Acuras, Broncos, Chevys, Dodges. New cars, old cars, trucks, beaters. They come in like bad weather, towed by a man whose name is not Fenwick, no matter how he answers the phone. Fenwick is dead, but we'll get to that.
All the crippled, stolen or abandoned vehicles, the road trash of the American dream, winds up here, the backwater zone-it-out-of-here realm of junkyards, razor wire and scrap metal. This particular outpost is a small automotive graveyard on an industrial back street in Temple Hills. It's called Fenwick Towing. The Barnabas Pit looms behind, a monstrous hump of dirt and mud and gravel with a bulldozer crawling across the top.
Joshi, who owns Fenwick Towing in Temple Hills, rolls on another call. "It's a rough business, but he's a very fair man," says friend Leon Skobic.
(Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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These cars come from everywhere. Guys boost them from parking lots, gas stations and driveways, after midnight and in broad daylight, hey-ya and floor it, Ja Rule on the CD. Then they wreck them or get busted or leave them at the curb. Other people crash, run away from their own car in the middle of the night, drunk or high or stupid or all three. Cars burst into flames behind shabby apartment buildings, as if by some spontaneous combustion of poverty and meanness.
And the abandoned cars. They get left on some beat-up street like a mutt in the alley, the prescription bottles and newspapers and DVDs panting expectantly on the front seat like their owners are coming right back, except that they never are, and you get stuck with them on your lot.
The afternoon sun weakens and fades.
"Fenwick," says the proprietor who is not Fenwick. He's on a cell, standing among the dead cars. It is the end of the day and the man on the phone is up at the "office," which is a run-down red brick house half a mile away. His name is Kenny and Kenny wants his stolen car back.
Fenwick says: "I told you I was coming. I told your girlfriend I was coming. I cannot keep coming if you keep calling me."
Kenny can wait.
Nobody wants to do this but everybody loves to hate the guys who do. They have to pay this guy to get their own damn car back, unless they don't have the money, which means they don't get the damn car back.
Grimy fingernails, dirty hands, angry people. Cash preferred.
The tow guy, this alleged Fenwick -- his real name is Rupendra K. Joshi -- is 62. He started in a hamlet in India and wound up running a tow truck outfit next to a dump in the U.S. of A. What a country.
For 20 years, Joshi has been making a living on $125 tows, lift charges, lowering charges, $35-a-day storage fees and a few hundred per, selling junkers to the yard -- working some of the worst hours known to mankind, in the rain, the heat, the 3 a.m. wreck on the Beltway. A lot of the business is taking calls on rotation from police in about a five-square-mile patch of Prince George's County to come get whatever heaps people have left in the road. You want that job? You know how people treat you? You sit in those cars and see the lives people lead. It's a graduate-level course in the lower ends of American life.
Like the stolen cars. Prince George's is the stolen-car capital of Maryland. Fifty cars boosted a day out here, nearly half of all the cars stolen in the entire state, and why? One reason is, in Prince George's or elsewhere, people leave their keys in the ignition, as in 30 percent of all cars stolen. People do stuff, it's so stupid you can't believe. Was Darwin right? Did we evolve? You tow enough cars, you see the rich, the poor, the forlorn and the criminally stupid for two decades, and you think, you gotta be kidding.
Or the knuckleheads who drive a beater and think nobody's going to steal such a thing. Here's a partial list of abandoned stolen cars Joshi towed the first three weeks of March: '91 Camry, '89 Volvo, '98 Acura, '94 Crown Victoria. Many go unclaimed; because the tags are expired and they're not able to meet inspection, the owners can't afford to bring them up to standard, so they just leave them. What do they do then? Like the guy whose car burst into flames in the parking lot in the middle of the night. Jamar, his name was. He paid $300 for it. It was going to cost him $195 to get it off the lot. He walked out of the office without the car, and you wonder what he's going to do now.
Joshi kicks the tires of a '93 Jeep Cherokee in the back lot. The wind is pushing his black and gray ponytail from under a greasy wool cap. Glasses and a thick silver beard cover a leathery face. His work uniform consists of battered jeans, muddy boots, a T-shirt underneath a long-sleeve shirt underneath a checked blue-black vest underneath a black parka. He is drawing on yet another Dutch Masters, one of the sluglike cigars he gets from dozens of boxes stashed around his office.
He considers the case of Kenny and his girlfriend, the ones who have called 10 times in the past half-hour about the '94 Crown Vic, and relights the stogie. To hurry; what for? There are always more cars, more hours, everything falling apart.
