Jigga What?
Up until yesterday, the coolest license plate I ever saw was on a silver Jaguar I spotted in the West Village, on one of those ancient, cobblestone, Victorian streets, where you expect to see Sherlock Holmes and Prince Albert conversing under gaslight with Jack the Ripper. It was one of those streets where it is eternally 11 am on a Sunday, well-dressed intellectuals sipping well-brewed lattes and completing another well-constructed Times crossword puzzle. The silver Jaguar was parked mere inches from a fire hydrant, because when you have a silver Jaguar, a $110 ticket is a mere pittance. The license plate: 3. That’s it, in its entirety. What could better display entitlement and privilege than having a single digit license plate? If your license plate is one single character, perfectly centered on the aluminum, you surely have never even been to the DMV, waited for five hours for your plates, and had to pay the $35 registration fee by check. I saw that plate and knew, there went a man of distinction and class.
Then yesterday, while driving on the BQE, I saw a license plate that completely trumped '3'. I was making the mad dash from the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to the McGuinness Blvd. exit, trying to zip across four lanes in roughly thirty feet of road length. So I'm amazed that I even noticed it, but then again, how could I not? Once I finally made it to the exit lane, I spotted the license plate in front of me said BROOKLYN. Great googly moogly! The street value of that plate must be incalculable. You know how many millions of Bucktown residents would kill for that plate? You could get Jay-Z to pony up seven figures easy, plus a stake Roc-a-Fella, and he might even throw in Beyoncé, just to get a chance to bid on it.
So who had this mystical emblem? Was it a pimped out Escalade? Was it a classic Cadillac? A maroon IROC with a two-tiered spoiler? No sir. It was a mid-80s Chevy Nova, baby blue paint faded into a pale gray. And it was driven by a large, bearded Hasid. Ownership of the plates, I'm sure, was as old as the car itself, probably dating to the time when the average schmoe could first get personalized plates. I wonder if this man even knows what he has. Surely he must garage the car, or else the plates would get stolen constantly, if no reason other than pure animal rage that such a shitty car has such killer tags.
BROOKLYN got off at our exit, which considering the large Satmar population in Williamsburg did not surprise me. I lost track of him somewhere near Meserole Street, where the battered panels of his minivan faded behind me, and me and my Oldsmobeast traveled under more pedestrian identification.