From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXX

Introduction

This is the thirtieth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. (No, XXX does not mean it’s rated X … it’s more like PG-13, maybe R, we’ll see what makes it in. If this ends up being my most popular Bits & Bobs post, I’ll know why.)

Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, and Volume XXIX is here. Are you thinking “pump up the volume?” (Didn’t think so.)

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re generally passages from letters I wrote friends and family back in the days before email (or excerpts from emails, in the days after). If this sounds boring, bear in mind I’ve always wanted to be a writer so I tried pretty hard to be interesting. Also, these snippets are pretty candid, and in my youth I was socially clumsy and also tended to ride my bike at speeds some would consider dangerous … so read on because there’s always a chance you’ll enjoy some schadenfreude, righteous indignation, or relief that it wasn’t you.

The Bits & Bobs in this post are in chronological order. The different volumes are all over the place and can be read sequentially, simultaneously, serially, seriously, surreptitiously, scrupulously, sensitively, and/or sanctimoniously.

All of today’s dispatches were written when I was attending UC Berkeley.

September 17, 1990

Today I was out on my new Guerciotti, just having the time of my life riding. It was early evening, starting to get dim, when I barreled down Claremont Ave, this wide, smooth, slightly twisty road, something like a 9% grade. (The low bottom bracket of the bike makes it really stable—although I did hit a pedal yesterday at like 45 mph which was kind of scary.) Anyhow, I’m flying along and suddenly I slam into a pothole or something. There’s this incredibly loud noise and for a split second, I’m completely blinded. I still can’t figure this out; I really couldn’t see a damn thing. (My best theory is that both retinas detached from my eyeballs because of the impact, and then they reattached. Or maybe it was like a cartoon of some kind and my eyeballs spun around in their sockets.) Anyhow, when I can see again, I’m in the left lane and there are cars coming towards me. Not like right in my face, but approaching pretty fast because I’m doing 50 mph. (I noted this later, of course—it’s not like I was looking at my bike computer at the time.) Did I mention that both my wheels were basically caved in at this point, and my back one was a potato chip? It felt like somebody had removed my rear wheel and replaced it with a jackhammer. I actually didn’t have a chance to be scared; my mind was totally tied up trying to respond. All in a split second, I’m aware of several things: 1) My rear tire, and maybe my front, are absolutely guaranteed to explode at any moment; 2) The chances of crashing are so high that all I can really do is cut my speed and try to get back into my lane so that at least all I hit is the ground, instead of the unforgiving windshield of a ‘73 Plymouth Reliant; and 3) If I use my back brake, the rear wheel will definitely slide out from under me as soon as the tire blows, if not sooner. So, I slam on the front brake, which grabs on the caved-in section of the rim and lurches the bike around even more, but somehow I get my speed down to about thirty and get back into my lane just before my rear tire blows up, then the front.

From here on out it’s easy; I mean, hell, people bring bikes down from 30 mph after dual blowouts all the time, no problem. God, what a rush. Both wheels are completely totaled. The bent sections of rim look like beer cans that a party animal has flattened against his forehead. I couldn’t even roll the bike home; I had to carry it. I feel lucky to be alive, or at least lucky I’m not dead. But at the same time, I feel cursed that this freak thing happened at all. Half of me says I should go out for pizza to celebrate still being alive, while the other half says I should save my money for the new rims I have to buy now. One thing is certain: I’m not going to spend my evening studying. I’ve been through enough for one day.

September 23, 1990

It’s taking a while to make friends up here; as you know, for most of my life I’ve been pretty shy. In the last couple of years I’ve become a lot more outgoing, but because I was shy for so long, I don’t have nearly as much practice socializing as, say, you. At UCSB I had the benefit of being on the cycling team, where I had a leg up socially because I was a fast rider and people respected that. That should help me here, too, but the Berkeley team isn’t nearly so social and we won’t really get together much until the racing season starts in February. So I need a Plan B, and I have one: my strategy is to show up early to class, plop down next to any random person, and strike up a conversation. Now, the only way this could backfire is if I chat up some dude and he thinks I’m coming on to him. This could be awkward if he’s straight, and even more awkward if he’s gay. I figure I better not risk it. So I only chat up women, because if they get the wrong idea, that’s totally fine—women are really good at guiding would-be romance into mere friendship. I mean, it’s practically a cliché, right? Of course, there’s the remote possibility that this failsafe process will go astray and some woman will not only think I have romantic ambitions but she will, too. So just in case that happens, I only chat up really good looking women. I’m not on the make … just trying to gin up some friendships and I gotta start somewhere, right?

