My father-in-law was a famous musician. His band was huge in the early 00s, but even now after they’ve broken up, to walk around with him is to hear strangers yell his name. From across the street, out the windows of cars, down the aisle at the supermarket. The stories of the band are wild, but my father-in-law is always absent in their retellings. Fame was never the thing for him. There’s one bordering on myth about the band partying backstage at the Sydney Big Day Out with Blink 182 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it was my wife’s 5th birthday. He got out of there as fast as he could, to cut the cake and tuck her into bed with a story and a gentle kiss on the forehead. He’s a wonderful man, and as the writer of all the songs, he gets by comfortably.
He’s dabbled in plenty of things since. He doesn’t need the money of course, he’s the type of hippy that never wears shoes for God’s sake, but he has all this free time. He wrote and released a collection of poetry, but it never captured him. He produced some albums for up-and-coming bands, but came to realise that new music didn’t excite him. Believe it or not, the thing that captured his attention was doing deliveries for a local brewery. They didn’t mind the no shoes thing. They gave him a refrigerated van, and he would drive around dropping off beers. This is where we found his second great talent after being a frontman. Confirmed it anyway; it had always been there, hiding in plain sight.
I was part of the family at this point, and between jobs, so he asked if I wanted to tag along and see how life on the road suited me. At dawn we pulled into the loading bay of the brewery, before heading out to Picton so we could make our way back through south-west Sydney. The first drop was still early, so there weren’t many cars about. The second drop off in Camden is where I first noticed it. We were driving along the main road, approaching the target, a hotel bottleshop. All the street parking was taken. The cars were jammed in, bumper to bumper. Then, right out the front of the shop, an old lady puts on her indicator and pulls out onto the street, leaving us a prime position.
“That’s pretty fucking lucky!” I laughed, but old mate driving shook his head. “That’s normal,” he yawned.
The rest of the day was a procession of perfect parking spaces. Most of the time, they were already there when we arrived, but a couple of times cars pulled out as we showed up. One time, council workers waved us in to a freshly painted bay; they had just packed up their roadworks for the afternoon. I was amazed, to the point that towards the end of the day, in the hustle and bustle of the Inner West, I was cheering and whooping every time we swept into yet another perfect spot. He was completely nonplussed. There had to be something to this.
* * *
I ended getting a job in the city, so my delivery days were short. The magic of the parking stayed in my head for a long while though. On the odd occasion that we all went out to a family event, I watched with awe as he would pull up out the front of the restaurant or one of the other relative’s houses. It didn’t matter if it was a busy street or a small suburban lane, it was always perfect. Nobody else seemed to notice.
At some point I mentioned something to my wife. At first she dismissed it, but two or three weeks later, after spending the day running errands with her dad, she came back home, eyes wide like dinner plates.
“Everywhere we went! Every fucking time!”
She agreed, there had to be something to it.
* * *
The wife and I thought it through, and realised that it must be something to do with the way his body was grounded, and the way that the energy then flowed through the car. We figured we could test something, like his hair or his toenails as they might have transient properties. He would never agree though, and my mother-in-law would probably disown me for asking. She gets funny with bodily stuff; all the stubble from his face, his fingernails and toenails, any hair from his brush, they’re all wrapped up in newspaper and burnt in the incinerator. So we were at an impasse.
We were over at their place one Sunday evening, to watch his beloved Parramatta Eels on the new television he’d bought, when my wife offered to go and get us a beer. I didn’t think much of it, but later when I hopped into the car to drive home, there on the passenger side was the bundle of newspapers. At first we joked about it, but stopped laughing when our grumpy old neighbour waved at us as he drove down the street in his beat up, rust-covered Holden HG. We parked right out the front of our place, the first time the space was free in a touch over four months.
* * *
The wife is an artisan. She makes ceramic; plates, bowls, mugs, and odd little erotic statues that double as salt and pepper shakers. She also fossicks for leaves, flowers, and dead insects, then casts them into resin to make jewellery. She started to experiment. First, she hid nail clippings amongst the petals of pressed flowers that she made into dangling amulets. Residual ash was used for a smokey effect as the resin was setting. Tied up with a little leather thong, they were kitsch and quirky and lovely. They felt powerful, almost warm when you held them. We decided to start testing them out.
