Getting Religion

Getting Religion

I started messing on this hunk of junk that a friend from the old neighborhood in Buffalo picked out of the trash. She was a Mercier. Before I was a messenger, I went to France. I was a college punk spending Uncle Sam's student loan, so there wasn't much left over to buy an authentic French bike while I was there. The neighborhood friend, Marvin, was disappointed for me, so when he found the already 20 year old bike in the trash, he knew that was the bike for me.

Grace, was a very bad rookie bike. I was not a mechanic at that point. Grace, without knowing it, was training me how to ride fixies. See, among Grace's multitude of mechanical personality problems, had wheels that were going steadily out of true. I didn't even know back then about the concept of truing wheels, much less being able to do it or ask for it at the bike shop. So to combat the rim-rubbing problem, I loosened the brakes more and more. Needless to say, I was riding with very bad brakes within a few months. In DC it's considered a real faux pas to stand at redlights, so Grace speeded my redlight running skills quickly. I couldn't stop worth a shit anyway. Rain was particularly daunting for me in that first year of currying. When it rained, I went from having bad brakes to having no brakes. I'll never forget coming down Independence Ave. in the rain down Capital Hill that one fateful day. I started out slow, just coasting, monster grip on the brake levers and praying the whole way. When I got to the bottom of the hill I was cooking and the light had been red for a good 5 seconds. Cars were coming and I shut my eyes and yelled for Buddha to guide my bike. Buddha came through. I got very good at getting around town.

I moved around a bunch, after several degrading episodes in bike shops around the country, I began acquiring tools and teaching myself how to work on my bikes. Now, brakes weren't a problem.

When I got to Seattle, some 4 years ago, after hearing tales of NY I decided it was time that I learned how to ride the only bike that could foil a NY thief. That was a bike with nothing on it to steal, a fixed gear. It was a scary thought, but I'm a spaz so I got it in my head that I had to start learning as soon as possible so that by the time I got to NYC, I wouldn't be a complete dumb ass on the thing. NYC is infamous for its courier-eating traffic, I figured if I was going to ride a suicide machine, I better have some miles under my belt before I dared ride it in NY.

It was do or die. I threw myself into the sea to sink or swim, no brakes. One night at 3 am I had the brilliant idea to really see what I could accomplish by going down Cherry Street. Cherry Street has a 29% grade, needless to say, I was completely out of control. From then on I just rode the fixie for errands.

I got to SF. The queen mother of heart attack hills. By this point I was adept getting down the hills because as I went down I'd put my foot on the front wheel behind the forks. My shoes had the strangest ditch-like worn spot on the sole. My front tires had only a strip of rubber running down the very middle of the tire. A lot of the time in my pre-skidding days, I had honed a certain skill in just resisting the momentum of the pedal stroke and maintained a certain degree of control, enough control to at least be able to turn before I got mowed down by a muni-bus.

I was having fun going down Van Ness. It isn't an extreme grade, but on a fixie with no brakes, there's a threshold of velocity one should not cross if one doesn't know how to skid. I went over that threshold. I was going toward McAllister and the outbound lane looked at me menacingly, I almost heard the street say, "Oh! You wanna go Huh? Well honey you aren't going to win this time!" I always talked to myself in moments like this. "Girl, keep your line straight, Honeycakes, easy DON'T PANIC." My mind was racing, there was no way out. The cars were nose to tail and blowing the light would be certain death or mutilation. Then I noticed the mini-van to my right. I gauged the sweatiness of my palm, I gave it a go.

I was beginning to get a little cocky now. I was still determined to conquer one of these walls they called hills in SF. Hyde St. beckoned on that sunny day. My heart was beating in my ears. I started down. I had it for half a block, then I noticed this dude kooking out on me across the street and I lost all of my concentration. All of a sudden the voices in my head were berating me. I was REALLY out of control now. It wasn't just the hill that almost made me crap my pants, I was also worried about my bike. Being one of the dumbest human beings that has ever lived, I was on a road bike with forward dropouts. If that wasn't enough, the fixed cog was on a regular road bike wheel with no lockring. Now if that stupidity isn't enough for you, the chain was pieced together out of three different used chains. It's amazing how the events of a few seconds can crystallize just how stupid you are. I saw no options, except one. I managed to get on the sidewalk and I ran straight into a wall. A very effective braking method, although I don't recommend it very highly.

The moment that made me decide that a track wheel was absolutely essential to riding a track bike happened on Bush Street.

No one stays in their lane on Bush. From the "loin", cars haul ass until they get bottled up around Kearny. I started in the "loin", thought I could hold the shit off the fan...then I got to Chinatown. Zen got me the rest of the way down. I listened to Obi Won Kenobi and the bike found the windows for me. Kearny was brilliantly green as I freight trained into the tighter rows of unruly cars. Peds were jumping out like trash being blown willy nilly across the street and somehow I found my line. I think Buddha was a big player in this incident as well. My ultimate fear was not death but of crashing at the terminus of Bush. If I crashed there, I'd be the laughing stock of all SF's couriers. They already looked at me sideways a lot of the time, this would be the defining moment. As I careened out of control past the Wall, I acted like I had every intention of going so fast. I plastered a look of supreme boredom on my terrified interior as I watched my friends in a blur out of the corner of my eye.

Mom came for the World Championships with $100 just for me. The hundred came from NY from my Step-father. He'd heard about the no-brakes thing and sent it with a decree. I told Ma to keep it. She looked worried and I think I actually saw a huge swath of her hair turn gray before my eyes. I demonstrated my new skill, a skid. Mom was satisfied and gave me the money anyway. "What will he know?" she asked me mischievously.

Now there was trouble, I had my mom's endorsement.

