures that contributed to the economic life of the community. To accommodate them and provide spaces for a constant flow of customers, the city had adopted certain parking rules. Enforcement was rigid, patrolling endless. All in the interest of the right people. Jason was the wrong people, or so he assumed. He was not particularly well known, paid, or regarded. No one had requested his opinion when the new rules were proposed. There had been no petitions, no town meetings, no democratic participation and no due process. To the City of Los Angeles Jason's shabby rent-controlled studio was nothing but an eyesore at one end of an upwardly mobile block. Considerate, Jason often worked late at night, when the street was empty and there was no one to annoy with his hammering, chiseling, welding, and bending. When he worked late, he slept late. The woman on the beat found out and tried to get to his car before nine every morning. She was a meter maid with ambition. When he ran out before a ticket was written, she finished it anyway. She had his license memorized. It became a war. Wondering who would want the job in the first place, Jason at times considered the character of someone who actually relished the work; who attempted to excel. He imagined her fifty years earlier as a tattoo artist at Auschwitz... now she had to settle for this. At least she still had a uniform. In the beginning he tried to stay ahead, jockeying his old car around in the mornings like a sleepwalking valet, sometimes parking miles away. When that failed he paid the tickets. For months he held his own. But now he held a yellow slip in his hands: "Last Notice—Going to Warrant." Perplexed, he went over his records. He had sent a check weeks ago. Jason called the Parking Bureau. Fighting through an automated maze of options, questions and messages, he eventually made human contact. No they hadn't received payment. No it wasn't their fault. It was the post office's fault—one arm of the monster blaming another. But no matter what had happened to the check, if he didn't drive downtown before five o'clock with twenty-eight dollars cash, the ticket would go up to sixty. Jason drove downtown, paid five dollars to park, and laid out the money after making the woman behind the counter promise that his check, if found, would not be cashed. "Why don't you just cancel the check?" "That costs ten dollars." "Oh." Fine. That done he proceeded to forget the incident. Six months of subsistence living, sculpting and parking enforcement dodging later, Jason noticed that twenty-eight dollars was missing from his account. Twenty-eight dollars gone left a very noticeable dent in the bank account of Jason Gerard. The check had been cashed. In a rage, he called the bureau. After six messages in four languages, three holds, two transferals, and a final twenty minute wait while someone conferred with a supervisor,

"Yeah, it's on the computer. You paid twice." "So send me the money." "I can't do that." "What? What are you talking about?" "You have to send in the canceled check and the receipt, there will be a six to eight week processing period, and you'll get a refund." "Look, they told me they wouldn't cash the check. That's my money. After six months I'm still supposed to have the receipt?" The man went on to say that Jason had to drive downtown to the same place as before and get another receipt. Jason drove downtown. He paid to park again, waited in line for an hour, and was told that what he wanted was impossible. He needed to fill out a form (available at the door where the hour-long line began) and send it to the court. Six months of futile correspondence ensued. Jason was never able to get his money back. Finally one morning after a late night he lost his running battle with the meter maid and got another ticket. He called the office again. "So right there, on your computer, you can see that you owe me twenty-eight dollars, right?" "That's right." "And now you're trying to extort another twenty-eight dollars from me for parking in front of my own studio." "You have another ticket, yes." "So prove that you're smarter than what you ate for lunch and just apply the twenty-eight dollars you owe me to the new ticket." "I'm afraid I can't do that." "Why?" "You have to send in the canceled check and your original..." "I don't have the receipt." "You have to get another one." "How?" And like every other time, here the whole thing fell apart. The situation was intractable. The twenty-eight dollars existed, in limbo. But even in limbo, Jason knew it was earning interest. An infinitesimal amount of interest, no doubt. Not enough to be important even to him, perhaps. What meant something to Jason Gerard was the benefactor of that interest. That really put him off. He couldn't pay any more tickets, just couldn't do it. They mounted. Finally one morning he went outside—late, of course, for something important somewhere far away—and found a strange, orange contraption hugging the right front wheel of his car. Closer examination of the device revealed it to be made in England and of impressive mass, probably worth as much as the old Datsun it held in its steely grasp. Booted. Jason went back through the rotting, loading-dock door into his kitchen. He called to cancel his appointment—with a bank manager interested in a Gerard original for his lobby, the first such interest in quite a while—and made himself a cup of coffee. Finding only cans of soaking brushes in the refrigerator, he sat down with it black and considered this latest assault on his civil liberties. It was, he decided, a cunning new slant on debtor's prison. Of course the damned things were British. They'd come up with the first one. In his mind Jason could see the misanthropic, bounty-hunting bastards, cackling and rubbing their hands in glee while matching license plate to computer printout and slapping on the auto iron-

