I Am So Popular: Like a Fish Needs a Man

Gentle readers, meet Eileen Schaubert, bicyclist extraordinaire and extremely good sport. Eileen works at Mellow Johnny’s, Lance Armstrong’s new downtown bike shop. She does community outreach and education. Eileen is an old friend of my young, hot boyfriend, Warren and he introduced us at a party.

That night, I confessed to Eileen that bicycles scare the crap out of me. And then I said one of those things you say at a party after you’ve done too many lines of coke and feel emboldened enough to tell a lie and believe it yourself: “Maybe we can get together sometime and you can get my ass on a bike.”

But I hadn’t done any coke and neither had Eileen and so when we crossed paths again I couldn’t pretend I had forgotten. Which is how I wound up with my bike-fearing butt back in the saddle.

A brief history of me and bikes. In elementary school, knowing Jimmy Richardson—my crush of the hour—would be riding by my house on the way to Midget Football (I swear they called it that), I decided to bust a move on my hand-me-down Schwinn. The goal was to time an Evil Knievel jump over our uneven driveway curb for the moment JR passed and in a manner that would convince him I was worthy of his eternal love.

I don’t think he saw me, which was a blessing, since I went flying off the bike and landed on my face on the concrete. Upon which a nail waited, eager to pierce my face. Which it did.

Other attempts at cycling have yielded similar results. Two particularly bad crashes in my early twenties—one which, yes, also related to having the hots for an unavailable man—semi-soured me on the mode. In college I procured a decent twelve speed and would ride maybe twenty miles some days, but that was Florida and flat and I cruised on mostly empty roads so I was hardly gaining commuter/inner-city experience or facing my fears.

When my kid was in elementary school, I got a cruiser so I could ride with him to school. That was a fun bike with a nice, big, couch-like gel seat. Mostly though, it just stayed parked in the living room so I passed it on to our Japanese exchange student when he moved out.

Then I was done with bikes, save for rare occasions like a five block cruise on a yellow bike I spotted on New Year’s Eve, a ride along Galveston’s sea wall, a wind-in-my-hair jaunt along a bike path in Astoria, Oregon. Mostly my motto was: This Woman Needs a Bicycle Like A Fish Needs a Man.

But what with the whole reduce-your-carbon-footprint-slash-gas-is-forty-bucks-a-gallon Venn Diagram of late, I started rethinking my bicycle stance. I didn’t commit to actually getting a bike. I just put the thought down on that mental To Do List, the one that also features items like: Learn Spanish! Learn Hebrew! Amass Positive Bank Balance! No Really—Quit Smoking! Clean out the Car!

Enter Eileen. I have found, in twenty-five years of reporting, that I have a tendency to use my job as a shield. Instead of saying, “You know, I really want to learn something but I am a total chickenshit about it,” I will say, “I don’t really want to learn this, but it is my duty as a reporter to tell others how they might learn.”

This technique has, at least a few times, worked. It’s how I wound up learning to set aside my aquaphobia at age 38 and figure out how to swim, which I did courtesy of an assignment to hang out with two-time Olympic gold medal swimmer and swim coach Shaun Jordan. But swimming, at least as I practice it, occurs in the safe confines of the pool at the East Communities Y. That body of water is four feet deep all the way across, you can see clear to the bottom, and you don’t have to share a lane if you don’t want to.

Biking, on the other hand, especially commuter biking which is what Eileen set out to demonstrate, does not have any such safe parameters. It’s you and eighty billion big, scary, stinky cars helmed by a lot of drivers who aren’t looking for you, don’t see you, and have no idea that in many instances it is legal for cyclists to ride in the center of a lane. And so they shout things at you. Or try to run you off the road.

Let’s talk about perspective—it really does look different from the other side of the fence. I know, when I’m out driving and, say, it’s night and I come up on a cyclist I hadn’t seen sooner because s/he is dressed in black and has no lights or reflectors, I get pissed off. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life dealing with the fallout of having plowed down a cyclist. And I especially can’t stand self-righteous, in-your-face cyclists who run red lights, cut in and out of traffic, and glare at you for being in the way, even if you’re in your assigned, legal spot in traffic.

So, in a nutshell: there’s a lot of fear and hostility out there on the road on both sides.

But now that I’ve ridden with Eileen, I have decided that when I am king, in addition to making everyone learn martial arts and meditation, I will also make every driver go out and ride a bike in traffic at least a few times. What an eye opener and I say that as somebody who—in large part because I have a teenager who rides his bike a lot—is already hyper-vigilant about watching for cyclists.

Before we went out, Eileen and I sat and talked bicycle laws, safety and routes for a long time. She was preparing to speak at a memorial service for a Fixie—a rider who rode one of those super fast, messenger style bikes. The kind without brakes. The police report wasn’t in yet to provide details so it was unclear who was at fault. But that doesn’t matter, really. The rider was dead and to me, that’s a bottom line. In the end, when it’s car vs. bike (or pedestrian) even if the bike (or pedestrian) legally has the right of way, guess who’s coming out on the wrong end of the stick in a collision?

With that in mind, and with a helmet firmly upon my very popular head, I followed Eileen through the streets and along the bike paths during rush hour. She was a champ—confident, knowledgeable and skilled. I feigned non-fear, shocking my own self when I figured out how to shift gears on my borrowed ride (a Trek mountain bike).

I’m sure it will come as no surprise at all to regular cyclists but let me tell the rest of you: a lot of the paths sort of just end, are cluttered with debris, and don’t necessarily lend themselves to easily commuting from point A to point B in a practical fashion. But then, at least there weren’t cars on the paths.

Now ask me how I felt, at 5 p.m., in the turn lane at 5th and Lamar, hoping to make a left and survive to write about it. Or how about this—as if Eileen had hired actors to greet us along the way and demonstrate some of her safety points, we encountered the following:

*Door zone hazards—that is, people suddenly whipping open their car doors directly into our path, which Eileen (but not I) knew enough to watch for and avoid.

*A teenage driver near Austin High, pulling her SUV in front of us and then throwing it into reverse and nearly hitting us again even after she spotted us.

*My favorite—a woman leaning out the passenger window of a minivan on Barton Springs Road screaming and gesturing at us, hollering, “It’s rush hour, y’all need to get off the road!” Why? Because we were—legally—riding in a lane.

So, my plea to both sides—a little more mindfulness, eh? I’m not stepping into the helmet debate except to say I think helmets are lovely things. I am begging for the use of lights—front, back, shiny, flashing, disco-ey warnings so I don’t hit you when I’m driving.

And drivers? Check out the laws and quit yelling at cyclists. It’s not their fault we have ridiculously limited bike lanes. Even if you are paying close attention and not, say, texting, yapping on the phone, and trying to tune in your kid’s backseat TV, you can still miss seeing a cyclist in the road. Toward that end, check out this video.

And Eileen? Thanks for the ride. Seriously, my crotch is still remembering our time together.

Spike Gillespie is still not sure about buying a bike, but if she does it’s going to have a very big, very soft seat. She is blogs regularly at LaunchPad Coworking and www.spikeg.com. She is also head mistress for the Dick Monologues. Email her if you want to reserve tickets for November 12th: spike@spikeg.com.