Photo by Matt O'Callaghan for Blacktress World

Blacktress is meeting Nirvana, her flakey, hippie friend (everybody has one), at a house party in Koreatown.  Blacktress has circled the block about 10 times already looking for parking.  And this is her # 10 reason why LA is complete bullshit.  Looking for parking is all too often a nightmare, she thinks. But just before Blacktress is about to get pissy about having to make her 11th rotation, she remembers something…

Like most actors in LA, Blacktress subscribes to The Secret, some of the newest of the new age thinking, which peddles, the power of positive thinking.  Ordinarily she would forget to remember that she believes in The Secret, but the song playing on the car radio is either Secret Garden or Secret Lover or something that repeats the word “secret” a bunch of times.  This jogs her memory.  So instead of getting pissy, she pulls over into a red zone, and takes a minute to visualize an open parking spot.  And ten minutes later… nothing.  Blacktress begins her 11th rotation.

She finally finds a parking spot 7 ½ blocks away from where she is actually going.  Perhaps I should have been more specific in my visualization, she thinks. In New York hoofing it 7 ½ blocks is considered  a walk in the park.  But she is a Lost Angelino now.  In Lost Angeles, hoofing it roughly 8 blocks is considered a re-enactment of The Trail of Tears.

She decides to take the spot anyway…  And  5 minutes later she’s still trying to wedge her car inside of it.

“I have my own method of parallel parking.”  Blacktress always told her ex, every time he offered to teach her the correct technique.  “Let me do my thing.”

Her thing never worked then and it isn’t working now.  She more than nicks, the gas guzzler in front of her.  The gas guzzler apparently belongs to the man across the street smoking a cigarette.

“ Hey!  What the fuck?”  He yells out through a puff of smoke.

Both Blacktress’ patience and car insurance are expired.  She speeds off.

The next morning Nirvana calls.

“The energy in that place was off the charts. Very chill but electric.  It must have been the full moon.  What the hell happened to you?”

“I couldn’t find a fucking park,” Blacktress says in a pre-coffee grumble.

“Yeah it was really bad last night.”

“How’d you find one?”

“I drove up on Spoke as he was leaving and got his.”

Spoken Word was Nirvana’s sometimes soul-mate, a semi-famous MC/poet/Kundalini yoga instructor, who lived in Echo Park.

“Was it awkward seeing him?”

“No it was cool.  My yin was doing its yin thing and his yang was doing its yang thing. So we meshed.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I double parked for a minute and we 69ed.”

Blacktress is now officially awake.

“In your car?!”

“ It must have been the full moon.”

“It must have been uncomfortable.”

Coffee is no longer necessary to give Blacktress her morning jolt; she reaches for herb tea instead.

“So the only way to get a good parking spot in Koreatown, is to blow a guy?!”  She says her mind incredulously connecting the dots.

“Yeah, sometimes blowing a guy will get you a good spot.”  Nirvana says plainly.  “It’s not trigonometry.  It’s LA.”