So, at the beginning of the semester I chatted up this gorgeous girl in one of my English classes, and again the next time the class met, and so on, and eventually I tossed the dice and invited her over for dinner. (I guess going for coffee would have been the more logical next step, being a bit more low-key, but I don’t drink coffee, and last time I went for coffee with a girl, I didn’t know what to order and got all flustered. I mean, I could have had hot chocolate but then I’d come off like a little kid, right? And tea is so fussy with the bag and the string and the little paper wrapper the bag came in, and the milk in the tiny pitcher, I mean, I don’t know, it all seems kind of twee. I don’t even remember what I did order that time, but I never had coffee with that girl again, which is a shame because she was fly.)

Damn, where was I? Oh, right, dinner. So I made H—, the girl from my English class, dinner at my apartment. My friend B— (who graduated from UCSB last summer and moved to Oakland with me) was there, at least for a bit before finding an excuse to bail, assuming I would want privacy, like this was some romantic thing. He subtly razzed me about this: when H— complimented our apartment and furnishings (most of them B—’s), particularly our couch and its pillows, Brett said, “Did you know these are throw pillows?” He didn’t actually wink at me as he said this, but it was obviously a subtle reference to “throw the ho’s,” a phrase in surprisingly widespread use by me and my Santa Barbara pals. We will say, for example, “Call me Hector. Hector Throw-da-Ho’s,” or we complain, “No meet da ho’s, no throw da ho’s,” or simply “No ho’s.” Of course we don’t mean ho as in actual whore; “ho” is just a handy synonym for woman, or perhaps for attractive woman, just like “freak.” And the “no throw da ho’s” lament is mostly true; most of us have nobody to throw most of the time.

Well, dinner went fine, and then H— and I randomly started watching “Akira,” a movie B— had rented, which was this Japanese animated thing that started off pretty well, with young attractive people zooming around on cool motorcycles, but at some point the main character has some kind of weird bodily mutation with his arms growing insanely and becoming like tentacles. I could tell H— was pretty freaked out so we shut that off and went up on the roof. It’s not that high up but had a great view of the Golden Gate and all that. Then it got a bit late and we went back to my apartment and the phone was ringing, which doesn’t happen that often, and it was H—’s roommate, calling to see if she was okay. I was surprised that a) her roommate would worry, and b) she was resourceful enough to find my phone number. Or was this a precaution? (“If I’m not home by 10, check on me, would you?”) So anyhow, I walked H— home even though it’s a pretty good neighborhood. It was a nice night and when we got to her place, she invited me in.

Well, this was unexpected. I figured I’d just see H— to the door, and then head on home. I don’t think I was even speculating about a friendly little peck on the cheek because this wasn’t really a date, not as far as I could tell. I mean, how do you tell? Was she inviting me in just to be nice? Or was this like in the movies and was supposed to lead to (dot dot dot)? Obviously I was over-thinking things, as usual. Anyhow, eventually it came to pass that I found myself sitting down in her apartment. I don’t remember what would have made me decide to sit down other than perhaps our conversation was ongoing and I didn’t feel like standing anymore. So now it didn’t look like my departure was imminent. So what was I supposed to do next?

It occurred to me that H— might be waiting for me to bust a move, and if I didn’t, she might take that as an insult. I sure didn’t want to insult her, and besides, she was super fly as I believe I mentioned already. The opportunity (even if it’s only a perceived opportunity) to bust a move with a fine betty doesn’t come along every day. A decision tree formed in my head: if I don’t bust a move and that hurts her feelings, that could jeopardize our friendship. But if she’s not waiting for me to bust a move and considers us just friends and then I do bust a move, that could also jeopardize the friendship, though honestly she must know she’s fly so how could she possibly blame me for wanting to bust a move? I figured, worst case, I bust a move when she’s not actually expecting—or wanting—it, in which case she’ll just turn her head suddenly to deflect the kiss, and I’ll immediately get the message, and then I can quickly blush and stammer out an apology, following which there’ll be no hard feelings, and then she and I can go on being friends. Right?

The scenario that I didn’t actually even consider, for some reason, was that she’d actually respond favorably and we’d suddenly be making out. Why didn’t this cross my mind? Who knows. Perhaps I’ve just been shut down by girls so many times, to auger in yet again seemed almost inevitable, scripted even. So imagine my surprise when I busted the most awkward move ever and it seemed to work. I said something totally inane, like “I like your sweater” and then I guess I must have reached for her, or maybe she read my mind and came forward, but next thing you know she’s sitting on my lap and we’re making out! Pretty thrilling stuff and she paused a moment to say something similarly inane like “I like your sweatshirt, too,” but mostly we’re just mashing faces. And then I become aware of this strange kind of rhythmic pulsing—not a sound exactly, but not exactly not. Kind of like a hydraulic rushing you might say. And I realize I’m hearing her pulse through her chest, which is proximate to my ear. This didn’t occur to me right away because the rhythm was pretty high for a heart rate. I mean, I wouldn’t expect a typical resting pulse rate (e.g., 60 or 70), since making out is kind of exciting, but we weren’t running stairs or anything either. Since my arm is around her, I can see my watch out of the corner of my eye, and what the hell, I decide to track the second hand and measure her pulse. Granted, in all the excitement I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my calculation, but it seems like her heart is going at about 130 beats per minute. Is she just super excited? Or maybe frightened? Or could she be having some kind of seizure?

