METER MADNESS

Just at the last second, Nan Van Horn heard the quarter humming in the air and ducked. Hurled from 75 feet away, it whizzed past and knocked a chunk of stucco off the wall behind her.

She was lucky. Other Newport Beach parking control officers have been punched, smoke-bombed and nearly run over by people irate about parking tickets. And on top of the constant profanity, grating lyrics from the Beatles’ song about “Lovely Rita” the meter maid, there is the endearing bumper sticker, “Meter Maids Eat Their Young.”

“This job isn’t for the timid,” said Van Horn, 29, a freckled, strawberry blonde with a no-nonsense manner. “How many people like to get tickets?”

Shifting into third gear as she accelerated toward Coast Highway, the six-year veteran said she was glad the department junked the old Cushman scooters and bought cars with four wheels. “They were real easy to shake if someone got mad and was trying to push you over,” she said.

Although most of the officers are women, don’t call them meter maids. They’re parking control officers.

Six full-time officers and nine part-timers (for the busy summers) prowl the streets of this seaside community. Last year they wrote 120,000 tickets--an average of almost two tickets per capita--bringing in more than $1.5 million to the city.

“It’s like being with the I.R.S.--you’re not very popular,” said Lisa Mitchell, who recently left the Newport force after three years. She now works for an investment company.

On July 4, Mitchell was helping a CHP officer set up flares when she turned around and saw smoke billowing from her car. Someone had dropped a smoke bomb through the rear window. “The car smelled of sulfur for two weeks and had to be professionally cleaned,” she said.

If anyone asked what she did for a living, Mitchell answered that she worked for the city. “I usually didn’t tell people because they’d start booing,” she said.

But out there on the streets of Newport and in the maze of alleys along the beaches, where officers put themselves on the front line of the parking wars, irate citizens sometimes fight back with more than booing. And not just in Newport.

In 1985, the Newport Beach Police Department considered arming its parking control officers with Mace. After Newport Beach police had arrested eight people in the previous two years for assaulting parking officers, the department surveyed other Southern California beach communities about the problem.

Responses ranged from an average of at least 10 assaults a year in Santa Monica and Seal Beach to five a year in Huntington Beach and none in Laguna Beach. San Diego reported an average of eight a year.

Newport decided against Mace. “Instead, we got a crash course in self-defense training,” groused one officer. “It was like those CPR classes you take and forget a year later.”

Horror Stories Abound

The officers know they are despised. They have heard the 1985 story of the meter maid in Miami who put three parking tickets on a battered car before noticing the next day that the driver was dead. Or the story of the San Francisco meter maid who towed a hearse containing a body from in front of a hospital after the driver stopped to get a death certificate.

Their powder-blue shirts and navy-blue shorts inspire an extraordinary and irrational loathing far out of proportion to the cost of a $17 ticket.

Two years ago, a Newport officer was ticketing a car parked in front of a fire hydrant when the owner arrived, jumped into the car and rammed the officer’s knee three times. When the officer radioed for help, the woman got out of her car and sat on the hood.

“Where’s the blood?” she demanded. “It’s your word against mine. There’s no blood or skin on my bumper.”

And the year before, according to police reports, a 180-pound man attacked a woman officer for ticketing someone else’s car.

Asked afterward what provoked him, the man said, “I don’t like cops. And I didn’t hit that whore. I threw a milkshake on her.”

She’s Heard It All

Van Horn, once rescued by a police helicopter after a parking valet ripped her ticket book away, has heard and seen it all. She shrugs it off.

“I’m just not sympathetic anymore. You deal with the same thing every day. They took it upon themselves to park that way. It’s their fault, not my obligation to look after them.”

During a hot Sunday in July she was unfailingly polite while driving up and down Seashore Drive doling out citations that cost the bearer anywhere from $17 for an expired meter to $52 for illegally parking in a handicapped zone.

Until about noon. A man so enraged that blood vessels seemed about to pop on his temple, insisted that she write a ticket for a Jeep parked legally, as it turned out, near his apartment building.

“Nice attitude you have,” he yelled in her window when she told him the Jeep was legal.

‘I’m Doing Some Good’

“What bothers me is I try to be nice, and they come off and tell me I have an attitude problem,” she said, pulling away. “He had no right to talk to me like that.”

A neighbor, who stepped outside, called after her, “He’s a big jerk, don’t worry about it.”

Van Horn sees her work now as trying to bring order to chaos. “You get people parking so crazy, even with us (giving tickets),” she said. “If we weren’t here, it would be a disaster. I feel like I’m doing some good.”

Still, it takes time to become accustomed to the steady abuse.

“Most people in their daily lives are not called names,” said Melinda Rogers, ticketing in the parking lot at the foot of Newport Pier. “The first time a lady called me an expletive, I cried. After a while, though, you realize they’re not attacking you personally.”

Even when the officers aren’t being insulted, they’re often being conned.

Pat Eisenberg, 37, a warm, wise-cracking officer who went to college and worked as a bartender and saleswoman before marriage, four children and her latest career punching out parking tickets, knows the con business cold.

Sampler of Excuses

Some of the more typical ones:

- Jamming a parking meter. “People think they won’t get a ticket,” she said. “They’re wrong.”

- Putting an old ticket on the windshield or taking a ticket from another car. “They think we’re idiots and don’t know which cars we’ve cited.”

- Young beachgoers borrowing a grandparent’s disabled sign.

- “I was just getting change.”

- “I was just checking the waves.”

- Driving away before the parking officer can put the ticket on your windshield won’t work, either. “We’ll just mail it,” Eisenberg said.

- And don’t expect to escape a ticket by leaving the car’s emergency flashers on.

“Everybody has an excuse,” she said.

Hard to Revoke Tickets

A common misconception is that parking control officers can cancel tickets, Eisenberg said. It is now almost impossible, she said, because her immediate supervisor and then a captain at the Police Department must also approve the reason for doing so.

Eisenberg, who like Van Horn is married to a Newport Beach police officer, has enjoyed a relatively frictionless two years as a parking officer. But she said, “One guy yelled so loud I was deaf all afternoon. If my children behaved so poorly, they’d spend the afternoon in a corner.”

She described the job as mostly public relations. “You have to be able to defuse a situation,” she said. “I work not to get the abuse. Anyway, you get twice as many positive as negative remarks.”

Kim Miller, 25, had a different experience. At 18, she drove out of the police building off Jamboree Road onto the Newport streets with her brand new leather ticket pad. Six years later she returned to the building for good, with an ulcer.

Moved to Desk Position

“I wouldn’t go back for anything,” said Miller, now the traffic division secretary. “The doctor wouldn’t let me work anymore. I had an ulcer from the job. It was very painful.”

A fellow officer said Miller was “too sensitive” during her stint on the streets. “She couldn’t handle it very well with people yelling at her all the time. She’d yell back and cry.”

The constant abuse was hard to take, Miller said. “Pretty soon it wears you down,” she said. “It’s not worth it to me being outside and getting beat up. People really feel we do that on purpose just to them. Like I just didn’t like them.”

Van Horn likes the job. “To me it’s a very professional job,” she said. “Being out on my own. Not being cooped up at a desk. You’re free, on your own and able to make decisions on your own.”

Then with a grin, she said, “Besides, how many people can be at the beach in shorts making $11.63 an hour?”