The light turns green and I continue driving down Canal Street. It's my second date with Tracy, and I'm taking her to the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe in Manhattan. Every Long Island family has a favorite restaurant in Chinatown, and ours is the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe. "You're gonna love this place," I tell Tracy. "When we were kids, my sister used to order pork chow mai fun and pour ketchup all over it." Tracy beams at me from the passenger seat. She likes that I'm sharing family stuff already.
I wait for the army of pedestrians to clear and I turn right on Mott Street. At Bayard Street, I take a left. "There's the restaurant," I say. "You wanna get out and I'll go park?"
"That's alright," Tracy says. "I'll help you find a spot."
OK.
I drive to the end of Bayard, but there are no spots. At Bowery I swing a right, then at Pell, another right. There's what looks like a spot but when we get closer I notice a two-pronged fire hydrant protruding from a brick wall. Nothing on Pell.
I try to reassure Tracy. "We'll find one."
"I'm not worried," she says. "I have really good parking karma."
I decide not to tell Tracy that I am upset by that expression, that it belittles a certain sensibility about pre-restaurant parking that has been passed down through the male line of my family. I inherited it from my father—one of the all-time great Chinatown parkers. For Richard Raskin, a parking space within easy walking distance of a restaurant was not some gift from the gods. Finding one was not dependent on personal good luck. Rather, it was the measure of a man, the result of hard work, carefully honed skills, and, yes, raw talent. My dad didn't "look" for parking spaces. He hunted them down. There's a tribe in New Guinea where, to initiate their sons into manhood, the fathers gather together, get naked, and masturbate into a river while their sons watch. In a similar kind of ritual, my father showed me from the front seat of his 1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic that men who take women to restaurants are supposed to find good parking. Quickly.
As we approach Elizabeth Street, Tracy is telling me about how her sister used to live in Little Italy above a pastry shop. I'm having a hard time concentrating on what she's saying, though, given the weight of the decision now facing me: circle around the Bayard-Bowery-Pell loop again, or chance it near the police station? It's been only a few years since I got my license, so I'm inexperienced. I make a left, and sure enough, Elizabeth Street is blue-and-white cop cars triple-parked all the way up the block. I lean my arm on the window and tap rhythmically on the steering wheel, trying to draw attention from the fact that I am now sheepishly heading back to Bayard.
Tracy is still talking, and I pretend like I'm following along. "Uh huh...Uh huh...Uh huh." Luckily she doesn't seem to have grasped the truth, which is that I'm not half the Chinatown parker my father was. Thank god Tracy never saw his parking. I'll never forget it. First he would get all quiet. Then his eyes would squint as he scanned each block for the telltale signs of an imminent space: a taillight glowing red, a car door flying open, the sound of an engine turning over. Sometimes my sister or I would say "There's a spot!" but my dad wouldn't even slow down because he had long since scoped out through his peripheral vision that it was a no-go because of a driveway or a hydrant. Tension in the car would build --- we were hungry, and maybe we would never find a spot. But then, all of a sudden, my dad would flick on his blinker and start backing into a space so tiny the rest of us never saw it. We were always skeptical at first. "This isn't a spot," my mom say. And he would say, "It's a spot." He would always find some way to wedge the car in—sometimes he backed it in and out, in and out, for ten minutes. I remember the look of pride on his face when he was done, and I knew he had accomplished something very important. My mom, post-parking, suddenly appeared calmer, as if she were thinking, "I am very glad I married this man."
When Tracy and I get to where Pell meets Mott again, I take a right and spy an old Chinese woman carrying shopping bags. She's breaking formation with the crowd on the sidewalk—she's reaching for her keys! I run the stop sign and hover behind her. The old lady gets into her car, and I wait for her to pull out. But she just sits there. She doesn't even turn on the ignition! I pull up to her window, point over my shoulder with my thumb and raise my eyebrows, the universal gesture for "Lady, you gettin' out?" but she just stares at me. I do the gesture again, and this time she does the wave-off-head-shake.
"Fuck!" I say. I continue down Mott.
I glance over at Tracy and she looks afraid. I guess she's starting to put it all together. She's thinking, "If this guy can't find a spot now, how's he going to provide for me if we take things further? What if we have kids? What if we take them to Chinatown? They'll probably starve to death while this bozo circles around." I'm already halfway to Worth Street when in my rear view mirror I see that old lady pulling out of her spot.
"Shit," I scream. "That bitch fucked me!"
Tracy tries to calm me down. "Andy, maybe we should just put it in a lot."
Oh my god. Why doesn't she just drag me out of the car and slice my testicles off? Listen: My father never paid for spots. Never. On the rare occasion when it didn't look like he was going to find a spot within a reasonable amount of time, he would just drop off me, my mom, and my sister at the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe and he would go park by himself. Of course, a few minutes later when he joined us at the restaurant, he would walk through the door with an unmistakable swagger. My mom would say, "You found a spot?" And he would curl his upper lip and give her a quick nod. It was that nod that's given by under-bosses on the Sopranos when they want to tell Tony that they've just killed someone. It was that nod that says, "It's taken care of."
I don't say any of this to Tracy. Instead I calmly tell her, "I'm gonna just circle around a couple more times."
Now Tracy is clearly annoyed. "If it's the money we can split it," she offers.
I cannot believe she thinks this is about money. I have a good job. I can afford to put it in a lot, believe me. But, like I said, the idea of paying someone to park my car -- what kind of loser pays for a spot in Chinatown? Do I look that pathetic?
I'm on Pell again. But now the idea of paying for it is out there, and it spreads through me like a cancer. I'm considering it, and what it will mean for me, for my future, for my future with Tracy. Then I see that spot with the hidden fire hydrant again, and I realize there might be enough space. I pull in. The front of my car is about a foot from the hydrant. I decide it's an acceptable risk.
Tracy sees what I'm doing. "You can't park here. You're too close to the hydrant."
"Don't worry about it," I say. "In Chinatown, when you can't find a spot, you make a spot."
Tracy rolls her eyes but I withdraw the key from the ignition. We get out of the car, and Tracy slams her door shut. "You would rather park here and possibly get in the way of a fire truck rescuing someone, than put it in a lot?"
"Yeah."
Tracy slams her door shut.
Just before she is out of sight, she turns around and yells at me. "You are so self-centered!"
I should tell her that she has it all wrong. I should tell her that I am so the opposite of self-centered. That the only thing I've been centering on is how to impress her. But I don't know how to say these things. Tracy and I eat at the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe, but we don't last very long as a couple.
Later, though, much, much later, I meet a woman at a party in San Francisco. On our first date I can't find a parking spot, so I tell her what happened with Tracy. I tell her the whole story, and that the sad truth of my life is that I feel pressure to find good restaurant parking.
On our second date, I pick her up at her apartment, drive her to a sushi bar on Arguellow Street. This time I find a spot right in front of the restaurant.
She smiles at me from the passenger seat.
"Oh baby," she says. "This spot is totally turning me on."
She's kidding, of course, but it doesn't matter. I've never felt more like a man.
END
Note: An edited version of this story was published under the title Hunter-Gatherer: Parking Division in the New York Times on February 25, 2007.