After a few minutes our embrace subsides, as explicably as it had started, and we say goodnight and I head home. As I walk along up Alcatraz Avenue, I ponder the strangeness of recent events, this sort of hybrid between a romantic comedy and “Telltale Heart.” The song in my head (there’s always a song in my head) is “Walking On the Moon” by the Police. By the time I get home I just kind of shrug the whole thing off as just another of those strange things that happen to me.

I saw H— in class the next day, and afterward as we walked across Sproul Plaza chatting, H— seemed just a little off, perhaps a bit stiff, certainly not behaving like somebody who has just embarked on a sweet romantic adventure. Honestly, I’d have been a lot more surprised if she did seem all excited about the passionate turn our evening had taken, though I’m not sure why. I guess it’s because I wasn’t that excited either; I was feeling strangely ambivalent about it all, probably because my excursions into dating so often end badly, so why would this be any different? And thus it seemed, like I said earlier, almost scripted when she finally came out with it: “About last night. I like you and want to be friends, but I don’t want to be … well, I don’t want to get involved.” I didn’t need to ask “involved in what”—the answer was “it,” as in “it all.” Which was fine with me. From that day forward we were just friends. Which, as you might recall, is all I’d really been looking for anyway.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXVIII

Introduction

This is the twenty-eighth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, and Volume XXVII is here. I never expected my collection to be so, well, voluminous, but here we are.

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re the closest thing to tweets or X posts you’ll ever get on albertnet, in that they’re rather short bulletins. But then, they’re nowhere nearly as short as the original 140 characters of SMS and Twitter updates. (In fact, today’s post might include one of my longest-ever Bits—or is it a Bob?— at over 500 words.) These are excerpts from letters or emails to friends and family, which I’ve decided ought to be amusing to a much wider audience (i.e., all 6 billion users of the Internet).

Since many of my friends and family probably ignored these bulletins originally, you may be the very first living human to pay them any attention! Read them all at once; one at a time over days or weeks; randomly; sequentially; capriciously; deliberately; repeatedly; not at all; or according to your own scheme that I haven’t even thought of. For each dispatch the date is provided and where I was living.

April 5, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I showed up late to my English final, and started in on the first part, which was looking at ten quotes from stuff we’d read, and identifying the work and the character quoted. Assuming (for some reason) that the exam was open-book, I started flipping through one of my books. The professor said, “Dana … what are you doing?” I was like, “Uh, just looking up one of the quotes.” The prof stated, “The identification section of this exam is not open-book.” The entire class started laughing. I said, “Uh ... sorry.” Then the whole class was on the floor. “You’ll go far in life, I can tell,” said the prof.

April 12, 1989 – Santa Barbara

Today I gave a pal a ride home from the cycling team meeting. He’s big for a cyclist—over 175 pounds, looks a bit like Bob Roll—and he was sitting on the handlebars of my mountain bike. I had the tires (Farmer John’s Cousins) at real low pressure because of an incident I suffered a couple of days ago. But that’s another story. A good one, though, so I’ll share it with you. 

It all started when I went to visit Geoff [in San Luis Obispo] for spring break and took my Tioga City Slicker tires with me. Why, you ask? Well, we held the first SLO Parking Garage Invitational Midnight Criterium last week. The parking garage, a brand new building that has received harsh criticism for its avant-garde architecture, has five, count ‘em five, floors, with hairpin turns all the way down—perfect for testing people’s bike handling skills. If you take the turns too wide, which can happen when a competitor forces you out, you hit these six-inch-high domes of painted cement. Gnarly! It was a total blast. 

Anyhow, when I returned to Isla Vista, I forgot to bring the City Slicker tires back with me, and had to mount up the Farmer Johns. They were really old, had been sitting around a good while. Well, on Monday I was just riding along, minding my own business, on the celebrated UCSB bike path when all of a sudden . . . BLAM! The rear tire just blew clean off the rim. Everybody in the vicinity jumped about three feet in the air. Being late as usual, I had to just keep riding the dang thing. It was pretty funny. Anyhow, upon careful inspection when I got home, I noticed that about a four-inch section of the rear tire had a severely damaged bead. I should have replaced the tire altogether but don’t have the time or the money, so I’ve continued to ride that baby, just at real low pressure. 

