Truesday: Red In The Pink

Anyhow, one instance doesn’t make a statistic. Well, actually it does, statistically speaking. But it proves nothing. I’m giving the pink bike theory another go.

After all, this one doesn’t have badass white tires and white mags like my Kuwa. My god, that bike was dope. This one’s not so sweet. It’s pink, but more in the way that my skin is pink. So when I ride it around town nude, it will look like my body is part bicycle. Just like Edward Scissorhands, except illegal and stupid looking. But all the ostracizing and eventual Machiavellian fake-deathing will be identical.

So this bike is about function. It’s about getting me to a better place. Better than wherever the hell it is I am probably confused about being at this moment. A state of more up-ness. Better than. Something. Anything.

But it’s not working yet.

Initially I was hoping that I’d be adopting a healthier, more responsible way of doing the whole a-to-b thing. But what the hell am I really getting into? I don’t know a damn thing about bikes other than: they’re way expensive and the people who ride them scare me sometimes.

Actually, they scare me in all sorts of ways. Some scare me by riding from Hyde Park all the way to Round Rock for work everyday. That’s like, five… hundred… hectometers. Or some shit (maps and distances are hard for some of us). It’s a long damn way, and it probably involves touching I35 at some point, which isn’t nicknamed “The Corridor of Death” in honor of how many people have met and fallen in love while stuck in traffic. The long distance bikers are some variety of super human. Super things tend to scare me.

Other bikers scare me by acting all brazen and dick-hole like. Riding on the sidewalks some of the time, against traffic, with traffic, between traffic. Ear buds and iPod drowning out the sounds of screaming sidewalkers, and pesky car horn warnings. They seem so middle school-ish. I mean, that’s how I rode my bike in sixth grade. All over the damn place. Safety? “Man, that’s gotta be someone else’s responsibility.” And I ran into shit all the time. It was a thing for me. Bushes, parked cars, parking cars, garage doors, telephone polls, people I didn’t care about. Me and my 800 lb “Renegade” from Target (swapped out that banana seat though, ‘cause it was just too vicious looking). All the time.

So whenever I’m driving up behind one of these bikers, I don’t know what they’ll do next. Some don’t bother looking before crossing into traffic, or popping up off the sidewalk and onto the shoulder. Running red lights and shit. Totally unpredictable, and yet so vulnerable. I know that when they screw up and do something stupid, which seems inevitable, I will be held responsible if I don’t see it coming and plan accordingly. And this used to bother me something awful. I used to cringe when sharing a lane with cyclists. Fist-shaking cringiness.

But now that I’m peddling my ass to work, sharing the road with drivers, the foot’s on the other peddle and I’m starting to hate drivers too.

Notice that I’m not swapping out. I’m still annoyed by two-wheelers. I’m not changing teams, I’m just expanding my annoyance horizon.

Yesterday, as I was heading home, climbing south up the insanely steep Bouldin Ave. from Barton Springs, pretending like I have a clue what to do with 21 goddamn gears, I came to a set of speed bumps separated by an esplanade. Of course, I was approaching this road hazard at the whizzing speed of hair growth, so I had lots of time to study the situation as I sweated toward it at inches-per-hour, cursing and “kah-chank”-ing.

There was only room for a single vehicle to pass on each side of the esplanade. No room for a vehicle and a bike. Plus, there was a speed bump there, and, well, I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to get over that hump with much efficiency. I certainly didn’t want to share the space with… a minivan.

During my slowed ascent to the bump, I heard over my left shoulder the faint sound of an automobile approaching from behind. I looked over and saw that it was a grey minivan. Going so slow that the driver just might have been peddling too. So I slowed to the point of stand-still to let the van know that I had no intention of competing with it for right-of-way into the hump-esplanade gauntlet. I wanted them to go first, so that I’d have plenty of space and time to safely navigate the thing. We were still a good thirty feet from it, so it would be another ten minutes before I got there anyway.

That damned minivan driver, obviously confused about something, decided to pull right up behind me, just to coast at my exact pace. Not to be too crass or mean, but motherfucker: what the hell? It’s hard enough to cry out loud while riding a pink bike up the side of a small mountain. No one needs an audience on top of that. But there they were, a woman and her little girl with pigtails, inches from my left handle bar, staring in awe through the charcoal tint, glaring in astonishment as if they found a circus bear that had gotten loose and stole a bike to tool through the neighborhood on.

I can only guess what was going on in the mind of that motherdriver. “Is he alright? Will he make it? I can see he’s struggling something awful, and I don’t want to scare him, so I’ll just drive right up next to him and stare REALLY hard like he’s diseased. I'm a motherdriver, so I know what to do. That way he’ll know that everything is going to be alright.”

After a couple of really awkward seconds shared between me and the riders of the van, I decided enough was enough. They needed to go ahead and take the esplanade, and I needed a moment to go ahead and have a momentary death before I continued on. My grand plan to get this done seemed simple enough. I would wave them forward, stop my bike, and just stand there for a while. Long enough for them to get far clear of me and my hill-climbing failure. Then I would resume my cursed path and my heart would probably burst on someone's front lawn.

Easy breezy.

So I lifted my left arm off the handle and signaled the “go ahead, asshole” wave while moving closer to the curb for a rest. The bike quickly stopped moving once I stopped pumping. The minivan stopped as well, ignoring my hand waving, which really pissed me off. The little girl remained glued to the glass, staring in scared wonder.

And then the strangest set of events unfolded.

You see, I’ve never owned a mountain-bikeish type bike. All my pedals have been free of tethers or clips. When you stop a bike, I have been trained to understand that one may simply lift their leg up off the pedal, and down to the solid ground below. This keeps one from falling down.

But this bike has strappy things over the pedals. Like, pedal bras for my breast-feet. So when my bike stopped moving, and I went to put my right foot on the curb for a poised and smooth touchdown, I noted that the straps over my shoes were not going to allow it. With my left hand still in the air waving, next to an idling minivan on a steep slope in a residential neighborhood, I simply fell over like a gunshot victim. No ceremony, no commotion, just… hit the pavement. I didn’t even brace myself for the impact. I was still confused as to why my foot refused to respond to my demands. Stupid straps.

But what really got to me, was that as soon as I had hit the pavement and looked up, the minivan smoothly started back up again. Almost as if that was her and her kid’s plan. When I was up and moving, she was all up in my Koolaid, heckling my ride, but as soon as I was laid out on the sidewalk and gutter of Bouldin Ave looking the part of: sad neighborhood invalid, she booked it like [toward the pigtailed daughter] “Finally, my god, I thought he’d never fall down. See Julie, that’s ten points. Count it.”

Damned drivers.