She's Got a Bike

And she can ride it if she likes, that is, if she gets it fixed:


I haven't been on a bicycle since 1987. Getting a car negated the need to pedal around New Jersey to get places. In the city I've become quite fond of walking (even before I decided to walk every block of Manhattan), but you ain't getting me on a bike in this town to save your life.

I just don't see it having a happy ending. I don't have the situational awareness to be bombing down some avenue pedaling my little feet off, even with the assurance of some kind of helmet — most likely what Jack Nicholson had in Easy Rider. I've driven way too much in this city to ever want to ride a bike in it. Drivers are just too nuts. Hell, bicyclists in this city are a goddamned pain in the ass too — except for stationary bicyclists, of course.

And now I hear it's a new trend with the awful hipster crowd not to have brakes on your bicycle, and they even have some sort of stupid nickname for it that eludes me at the moment (and I'm not trying very hard to remember it. crap I just did.) They're called, "fixies," as in fixed gear.

When I was a kid, ALL BIKES WERE FIXED GEAR! But we didn't call them "fixies," we called them BIKES. And if the chain broke, you had better enough sense to take one of your feet and jam it against the rear wheel before you wound up going headlong into a garage door. I didn't learn that trick until I was a teenager.

The one time I can remember dropping a chain it was the fall, so I aimed my Schwinn (or maybe it was my Huffy, which weighed around 80 or 90 pounds — or so it felt to me), at a bag of leaves, thinking it would be akin to landing in a pile of foam.

I'm sure Dr. Michio Kaku could describe it better than me, but the bag of leaves abruptly stopped the bicycle, yet I kept on traveling forward through both time and space. I probably didn't land far from the bike, but this fish story grew so much I can't tell you much else besides that I had the wind knocked out of me, and was probably crying, hurt a lot less for all the commotion I was making.

But no, you ain't gonna be gettin' me on no bike in this town.

No way no how.
Not now, not never.