Which returns us to my original story. So I’m giving this guy a ride on my handlebars; the bike’s squirming around everywhere due to the low tire pressure; I can hardly see around the guy; I can hardly reach the brake levers; his full backpack is smashing into my face; it’s dark; and we’re wearing sunglasses. (Okay, it wasn’t dark and we weren’t wearing sunglasses … just couldn’t resist the “Blues Brothers” reference.) But hey, none of this is any problem because I’m a bike racer, right? We crash up and down off the bike path a number of times, narrowly missing other bikers and pedestrians, wobble quite a bit during slowdowns, and I actually enjoy some success in creating the illusion that I’m in control. That is, until we come within a block of [my apartment building] La Loma and a tiny Chicano kid, a toddler really, rides right out in front of us on his tiny bike. 

Well, his reflexes obviously haven’t developed yet, and ours are severely limited, and we’re on a collision course! I don’t know which way to go around him because I can’t predict what he’s gonna do, I mean it could be anything, or nothing. So my friend and I both begin yelling, like the two convicts in “Raising Arizona” when they realize they have left a man behind: “AAAAAAAAAUGH!” After narrowly averting disaster through my expert bike handling and our ability to remain cool in a pinch (well, okay, maybe it was just luck), we look over at the parents of the kid, expecting them to be super pissed, ready to kill us for recklessly endangering their child. But instead they’re laughing. Laughing! Cripes, don’t these parents know danger when they see it? They certainly wouldn’t have been laughing if little Junior had been trampled into the asphalt by over 350 pounds of man and bike, the unmistakable tread of the Tioga Farmer John’s Cousin embedded in his face!

October 12, 1991 – Berkeley

I need to find a dentist out here. I’ve asked my pals for recommendations and usually get kind of a blank look. But a guy at the bike shop, B—, who looks and acts like Bill or Ted from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” did give me the name of his guy. I think I’ve mentioned B— to you before, he’s the guy who separated his shoulder mountain biking and then sold all his prescription Vicodin so he could buy ganja. Anyhow, he said his dentist is “totally kickback” to the point that B— talked the guy into dispensing unnecessary laughing gas, just for the hell of it, and for free no less. (B— is quite the salesman.) That doesn’t seem entirely professional to me. And then, as if an afterthought, B— told me about the last time he had a cavity filled. He’d had all this Novocain, of course, and then afterward he decided to smoke some weed, which of course gave him the munchies, so he went and bought this big sandwich, and he was eating away on it and then something seemed wrong and he looked closely and the sandwich was all covered in blood. Turns out he’d been chewing on his tongue because he couldn’t feel it! Daaaaamn!

March 13, 1992 - Berkeley

A couple of my roommates and I have a Thursday tradition of boys’ night out. (Not like there are any girls in our lives to exclude from these outings, of course, and if there were girls in our lives, we’d surely bring them along, or more to the point they’d bring us along … but I digress.) We sometimes start at the Come Back Inn, which is a barebones place, not much furniture, mainly linoleum, and I think their name is based on how they routinely get shut down for serving alcohol to minors, and then they do their time and re-open. It’s not uncommon to stand around there with a pitcher of beer since there’s no place to set it down. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen dudes drinking right out of the pitcher. But we also like the more upscale places, Henry’s and Raleigh’s. My roommates are always hoping to hit it off with some hot coed, and they have this theory that if they pump iron right before we go, their muscles will look bigger and they’ll become irresistible to women. (They have a home weight set, including  a bench press.) That strategy just might work for them one of these times, but as you know I don’t have any musculature to speak of and if I tried to pump iron I’d just injure myself.

So anyway, we were at the pub and E— was scoping out the babes, kind of like a lion surveying the savanna deciding what prey to go after, and finally decided on this cute blonde. He caught his reflection in a mirrored beer ad, checked his hair, straightened his red Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, shot us a quick look as if to say, “Watch this,” and set out to start a conversation. He headed over and exchanged what couldn’t have been more than a few words before turning away and walking back to us, tail between his legs. Man, he was pissed. “NorCal sucks,” he said. “In L.A. and San Diego women were actually cool, they’d give you the time of day. But you get a chick up here who’s even halfway good-looking and she’s totally stuck up.” M— and I gave him a hard time for getting shut down so hard, but we held back a bit as he was clearly smarting.

Well, then he spotted some other young beauty but speculated that she’d be just as snooty, even though her blond hair was obviously dyed. Somehow we got to daring each other to go ask her what color her hair really was. We all liked the idea in principle but nobody was volunteering, so we ended up doing roshambo (i.e., rock-paper-scissors) and of course I lost. So I went over, sat next to her at the bar, said hi, took a few moments and a few sips to get my courage up, and then—looking her right in the eye—popped the question: “What color is your hair, really?” She said, “Oh, this is my natural color.” What could I say? Looking at her dark eyebrows, I said, “Well, what about your eyebrows, then?” Without missing a beat she said, “Oh, I dye those.” Wow. I was impressed. Such quick thinking, totally unrattled, and best of all not hostile! I replied, “Well, you did a great job. I never would have guessed.” 

