COLUMN ONE : Driven Mad on Streets of Manhattan : A thousand officers patrol the curbs, and a parking ticket is handed out every two seconds. Worst of all is the trip to the auto pound.

They are always out there, urban vagabonds circling Gotham, eyes darting side to side, stomachs hardening into fists, lips cursing the fates. They are the anxious and the weary and, often as not, the tardy. They are the drivers who cannot find a place to park.

Each day, more than a million vehicles slog about Manhattan, just a finger of an island really, 13 1/2 miles top to bottom. The cross streets are narrow, the terrain pot-holed, the road crews always making an incision. The average speed, city officials say, is 7 m.p.h., all of it creep and lurch.

If the going is merely slow, the parking is absolutely impossible. New York does all it can to discourage the automobile. Parking signs are as complicated as railway timetables. More than 1,000 officers patrol the curbs. Some 15 million parking tickets are issued each year, one every two seconds.

Legendary among the hassles is a thing called alternate-side-of-the-street-parking, where the spaces on one side vanish for three hours every other day. Frenzied drivers must start their engines by an appointed time, often to move their cars only a few feet, double-parking opposite where they just were.

The private sector assists in dissuading auto travel. Garages here charge more per hour than anyone but the psychiatrists. A multitude of thieves help out, too. Car owners plead with them for compassion, affixing handmade signs to windshields: No radio . . . Nothing of value inside . . . You already got me . . . Doors unlocked, so please don’t break my windows.

Finally, there is the ultimate deterrent to motoring, a costly, maddening experience that befalls only the 400 sorriest drivers each day. It is foreshadowed in the italic print of the city’s parking regulations. Remember: All of New York City is a Tow-Away Zone .

And it means a dreaded excursion to Manhattan’s storied auto pound.

The prosperous businessman Daniel T. Scalzi overslept that morning. He is a corporate vice president for Paine Webber Inc., manager of its brokerage office on Park Avenue. Important guy, that Dan Scalzi.

This was a bad day for a slow start. He had a power breakfast to get to over at the restaurant Trattoria in midtown. Then there was a big 11 o’clock meeting, a $500,000 deal in the offing.

So he had to hustle. He slid into one of his four cars--the ’91 Mercedes 420SEL. He suffered the long drive to the city from his home in neighboring Westchester County. Damn this lousy traffic! Unbelievable.

Most days, he parks at an all-day garage near wherever he has lined up his final evening meeting. But there was no time for that. He was going to have to pay those exorbitant $15-an-hour rates at a lot near the restaurant.

He aimed his pricey car up 44th Street--and that’s when he saw it, a stunning oasis in the asphalt, this empty parking spot right across from Brooks Brothers, rare as a 75-point leap in the Dow.

“Too good to be true,” he told himself. But he went for it anyway, buttoned the coat of his dark pin-striped suit, gathered up his brown leather briefcase, pumped quarters into the meter.

Dan Scalzi was gone.

Donald Williams is one of the city’s best tow truck operators--untouched by the many scandals, the stealing of valuables from impounded cars and the carefree realigning of an auto’s front end in transit.

His covenant is with swiftness, and that is something of a necessity. Last year, traffic officers were confronted or assaulted 608 times on the job. Williams tries to disappear with a car in less than three minutes.

The great concern is “jumpers,” those drivers who charge across the curb like just-gelded bulls. They scoop their language right out of the gutter and occasionally toss in a punch for emphasis. A few leap into their cars and go limp as if they were some kind of parking Gandhi.

Nine years on the job, and with more than 10,000 tows notched, Williams still worries that someone will wring his neck. “A motorist is like a dog,” he said of his technique. “You must never show them any fear.”

Tow operators stick together on the busy and mean streets of midtown, chat on the radio, cheer each other on. A Jaguar or BMW is greeted back at the pound with hurrahs and high fives.

That is why Donald Williams was tickled to spot Dan Scalzi’s gray 420SEL. A ticket on its windshield was visible through the rear window. He pulled over, dropped his chains and hooks, latched the gear near the auto’s front wheels.

Quickly, a crowd assembled, which is the custom. The “sidewalk lawyers” enjoy the show. “Hey, why don’t you give him a break?” shouted one onlooker.

This was easy to rebut, with the auto in tow being a Mercedes. “This man can afford it,” Williams said, appealing to the class struggle that lives secretly in every human heart.

He jimmied open the auto, inserting a long metal rod inside a window. But then there was a problem. Damn these expensive cars! The transmission was locked with an anti-theft device; he couldn’t get the gearbox into neutral.

What to do? He radioed for his supervisor, Lt. Frank Dantone of the Transportation Department. The two men studied their options at the scene. The car couldn’t be towed from the rear because a truck had it blocked. “We better give up,” Williams said, heavy with regret.

What a pity, too, a Mercedes and all. For once, he wished the driver would suddenly come scrambling out. Then they could simply ask him for the keys.

Almost on cue, Dan Scalzi appeared, the sight of the tow truck a jolt that hit him between the eyes like the shovel of a snowplow. Up came the flaps from his corporate unflappability. “Hey, what are you doing?” he barked.