maidens. Finishing his coffee, he returned to the street. He wasn't alone; the livelihoods of a whole raft of offenders had been paralyzed in the nocturnal sweep. Dazed, he stood and watched while up and down the street people from all walks of life realized they were walking. Everyone was angry, of course—but not nearly enough. Nobody had that Tom Paine glint in their eye. Nobody was ready to make molotov cocktails and go live in the hills, or even write a congressman. They all just took it, like a sad old queen in a crowded cell block. Causes had never been part of Jason's life. He'd never seen a revolution lead anywhere, never seen a revolutionary leader living in a cardboard hut after the national treasury was in his hands. He knew that at this end the food chain was a vicious grab for too much, a free for all of greed that made three polar bears fighting over a wounded penguin look like a Sunday school lesson. Idealism never triumphed, right never prevailed, never had and never would. Well, there was Robin Hood, of course. To Jason Robin Hood was myth and Errol Flynn in green tights. But if there ever really was a Robin Hood, as selfless and pure and straight as the arrows he shot... Impossible, he thought; couldn't happen. Well, maybe if there was absolutely no chance of personal gain, whatsoever. Otherwise he would fuck up. Take over. Tax and keep and extort for his own damned self. There was no trade in torched auto boots. Even without the obvious legal hurdles their scrap value would be negligible. Too big for jewelry or bondage toys, they wouldn't even make good garden statuary. No, to a merchant they were worthless. But to Jason? Nothing could equal the shock value of a street-full, smoking in the morning sun. A phone call to the number so considerately left on—glued to—his windshield provided Jason with an automated reading of the terms. Release of his car would require payment in full for all the tickets, as well as seventy-five dollars each for the services of booting and de-booting. Failure to do this within three days would result in the towing of his car to the police impound lot, all of fifty feet away. To get it from there would mean paying all the above, plus a standard sixty dollar towing fee (over a dollar a foot) and a storage charge roughly equal to the rent on his studio. The hole would get deep fast. Compliance was out of the question. But if he found a way to cut the thing off, he couldn't do just one—a sure bust. Dozens would have to go down at once, all over town, to confuse the authorities and make a statement. An ideologically pure statement. That is, after the first time, when his own car was at stake (an insignificant gain, he mused, compared with Fidel's thirty years of fine cigars.) Beyond that, here was an opportunity for artistic as well as political satisfaction. An artist if nothing else, Jason examined the boot. The locks were case-hardened steel. Unhacksawable. No matter, something more theatrical than a cleanly cut lock was needed. This called for fire. But melting tires wouldn't do. These people were already victims. After pondering the question, Jason went back into his studio, pulled out a sketchbook and designed a system involving a cutting torch and protective sheet of steel. Finding the tireguard in a heap of scrap metal, he walked off in search of the right acetylene torch. Nothing he had in the studio was up to the task. An exhausting five hours later he'd found it, forlorn and purposeless, surrounded by old trucks, tractors and park benches in a City of Los Angeles salvage/repair yard. The symbolism and symmetry were perfect. So, late that night, wearing black and wielding wire cutters, Jason breached a chain link fence and liberated the unused tool to a higher cause. The next day, after getting the torch in working order (a difficult task that involved hitching a ride all the way to Pomona for parts) and christening it with a

bottle of beer, he settled down with the rest of the six-pack to wait for nightfall. Well into the wee hours of the morning Jason once again put on basic black and boldly struck out to free his car. His first run through the procedure was messy; part of the tire got a little runny and some paint on the front fender melted, but off came the instrument of oppression. Elated, he installed the torch in the back seat of the car, facing the street, and went hunting, bringing a camera to capture the proceedings for posterity. As it turned out, all the hardware wasn't from the same manufacturer. Some boots were tougher than others; some were of an entirely different design. Jason realized that he would have to make another tireguard for these. The sturdier ones would just take longer than the fifteen seconds he