The Russian Futurist Parks His Car

Have you ever tried to park your car in Brooklyn? It is not easy. First of all, parking spots are impossible to find.

Second of all, Russian Formalists are not very good parallel parkers.

Especially Mayakovsky.

Why him in particular? Well, parallel parking takes patience and precision, and though Mayakovsky did remodulate Russian verse, thereby eliminating predictable end-rhymes and rejuvenating literature as a voice for the masses, he lacked the kind of large, car-filled expanse of gradated pavement in which parallel parking can be learned without danger to oneself or others.

In America, on the other hand, the asphalt grows on trees. Dean Moriarty, according to legend, could hair-turn a school bus while going eighty off an exit ramp, sliding it without adjustment between a pair of priceless Ming vases.

But then Dean Moriarty was a symptom of capitalist malaise. That kind of energy goes nowhere.

Far better to leave your apartment at four o’clock in the afternoon, move your car to the opposite side of the street, and then wait until the parking ban on that side is lifted. This way, you will probably not have to parallel park.

You will have to wait in your car for two hours, but that will allow you to see things.

You will see:

The arrogance of the far-too athletic pregnant woman.

The flamboyance of the guy who spends forty five minutes towelling his orange Corvette with a diaper.

The birds of our neighborhood.

One of the rhymes that Mayakovsky saw as obsolete was krov / lyubov, blood and love, which in English are dissimilar enough to qualify as slant rhymes.

What does “Love” rhyme with in other languages?

Dove.

Stove.

(In the Brooklyn school of Russian formalism, of which I am apparently the only member, stoves are clotted with the ashes of the trodden-upon proletariat and therefore rhyme with "Love.")

What happened to the Revolution, Seth? What am I doing here, parking my car for two fucking hours?

My heart beats faster as the rear-lights on the van in front of me blaze red, red! My mind prepares for open space. Tundra! Russia! The snowy fields stained black with the blood of my enemies! Unfortunately it turns out he’s just backing up.

He wants that extra inch.