The Two-Car Garage Problem

Good people, if there are any of you left, I am outraged. Old school outraged, the way I used to get before Rokwell T. Finger jumped the shark and started involving myself with pro-wrestling and the Russian mob. For some reason, domestic annoyances bother me more than all the lost-at-sea pirate trials and tribulations I've ever experienced. I'm telling everyone, no matter what the realtor says, I have a two-car garage.

I hardly think it's the right of some tubby woman named Sandy to decide how many cars I can fit in my garage. Yet when she sold me this house, Sandy got all high-and-mighty telling me what I could do with it. Three bedrooms, one and a half bath, a basement, and a one-car garage. Well, needless to say, I was offended. It's a big garage. What official garage-judging organization ruled mine could only hold one car? I threw her out of the house immediately, and regretted having already signed the papers to buy it. I can't help that. I don't feel right stepping into an unowned house.

Ever since then I've been fighting the one-car garage demon. There's got to be a way around this tyranny. You can store five motorcycles, side by side, pretty comfortable, and up to 29 non-motorized bikes if you lay them on their side and stack them. Not very convenient, but I still take pride in knowing the ultimate capabilities of my garage. Not that it helps in the matter of cars.

Now, my car is a Lincoln with some homemade fins on each side, so it hardly makes for a good test subject for maximizing garage efficiency. I had to find a way to get my hands on at least two cars, preferably compacts. But who knows, I could have fit three in with enough resources at hand.

I first approached my friends at the commune and asked to borrow their cars for my experiment. They weren't very willing to oblige me. Omar Bricks threatened to throttle me and implied I was making fun of him. But I had no luck borrowing any cars, so I had to rent some from one of these new-fangled car-renting places. I would rather have had the Knight Rider and the Dukes of Hazzard car, but all they had left were boring ones. Still, I got enough for the experiment.

I will grant Sandy, filthy, conspiring Sandy, that it is quite difficult to fit two cars into my garage, but it's far from impossible. Inconvenient, I'll grant. Perhaps even dangerous and a foolhardy gesture. But I did it, damn you, Sandy. I could not park two cars parallel, either facing the back wall or the sides, and there was no success in parking them perpendicular. Sure, technically you're in the garage, but since the door wouldn't close I doubt it counts. I was ready to give up, to park Camembert's wheelchair next to the single car and call it a one-and-a-half car garage. Then inspiration struck, when I recalled my failure to get the Duke boys' car at the rental place. Surely some clever stunt driving could put one extra car in a garage with so much headroom.

Trying to simply jump the car into the garage failed. I flattened the bottom car on the one occasion I didn't hit the garage itself. Perhaps if I had landed the top on the bottom perfectly, I could have gotten the door closed, but I found it impossible to do. My success came, instead, when I set up some half-ramps and got the second car on two wheels—I practically glided right into that garage. It scuffed, scratched, maybe even crushed the bottom car's side, some could say, but I think I've proven my point, Sandy. Your one-car garage is a limited concept whose time has come. My garage is a two car garage, for the seasoned driver. Not that those two cars can ever be returned to the rental agency, and I may need expensive repairs to the garage. But as I've stated time and again, nothing is more important than being right.

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