James W. Gee Jr., owner of Youngin’s Towing, has not always had the best relations with his customers—they’ve been so bad, in fact, that Youngin’s has recently had its business license revoked by the city. Nor is his record with cops spotless. In June 2004, Gee was so belligerent to a 5th District cop that he was arrested for disorderly conduct. According to an arrest report and court documents, a Youngin’s truck had been parked in front of a police maintenance shop near the Youngin’s lot on Montana Avenue NE. Cars couldn’t get in or out, and Officer M.W. Schaeffer began writing a ticket. As Schaeffer placed the ticket on the windshield, Gee and two employees ran toward him. “Write all the tickets you want, you white cracker motherfucker,” Gee yelled, according to Schaeffer’s report. “I’ll get you.” When Schaeffer called for assistance, the towing proprietor turned back.

Schaeffer and his backup went to arrest Gee at Youngin’s. When they told him he was under arrest for disorderly conduct, he replied, “What you gonna arrest me for?” and walked behind the counter. Six other Youngin’s employees pressed into the room. When the police tried to cuff him, Gee backed against the wall, waving his arms and yelling. More cops arrived on the scene before the arrest was made.

Later, he filed a pair of lawsuits against Schaeffer and other cops in federal court for $185 million, alleging civil-rights and other violations. Both cases were eventually dismissed.

Gee’s appeal of his license revocation was slated to go before an administrative-law judge on May 31.

Saturday night, I was drinking beer and eating steak with my neighbors. The host kept saying he wanted to fatten me up; he acted hurt when I didn’t finish my potato. In an hour, I went to my room to do some work. My windows were open, though, and soon I heard so much commotion from outside that I had to investigate. According to my neighbors, this is what happened:

Five minutes after I left, some kids from the Potomac Gardens project lined up on the other side of G Street SE. They threw eggs, rocks, and bottles at my neighbors. Then they retreated, went down an alley, and did it again. Between these two volleys, blue jeans got splattered, one $300 pair of shoes was ruined, but no one was hurt. One man lost enough of his cool that he chunked a bottle at the kids and chased them down the street. The woman with the ruined shoes called 911.

Forty-five minutes later, an officer showed up in a foul mood. Though it was dark, and he’d come too late to chase the eggers, he berated the woman for not providing a better description: All she had been able to say was that they were a group of black youths.

Today, the city assembled inspectors, police officers, and reporters for “Operation Pitbull,” a crackdown on shady operations along Bladensburg Road NE. The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs wanted to catch used-car dealers who were screwing their customers. What happened was less spectacular.

At one used-car lot, inspectors learned that a federal task force had arrived on a previous day and seized a number of autos. Most of the cars on the premises didn’t have license plates, and some were stored illegally in the public alley. “This ain’t no chop shop up in here,” said employee Jerry Robertson. “It’s legit. Everything’s straight.” After inspectors wrote infractions and asked pointed questions, Operation Pitbull moved on.

At a second dealership, auto-unit officers examined a Frankenstein job in which the back end of one car was being welded to the front end of another. All the officials in the garage agreed that this salvage was illegal. But the owner wasn’t around, and the mechanics sat in the shade, pleading ignorance. This shop stayed open, too.

DCRA did close one business that day: an AAMCO Transmissions outlet, a clean-looking garage that happened to be storing a D.C. government truck and two Water and Sewer Authority vehicles. The AAMCO’s owner, Eung Chung, didn’t have a certificate of occupancy that allowed him to store cars or perform some of his other services. He said he didn’t know that he was doing anything wrong. At least one official believed him.

“They’re gonna shut him down,” DCRA spokeswoman Karen-Siobhan Robinson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson told reporters.

“Oh, cool!” said one TV photographer. “What does that mean? They’re gonna lock the gate and walk him out in handcuffs?”

Chung drove off to apply for a new certificate of occupancy. The garage doors came down, and an employee grinned as he closed the gates.

CORRECTION, 5/24: The original post misspelled DCRA spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson’s name.

On television, James W. Gee Jr. of Youngin’s Towing looks tough but honest. If you treat him with respect, he says, he’ll treat you with respect. Viewers have no reason to believe otherwise. The only contrasts to Gee’s opinion are car owner LeRoy Atkins (you might remember him from our story) and Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs spokesperson Linda Argo, and neither one holds up against Gee’s smoldering self-assertion.

WJLA-TV’s Sam Ford frames his story as a question: Does Youngin’s really rip customers off, or are they just upset at Gee’s aggressive personality? Then he leaves it hanging through the rest of the time that he re-reports our story.

Context, please! He’s alleged to have cursed out an old woman (according to Valerie Mitchell Sigwalt), chopped up one man’s car (according to St. Lawrence Smith), and kept another car even after the city told him to let go (according to Robert Jacobs’s civil suit). When I interviewed him, he said that black people “don’t know how to conduct business,” while white people—like me—do.

