Real Men Park Near the Restaurant
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How I inherited this ridiculous notion from my dad — and learned to embrace it.
It’s my second date with Tracy, and we’re driving to the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe in Manhattan. Where I grew up on Long Island, every family had a favorite Chinatown restaurant, and my family’s was the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe.
After the army of pedestrians clears, I turn right on Mott Street. At Bayard, I hang a left.
We arrive at the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe, but there are no parking spots on Bayard. At Bowery I take a right. Another right at Pell. There’s what looks like a spot, but when we get closer I see a two-pronged fire hydrant protruding from a brick wall.
“Do you want to get out and I’ll find a spot?”
“That’s OK,” Tracy says. “I’ll go with you. I have good parking karma.”
I decide not to tell Tracy that I am upset by that expression. That it belittles a sensibility about pre-restaurant parking that has been passed down through the male line of my family.
I inherited it from my father — one of the all-time great Chinatown parkers. For Richard Raskin, a parking space within easy walking distance of a restaurant was not some gift from the gods. Finding one was not a matter of luck. Rather, it was the measure of a man: the result of hard work, carefully honed skills, and, yes, raw talent. My dad didn’t “look” for great parking spaces; he hunted them down. I once read about a tribe in New Guinea where, to initiate their sons into manhood, all the fathers gather together, strip naked, and masturbate into a river while the sons watch. In a similar kind of ritual, my father showed me from the front seat of his 1977 two-tone blue/light-blue Chevrolet Caprice Classic that real men who take women to restaurants find good parking.
Quickly.
We approach Elizabeth Street and Tracy is telling me about how her sister used to live above a pastry shop in Little Italy. I’m having a hard time concentrating on what she’s saying, though, given the weight of the decision now facing me: Do I circle around the Bayard-Bowery-Pell loop again, or chance it near the police station? It’s been only a few years since I got my license, so I’m inexperienced. I make a left, but Elizabeth Street is blue-and-white cop cars triple-parked all the way up the block. I lean my arm out the window and tap rhythmically on the steering wheel, trying to draw attention from the fact that I am now sheepishly heading back to Bayard.
Tracy is still talking about her sister, and I pretend to follow along. “Uh huh…Uh huh… Uh huh.” Luckily she doesn’t seem to have grasped the truth, which is that I’m not half the Chinatown parker my father was. When my dad didn’t see a spot, he made a spot. Thank god Tracy never saw his parking. First, he would get very quiet. Then his eyes would squint as he scanned for the telltale signs of an imminent space: a taillight glowing red, a car door flying open, the sound of an engine turning over. My sister or I would say “There’s a spot!” but my dad wouldn’t even slow down because he had long ago determined through his peripheral vision that it was a no-go because of a driveway or a hydrant. Tension would mount in the car. We were hungry. Maybe we’d never find a spot.
Then, all of a sudden, my dad would flick on his blinker and start backing into a space so tiny that the rest of us never saw it. We were always skeptical at first.
“This isn’t a spot,” my mom would say.
“It’s a spot,” he would say.
He would inevitably find some way to wedge the car in. Sometimes he had to back in and out and in and out for ten minutes. I remember the look of pride on his face when he was done, and I knew that he had accomplished something very important. My mom, post-parking, suddenly appeared calmer, as if she was thinking, “I’m very glad I married this man.”
When Tracy and I get to where Pell meets Mott again, I spy an old Chinese woman laden with grocery bags who’s breaking formation with the crowd on the sidewalk. She’s reaching for her keys.
I run the stop sign and hover behind her. The old lady gets into her car, and I wait for her to pull out. But she just sits there. She doesn’t even turn on the ignition! I pull up to her window, point over my shoulder with my thumb and raise my eyebrows — the universal gesture for “Lady, you getting out?” She just stares at me. I do the gesture again, and this time she shakes her head and waves me off.
“Jeez!” I say. I continue down Mott.
Tracy now seems afraid. I guess she’s putting it all together. She’s thinking, “If this guy can’t find a spot now, how’s he going to provide for me if we take things further? What if we have kids? What if we take them to Chinatown? They’ll probably starve to death while this bozo circles around.”
I’m already halfway to Worth Street when in my rear view mirror I see the old lady pulling out of her spot.
“Shit!” I scream. “That bitch fucked me!”
Tracy tries to calm me down. “Maybe we should just put it in a lot.”
My god. Why doesn’t she just drag me out of the car and slice off my testicles? Listen. My father never paid to park near the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe. On the rare occasion when it didn’t look like he was going to find a spot within a reasonable amount of time, he would just drop off me, my mom, and my sister at the restaurant and he would go park by himself. Of course, later when he joined us, he would walk through the door of the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe with an unmistakable swagger. My mom would say, “You found a spot?” and he would curl his upper lip and give her a quick nod. It was that nod that’s given by under-bosses on the Sopranos when they want to let Tony know that they’ve just killed a man. It was that nod that says, “It’s taken care of.”
I don’t tell Tracy any of this. “I’m gonna just circle around a couple more times.” I try to appear calm.
“If it’s the money,” she says, “ we can split it.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Money? I can afford to put it in a lot, believe me. But like I said, the idea of paying someone to park my car — what kind of loser pays for a spot in Chinatown? Do I seem that pathetic?
We’re on Pell again. But now the idea of paying for it is out there, and it spreads through me like a cancer. I’m considering it, and what it will mean for me, for my future, for my future with Tracy. Then I see that spot with the fire hydrant again. There might be enough space. I pull in. The front of my car is about a foot from the hydrant. It’s an acceptable risk.
Tracy sees what I’m doing. “You can’t park here. You’re too close to the hydrant.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “In Chinatown, if you can’t find a spot, you make a spot.”
Tracy rolls her eyes but I withdraw the key from the ignition. We get out of the car.
“You would rather park here,” she says, “and possibly get in the way of a fire truck rescuing someone, than put it in a lot?”
“Yes.”
Tracy slams her door shut. “You are so self-centered!” she says.
She has it all wrong, of course. I am the opposite of self-centered. The only thing I’ve been centering on is how to impress her.
But I don’t know how to say that yet.
Later — many years later — I meet the woman in San Francisco who will become my wife. I cannot find a parking spot on our first date, but for some reason tell her exactly what I’ve just told you — about my dad, Tracy, the Sum Hey Rice Shoppe. I tell her that I feel pressure to find a sport near the restaurant.
On our second date, I pick her up at her apartment, and we drive to a sushi bar. This time, I’m able to park right in front. She smiles at me from the passenger seat.
“Oh my god,” she says. “So close to the restaurant. This spot is really turning me on.”
She’s kidding, I know. But it doesn’t matter.
I feel like a man.
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An earlier version of this story was published in The New York Times “Modern Love” column. Bonus: Here’s a 25-second clip of my paternal grandfather, Walter, bragging about a spot he got, while on a date in the 1920s, with my grandmother:
