Advanced Parking
How to Park Like a Boss
I used to live in New Orleans (1985-90), and one day a friend invited me over to his apartment. I followed him riding his motorcycle and me in my Toyota Corolla. He was zooming along at about 40 miles and hour and I was blissfully following him. Suddenly he zoomed up on the sidewalk and off through a park. I looked forward and saw why. Everyone was stopped at a red light. I was doing 40 and had no way to stop in that amount of space, even with brakes locked. I locked them anyway hoping to minimize the damage. The car fishtailed out one way, then swung back hard and went sideways and slammed into a parking spot between two cars using the curb to absorb the momentum. Not a scratch on anything. I got out to aghast stares from the other drivers, and casually put some coins in the meter and walked off like I meant to do that.
The only parking job I saw that beat this feat was at the intersection of Clairborne and Carrolton. I was coming out of a K&B when my girl friend asked me to stop so she could load film.
As she fiddled with the film, a driver ran the light without slowing down, right were we would have been walking in the crosswalk. He hit a car, spun around. He looked about and decided he would be a "hit and run" and gunned it. Then hitting a car going in another direction, this sent him careening into the steel light pole breaking it cleanly off at the base. Next he ramped over the media wedging his car underneath a trunk with a hazardous material sign. He gunned it till the tires caught on fire. The trunk drivers took off running. Then he gets out of his car and walks over to the middle of the road and begins adamantly explaining why it wasn't his fault. Now that's chutzpah.
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