My Bicycle Hell – Part 2 – The Golden Shower
When we ended Part 1, my parents were poised to exact their revenge on me for losing my almost brand-new Kmart Excaliber BMX bike to thieves in the park (in the thieves defense, I DID leave it there overnight). I don’t even remember where they found the next clunker they gave me, but in many ways it was worse than the Banana Turd. It kinda looked like this:
Except it was bright, bright yellow. What I remember most about “The Golden Shower” was that all of the gears, which are supposed to make riding easier, were rusted up, making it feel like I was pedaling up hill at all time. In addition, it had really cool-looking handbrakes that didn’t work. So every time I had to stop that badboy I had to pull a Fred Flintstone and hope to Baby Jesus that I would stop in time (the scene in Temple of Doom where Indy stops the Mining Cart with his feet pretty much sums up my daily rides to school for ya). Lastly, the yellow paint made me easy to identify and single out in a crowd, meaning more shoes up my ass per month than I had even averaged in the Nanner Nightmare days.
I couldn’t do anything about the condition of the bike, but I soon realized that I COULD do something about the awful piss-colored paint, in fact NEEDED to before some bully’s shoe became permanently lodged in my rectum (there had already been a couple of close calls). So I scrounged around in my Pop’s mess of an outdoor work area (which is a story all by itself) and finally found a half-full can of black spray paint. Bingo: my bike was about to get a whole lot cooler.
It took me about ten minutes to spray down most of the bike with the sticky black paint. As you can tell, I was no perfectionist, even at that young age. The result, in hindsight, was a complete fuckin disaster. The bike looked like a Salvador Dali painting: the spokes were half gray, half black; the cheap paint was flat and grainy; and tiny islands of yellow peppered the bike like burst sores. But to my down-syndromed eyes it looked sweet indeed, like a whole new bike!
I had ridiculous visions of riding in to school and fooling people into thinking I’d gotten a new bike. Maybe, just maybe, the beatings would stop.
I was excited as hell, and decided to celebrate by riding my ridiculous contraption over to my friend’s house to show him my masterful handiwork. I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he saw the makeover I’d been able to accomplish in just 10 minutes.
As I began to pedal, I ignored the familiar battle to make the damn thing move (picture an exercise cycle on the highest setting and you have a start). Nothing was going to spoil this moment for me. In my excitement, I pedaled faster and faster, gradually picking up speed until my surroundings were a blur. In my head, it was almost as if I had my sweet, doting Excalibur back and we were making tender music together again.
Maybe it was this distortion of reality that inspired my next move, because I was clearly out of my head to try it. As I continued to gather speed, I leaned back on my newly black ten-speed and popped a glorious, show-stopping wheely.
And stared in horror as my front tire came off and quickly rolled away like a wino leaving the scene of an accident.
For a moment I hung there, precariously pedaling my brakeless unicycle like a circus clown. If I had thought things through, I probably could have jumped off the back and come through the incident relatively unscathed. But alas, I’m a dullard, so instead I just kept the wobbly contraption up in the air as long as possible (about 3 seconds) and then came crashing forward.
My delicate, pre-pubescent man marbles hit the bar in front of the seat with the force of a Star Jones cannonball, forcing the little guys so far into my body cavity that I felt them tickling my uvula. An instant later I splatted against the pavement with a pitiful “Ugh” noise and slid forward on my hands and knees for what must have been a half mile judging by the amount of asphalt that became lodged under my road-rashed skin.
As I curled up into a fetal position, my balls speaking to me in tongues, I glanced over at “The Golden Shower.” The back wheel spun lazily, and the missing front tire had revealed a patch of yellow paint I had missed.
I was pretty sure there was a lesson to be had somewhere in all of this, some glaring symbolism. But I couldn’t come up with a damn thing, which maybe was the most important lesson of all: it’s hard to have an epiphany with a mouthful of bloody chicklets.