I was kind of pleased with myself for not seizing up completely at her retort. And since she was pretty fly to begin with, it seemed well worth trying to turn this into an actual conversation. So I tried, and I’d say I lasted at least another 90 seconds before completely running out of things to say. I suppose I felt like how a rodeo rider must feel, where every second he stays on the bucking bronco grows his achievement. It didn’t even occur to me to buy her a drink, which would have bought me at least a few more minutes. But what can I say? I got no game, and eventually I wandered back over to my pals. “Well, you didn’t strike out as fast as E— anyway,” M— remarked. Gloating just a bit (I have to admit), I tried to deploy some swagger: “You know, that’s actually a pretty good pickup line. At least it was novel. I’m gonna use that again. I totally could have gotten her number, if I’d wanted.” Of course my pals just laughed in my face. That’s what friends are for, right?

July 15, 1997 – San Francisco

For my birthday E— bought me this cool a magic lamp thingy. It’s is a cube-shaped wooden frame, open at the top and bottom, with rice paper for walls. Inside is a cylinder of thin paper with figures cut out of it, with colored cellophane covering the cutouts. The cylinder’s roof is a paper pinwheel, and the center of it is a tiny glass dome that sits on a little needle, to form a bearing. Beneath this there’s a little light bulb. Heat from the bulb is turns the pinwheel, and thus the cylinder, so that the figures of colored cellophane are projected on the rice paper walls. The effect is a moving picture of the figures (dancers, animals, etc.) that seem to dance across the rice paper, seeming to grow in size as they near the edges. I guess this would typically be a nightlight for a kid’s room. We’d seen it in a shop window in the Marina when we were out for a walk and E— noticed that I liked it, so she sneaked back there and bought it. Anyhow, we had a friend over who just stared at it, perplexed, trying to understand the point. Finally her eyebrows went up like she’d had an “aha!” moment and she said, “Oh, I get it! It’s because you guys don’t have a TV!” Um… right. That’s it.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXVII

Introduction

This is the twenty-seventh installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, and Volume XXVI is here. These volumes speak volumes about my past, but they don’t speak these volumes clearly; I guess I set the volume too low.

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re just sprinklings of prose I wrote in my youth, typically in letters or emails because I didn’t have a blog yet. (I mean, nobody did.) I’m posting them here to backfill all those people, all those years ago, who typed “www.albertnet.us” on a typewriter and then scratched their heads because nothing “loaded.” Or they searched their email folders for “albertnet” or “blog” and never found anything.

Since many of my friends and family ignored the printed materials and/or emails I sent them back then, yours may be the very first pair of eyes ever to land on these bits and bobs! Read them back to back, front to back, back to front, left to right, right to wrong, top to bottom, bottom to top, randomly, frequently, occasionally, or not at all. The date is given and where I was living.

January 18, 1989 – Santa Barbara

Today I lost concentration while biking home from class, because I was looking at this hot chick in her VW Cabriolet. (I thought it was this girl Molly from my French class.) I took the turn onto Camino Pescadero too fast and too wide, and drifted just a bit into the oncoming lane, and there was a car coming the other way. It almost pegged me, and easily could have, had conditions been only very slightly different. For example, if the girl in the VW had waved, I could be dead now. But life is full of risks, especially at a college like this with so many fine ladies. And life itself is the ultimate risk, with a terrible track record (i.e., nobody's survived it yet).

October 17, 1989 – Santa Barbara

The UCSB cycling team is has a new sponsor: Gold’s Gym. Next time you see me I’ll probably be huge. We also have a sponsor for heart rate monitors. They’re pretty expensive because the company that makes them mainly does medical equipment. But the team still isn’t getting any real cash. And Fletcher Brewing Co. (the maker of Firestone) is no longer a sponsor of collegiate cycling. What a blow!

I can’t remember if I told you this story, but this brewery is pretty new and is trying to popularize non-alcoholic beer by promoting itself through cycling events. Last year they sponsored the collegiate national championships in Colorado. We got it at dinner the night before the road race, and since it’s non-alcoholic there was no reason we couldn’t partake. I didn’t much care for it, and the next day right after the road race I asked a teammate, “Dude, did you try that Firestone last night?” My teammate shook his head and I was about to say, “It was disgusting!” when I noticed somebody in my periphery who seemed to really perk up and take notice. This guys was in a suit, which seemed really odd. I mean, who wears a suit to a bike race? So, acting on instinct, I did a 180 and proceeded to tell my friend, “It was amazing! I could drink that stuff every night!”

