Like Riding a Bike

I recently gave my bike away, making it official: at 44, my two-wheeling days were over. I hadn’t ridden in years. Two herniated discs make it impossible to pedal in comfort. Maybe I was keeping the bike in storage in case of a miraculous turnabout when, some morning, I would spring from bed, instead of rolling out, mount my 15-speed racer, and take the long way to work.

I’d don comfortable cycling attire – something made of cotton, something that breathes, not those ridiculous spandex hindquarter condoms so many middle-aged men feel compelled to shoe-horn themselves into these days – and cruise along the picturesque Mystic Lakes, onto Mass Ave, Arlington as if it were the Champs-Elysees, and into the post office parking lot for some pre-shift stretching.

But who was I kidding? The bike was in showroom condition, with very few accumulated miles, but the truth is, even at peak physical condition, I was never very good at riding a bike.

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I was 5 years-old when the training wheels came off. My trust in older people was absolute, so when my 10 year-old brother, Jimmy, and a few neighborhood boys, marched me to the top of Robin Hood Road and told me to coast straight down, I went along without question.

“Hold on and keep the front wheel steady,” they said.

The bike belonged to my friend, John John. We called it The Purple Flurp; a bright-purple miniature stingray with banana seat and two-foot sissy bar that, when seated, came even with the top of my head. Robin Hood was a lightly-traveled cul de sac and I waited fearlessly atop the hill like Evil Knievel at Caesar’s Palace, then pushed off, let gravity do its thing.

Balance was not a problem. I freewheeled, coasting the downward slope. Nobody said anything about pedaling, so I just held on and kept the front wheel steady. A high-voltage sense of freedom coursed through my bones as I picked up speed. Then the hill, which wasn’t really much of a hill, but seemed quite steep at the time, began to flatten out.

If Robin Hood Road were on a golf course it would be a par-three with a dogleg right; the dogleg being the hill, leaving me traveling from green to fairway, the bend on my left. With the bend fast approaching, I was running out of pavement. Nobody said anything about turning, so I continued to just hold on, keeping the front wheel steady, tires buzzing, mixing with the wind in my ears.

Straight ahead was a driveway, but nobody said anything about stopping, so I held on, front wheel steady.

The driveway belonged to the Grecco’s, one of the few families on Robin Hood who did not have young children, and the only family whose property was protected by a chainlink fence. The gate to the driveway was swung open, leading to a below-street-level basement garage. Inside the garage was Mr Grecco’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville. On the lawn stood Mr Greeco. He was an enormous man, so enormous, in fact, that we used to wonder if that big Cadillac hadn’t been built around him. He watched as I burst uninvited through his gate, his mouth slightly open, face scrunched up as if trying to figure out some complex scientific riddle.

The driveway was a long black tongue, the garage, a gaping mouth, the Cadillac’s rear bumper, a shiny toothless grin. All coming up fast. I was about to be swallowed whole. Several bones were going break.

My life did not pass before my eyes. But then again, maybe it did; at that age, I hadn’t done much worth reliving.

Then something strange happened.

I stopped.

The bike didn’t fall over. There was no squeal of tires. My feet remained on the pedals, my hands on the handlebars, front wheel steady. The distance to the bumper of the Cadillac couldn’t have been more the five feet.

I turned my head and there was Jimmy, out of breath, his hand gripping the sissy bar.

Mr Grecco stood on high as Jimmy and I walked the bike off his property. His face still scrunched, it looked as if he wanted to say something, but could not unscrunch himself.

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“Reverse the pedals if you want to stop.”

That’s what everyone told me.

But I couldn’t bring myself to apply this lesson. I thought, Reverse propulsion and you’ll go backwards. I was a logical kid; if it didn’t make sense in my head, I wasn’t about to trust it. I was also stubborn, my independent nature superceding my faith in elders. And even though the older kids demonstrated perfectly how to brake, it looked like a trick. I decided to drag my feet instead.

All through the following spring, I used the bottoms of my shoes as break pads. Then I found myself hurtling downhill again. This time, I was alone.

They say most accidents happen within a block of home, so it should come as no surprise that the gateway to this stunt was the hill that led to our house at 96 Oak Street. Our driveway was the first one on the right. The idea was to begin cutting back speed as I crested the hill, then start dragging my feet while rounding out my approach in a question mark-shaped path, coast straight into the driveway, and taxi safely to the garage.

Things were going according to design and I was about to veer into the lefthand lane when a car appeared in the road ahead. It was coming on too fast for me to risk looping into its path so I adjusted my flight plan accordingly, dropped my size-seven landing gear, and braced for impact.

I entered the driveway at an impossible angle, legs splayed, eyes wide. This time, there was no doubt, I was absolutely going to crash into something.

The fence that surrounded our yard was white post-and-rail, built by my grandfather, who strengthened any weakness whenever he came to visit. Lining the fence were my mother’s peony bushes. The flowers were for ornamental value, not for softening the trauma of high-speed collisions. I aimed instinctually for one of the bushes anyway. My front tire sliced through it like a pizza wheel, striking wood without any reduction in velocity.

Hitting the fence was like driving into a retaining wall. And the bike did stop. I, however, continued on, over the handlebars, over the fence, into a swan dive, and onto the McSweeny’s front lawn.

I landed chest-first, the pressure collapsing my lungs like a pair of shriveled whoopie cushions. Suddenly I had no air. Seized by panic, I rose up on my hands and knees gulping for oxygen, the absence of breath producing a rib-crunching pain. I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t cry. Perhaps it’s the closest I’ll ever come to reliving my own birth.

