When I first moved to LA, I didn’t know how good I had it. I lived in a little house (generous word) on the border of Silver Lake and East Hollywood. It was (and still is) being eaten by termites, had some design quirks (several kitchen cabinets were installed upside down), and hosted a rich ecosystem of street creatures (future post to come). All that said, it did have a glorious driveway, which meant no street parking, which meant the termites could happily munch away half my bedroom, and life would still be free and easy.
Now I live in a house I love (though I loved the little house, much like one loves those dogs with messed up noses and tongues flopping out of their faces). But as we all know no good thing comes without a tradeoff, and in this case, it’s the loss of beloved off-street parking.
Before I launch into a lot of complaining I will say: that I do not live in one of the notorious horrible parking neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In those cursed places, people circle blocks for days, growing hungry and tired as they hope to find somewhere to safely land, hallucinating spots next to fire hydrants, eventually parking so far from their homes they may as well just give up their car altogether. This twitter thread recap (journalism!) is a peek into that true hell, and I’m grateful every day that I only live in slight purgatory. Parking privilege acknowledged, we can move on.
Most of the time (the middle of the day) it’s quite easy to find a space. But like most things, it goes to shit after dark. The street is inevitably lined with cars, sometimes interspersed with haphazard, frustrating gaps that you will tally as you cruise along, adding them up to MULTIPLE full parking spaces in your head. This, despite the conversations you’ve been having re: finding hope in other people rather than social structures, will make you turn against humanity very quickly and mutter to yourself that the city should come in and DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS because COMPLETE ASSHOLES have NO REGARD for OTHER PEOPLE. Your blood boiling, you will throw in the towel and resort to the one place you know there is always a spot: the enormous hill at the end of the block.
It dips down, intersects with our street in a four-way stop, then immediately climbs up again only to dip down, for the final time, on the next block. It is called Marathon, which makes sense based on how heavily you breathe ascending it. As the adage goes: “When arriving after dark, Marathon is where you must park.”
As you park, your car will immediately start rolling down the hill if take your foot off the gas or the brake. When you successfully navigate into a spot, crank the parking brake, and go to get out, you will feel as if you’re being air-lifted out of the Grand Canyon. Every time I park there I have no idea how my car stays put. It’s a denial of physics (right?), of nature, of God. You say a quick prayer for it to, in the words of Lisa Loeb, stay
.And then you walk the block and a half home and try to forget the fact your car is wedged on a hill practically halfway to the sky and pretty soon that fact is subsumed by the other problems you worry about in your home (healthcare, whether the cat is feeling okay). You go to sleep, perchance to dream, definitely to forget you have a car at all.
The next day, probably when you’re already running late for something, you’ll remember the car is parked on the hill and will curse the day Henry Ford was born. You’ll trudge (the only way to accurately describe that movement) back up, balancing your purse and canvas totes, then open the passenger door which will inevitably scrape on the pavement. You’ll dump everything onto the seat, then trudge to the driver’s side, trying not to get hit by the people who go too fast up and down the hill. You’ll get in your car, relieved that one journey’s over, ready to start the next, only to realize that your phone is back home at sea level. That’s okay. You live on the hill now. And it might just be the one you die on.
Or, if you haven't yet discovered the Marathon Hill, you park that albatross four and a half blocks away, and you're not quite sure WHICH four and a half blocks...
With the Kate Bush song miraculously topping today's Billboard charts, we couldn't have hoped for a more zeitgeist-tapping title. But, I suppose, this is why we come here, isn't it?