We purchased tickets to a concert at the Opera House. Vivid was on, and we knew the streets would be packed and that parking would be a nightmare. We hung our parking charm from the rear vision mirror and set out. The traffic was horrendous as we expected, but as we got to the roundabout at the end of Macquaire street, starting to feel disheartened, a security guard picked us out of the traffic.
“Youse going to the concert?”
“Yeah, just looking for somewhere to park.”
He pointed through the bollards onto the forecourt of the Opera House steps. “I need to move the van for a coupla hours, but I need someone to mind the spot.” We agreed. The other security parted the crowds and opened up a space for us to pass through. The van was shifted with a friendly wave, and we ended up parked where we could see the light installations on the Harbour Bridge and the white sails of the Opera House through the windscreen of our car.
I figured out a way to turn a profit from these good luck charms. Down the road from our place is a Greek orthodox church, and there are two men that set up a little stall there on Sundays to sell trinkets. It’s mainly ceramic evil eyes and other little knick-knacks. We walk past them often. One day we stopped for a chat and told them that we made talismans, particularly effective for finding parking spots. They were sceptical, so we told them to try a couple out. Next weekend when we walked past, they asked for as much stock as they could get their hands on.
* * *
The consequences weren’t evident at first, but after a few months they began to show. It was the Greek church first. Every Sunday all the parishioners would arrive, and for one reason or another all the residents of the nearby houses felt compelled to visit relatives or drop into cafes or whatever else. The traffic around the area was bedlam before the morning service, and in the afternoon when the service was finished, the streets were deadly quiet and empty.
Word of mouth must have been spreading. The two fellas paid us in cash for what they sold, and the amount they charged was skyrocketing. They constantly demanded more stock, meanwhile they handed over larger and larger lumps of cash as payment. We were making excuses where we could to visit the in-laws, one of us distracting them while the other scraped what they could out of their backyard incinerator. We were getting resin delivered to our house weekly, then twice a week, then daily. I was stepping back at work in order to help with the process.
Not long after that the problems started appearing on the news. Nobody could make sense of it, but the CBD was starting to develop strange traffic patterns. Folks would pull into parking spots, only to pull back out onto the road again so the car behind could park. The media were likening the phenomena to the death spirals that ants get stuck in when they lose their pheromone trails and start to follow each other instead. It was observed in Penrith, in Parramatta, in Newtown, and even in
Newcastle and Wollongong. Productivity was plummeting and people were losing their jobs for their erratic behaviour, explaining to puzzled journalists that they were compelled to rush back to their vehicles and move them at all hours of the day. On the plus side, there was an uptick in visits to nursing homes, art galleries and charity shops as those driven to vacate their parking spots found ways to kill the time.
* * *
A royal commission was ordered because of the drops in economic activity. The craze had hit Canberra and the PM had missed an important meeting when his driver had pulled into a spot, and then back out of it again before letting anybody out of the vehicle. The two blokes outside the church went to ground amidst the publicity, but there was no paper trail that linked them to us. We stopped making the charms obviously.
Governments were committing billions to public transport as a way to stop the problem, but it was the fires that accelerated the end of the nightmare. We’d taken the charms out of our car ages beforehand in case somebody suspected us. One day I noticed a burning smell coming from the garage where I had stashed it. Turns out that something in the resin had a slow reaction with the ash we had sprinkled throughout the charms. It would get progressively warmer until it caught fire. We were lucky, we only lost a box of rags. Others were less so. Whole cars went up, and the burnt out
shells could be seen on most streets. Worse than that, cars parked in garages burnt down entire houses, and the afternoon air was often filled with acrid, chemical smelling smoke. Several people lost their lives. Soon however, traffic around the area started to return to normal. People had stopped driving anyway. The wife and I burnt all the evidence that we had ever been the cause of this, in the in-laws incinerator of all places. We had managed to make $70K from the endeavour, but we didn’t know what to do with the cash without raising suspicion, so it remains under our bed.
* * *
I think the country’s a better place for it when it comes down to it. The investment in public transport has made Sydney more like a European city, and hundreds of the streets are walkable now. There are bike lanes everywhere and folks are cycling instead of driving nowadays.
Some of us still drive. My wife and I do. We each have a ziplock bag in our glovebox with a handful of nail clippings. Nobody notices that we always get the parking spaces that we want.