Also unmentioned: Gee’s an ex-con. His record in D.C. Superior Court includes convictions for simple assault, disorderly conduct, and receiving stolen goods. He was charged more than two dozen times in the District and at least twice in Maryland.

Unlike many car owners with beefs with Youngin’s Towing, Michigan Park resident Kevin Williams actually wanted the controversial company to tow his car. The Infiniti coupe had broken down on Pennsylvania Avenue SE, and he needed a wrecker to take it to a service station on Alabama Avenue SE. According to a court complaint, the driver hoisted Williams’s car and started off in that direction, then he ran into a parked van. The impact detached Williams’s front bumper and broke his signal lights.

Youngin’s offered to repair it for free, but then Williams waited more than three months for the car to be ready. When it was finally done, he says, the front signal lights were still out, cheap paint covered the bumper, the steering column was in pieces, and the ignition didn’t work. He says Youngin’s owner James W. Gee told him he had to pay to have the ignition fixed. When Williams didn’t like that idea, Gee pushed his inoperable car into the street. Williams couldn’t drive away until a Youngin’s mechanic took pity on him and got a key to start it.

“It looks like a real S-H-I-T-T-Y job,” says Williams, 29, who has become the most recent car owner to sue Youngin’s in D.C. Superior Court. “To get that type of service done and to go through that is really hurtful.”

Williams filed his complaint May 8. Five days before that, Youngin’s appealed the city’s attempt to revoke its license. Gee’s company is under fire from the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which has already fined Youngin’s at least $4,000 for violations of the city’s towing laws.

Gee referred questions to his lawyer, Robert W. Mance, who said his client had no comment.

My neighbor sat shirtless in his yard on Mother’s Day. He had his vodka, his beer, his sausages, his pork chops, his chicken, and he had found a way to amuse himself.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said. “I’m just saying Happy Mother’s Day.” Then his voice got lower: “I’m just saying it to girls who don’t look like mothers.”

Capitol Hill yesterday was full of such women. Each would seem lost in her thoughts as she strolled past the yards bright with roses. Then the voice would boom out of nowhere: “Happy Mother’s Day!” And she would look up from her reflections and see this big-bellied roofer with demon tattoos grinning at her.

Most of the women just blushed. One of them thanked him but explained that she was not a mother. Then the neighbor began to chant lyrics from the metal band Total War. He performed long enough that I got bored with being told to “burn the church” and “crush the priest.” I was grateful when a new woman passed.

“Happy mother’s day!” he bellowed.

She called back: “Same to you!”

Last night in Wonderland’s beer garden, a drunken man chased his friends. He wanted them to hear the jokes he was telling, loudly: “What does a gay horse say? Haaaaaay. What does a straight horse eat? Haaaaaay. Three men were standing at the pearly gates. No, you listen to me. Three men were standing at the pearly gates…”

The other guys fled him from table to table, ducking under the benches. Anyone would want to get away from that. But Horse Guy and his posse settled at my table.

After several minutes of “_Haaaaay, haaaaay, haaaaay,” Horse Guy hurled an ashtray, and it shattered in front of a long-haired man in a Mickey Mouse jacket. Horse Guy just sat with a smug look as Mickey Guy started to get up. The posse tried to save him:

“Say you’re sorry!”

“Just say you’re sorry, man!”

“He’s serious!”

And finally Horse Guy turned around. “Are…you…serial?” he slurred.

“I’m pretty serial, man,” Mickey Guy said.

Murmuring apologies, praising Mickey Guy’s kindness, Horse Guy’s friends led him out.

A half-hour later, Horse Guy leaned over the fence and asked us to hit him. Mickey Guy jabbed a cigarette at his nose, but he wouldn’t fight. A man standing nearby wouldn’t either, not even when Horse Guy tried to involve him in a game of push-and-shove. Then the bouncer got in Horse Guy’s face, and he looked as if he would do it, he would really land that one good slug.

But he didn’t.

“Can you just understand?” Horse Guy said. “Can you just understand me?”

He kicked the fence loud enough for everyone to hear it.

I had a one-night stand in December with a woman who, once we were too far into things for a second thought, told me that she had been raped. She said she was clean, but when I didn’t hear from her again, I started to worry. I would wash my hands for too long in the bathroom and be afraid of touching my fly. So when Angela reported that Whitman-Walker Clinic was testing for free, I decided to quit hiding from God.

HIV and STD tests have two phases: They draw blood, then they take a urine sample. After the needle, I was waiting with a small group in a hall where the chairs faced each other. People who are about to pee in cups don’t want to make eye contact. But if we turned our eyes up the wall, we saw our own reflections in a plastic frame, and that was worse.