Well, the suited guy walked up at this point and said, “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.” He stuck out his hand and introduced himself: “Hale Fletcher, Fletcher Brewing Company.” The head honcho! And this was great because they’re in SoCal and our UCSB team had been courting them as a sponsor. I chatted the guy up, praised his product to the high heavens, etc. Alas, I didn’t follow up later, and this promising conversation came to nothing.

[Interesting footnote: while Firestone the NA beer never took off, the project eventually became Firestone Walker Brewing Company, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Adam Firestone and David Walker are the founders, and it was actually Adam’s father, Brooks Firestone, a vintner, who got the NA thing going with Hale Fletcher. My older daughter, who graduated from UCSB fairly recently, says Firestone 805 is the go-to beer for partying frat boys. And recently I discovered Firestone’s 8Zero5 NA beer, which is excellent—and which they’ll tell you is their first foray into the NA realm (not acknowledging the original Firestone product). Now you know better. For a neat article on this, click here.]

January 5, 1993 – San Francisco

While I was visiting Boulder I managed to get a dental appointment with our old dentist, Dr. Lewis. That was pretty cool. The hygienist was the one I remember, too, and carried on the usual conversation, chattering happily away. It was more of a monologue actually, since my mouth was obviously full, though I tossed in a quick sound bite every few minutes after rinsing that hideous yellow water away. She’s always asking questions but won’t let me answer. I even bit her once. But anyhow, she’s about eight months pregnant, and was talking about how she had a scare with the baby seat in her car. Seems the seat got disconnected from the seatbelt somehow, so when she braked suddenly the whole thing lurched forward. By the time the cops got there the little kid was just sitting there, trying to scream with his face ripped off. Just kidding—couldn’t resist a “Mad Max” quotation. The kid was fine, his feet stopped him on the back of the front passenger seat. But she was wigged out, and not long after the incident her husband brought home a rented movie—”Raising Arizona,” of all things. So before putting in the movie, he said, “Now listen: there’s a few pretty crazy scenes involving the baby, but I’ll tell you now, nothing bad happens to the baby. He always comes out fine. So don’t flip out.” She’s saying, “What? What the hell are you talking about?” Of course when the scene occurred when Gail leaves little Nathan Junior atop the car, she almost flipped out anyway. “Why did you even rent this?” she cried. So that was pretty funny. Then, I got more than the usual token cameo appearance from Dr. Lewis. He attacked the barb on the inner surface of my right big tooth, which had been damaged in my bike accident last June. He used a dentist’s version of a Dremel tool and just ground it smooth. He says if the tooth turns grey (!) or begins to hurt or be abnormally sensitive, I’ll have to have a root canal. That would sure be a drag. But he said that if it hasn’t happened yet, it probably won’t.

April 17, 1995 – San Francisco

I hear you about dads, and how intimidating it can be to have one, especially if you’re a male adult trying to become a man. [My brother] B— called our dad for advice because his (B—’s) refrigerator had died and he was having trouble fixing it. Our dad seemed really disappointed that B— hadn’t figured it out, and in fact seemed a little bewildered at his son’s total incompetence, like we should all be born knowing how to fix this type of thing. Didn’t offer much advice, really—just placed a really hard pit in B—’s stomach. I mean, our dad designs and builds interferometers, for Christ’s sake. I don’t even know what an interferometer does (other than measuring interference, presumably—but to what end?) As far as refrigerators, I know how to procure and replace the light bulb, but that’s about it. (One time when vacating an apartment I unplugged the fridge to save electricity, after which it eventually defrosted and spewed water all over the carpet of the shithole apartment, which cost me my entire damage deposit.) Anyhow, B— bit the bullet and eventually fixed his fridge! We’re talking A-Team or MacGyver here. I think he had to install a small piece of beef liver somewhere to complete the repair. I don’t know if he even mentioned his ultimate success to our dad. It was probably too sore a subject by then.

June 23, 1996 – San Francisco

A colleague of mine made a comment about a business contact being attracted to her. I joked, “Don’t let your husband know that.” She replied, very casually, “Oh, that doesn’t matter. We’re getting divorced.” I thought it was a deadpan joke. I mean, how could she be so casual about it? I was so sure it was a joke that I replied in similar deadpan fashion, “Well, isn’t that why the modern wedding vows say ‘Till divorce do us part?’” She said, “Well, that’s an interesting way of looking at it.”

I still thought she was joking. “Well, no point letting a failed marriage interfere with your life, right?” To which she replied, “Gosh, you know, I think you’re right. I like that!”