“Your car is being impounded for illegally parking,” Lt. Dantone said.

“Illegal? Where is the sign?”

“The signs are all up and down the street.”

And sure enough, one of them was nearby, though largely hidden from view behind the awning of a restaurant. “No Standing 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.” it admonished atop a complicated series of other prohibitions.

Daniel T. Scalzi, 43-year-old fast thinker, thought fast. He was a savvy stock broker, the world his to sell like Kool-Aid at a day camp. Maybe they had him dead to rights--and then again maybe he could wriggle his way out.

“The sign is obscured,” he insisted, the alibi rolling off his tongue as easily as a breath mint. “All you can read from here is the ‘p.m.’ part.”

This impromptu excuse floated off like a bubble, weightless amid the street noise. There would be no clemency, Scalzi realized. He reached for his wallet and the healing powers of its magic plastic. “OK, how much do I owe?”

“Sorry, no settling up on the street,” the lieutenant answered, his hands signaling an X. “Would you put your car in neutral for us?”

This was an unexpected question, opening up one more possible escape hatch. “And what if I don’t?” Scalzi sneered boldly. He was more tough guy than businessman now, eyeing his tormentors as if they were lower than gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

But Lt. Dantone stood his ground. “If you don’t, we could wait here all day,” he said firmly.

And finally, it all sunk in: the $45 ticket, a $150 towing fine, his morning meeting blown to dust. Scalzi’s voice dropped into forlornness.

He asked quite pitifully: “Where is my car going to go?”

The auto pound is a dreary presence in a city of grand structures. It sits along the Hudson River at 38th Street, but there are no water views, just a mammoth hangar surrounded by barbed wire and guard stations.

Inside are 1,000 vehicles, many of them the essential wheels of couriers and repairmen who foolishly gambled on a few extra minutes.

The well-barbered Dan Scalzi had yet to unbutton his suit coat when he walked into the small, square Redemption Room. The line was one of those that folds around a series of ropes, the people nestled side to side in a constricted space, like intestines.

Graffiti was on the front door: “Welcome to hell!” More was on the walls: “This place robs the working class.” “May God treat you the same way!”

Only two of the five pay windows were open, the clerks behind thick bulletproof glass. Budget cuts had thinned their ranks. They did their jobs with a world weariness that comes with being cussed out eight hours each day.

Scalzi assessed the wait amid this indoor gloom. Each transaction at the windows seemed to provoke an incident. Lilo Hintz-Sell, for instance, demanded an explanation for why her van had been towed.

“How should I know?” said the beleaguered clerk. “I didn’t tow it.”

“Why don’t you know? Listen to me. Listen to me. You’re not listening to me! You better listen to me because I pay your salary!”

The windows were locations of constant exasperation. Once there, many learned they could only pay the fine in cash. If they had the cash, they needed proof of insurance. If they had the proof, they were confronted with unpaid traffic tickets retrieved from some dark pool of past infractions.

“OK, I’ll pay the fine,” said Gideon James.

“Not here,” said the clerk. “You pay downtown, then you come back.”

Dan Scalzi watched all this and began to search for the correct metaphor, settling on North Korean torture of prisoners-of-war. “This is truly why New York will just die someday soon,” he said. “It is not workable any more.”

There was good fellowship in the line, however, a genuine font of commiseration. Scalzi was ahead of the 32-year-old elevator repairman Sam Master, who had on a gray T-shirt and a gray shirt under a dirty gray jacket.

Master rarely has the opportunity to talk to a corporate V.P. He thought the broker might welcome a repairman’s financial advice: “Listen, if you’re going to spend the dough for a Mercedes, why not buy a Rolls Royce?”

“A Rolls costs much more,” Scalzi said. “My Mercedes would now cost $80,000, though I only paid $50,000.”

Master was stunned by the prices: “How many hours a week you work?”

“I work 70-80,” Scalzi said impressively.

“But you don’t get your hands dirty.”

“No, but I get my mind fried.”

“I’m a working stiff.”

“I’m a working stiff, too.”

“Let me tell you,” Sam Master persisted on. “It’s one thing to get stiff working on a $500,000 deal and another to get stiff paying the rent.”

Finally, after an hour had evaporated, Scalzi made it to the window. Yes, he had the cash. Yes, he had a driver’s license. Yes, he had no unpaid tickets.

“Can I see your automobile registration?” the clerk asked.

“My registration is in the car.”

“Then you need to get a pass to go to your car.”

“Where do I get a pass?”

“At the information window.”

“The information window is closed.”

The clerk immediately walked over to her right. “The information window is now open,” she announced loudly. “Anyone who needs a pass to get their registration or insurance from their car, please get in the information line.”

Dan Scalzi took a quick step to his left. He was now first in line at the information window, which temporarily seemed OK. But fast thinker, he thought fast. He could see where the awful logic of the auto pound was heading.

“And what happens after I get my registration?” he asked, though he, like every other New Yorker, could sense the answer.

“Then,” the clerk said, “you get back at the end of the other line.”