One man slouched against the wall in baggy clothes, with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. He was flipping through Cosmo or something. Though he never looked up from the page, we all could hear what he was saying:

“Beautiful. Oh, so beautiful. Look at that swimsuit.”

“Yes, gorgeous, man. Mmm. Here’s a girl doing ‘jinjitsu.’ Oh, no, no, wait, it’s not jinjitsu, it’s—what do you call it?—It’s yoga. She doing yoga.”

“She look Spanish. How come a Spanish girl doing yoga?”

We started to laugh. The guy looked up and enjoyed our approval, then his number was called. He said, “Bingo!” and walked away.

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One night in summer of 2002, I walked through the streets of my hometown, taking pictures. After I tried to capture a view of the U.S. flag flapping outside the federal courthouse, an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms followed me down the street, flashed his badge, and asked what I was up to. He never arrested me or took my film, but I didn’t appreciate his attention. I realized then that people who work security at government buildings don’t like me.

Take the Capitol Police officer who recently ordered me to the other side of the sidewalk. It was a bright Saturday, plenty of people were out, and I was not carrying anything suspicious; somehow he still needed to bark orders. He kept yelling until I was close enough to ask why I couldn’t go up Independence Avenue in the direction of my home. “We have a situation,” he said.

Then there was the earpiece guy at the National Gallery’s West Building who interrupted my enjoyment of some English landscapes to command that my shoulder-bag hang at my side, not over my back. “O…K…,” I said very slowly. But I was thinking, All right, you just let your guard down once, just once, and I’ll nab a painting faster than you can say Samuel Palmer. I couldn’t help it. This is the problem with being thought a menace: You start thinking like one. When people act as though you’re about to do something nasty that you would not ever do, you start to wonder if it would be fun.

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Retired D.C. cop Stuart Smith responds to the current edition of Suit Yourself, our weekly feature detailing lawsuits filed against the District, in which a Ward 5 man is suing local cops for assault and harrassment:

Possibly the worst thing about this case is the many hours that city employees (police supervisors and attorneys) have spent and will spend attempting to investigate these “allegations”.

This is not to say that citizens have never been victims of police abuse, or that those victims are nor due compensation, but if a citizen complains that, while speeding, he was stopped and issued a ticket, the officer’s captain will end up spending at least ten hours detailing his/her interviews of the complaining citizen, the officer or officers accused, and any number of putative witnesses. This is true even when the “complaint” doesn’t allege any violation of law or policy.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that this kind of suit distracts us from legitimate complaints.

Also, in my twenty-seven years on the MPD, I have never met an officer who could be cowed by hearing that a suspec’s sister (or father, brother or mother) was an attorney. Being the brother of a police official might be another matter.

Once in ninth-grade theater, we read short stories aloud. Mine was “Kaleidoscope” from Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. It drags on for pages and pages of marvelous description of men falling through space from their scrapped rocket. As they drift apart, each to die alone in a different corner of the sky, the men talk about life, settle their grudges, and accept their fates. It’s not a good thing to read to ninth-graders. Here I was lost in words that I still catch my breath to recall. Here were my classmates, wishing the rocket men would shut up and die. Well, I showed them. I read all of it. And among the many reasons that I didn’t get dates in ninth grade, this stunt takes a prominent place.

If Bradbury was no good for my social life then, he made up for it later. I started to realize in college that most of the people around me who liked books, liked his. And this was a bit of a revelation, because the authorities hid Bradbury from us. The words “science fiction” and “fantasy” got attached to his work, and those were enough to keep him out of textbooks, off reading lists, and away from classrooms, except where one of his more boring books is concerned. The Pulitzer board is right to recognize him, but it awards him a special citation in a way that still cheapens his legitimacy: “A special citation to Ray Bradbury for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” The poison is still there. We can’t simply call him an author of fiction, someone who made up things that often don’t fit a category.

Look at a sample of the other stories in The Illustrated Man. “The Other Foot” shows what happens when blacks and whites come separately to Mars. “The Veldt” describes two children who use the household entertainment system to kill their parents. “The Man” treats the arrival of a Messiah from the perspective of one who just missed him. Yes, many take place in the future, on other planets, on rocket ships, but many also take occur in the small towns of ’20s and ’America. His theme is not gadgets or magic; it is the glory and the horror of being human.

I say give him a prize, but don’t give him a label. What do you think?