figured he could get away with—if he was lucky. Already restricting himself to dark, quiet streets and being extremely cautious, Jason was no martyr. Idealist or not, he knew that jail was not a fitting end to this glorious campaign. Eight of the enemy went down the first night, with no close calls. Each severed, twisted piece of steel was photographed and left where it fell. Arriving home filthy and exhausted, Jason carefully arranged the boot around his own tire and removed the torch, storing it under his kitchen sink. He took a shower and passed out on top of his covers. Waking at noon, he dutifully reported the vandalism of his boot. After doing so he locked up the studio and drove to Las Vegas. By his third day in the capital of anonymity and institutionalized sin he had swapped the Datsun straight across for an early seventies Plymouth Duster, registered it to the address of a waffle shop just off the Strip, and won a hundred and seventy-five dollars playing blackjack at the Mirage. The night he got back to LA. he loaded the torch into the Duster and chalked up six boots in a row, just off Hyperion Boulevard in Silverlake. That week saw seventeen more clattering to the pavement; the following, fifteen. The photo collection grew. Talk on the street turned to the mystery of the severed boots. No one, not even Jason's closest friends, knew he was the one liberating cars citywide. Finally mention appeared in the media. First there was a tongue-in-cheek paragraph in the LA Weekly, written by a staffer whose own car had benefited from the covert largesse, followed by an Eyewitness News report and an article in the Times within days of each other. But it was a graffiti artist in Echo Park who gave the perpetrator an identity. Leaving his front door just as Jason was driving away from a particularly good run near Dodger Stadium, the inspired artist sprayed a beautifully filigreed BootBlaster on the street alongside the freed automobiles. That was all it took. The name and reputation of the BootBlaster spread like Exxon oil on Prince William Sound. The mayor was furious, the police chief was livid. Every available officer was on the streets every night. Traps were set; elaborate plans laid; speeches made. Jason decided to take a break. He'd done his part. But copycats sprang up everywhere. Citizens destroyed their own car-cuffs, knowing that they could hide behind the rash of spectacular crimes being attributed to a single source. Not a boot in the city was safe. Stramp-Newton, the small industrial town in the British Midlands where the majority of the contraptions were made, experienced a boom unequaled since World War II. Maggie Thatcher took credit, citing the success as the positive result of her economic programs. Car stereos boomed out MC Ice `E's BootBlaster Rap up and down Hollywood Boulevard. Capitol Records picked up the independently produced single for six figures (against sales.) Within weeks, smoldering-auto-boot T-shirts given out to promote the record were all over Hollywood. A major television production company put two writers on a Bootblaster project, pushing to get a TV movie out before the furor died.

Jason, hoping to turn a profit from his creation, made a half-hearted attempt at selling the torch equipped Duster to the TV company and the video department of Capitol records. Both turned him down. He was told that his rig was neither realistic enough for TV nor sensational enough for a music video. The video team went for a modified backpack flame-thrower. The TV film was eventually abandoned, but not before over forty-thousand dollars had been spent developing a fire and brimstone mechanized assault vehicle better suited to Rommel thundering across Africa than someone inconspicuously slipping around Los Angeles. In the wake of his commercial failure, Jason instinctively knew he had fallen from grace. Superstitiously sure that had he succeeded he would have gotten caught, he gladly slipped back into routine, the only change in his life being the completion of his mural, Liberation: a TransUrban Sculpture—the photographs, arranged on a large board and laminated. Jason remained inactive until the continuing manhunt ended with the arrest and jailing of an unemployed sheet metal mechanic caught mutilating the boot on his Camaro. Reginald Johnson, drunk and angry at his wife's desertion for a mariachi trumpet player, was damned by occupation and possession of the proper hardware. As Johnson languished in jail, kept there by circumstantial evidence and an angry city hall, Jason launched a major campaign. Indignant that the police chief should be publicly gloating over the capture of a man so obviously not the real BootBlaster, so lacking in style and ability, Jason went all out, even signing his work—two red B's sprayed on the street beside each liberated wheel. Within a week, aided by relaxed police pressure, he was able to score twenty-three more boots, enough to get Johnson released—quietly—by an embarrassed police department. Jason went back to ground. In even the most inflationary of times it would be hundreds of years before the interest on his disembodied twenty-eight dollars equaled the money he caused to flow from the city of Los Angeles to the factories of Stramp-Newton. Satisfied, he bolted the torch to the bottom of the mural.