By 
We've all seen them. The guy or gal in a BMW 335i or worse, a Ferrari F430, trying to back into a streetside parking spot, getting it horribly wrong, and pulling forward to try it again. And again. Sometimes you have to stop and watch, and can't help up wonder: Who is that asshat?
Well, that asshat is me.
I'm an automotive journalist, and in the 18 years that I've been paid to play with cars, I've driven an F1, raced at the Rolex Monterey historics, turned laps in anger at Le Mans, and handled tens upon tens of millions of dollars of exotic machinery. Safely. I'll drift a corner with smoky aplomb, and I could nudge a dime on a racetrack curb.
And yet those skills wither and that bravado dies the moment I put a vehicle into "R." It is my great shame: I am a horror in reverse, and my parallel parking is an embarrassment.
Not that I can't put my hand over the back of the seat and look over my shoulder, squinting that Blue Steel look of a man intent upon a reverse-type maneuver. I've got that part nailed. It's the point after when things fall apart.
Say I'm driving down a one-way street and find a garbage truck blocking the way. Those overall-wearing gentlemen are in no hurry; there is no task more Sisyphean after all. Hence the best bet is too simply back out of the street and move on.
No problem. I've got this.
Then my mind clouds as a Stephen King-like mist rolls in, filled with terrible flying creatures and fanged-teeth monstrosities that I can't quite make out but are totally distracting. I glance, needlessly, at the rear-view monitor and then at both side mirrors, trying to piece together the various visual bits of fragmented information. I tentatively begin my backward traverse, see-sawing the wheel stupidly, as if avoiding tiny mice stampeding down the street. Oops, too close here, now too close there. That attractive woman in the miniskirt is laughing isn't she? Just steer away from her.
I've got a touch of dyslexia, which I think has something to do with the deficiency. Most often, though, it manifests in the transposition of numerals. Tell me your cell number and I'll get it wrong nine times out of eleven. The first time I'll feel a tinge of frustration, and after the second my mental acuity sucks out of my head like oxygen suddenly released in space. "Just text me the number," I'll snap.
That same mixed-up sensation arises when I'm in Europe and have to back into a parking-garage space a half size too small even for the VW Golf I'm driving. That old Parisian woman just wheeled in backwards next me in her Peugeot and is already down the street buying baguettes as I'm futzing around, inching backward like a drunken crab. I just can't seem to put the visual picture and physical movements together in the facile way that I can easily judge braking distance when I'm blitzing down a track at 145 miles per hour.
Good thing I now spend a lot of time shooting videos of cars, which requires many passes on the same stretch of road or in a narrow tunnel. That often also means a subsequent reverse back up the road or narrow tunnel. Just as luckily there are often a series of high-def, 4K cameras to capture said action, manned by jaded crewman ready for a laugh.
So too goes my great love of parallel parking. That skill involves both painfully slow speeds and reverse, so, Achilles, please meet heel. I fully understand what I'm supposed to do, and once in a while when I'm not paying attention, I'll do it perfectly. But I start to overthink it and thus begins the tragic comedy. "Hey," my passenger might say at the bitter end, when I'm finally ensconced between two other parked vehicles, "you're two feet from the curb." I've lost friends that way.
A couple of years ago I took a special VW Group driving test which the company administers to any VW employee who wants to become an official test driver. The exercises took place in a semi-secret testing ground in the Arizona desert and included high-speed lane changes, recovery of a spinning vehicle, emergency braking maneuvers, and driving on a steep bank. Aced them all. The last two tests were driving backwards through a slalom and reversing a car out of a very tight box. I passed, but I'm pretty sure the instructor gave extra weight to my ability to make a pendulum turn in the dirt and not my predilection for gathering up cones under the bumper during the reverse slalom.
Dare I resort to something like a self parking technology? Nay! I have pride, after all. And I actually have improved. I'll get the car in a space in one try, maybe two, if inelegantly.
Better than the late 1990s, when I moved to NYC. I was fresh from the desert Southwest, where the entire world is your parking lot and parallel parking isn't even a concept, let alone part of a driving test. I had an Acura NSX, the first truly cool press car of my career. I was single, and I was out to make an impression. A buddy happily jumped into the passenger seat, and we headed for a hot club. There was a long line outside and, incredibly, a space right up front. All eyes were on us. And then the klutz dance began.
After a minute, maybe three, my buddy got out of the car and slunk away. When I finally lodged the car in, I got out and faced the giggling spectators. I'd made an impression all right. The doorman grinned widely and shook his head as he allowed me by. And was kind enough not to call me an asshat.
Jason Harper, a contributing editor to Road & Track, has tested and written on cars for two decades. His scariest drive was a rally race in an original Lancia 037, his first drive of a supercar was the Porsche Carrera GT, and the only time he's gotten a speeding ticket was in a base Mini Cooper. His column, Harper's Bizarre, runs every Wednesday.
