In the old days, kids would cruise the Ave in their big shiny cars and head out to the ever-present “Make-Out Point” or “Lover’s Lane” overlooking whatever quaint little town they lived in. If the movies are to be believed, every town in America came equipped with a hill topped with a small, unpaved parking lot; and the logistical mastery of packing in a bunch of cars at the edge of the bluff made those randy teens a model for organized labor.
With limited options for places to get frisky, “going parking” made perfect sense. It was convenient, it was naughty and it was exciting. These young people would explore the edges of their propriety and their clothing, drawn by the temptation of their budding sexuality. It was a secret between you and your girl or bo, a dozen other horny kids who were there for the same reason, and the population of the locker room during the next day’s gym class. No one would raise an eye at your unseasonable turtleneck the next day, but they would wonder why you had a big dumb smile on your face for no apparent reason.
All this was a bit before my time, of course. My knowledge of the glory days of “going parking” is limited to Happy Days reruns, Grease and Cry-Baby. Winkler, Travolta and Depp were so cool, so smooth and so successful with women that they made going parking look as easy as getting a pack of gum.
Things were not so smooth for me.
In my late 20s, being the ever-sensitive boyfriend that I am, I went to meet my then-girlfriend for a drink after she got off of work. She’d had a long and stressful day, and the next day promised to be even longer and more stressful; so we stopped in for cocktails at a restaurant close to her workplace that had been a Denny’s in a past life. The place was awful, and not even awful enough to be cool, but the booze was sufficient to get us pretty lubricated. And heated. After forty-five minutes, we both had one thing on our minds.
I invited her to my place, but she had to be up really early the next morning and knew coming to my place was a bad idea, because she’d end up staying all night. Going to her place was also out of the question, because I’d keep her up. While she was being practical, I took it as a challenge, and the cheap whiskey and cosmos were taking full effect. We both knew something had to happen quick. We closed out our tab and jumped in my car.
There’s no good Lover’s Lane or Make-Out Point that I know of in the Northgate area of Seattle (or anywhere in Seattle, for that matter). The best we could hope for was finding a poorly-lit street in the nearby neighborhoods to park the car. The phrase “make out like bandits” comes to mind. I zipped around from street to street in a frenzy with her hand on my knee and her teeth on my ear. My manhood was beyond question as I slammed through the gears and squealed around corners with a pretty girl next to me who could hardly wait for the Jack-and-Rose scene to get rolling.
Then I saw it. The dark end of a dead-end street, and an empty parking space at the curb right in front of a house with no lit porch light. The closest streetlight was far enough away that the car would be parked in shadows between two other cars, and there wouldn’t be any through-traffic. It was late enough that the odds of residents coming and going were in our favor. It would do.
I parallel parked like a boss, yanked the parking brake and turned off the car. In a split second, our seat belts were off and my girlfriend and I were all over each other, tearing at each other’s clothes like our lives depended on it. We kissed like we were drowning, and lunged at each other like we were dueling. Hands clutched, buttons popped, fog started to form on the windows, and passions were fueled by liquor and risk. This was going to be quick and intense and awesome.
“We’re moving,” she whispered heavily in my ear.
“I know, baby, I know,” I whispered back into her neck. I was awkwardly stretched from my seat to hers trying to get her clothes off and working on a hickey at the same time. Yeah, she was totally right, I thought. We were really moving now, really gaining momentum, really about to get it on. “I know…”
SLAM!
The car jolted violently as we heard a loud crunch. Our heads snapped up to see what had happened. I thought another car had run into us. There was, in fact, a collision; but in my clumsy maneuvers around the front seat of my car, I’d unwittingly pushed the parking brake back down, the car wasn’t in gear, and we’d rolled a few feet down the slight slope of the street right into the back of a Nissan Maxima.
I bolted upright in my seat, started the car, and backed up. In the shadows, I couldn’t see if there were any dents on the Maxima, which I took as a good sign. I didn’t get out of the car. I didn’t leave a note. What I did do was set a personal record for the fastest three-point u-turn and sped off before any of the residents could come outside to investigate the noise, simultaneously trying to buckle both my seat belt and the belt of my trousers. I multi-tasked with all the grace of a one-man-band fleeing a crime scene.
The mood was killed, of course, by a different kind of adrenaline. My girlfriend straightened herself up as I drove her back to her car. We didn’t say a word as we drove, and when I came to a stop in the parking lot outside the former Denny’s, she said, “OK, I’ll see you later” like she was saying goodbye to a co-worker and got out of the car. She was disappointed. Disappointed in me.
I watched her drive away before heading home myself. I was no Winkler, Travolta or Depp. I was a clutz and an idiot. We never spoke of it again, preferring, I suppose, to maintain the illusion that I was a pretty cool guy–for both our sakes.
