We have just moved to New York, and outside the window at this very moment a man is parking a twenty-foot car in a nineteen-foot space. He has been working at it for ten minutes. It is a classic illustration of the New York temperament. If this man were a San Franciscan, he would give up and go play tennis. If a Washingtonian, he would already have a reserved parking space. Getting a reserved parking space is what Washington is all about. When it comes to parking, the true Washingtonian makes Machiavelli look like Anne of Green Gables.
The New Yorker, however, has to fit life into spaces too small for it. What he calls home would look like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet the New Yorker manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
A window affording a view of the sky is something to boast about. Getting a seat on the subway is an exciting start to his day. On such a day, he suspects, the gods may even favor him with a lunch table expansive enough to contain not only his pastrami but also a dish of pickles and a glass for the cream soda.
The sight of a nineteen-foot parking space makes him giddy with delight. The average $250,000 town house is only seventeen feet wide. Is it a wonder that a nineteen-foot parking space looks to him like a berth fit for the QE2?
So he backs in with his twenty-foot car, nudges the car parked behind him, calls on his horsepower and applies brute force to the car behind. Would he really be so unfeeling toward another car’s gearbox? Not unless he had to. He pulls out, cuts his wheels, goes into reverse, steps on the gas.
The machine behind, locked in parking gear, shudders under the impact, leaps back a few inches. He cuts his wheels, attacks the car in the front position.
First he nudges it around the bumper with the soft nuzzling of a tentative seducer. The front car declines to yield. He goes into reverse. Bashes rear bumper against rear car. Rear car shudders, leaps. Then—gear in forward position—slam on the gas—bang the front car. Everything vibrates. Back he goes—bang—into the rear car. Forward—boom—into the front.
This goes on daily outside this window. Shattered pieces of red taillight covers regularly litter the gutter. Whatever ruin occurs to internal automotive organs will become manifest only later when thousands of rush-hour motorists sit cursing another breakdown on the East Side Drive.
Once in a while the owner of one of the parked cars under assault will arrive during the brutality and take exception to the violence. This raises the prospect of combat. Eagerness for combat is another New York characteristic. This is only natural. When you are trying to live a twenty-foot life in a nineteen-foot space, you have to be ready to fight for every millimeter.
Although the papers regularly report homicides committed during parking quarrels, I have never seen one end in bloodletting outside the window here. Occasionally there will be a stream of vile language and threats to commit horrors, but so far the police have always arrived in the nick of time.
The most dangerous crises arise when two parkers simultaneously spot a nineteen-foot space and simultaneously start to pull into it. This leaves one car with its front end sticking out and the other with rear end blocking traffic. These impasses produce passions out of Italian opera. Threats, oaths, cries of hatred, tears, pledges to exact vengeance and screams of dismay from other cars jammed behind the blockade.
Trying to fit life into spaces too small for it takes a toll on civilization. Blood pressure among New Yorkers is probably always high. One goes through life most days with temperature just one degree below the boiling point. It takes very little to push it into the danger zone.
New Yorkers instinctively realize this about each other, and, recognizing the danger, try to avoid encroaching on each other’s limited life space.
This may be why New Yorkers instinctively avoid making eye contact with each other in crowded places, why they “look right through you,” as dismayed visitors often complain. They are not looking right through you at all; they are discreetly avoiding an intrusion into your space. They sense the danger in a place where a one-degree temperature rise can mean an explosion.
A man newly arrived in town tells of parking his van at the curb in Greenwich Village one night, returning next morning and finding a message on the windshield. It said, “If this truck is parked here again it will be destroyed.” He never parked it there again. He suspected the threat was probably bluster, but on the other hand this being New York…