Does Anyone Make Out in Cars Anymore?

LET ME START WITH THE VICTORY. After many trials and tribulations, I successfully made love in a car in Los Angeles.

Was it comfortable? No. We were parked on an incredibly steep hill on a tiny street off the Silver Lake Reservoir. To our benefit, the steepness meant the lots were graded and the houses perched far above street level. The downside, however, was that I had to contract my abs Pilates 100-style to keep my body from sliding down toward the hatchback door.

Was it sexy? Also no. Unless hearing the one-sided phone conversations of nighttime dog walkers and subsequently panicking they’ll hear you is your thing. But the point is my boyfriend and I did it. Literally. We did it. For maybe a solid nine minutes, before I started to worry I was suffocating like a dog left in a hot car. (We did not roll down the windows.)

Here’s the situation: My boyfriend and I are both divorced with kids. Meaning on many a date night, our respective apartments are occupied with babysitters and children, i.e., not a great setting for sexual congress. If you’re thinking “hotel,” I counter, “In this economy?” (Likewise “motel”/“bedbugs.”) The obvious solution? A classic car tryst. Pull over on a dark street, cut the lights, and start smooching, maybe more. For us, which activities the “more” entailed turned out to be very dependent on which car we took that night — his hatchback featuring fold-down rear seats or my bottom-of-the-line hybrid with a Goldfish cracker-encrusted car seat stuffed in the back.

I naively assumed vehicular romance would be relatively easy to accomplish in Los Angeles. Sure, the California penal code frowns on “lewd or dissolute conduct in a public place or in a place open to the public or exposed to public view” — but a successful prosecution also requires that someone your conduct might offend be present, and that you persist regardless.

Not much of a deterrent, given that there are many, many cars. And many, many streets. I admit I don’t have hard data, because there is none. At least on a local level. (In the Midwest, where they study this apparently, 60 percent of Americans report having participated in sexual activity in a vehicle.) But for what it’s worth, Angelenos in the movies seem to do it pretty often? Danny tries to cop a feel in a convertible in Grease. Bronson Pinchot gets a blowie as he careens around the curves of Mulholland in True Romance. Not even gonna start with the car-related kinks of Cronenberg’s Crash. Mainly I’d assumed car hookups are happening frequently because meet-in-the-middle dating culture in a city as expansive as L.A. often means it’s a 25-minute drive (or more!) back to someone’s bed. Sometimes a backseat is truly the best option.

Yet the first time my boyfriend and I attempted hatchback relations, we were stymied.