Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Ellen McGrath Smith’s "Getaway Cars" is a compelling narrative poem that explores themes of authority, entrapment, rebellion, and self-awareness. Told in three sections, it traces the speaker’s experiences as a radio clerk in a municipal office handling parking enforcement, her arrest for drunk driving, and her eventual realization that she, like the immobilized cars she once helped "boot," is trapped in a system with no easy escape. The poem juxtaposes humor with desperation, using bureaucratic imagery to highlight personal struggle and transformation.

The opening section establishes the speaker?s role in a hierarchy of enforcement, beginning with a provocative question: "Who is more hated than a meter maid?" The meter maid, a figure of petty authority, is framed as part of a chain of command in which the speaker plays a role: "there I was, downtown, a clerk in the radio room... picking up the mic when the Boot Crew / had been called by a meter maid who thought she had a scofflaw on her hands." The speaker’s voice is detached, even amused, as she relays orders with the curt phrase: "Boot him, Dan-o." This casual exercise of power over anonymous drivers contrasts with the more visceral presence of Sal, the leader of the Boot Crew, who is depicted as tough but oddly generous: "Once he brought a six-foot fully dressed hoagie into the office, ?for the girls? he called us." This anecdote humanizes the enforcers, hinting at the ways in which they navigate their own place in a rigid system.

The speaker?s father, a police officer, reinforces the importance of job security in this bureaucratic world: "hold onto that job, girl; you?re lucky I knew somebody." Benefits like "Dental, eye care, pension, Major Medical, etc." are listed in a clipped, transactional manner, suggesting that stability, rather than passion or fulfillment, is the main justification for her continued employment.

The second section abruptly shifts from her professional role to her personal downfall: "I was arrested for drunk driving." The ironic reversal is immediate—where she once helped enforce municipal rules, she now finds herself at their mercy. The turnkey (jail guard) recognizes her, as does the matron, yet this familiarity does not soften the consequences. Her behavior in jail—"I screamed, turned over the box-spring in the cell, multiplying my bruises."—suggests not just fear, but rage and resistance. The chaotic details of her night in jail, including "a fight with a prostitute who wanted, in her tiger-print halter, to sleep," add a surreal, darkly comic edge. Her most poignant act of defiance is refusing to let them call her father, despite his status and potential influence.

Her morning call to her boss from jail marks the lowest point: "I told my boss I was downstairs in jail." The understatement here amplifies the humiliation. The boss’s reaction, revealed in the third section, is one of exploitation rather than empathy. Instead of helping her move past this event, the boss turns it into an opportunity to exert control, forcing the speaker to write letters and then ridiculing her vocabulary: "These big words, come on, now this don?t sound like me." The power dynamic here mirrors her earlier role in the enforcement chain—just as she once immobilized cars, she now finds herself restrained by an abusive workplace dynamic.

The poem’s final metaphor is its most striking. The speaker, despite her "sizable pension" and her father’s approval that she is "paying her bills," feels the "clamp and the pull" on her own feet. The physicality of this image mirrors the Denver Boot used to immobilize cars, a device she once ordered others to apply. Her repetitive duties—"whether Xeroxing or smoking in the snack bar"—are accompanied by a constant awareness of those stuck cars left behind overnight in the Schenley Quadrangle, "so seemingly like all other cars, immobile now, their windshields X?d." The personification of these cars, with their imagined cartoon speech bubbles—"?Who’s my driver??" and "?Who owns me??"—reflects the speaker’s own existential questioning. Like the cars, she feels trapped, wondering who, if anyone, is in control of her life.

"Getaway Cars" is a poem about entrapment—not just in legal or bureaucratic systems, but in cycles of expectation, authority, and self-destruction. The speaker’s journey from enforcing the rules to breaking them to feeling their weight upon herself is told with sharp irony, dark humor, and a keen sense of power dynamics. The poem ultimately suggests that control, whether exerted or suffered, is an illusion, and that the real struggle is not escaping punishment, but escaping the roles we inherit and the structures that shape our lives.

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