Air finally made its way in, but was expelled instantly by a series of shuddering sobs. I got to my feet as my mother was making her way around the fence. She didn’t ask what had happened; it must have been obvious; me crying in one yard, the bike collapsing her peonies in the other. Later, she convinced me that learning to stop without incident was a skill worth mastering, especially if I wanted to survive childhood.

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And so I learned to brake, discovered it wasn’t that difficult, and, as I grew, began venturing out of my neighborhood to visit friends made at school. My biggest problem on busier streets was avoiding obstacles in the shoulder; sticks, trash, standing water, I wrestled with them all, but the worst was the excess sand that accumulated in early spring after the snow-melt.

It seemed every year, I’d be cruising along, leaning into a right-hand turn, when, Slam! I’d find myself sprawled on the pavement like a cavalryman, his horse shot out from under him. Usually, the fall would result in nothing more than a bruised forearm, but, more and more I found myself looking forward to one day owning a driver’s license.

In my early teens, I’d sometimes borrow my sister’s 10-speed. It was undersized for a racer, but was painted neutral-green, had reliable hand-brakes, and, most importantly, did not have a recessed, step-through frame indicative of a girl’s bicycle. 1

One wet summer night, after hanging at a friend’s house, I was halfway home when a light drizzle suddenly turned torrential. With raindrops blurring my vision, I was taking a corner when the bike lost traction; the skinny tires like super-dull skate blades on a freshly smoothed ice surface. Once again, I was going down. Hard.

The bike slid away as I made a perfect eight-point landing on the slick pavement. First the palms of my hands, then elbows, followed by both knees and hipbones. I skidded about a foot before coming to a stop, scraped and bleeding.

With still a ways to go, I picked myself up and looked back angrily like the klutz who just tripped over a crack in the sidewalk. A few feet behind was a manhole cover. Not a square drainage grate, but one of those shiny, dimpled iron plates that say SEWER across the center. Sonofabitch. There was no one around so I took my time inspecting the bike for structural damage. It checked out, but my cuts were beginning to sting as water seeped in.

I rode home cautiously in the unrelenting downpour, my sweat pants torn at the knees, coasting most of the way.

By the time I walked into the house, the pain had begun to subside, but my rain-soaked clothing was blood-stained, making my injuries look more serious than they were.

After a little cleanup and some antiseptic, I was left with a few scars that would remain well into adulthood along with a growing realization that maybe cycling wasn’t for me. I decided to walk until I was old enough to drive.

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I’ve always been physically active, staying in shape through several phases of training – competitive sports, free weights, nautilus. So in my early twenties, when I began looking for a new way to break a sweat, it dawned on me that, as a lifetime borrower and receiver of hand-me-downs, I’d never actually owned my own bicycle.

Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was the bikes.

An impulsive shopper, I purchased the first bike that caught my eye; a metallic-blue, fifteen-speed Schwinn Passage. It took about a week for the problems to start.

First, the bike came equipped with narrow, racing-style quill pedals fashioned with straps and toe clips. For someone like me, who didn’t always require fins while scuba diving, the pedal assemblies clutched my sneakers like alpine ski bindings. Second, the rear derailleur came out of alignment whenever I down-shifted causing the chain to disengage and fall free of the sprockets. This usually happened while pedaling uphill, leaving my legs pumping without resistance as the chain dangled impotently like an untied shoelace.

As the bike began to falter, I attempted to free my feet, which remained clamped down, sending me once again to the pavement, scraped and bruised; a public idiot.

“Are you alright?” passersby would ask. Just great, thanks, I’m in my early twenties thinking I may have been better off buying a tricycle.

You may be saying to yourself, Why didn’t he just fix the things that were troublesome? A fair question. But I was never one for performing repairs or modifications. Seemed every time I tried to improve upon or fix something complicated – complicated for me, that is – things just got more complicated. I once tried to adjust the spool tension on a fishing reel, ended up stripping the gears in the process; then there was the time at my father’s gas station when I attempted to fill a customer’s radiator with oil.

No, there wasn’t going to be any tweaking or mending. I reacted like a frustrated, mechanically-challenged incompetent, punishing the bike for letting me down by stacking it on the porch amongst old baseball cards and Christmas decorations where it would remain for several years.

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When I next turned to my two-wheeler, I was approaching thirty with low-back pain that yearly crossed activities off the list of exercises I could perform without discomfort. Competitive sports were out; controlled motions were in.

First, I removed the toe clips and straps – to my surprise, the pedals didn’t come apart – then filled the tires and drove to a local cycle dealer for a tune-up and helmet.

The bike was ready.

My back, however, was not.

The terrible potholes and crowded streets of Massachusetts are no place for someone who absorbs every bump and encroachment with the potential for a one-week stay in bed. The bike was returned to the porch until recently when I decided maybe someone else could put it to use. With the low mileage and somewhat recent tune-up, the bike was like new, and I came to the realization that I was probably not going to wake up some pain-free morning and pedal my way to work. Perhaps it was just a case of the handler not able to tame the stallion. Either way, I was relieved to be rid of the temptation, the reminder. It’s someone else’s burden now. In the end, letting go was easy. Like riding a bike.
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1 Incidently, the person who determined the gender of the step-through frame had to have been a woman; there’s no way that, given the choice, someone with testicles would’ve opted for a design that called for a metal tube running crotch-wise seat to handlebars.