A day or so later, I learned to my horror that she was getting a divorce, and that what I’d taken as deadpan humor was actually dead seriousness … meaning I’d seriously put my foot in my mouth. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t been angry with me—could she have my cynical comments seriously? It seemed impossible. When I profusely apologized, she said, “No, you had some good points!” She actually seemed to find some wisdom in it. I was horrified.

September 27, 1996 – San Francisco

I’m pretty bummed because one of our favorite retail shops has folded: the Schlock Shop. Since you obviously wouldn’t know what the Schlock Shop is—or, well, was—it was a dimly lit, mildew-smelling old place that carried ancient hats of all kinds, including World War I helmets, pith helmets, and English constable hats. They also had pipes, razors, and other oddities. That these items were authentic was suggested by their either being hung from the ceiling just out of most peoples’ arm’s reach, or behind glass. That place was really more like a museum than anything, and I suppose it was somewhat rare that they actually sold anything. I guess I’m complicit in its demise in that I never even considering buying any of the very cool but ultimately useless stuff they offered. I mean, what would I need with a pith helmet? Anyhow, in its place there’s now a brightly-lit store selling modern-day, actual schlock, like $50 ceramic cookie jars in the shape of Homer Simpson, and $25 Star Wars commemorative plastic statues. The new incarnation makes me want to wretch.

April 14, 1997 – San Francisco

We went to Target a few weekends ago to buy a baby shower gift for my friend and his wife. They’re only the second couple we know to have a baby. It’s crazy to think we might get there within a few years; from here it’s as weird as if they’d become astronauts. Anyhow, the bridal registry racket has evidently spilled over into baby showers now. My friends had registered at the Lullaby Club at Target, and we picked out a product I’ve never heard of: the Diaper Genie. In a perfect world you’d rub a lamp and this genie would appear and change your baby’s diaper, but this thing basically looks like a fancy garbage pail. When [my wife] E— and I were in the checkout line at Target the woman behind us, who looked the quintessential suburban mother, said, “Oh, you will just love the Diaper Genie. I bought one and boy did it come in handy. Thing is, it sure fills up quick. But it’s great, keeps the smell down. I used it with both my kids, now, ha, my sister’s got it, she’s just had her first. Anyway, good luck!” We didn’t have the heart to explain it was a gift and we’re childless. Besides, we surely looked the part, hauling that Diaper Genie out to our Volvo station wagon.

October 1, 2001 – Albany

I was trying to assemble our new Diaper Genie, and could not get the damn thing to work. I didn’t even want the Diaper Genie. It was a baby shower gift and we hadn’t registered or anything, our approach being “surprise us!”—and I guess we were. But hey, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, right? But I absolutely could not figure out how to install the bag cartridges that are supposed to ensconce the soiled diapers in a long linked-sausage configuration. Like all new parents I am horribly sleep deprived so my brain barely works to begin with. The only instructions were printed on the ring-shaped cartridge, which is called a “refill.” (Seems like a stupid name for the very first cartridge I’d ever install; it should be called a “fill.”) The stupid thing is, the instructions become obscured in step 2 out of 5 when you put the cartridge into the Genie. Why print them on the cartridge? How about on a damn piece of paper? I had to keep pulling the cartridge out and reading ahead and trying to hold the steps in my head but it was just a fog in there.

Some of my frustration, I’ll concede, was ego-induced. I figured this thing had to be intuitive enough for a high-school dropout trailer trash teen parent to use; why couldn’t I, a college-educated Subject Matter Expert, get it to work? The refill contains this endless plastic bag and you’re supposed to pull some of it out and tie a knot in the bottom and then stuff it back in push it down to the bottom, but the refill didn’t really fit in the DG compartment no matter how I tried to angle it in there. Finally I beat on the top of it with my fist, as if I could just hammer the damn thing into place, and then I hurled the entire contraption down the stairs with a tremendous clatter, much to the amazement of E— and a friend she had over.

I phoned a fellow parent, for whom I bought a Diaper Genie years ago, and after extensive troubleshooting he determined that what I have is an old, small-mouth DG presented in the box of a new, large-mouth DG, along with the “refill” for the new, large-mouth DG. This is why it wouldn’t fit. Probably somebody re-gifted us a barely-used but obsolete DG, throwing in the modern-style refill to make it look new. How could they? But obviously I can’t go complaining to them, that would be ungracious. So instead I think I’ll march into Target with it and demand a replacement. If they don’t pony up, I’m going to spread model airplane cement all over the damn thing and torch it right there on the showroom floor!

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Old Yarn - The Day I Learned Bicycle Gear Shifting

Introduction

Here is the fifth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” and most recently “The Brash Newb”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Trigger warning: this post is long. It is a rambling tale that doesn’t skimp on any details. And no, it won’t teach you this weird little secret your doctor doesn’t want you to know. It won’t give you the social currency you’d get from talking with colleagues about the last episode of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Season 2.* So if you’re cool with bike lore of no particular interest to your social network, then read on. But if you’re impatient and/or won’t read anything you can’t summarize in a tweet (I refuse to say “X”), go somewhere else.

