Summer Road Block

A summer scheme goes awry.

The setup for this whole scheme was remarkably simple.

$25 for a neon-yellow vest and light-up traffic control wand.

$100 for a pack of orange traffic cones with heavy rubberized bases and reflective white tape.

Another $100 for miscellaneous signage.

There was a small medical office building with a decent-sized parking lot right off the main thoroughfare to the beach. It naturally had signs posted at the entrance to the lot, stating that it was for customer parking only, and violators would be towed at their own expense. They weren’t open on weekends, and had run a chain across the entrance to the parking lot just as an extra measure of security. But the cheap padlock that held it in place didn’t put up much of a fight when facing down my industrial bolt cutters, and I had the chain retracted in no time.

I hung up my own signage over the existing parking notices, so the lot now advertised, “All day beach parking: $20, CASH ONLY.”

I slipped on the reflective vest and set up the cones to make it look like a legit turn lane was being created for anyone who wanted to park in this unreasonably cheap parking lot.

The $20 wasn’t an arbitrary number; it was low enough to compete with the meters out along the street while also giving beach-goers the added bonus of not having to run back to their car to refill the parking meter every two hours. It also happened to be about $10 cheaper than the other all-day parking lots in the near vicinity, so I didn’t have to wait too long before my first customers showed up.

A beige Mercedes Sprinter van with a surfboard rack tied to the top was my first customer, followed by a Lexus RX450 carrying a young couple with all the trappings of a beach picnic, and then an older model Toyota Sienna with a bunch of college kids that piled out and wheeled a keg toward the shoreline. In less than an hour, all fifty parking slots were filled, and I had $1,000 in my pocket.

Which would have been a good day’s work, but I felt like I could do a little better.

I called a buddy of mine who worked at a tow service and asked if he’d give me a finder’s fee in exchange for a tip about where he could find a bunch of illegally parked cars. He told me they’d only make about $50 net per car towed, so his boss could only authorize a finder’s fee of $500 on fifty cars in the same lot.

I told him that was fine and quickly removed all of my signage so that the lot full of cars was clearly parked in the “customers only, violators will be towed” lot and counted my $500 that my buddy handed me in assorted and crumpled bills.

As soon as they were gone, I put up my signs again and parked another fifty cars, making another $1,000 and bringing my daily total to $2,500.

It probably would have been prudent to quit while I’m ahead and just pack up and leave at that point. I used some of my cones to block off metered street parking as people vacated the spots throughout the afternoon, and then rented those out for $20 as well. I would have made another $500 from that too, if one of the last vehicles coming down the road hadn’t been a police cruiser.

Parking temporarily in the driveway of my homemade beach parking lot, the officers got out of their vehicle and approached, asking me to show them my permit for running my parking business. I tried bluffing them with a story about how I knew the owner of the office building who gave me permission to make some money on the side, but I didn’t have a good reason for why I was blocking off and leasing metered parking spaces on the street, which belonged to the city.

I definitely didn’t have a permit for that.

And so, I spent the rest of a beautiful summer weekend in a holding cell, awaiting arraignment. Something that - even with a public defender - I could only imagine would cost me well in excess of the $3,000 I made from the scheme in the first place. Maybe I got a little too ambitious; flew a little too close to the sun.

If anyone asks just call me the Icarus of the main street beach parking hustle.

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Word Count: 757

Prompt: Please write a story or poem that has the title: "Summer Road Block." Please select "Transportation" as one of your genres.

Written for: "The Writer's Cramp"