When I saw Grindhouse, one of my friends kept pointing at a man far behind us in a hooded sweater. “It’s him!” she said. “It’s Nicholas Cage!” I wished she’d shut up. The last thing I care for is celebrity sightings, and what would Cage be doing anyway in the AMC Loews Georgetown theater? I tried to keep my eyes on the film, but now I didn’t want to. I wanted to stare up at the hooded man to see if he really was Nick Cage. “Why did you have to do that?” I wanted to say, and perhaps fling popcorn at her for putting my curiosity on alert. Then the movie was on. I lost myself to the strippers and the dead. Halfway through Grindhouse, we see a Rob Zombie trailer called “Werewolf Women of the SS.” It includes a cameo of Cage as Fu Manchu, making devilish gestures in front of a Nazi flag. At this provocation, my friend was at it again: “Did you see him? Did you see him? He’s really up there.” No peace.

We were leaving the theater. Cars rumbled on the overpass, people walked in dirty coats, and my friend was preparing her camera. I shook my head. One sees no celebrities in places like this. Then, through the glass doors, I noticed the man in the sweater, wearing a scarf, walking with a dark-haired woman. I gaped. This did, indeed, resemble the face I knew from Gone in 60 Seconds. Some young men approached them; I could see them talking, smiling, the hooded man giving a wave. The men came through the doors in satisfied awe. “Yeah,” one of them said. “It’s him.”

In 1995, Laverne Robinson was fired from his job as a sales manager at Ottenberg’s Bakery, one of the District’s biggest bread distributors. Six years later, he won a nearly $350,000 racial discrimination judgment from the D.C. Commission on Human Rights. Now, after another five years of litigation, a division of the D.C. Court of Appeals has said that Robinson can’t get that money. The reason? Ottenberg’s had offered him his old job back soon after his firing, and he refused to take it.

“I just couldn’t believe some of the things I heard [on the job],” Robinson says. “It was nothing for them—the black guys and the white guys—to be using racial slurs.” The commission ruled in Robinson’s favor in 2001 and awarded him $348,825 in damages, back pay, and front pay. Ottenberg’s appealed, and the appeals court reversed the decision in March.

“It is undisputed that Robinson had received favorable evaluations, promotions, and pay increases,” the judges wrote. “A finding that Robinson’s rejection [of the rehire offer] was objectively reasonable is not supported by the evidence.” An attorney for the bakery declined to comment, and now Robinson wants to be heard by the full appeals court.

“The division’s decision, as written, will harm not only Mr. Robinson,” his lawyers wrote in their petition for a rehearing, “but all other future victims of discrimination in this jurisdiction.”

I drank too much at the City Paper party last night, and I paid for it this morning, with the aching head and inability to think that come of getting too friendly with bad red wine. One of my first blurry thoughts—besides “Oh shit, it’s 10″ and “I need water”—was “I wish I was in New York.” Let me explain: I was not missing skyscrapers, glamour, or heaps of garbage; I was longing for a cheap breakfast.

I don’t have much money, and I don’t know how to cook. But during the month that I slept on friends’ couches in Manhattan and Brooklyn, I managed to live mostly off food items that cost about $1 each: 50 cent rolls and bagels and coffee, $1 samosas and pastries, $1.50 egg sandwiches and slices of pizza. I tried to keep track of East Village locations that advertised a full breakfast for less than $3; I couldn’t keep up with them all. It seemed that in the city whose cost of living puts even ours to shame, I could eat my fill and still have half of a $5 left over. (Drinking was another story.)

I came to the District expecting that well-prepared ala carte items could still be had for cheap. How wrong I was. Take Woodley Park and Adams Morgan, where I work. An egg-on-bagel sandwich at So’s Your Mom or International Cafe costs more than $3 with tax; add coffee to that, and most of your $5 is gone. A bagel does not sell for less than 75 cents, and if you want a good one, say at Heller’s Bakery, that little circle of dough is a dollar all by itself. This is to say nothing of pizza slices, pastries, or samosas, all overpriced.

I finished my $2 cup of coffee and $1 bagel at Murky Coffee on Capitol Hill. If I were in New York, I would be full of life-sustaining grease. But here I was full only of what Cervantes called “duelos y quebrantos“—gripes and grumblings.

To draw attention to our newly designed paper, all staffers are helping to hawk today’s issue at Metro stops and elsewhere. So I stood outside Union Station, with the men who were passing out the Express and the Examiner, and I shouted: “City Paper! Get your City Paper!”

I had to shout the name a few times before people believed me. “We get City Paper in the morning?” one woman asked. The other hawkers were gracious at my encroachment on their territory: Mr. Express made small talk; Mr. Examiner hawked a couple of papers for me and offered me a bottle of water.

These guys were pros. As the wind brought snowflakes, my hands were bare, and Messrs. Examiner and Express wore gloves. Also, their much thinner papers folded in half easily; mine didn’t. Sometimes people refused a paper because the wind had wrinkled its cover. Sometimes my advertising inserts would clatter to the ground, and I or Mr. Examiner or some poor reader would chase them around the sidewalk. Thank God we added staples.