When I got to DC nothing happened to me with the fixed gear except it was aluminum and a piece of crap and after a couple of cold days and a couple hundred miles, the thing, surprisingly, broke.

The sad long days on the Fuji. I was so resentful, I didn't even name her. She's a good workhorse and didn't deserve my wrath, but she was just no damn fun. Every time the derailleur threw up into the spokes I cursed her. When the brake cable would snap after a day of rain, I'd glare at her, "See!" I told her, "This shit wouldn't happen on a fixed gear!" I blamed her for everything. Period cramps, mood swings, a fight with a motorist. In my mind, everything was that damn bike's fault. My quest for my fixie went on for months. First I didn't have enough money, then I didn't know where to look. Then one day the sun broke through the clouds and I found my true love. Matt turned me on to her. Lisa had her. She lay there, wheelless. She looked like sleeping beauty. Powdered blue, French. She was the sexiest sleeping bike I'd ever seen. Forty bucks and she was mine. That night I watched bike TV. I dreamed of the days we would spend together. The doors we would dodge, the black marks we'd make, the boxes we'd carry. I felt like crying.

I rode her one day for work. She actually sang. She was a little off-key, her decrepit cranks constantly loosening up, but she was singing. We split lanes, we skidded we did the things a bike and her girl should do together. Then the house of cards fell. The bracket. The goddamned bracket. Being French, Aung has picky tastes. Everything in the world, nearly everything, is threaded English. Leave it to the damn frogs. They just have to be different! Months went by. Money was spent and finally Phil arrived. I held the box like it was the holy grail. I let my friends fondle the axle and coo. Soon, Aung would be complete.

It had been my dream since my college days to ride in Paris. I'm a francophile, I speak French, the Tour de France. I wanted to ride at the Place d'Etoile. I had been there in 1990 and remembered it being the worst traffic circle I'd ever seen. I love traffic circles. Some of my most exhilarating moments on a bike have been in traffic circles. So the US messengers headed of to Europe in 97 to go to the CMWC in Barcelona, and I was determined to ride that damn circle, on my fixed gear no less. I think she liked it because she didn't get a flat the whole trip.

When I stood with her in front of the Champs Elysee I felt the idiotic urge to bend down and kiss her top tube. So the same weirdo who used to name her peas and carrots at dinner and then make noises like they were actually alive and terrified of being dumped im my mouth, I kissed my bike.

A bike and her girl do Place d'Etoile.

A bunch of people with a tough guy problem (including myself) went to NYC for a 4th of July race. They had this track skid competition under the elevated train trestle at Coney Island. My skid compared with the likes of Boston's Santana and the famous Squid of New York, was like 1/2 pint whining to Pa on Little House on the Prairie. I felt like the little skidder who couldn't.

I set about to remembering every brilliant skidder I'd ever seen. I remembered Richie fish-tailing down 13th before we got to the Zeitgeist in SF. I remembered Squid hammering down Wilshire in LA and then laughing at death as he did a breathless skid at the intersection famous for the OJ riots. I remembered how they moved their bodies, where they looked and I was determined to surprise everyone in Barcelona.

Boston isn't a great place to practice skidding long. You can never get up a lot of speed because cows didn't have long straight-aways in mind when they designed the city.

When we had that ad-hoc skid competition though, it felt like my tires were slathered with grease and I was sliding on wet glass.

When I got back to DC I was going through a tire every two weeks, that was if I was exercising restraint and not goofing off in traffic skidding around like an idiot.

When I first started riding a fixie, I loved the fact that I couldn't stop because it was making a better rider, forcing me to pay more attention. It was also keeping me out of fights.

When I learned how to really skid, it felt like the days when the little boys on my block and I would measure the skids we could get out of our coaster brake bikes. Mine was always pretty long.

My favorite moment of all time with Aung happened on Clarendon. I was feeling cocky as hell. I'd had 1/2 a pot of coffee by the time I made my drop up high in Arlington and I was looking forward to the long ride down Clarendon. Something snapped in me around the courthouse. Sometimes my commonsense detaches itself from my conscious thought and I give in to hedonistic impulse. At Courthouse, I started to hammer. I was going around 25-30. I was spinning faster than I'd ever gone on my fixie. I was still descending. The road was curvy, I made a light. It should've been a wake-up call to my commonsense, but my commonsense was out to lunch. At Nash, Clarendon starts a serious drop, at Nash I locked it up. I didn't mean to stop, I was way over the goose. I careened forward, slowing enough to angle my skid propelling me into the left lane, setting up a turn. When the break in the oncoming came, I sat in the saddle and pedaled hard, making the slice. At Key Blvd., another serious dip. I started skidding in the middle of the intersection at Key and Ft. Meyer and continued skidding down to Lynn where I threw my ass around aligning my back wheel with cross traffic and began pedaling a typical 4 lane slice. Sheer exhilaration. A long way from Bush Street.

I name all of my bikes. I give them ugly names if I don't like them. I hated Horace. Horace and I parted company years ago. I had to pick an appropriate name for my fixie because she wasn't built with 40lb boxes in mind. She was built to ride around on a calm track, not between buses and over potholes. She's been a champ, and quite patient with me. So her name is Aung after a little Burmese lady who won the Nobel Peace Prize because she gave up her freedom so her people would one day have a democracy. Both Aungs have given me inspiration. Aung is with me hour after miserable cold and rainy hour. Aung keeps the roof over my head, the food on my table. More importantly, Aung by virtue of what she is and what she represents, has taught me the importance of simplicity. It's the absence, the minimalist nature of her message. People ask fixie riders all the time why the hell they ride such a bike. For me it took a lot of the frustration out of my job and put the fun back into it. I don't spend hours tinkering with my brakes, I don't ride the elevator wondering what will be remaining when I come back to the parking meter. I just ride.

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