Bike Snob - Anonymous [25]
The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know that if I looked at my life as footprints on a beach there would be a lot of bicycle tire tracks. In the early scenes, there would be the ones from the old hand-me-down Schwinn on which I learned how to ride. At first, there’d also be a set of training wheel tracks next to the main tracks, but eventually those would disappear, though I’m sure there would be scattered sand and some blood where I fell off the bike while getting the hang of things. After a while, those would be replaced by the knobby tire tracks from my first BMX, on which I learned to skid and do tricks on the streets of Bayswater, Far Rockaway, with my first best friends, a pair of identical twins. Then the knobby tire tracks would wander off when that big kid asked if he could “try my bike,” and I let him, even though I realized as I handed it over that I’d just given it away. Fortunately, though, the tracks didn’t wander very far, and I actually found the bike later that day in front of the kid’s house, because he was even dumber than I was. Then more BMX tracks, at first all chaotic because of all the tricks, but becoming increasingly linear and deliberate because as I got older I got into racing. Then there are the tracks from the old crappy Univega I started doing longer rides on in college, and that would bring me to adulthood where at present the bicycle tracks of my life are a vast ganglion of varying tire widths and tread patterns shooting off into all directions.
At this point in my vision I’d probably ask: “Great Obvious Bicycle Metaphor, you once said that if I decided to ride you’d be with me all the way, but I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, like that time I was ‘slaying’ some singletrack and rode into a tree, that there was only one set of footprints and no tire tracks after that for a while.”
The Great Obvious Bicycle Metaphor would reply, “You stupid idiot. That’s because you separated your shoulder. Bikes go where they’re pointed, and you pointed yours into a tree.”
“Okay, fair enough. So where were you in high school?”
“You were an awful brooding creature like most teens. Nobody wanted to be around you. I stayed as far away from you as possible so as not to hear your awful music or inadvertently witness your fumbling formative sexual experiences.”
“Eeew.”
“Exactly. But you did discover skateboarding and a lot of bands you liked because you were interested in bikes, didn’t you? You never really liked most of the things other people in your high school were interested in, so being into bikes helped you seek out and discover your own interests. So you could say I single-handedly led you to your first independent cultural discovery, couldn’t you? You could also say I respected you enough to give you your space.”
“I suppose that’s true. But how about this? Remember when I got my first really nice road bike?”
“It really wasn’t that nice—it was just a Cannondale.”
“Well, it was nice to me. Remember how I bought that bike, even though I could hardly afford it? Remember how I rode it all the time, and then I ended up leaving my job because I was unhappy there and then went to work as a bike messenger? I was having a great time and really enjoying it and things were going great. Just look at the beach! There’s my footprints and your tire tracks, side by side. Then I locked my bike up to a mailbox,