L.A.R.P. Towing, LLC

Dylan Hostetter, Opinions and Humor Editor

I hate driving; I absolutely loathe it. Between all the cars, bikers and pedestrians, city streets are a wasteland. People walk in front of cars, cars mow down bikers and bikers crash into parked cars. It’s a never-ending game of Rock, Paper, Scissors and no one comes out on top.

My first week in the city, I swore off driving — not that I had much luck walking either. Within 10 minutes I had already stepped in front of a passing cyclist, gotten the finger and moved on with my day. Bike lane, “shmike” lane. Nonetheless, I have a car; I might not like it, but I need it.

Grocery trips, for instance, would be practically impossible without it. The last time I walked down the street carrying grocery bags, one of them burst and sent half a dozen cans of Chef Boyardee Mini Ravioli rolling down the street. After catching my breath from sprinting the two blocks to retrieve them, I decided I would suck it up and start driving to the grocery store.

My car is conveniently parked in a secure underground lot below my apartment. It’s safe, secure and out of sight — at least that’s what I thought. One fateful Sunday morning as I went to get into my car for a grocery run, I noticed something slightly alarming — it was missing.

I immediately ran to the leasing office to let them know my car had either been stolen or spontaneously evaporated — for some reason, to me, the latter seemed more realistic — but they told me it had actually been towed. Towed! They towed my car! But of course, they surely had a good reason.

“We just felt like it,” the woman at the front desk told me. “We can do what we want.”

She then passed me a business card with the information of the towing company. It read “L.A.R.P. Towing, we’ve got your car you loser.” It was the most antagonistic business card I had ever read, but at least it had a number at the bottom for me to call.

In a broken British accent, the man who answered told me it would be $225 cash to get my car back and that the next available appointment would be at 8 p.m. 

Who picks up their car from a towing company at 8 o’clock at night? That is a daytime activity. It would be like golfing at night, it just doesn’t make sense. Plus, it would be much more dangerous to drunk drive a golf cart in the dark.

I had no choice but to agree to their ridiculous pick-up time for fear they would increase their price. I could barely afford to pay $225 in the first place. I really considered just letting them keep the thing because once I paid to get it back it would be of no real use to me — it’s not like I could afford to go grocery shopping anymore. 

I arrived right on time at the address they gave me and was surprised to see that instead of a run-down office building or a retrofitted shotgun house, there stood what I can only imagine was a condemned mini-golf castle. On the front was a poorly painted sign that read “L.A.R.P. Towing, you found us loser, now pay us.”

I got in the surprisingly long line of other people there to pick their cars up at 8 p.m. and waited patiently for my turn. Finally, when I reached the window, I was greeted by a man in a full suit of Arthurian knight’s armor.

“Slaying dragons not paying well, huh?” I said.

I couldn’t see his expression behind his face shield, but I could intuit there was no smile. After passing him my ID, I was let through a small door in the gate to retrieve my registration from my glove compartment. Once through, I entered into a large, dimly lit gravel parking lot.

At the far back end, I spied my car, but between it and I was something very strange: a group of 20 to 30 middle-aged men dressed in full armor with swords, shields and battle axes. Not knowing what else to do, I walked towards them.

As I approached, they all turned and stared at me. One of the more timid-looking men even raised his shield. To break the tension, I jovially asked a question.

“Are you guys LARPers?”

There was a murmur among the men until one of them said, “No, it’s not LARPing, it’s better. We’re beating the crap out of each other with real swords.”

“But isn’t the business named ‘L.A.R.P. Towing?’” I asked.

“That’s an acronym,” he stuttered. “LARPing At Rear Parking.”

“You just said LARPing.”

“It’s different, man,” he said.

I’d had enough by that point, so I retrieved my registration from my car and went back to the window. There, the knight filled out the receipt while I watched through the chain link fence as the men began to battle each other. Those guys weren’t lying, they were the real deal — I think I saw somebody get impaled on a DIY welded lance.

As I passed over my $225, the knight stopped me. 

“That money’s no good here, we only accept bezants. That will be 225 bezants.”

“Bezants?” I asked, bewildered.

“Or 4,500 groats. That about evens out.”

“Where am I supposed to get bezants?”

“There’s an ATM there across the street,” he said, pointing to a lonely ATM lit by a single street lamp in the middle of an empty parking lot. I guess I shouldn’t call it empty because there was a long line of armor-dressed men and women waiting to withdraw their desired amount of bezants.

After standing in yet another line, I put in my banking information and the machine spit out about 40 pounds of gold coins. I didn’t have anything to carry them in, so I scooped them off the ground and made a sack out of the front of my shirt.

Ambling back across the street, I dumped the pile of money on the window ledge.

“Sorry, appointments are over. You’ll have to come back in the morning,” the knight said.

Before I could plead my case he had already slammed down a metal door in my face. Around that time, the group of parking lot LARPers were leaving through the gate and packing their things into their cars. One of them waved me down as he walked past.

“You should come for lessons sometime, man. We’re here on Tuesdays and —”

“Let me stop you right there,” I said. “I’m not doing that.”

I decided then and there that they could just keep my car — it’s just not worth the trouble. I can walk to the grocery store just as well as I can drive there. Maybe I can even use some of my bezants and invest in some tote bags.