He says if I park there, it’ll probably be the one time the landlord shows up and wants to use the space. His landlord never uses it, but just to be safe, he says. There’s easy street parking in front of the apartment building, but he says technically it’s his landlord’s parking space. It turns midnight on the digital clock on the dashboard, and I can’t find parking. I have grown up in a city made out of sex and yet never had it myself. You can almost see sex dripping off everyone, getting everywhere, sticking to windowpanes and the outside of cars, sealing the small café tables to the sidewalk, drawing strangers toward one another in a wet, invisible spiderweb. It’s midnight in summer in an old Italian neighborhood that’s turned into the strip clubs and bookstores and bar. Or perhaps no one is drinking and driving. Everyone is awake and everyone’s drinking and everyone is driving home. The city’s public transit system doesn’t stay open this late, nor does it really service this part of the city, but the neighborhood is alive in neon, in bedroom eyes and slurred consonants. I reach the top of the hill at Green Street and drive back down, restarting the same circle. I’m in North Beach and it’s just before midnight and I still haven’t found parking. Now, as though sickeningly resultant of other losses, the physical world around me seems to have taken on weight and volume, ripeness and skin. In the last few months, though, a lot of things have gone wrong (family things and money things, beginning to understand the brutally intertwined relationship of those two nouns, a small seam that splits the my life into the part before I came home and saw my dad crying, and everything after that). I am convinced the world’s beauty exists only in two dimensions, that things can only be looked at and not touched, as though until now I’ve only been standing in front of a very large painting, politely keeping to the museum’s rules. I have grown up in an astoundingly beautiful place, but at age seventeen I have never wanted anyone and have never felt wanted. But I’m a month from finishing high school, and since I can remember there has always seemed to be a party I’m missing because I’ve failed to understand how verbs work, failed to learn how one takes action rather than simply looks at things. I understand that it was not like this for everyone. The condition of adolescence, at least in my experience, is that of standing outside an opaque structure, walking around it looking for the door, and never getting inside. I’ll never know if the Bay Area is in fact boring or if I was just an especially sheltered teenager. Perhaps it might be better to spend the rest of my life driving an imperfect circle around North Beach’s hills than to try to parallel park my car. I’m looking for parking, and I’m probably going to have to parallel park, and I am weighing the necessity of this activity against all future activities. But right now I’m a terrible driver, and San Francisco is a particularly difficult place in which to be a terrible driver. Three months after this story takes place, I will move to New York City and from then on spend my life exclusively in cities with celebrated public transit systems, and never drive a car again. San Francisco is also an exceptionally difficult town in which to drive, but nevertheless, I am a terrible driver.
PARALLEL PARK HOW TO
Helena Fitzgerald Nonfiction How to Parallel Park in San Francisco by Helena Fitzgerald