How to Park Cars: A Manual for Valets and Unsuccessful Suicides
Chapter 1: Spots and Approach
Approach an open parking space. Drive past it about a half car length. Steer your vehicle about 45 degrees away from the desired spot. Put the car in reverse. Back into the space. Turn your head all the way around before or during backward motion to ensure no pedestrians are around. Use mirrors to calculate the proximity to other vehicles or lines.
I have parked something in the neighborhood of 100,000 cars over the last ten years. This excludes parking my personal vehicle, or as the well-to-do call it, my daily driver.
My employment all this time is valet, which in this country means a (usually) young man who parks cars for other people. My youth is now suspect. I am the ancient valet age of 34, which in this industry signifies someone who has landed a career tip locale through luck and driveway politics, or a dunce and lazy servant, likely addicted to a vice like weed or drink or self-pity. It is always easier to settle down in this life, even to settle into a dismal situation. Most people labor in search of comfort. I encourage you to make like St. Francis, labor for something else.
I have been inside most vehicles. Think of a car. I have probably parked it. Yes, even the “supercars.” There are exceptions. The rich folks won’t bother to import a foreign economy car, and for this reason, Renaults, Peugeots, whatever the Chinese drive…these I haven’t experienced.
My opinions about cars primarily concern the interior, gearbox, and ignition, sometimes door handles too. Tesla door handles took a long time for me to warm up to. It’s difficult to know where to grab when the passenger beats you just slightly in cracking the door. I have decided on the small gap between window and frame. Mercedes, truly magnificent gadgets in general, have gearboxes that are pathetic little levers that would snap with the same ease as a geezers finger, and reduce the whole machine in my mind to frail junk. Volvo has the best interiors of any car on the market, but they decide to ruin things with queer ignitions and clitoral sorts of shifters. The Scandinavians are an odd lot. When I started out on the job, we used to get a chuckle giving Saab keys to green valets and watching them fail to find keyhole (it’s on the center console). Saabs aren’t really around anymore, and I’ll confess also to a very small number of “classic” cars caressing my ass over the years, and the classics I have parked are generally speaking some of the more stressful endeavors. They’re heavy, quirky, and usually have clutches worn out by generations of dead feet.
All that said, I am not, despite my profession, a “car guy.” I don’t care much about automobiles and I have no pride in my own. I will say I have a certain sadness and disdain regarding trucks, mostly because of their size and danger, though the sadness comes from realizing, after I moved locales to valet at a property with exceedingly wealthy clientele, that the rich more or less don’t drive trucks, and that if there is a car of the poor man, it is the ford F-150, Chevy Silverado, and Dodge Ram. I doubt the owners of these vehicles will be mad that I have called them out this way. And that is what makes me sad. These poor folks will often disclaim the truck purchase that it’s valid so long as the owner intends to use it as a work vehicle. But then again, the wealthy do not work in the kinds of labor that require a truck. Usury, land leasing, and fame mongering are their preferred labor, and the world has not changed so much that manual exertion doesn’t relate to the lower classes anymore.
I do not actually know much about cars, either, when it comes down to it. How they function under the hood, all those wild pieces and dirty components, they are a nest of snakes to me. But there is something I know more than most about them—I know how they feel, and how to touch them.
There was once a man, a burly United States marine, who summoned me to retrieve his car in the early morning. It so happened that about 70 marines, all lodging at this hotel, were asking for their cars at the same time. It’s not quite a misconception, rather something the general public doesn’t bother imagining—but hotels are seldom lodged by disparate and random bookers. They have sales departments that seek lodgers of corporate and organized scales during off-season, particularly.
So all these marines are on their way to work at the local base, ignorant of any concept of carpooling, and I’m running to get their rental cars one after another. The particular marine of this story was stuck with an embarrassing vehicle, a Kia Soul, truly a beautiful car for a valet—very small and girlish, but for the six-foot-three hulking soldier, obviously not his elected rental.
I brought his car from the garage and onto the driveway, and I handed him the keys. Before he even steps towards the vehicle I’m taking the ticket for another car, running for the next. When I get back on the driveway again, I can see the Kia is still where I left it. The marine is inside struggling.
You don’t treat everybody the same on this kind of job. If it were a skinny civilian, I probably would’ve gone up to them immediately and helped. But I let him struggle for a minute, just side eyeing the situation while I got a couple more cars. Finally, in raw frustration, he comes up to me and asks if I’ve done something to the car.
I get inside and turn the key over without much trouble—it only took a kind of touch, a combination of foot-on-brake, one hand on wheel, slight grip and tilt to start the ignition. The marine, not a terribly prideful man as the image of him might suggest, remarks that he knew it was a matter of turning the steering wheel a bit, but couldn’t, despite all his strength, get it to budge. He thanks me.
I do not really know much about cars. But I know very much how to touch them. I can locate a kill switch without being told about it, I can often guess your valet pin if you have a security box, I shift smoother than you do in your own car.
And so I’m sure that sometimes another knows more about my body than me. They may not know every detail, they may not know my creator from a doorknob, but still, through a kind of work, they can better operate my motions than I can. And just because I might have this touch with anyone or anything else, doesn’t mean I’m anywhere close to knowing the whole thing.