Bicycles and Me

I want to ride my bicycle;

I want to ride my bike.

I want to ride my bicycle;

I want to ride it where I like.

-- Freddie Mercury

In the beginning, there was the red Schwinn. Or at least that's how I remember it. There were, in fact, many bikes in our neighborhood. We had a bicycle culture when I was a boy in the 1970's. I haven't thought about it in years, but as I recall the accessories I bought for that bike -- the baskets and rear view mirrors, the generator lights that ran on pedal power, and the horns -- it makes me realize just how important my bikes were to me back then.

I suppose each bike was a kind of status symbol that said something about the kid who rode it. I don't pretend to have a memory that could call up all the different brand names each kid had, but I do remember one distinctly -- the Raleigh Chopper that Richie Mahoney owned. If I'm not mistaken it was a rust brown color and it was the coolest bike by far.

That is until Richie trashed it. That's what we did with our bikes back then. We were heavily influenced by the ABC hit TV series Happy Days, and there was a very popular storyline about the Fonz falling for Pinky Tuscadero, leader of the Pink Ladies. She was just as tough as Fonzie, and the two of them rode motorcycles together. To me, they were nothing short of the perfect couple, so I was devastated when Pinky was injured during a demolition derby by the evil Malachi Brothers. My friends and I regularly re-enacted the derby on the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, much to the chagrin of our parents, I would imagine, who must have wondered how we managed to smash up our bikes so completely on such a regular basis.

I would also imagine that I was the Fonz and Lorraine Mahoney was Pinky, and that we were the king and the queen of the demolition derby. No matter how things turned out in the cul de sac, in my mind, we always won, and lived happily ever after.

(I was a bit of a Walter Mitty, even back then.)

Bikes became less a part of my life as I got older; although that changed when we moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan when I was going into the tenth grade, in the summer of 1978. One of the first things I noticed about Grosse Pointe Park, the town where we lived, was how flat it was. My brother and I were given bikes as a means of transportation; he rode to the middle school each day, and I rode over to Grosse Pointe South High School. It was an easy, bucolic, painfully suburban ride.

The first time I ever got intoxicated was in Grosse Pointe, at Wendy Maniere's house, about a block away from where I lived. At the end of the party, I rode my ten speed home, which was no easy feat. As I recall, there were no cars on the road, but I still managed to get tripped up at a stop sign and land on my ass.

I walked my bike the rest of the way home, collapsed into my bed and vomited shortly thereafter, in a manner so violent that I found myself promising the toilet bowl I would never drink again. (I lied.)

Bicycles didn't really play a part in my life again until I went to college and met Susan Barney. We bought ten speeds together and would take them for rides over to Oakwood Cemetery, where we would sit against trees and read. This was one of those simple, quiet pleasures of those years that I'll remember always.

When the two of us traveled one summer in Europe, we rented bikes in France, in Aix-en-Provence, I believe it was. The travel had wearied me, so that riding the French bicycle was difficult, and I ended up not only exhausted, but sick, as well. I remembered a cure for nausea I had found while traveling in California, when I got car-sick driving up Big Sur. I had my girlfriend's older sister pull the rental car over, and I sat on the side of the road, ready to be sick. Then I noticed a familiar smell -- eucalyptus. I was sitting right beside a bush of the stuff. As I sniffed in the aroma, I immediately felt better. There wasn't any eucalyptus in France, so I sat under a tree and breathed in the smells of the grass and earth until I felt better. (Susan was good enough to take a picture, capturing me in this condition.)

Bicycles were absent from my life during my time living in Manhattan, as that was an era of mind-numbing blurriness, for the most part. It wasn't until I re-emerged on the other side of the East River, in Brooklyn, that I decided to invest in another bike. I lived next to Prospect Park, a biking mecca, and I was wheeling into a new life, yet again.

Now, here in Manor, Texas, I ride my bike as often as I can. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those guys you see going up hills on the side of the highway, wearing brightly colored spandex, and I didn't need to take out a second mortgage to buy my bicycle. I like to ride a mile or two at a time, or just go for a spin with my kids every now and then. It's not much, but there's a feeling of freedom and renewal I get when I'm on my bike. And I'm not saying the red Schwinn will be my "Rosebud" or anything as heavy as that, but I do feel a connection to all those earlier, cycling selves each time I get on the bike and ride.