(*As much as it sounds like I made up this TV show, I didn’t. It’s the fifth most popular show on Netflix right now. The center cannot hold.)

Learning to shift – late summer 1978

As I mentioned last week, one of the cooler things my dad ever did was to buy my brothers and me 10-speed bikes long before any other kids had them. In fact, these were the first bikes we ever owned. This yarn is about the day—in fact, the very moment—I learned how to shift gears. If that sounds really boring, don’t worry: I’m here to entertain, not to edify. This post describes, among other things, three bike crashes and one near-death experience. (Why isn’t this post mainly about the near-death experience? Because that didn’t change my life. It just put it briefly in jeopardy.) (Full disclosure—if I can be permitted to directly follow a parenthetical with another parenthetical—this post doesn’t feature any really gory crashes. For that, click here or here.)

The peculiar thing about getting this ten-speed for my ninth birthday was that my dad forbade me to touch the gear-shift levers. I asked why my bike even had them if I wasn’t supposed to touch them. “Don’t worry about that,” was all he said in reply. This was pretty typical of my dad. He didn’t really like dialogue. He absolutely loved a good monologue, so long as he was delivering it and on a topic of his choosing (for example, the design of an interferometer he was building), but had little patience for pushback or even pointed questions, which could seem like insubordination. So I just kept my mouth shut and, in the ensuing days and weeks, even months, rode the bike around in first gear all the time. Yes, I was that well-behaved and craven.

I don’t know exactly why my dad prohibited gear shifting, but it’s not hard to guess. His opinion of his four sons wasn’t exactly rosy. It’s probably Geoff and Bryan’s fault. They’re twins and the oldest. Family lore (passed down from our mom) has it that our dad originally had high hopes for his kids, figuring we’d all be the genius offspring he richly deserved, but these hopes were dashed early. When the twins were still babies, he caught them trying—and failing—to throw all their blocks out of their crib. They weren’t clever enough to align the blocks properly to fit through the slats. These dumb babies were just banging the blocks against the slats, perpendicular to them. Disgusted, Dad brought our mom over to witness this atrocious stupidity. Did she wonder if jettisoning the blocks was even the goal of these babies, vs. enjoying the chock-chock-chock sound they were making? Or was she tempted to explain to her husband about realistic infant development milestones? Apparently not. It seems nobody ever corrected my dad, and from that day forward he had to live with the sad “truth” that his kids just weren’t up to snuff. (Other family lore has it that he said to me once, “You’re not very bright, are you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this anecdote except there were five witnesses. Could we all be wrong? Well, actually, yeah, but not necessarily.)

Where bicycles were concerned, our dad was particularly pessimistic about our capabilities. As described here, all three of my brothers and I distinctly recall our dad’s reaction when Max (who’d drawn the short straw) asked if we could register for the Red Zinger Mini Classic bike race. “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles,” he declared. “You’d get yourselves killed.”

So why did he even buy us cool ten-speeds, if he had such a low opinion of our cycling prospects? I put this question to my brother Max. His reply was along the lines of, “Typical one-speed kid’s bikes disgusted Dad. No son of his would ride anything so vulgar. We had to be on proper ten-speeds whether we deserved them or not.”

Now, I realize I should be careful not to drag my brothers too far into my own story as regards the gear-shifting prohibition. I don’t specifically recall them being included in this, so I asked Bryan about it. “I think we were allowed to shift,” he said. “We probably ruined that for you with our own screw-ups.” He proceeded to recall how he tried to fix one of the brakes on his bike. He loosened the cable-fixing bolt, perhaps for diagnostic purposes, and pulled the cable out. Back then the cable would feed through a very narrow cylindrical aperture before being bolted down. Since this is the same dumb kid who as a baby couldn’t even throw a block out of his crib, you won’t be surprised to learn what happened next: he couldn’t get the cable back in. In fact, when he tried, the individual steel strands broke free from one another, fraying hopelessly. Bryan broke down in despair, convinced that he’d entirely wrecked his bike. Not only would he not have it to ride anymore, but he’d be in big trouble with Dad.

If getting in trouble for bike problems strikes you as preposterous, you obviously never met our dad. He was so devoted to his career, any extra parenting demands that pulled him away from his work during an evening or weekend was like a crisis. Nothing, it seemed, peeved him more than extra child-rearing tasks. We would actually be in trouble for getting a flat tire on our bikes. This was construed as an act of moral turpitude, like we were trying to throw our dad’s world into a tailspin by running over something sharp. It’s like nothing was an accident … every mishap was an act of treachery. All this being said, there was a positive side to our dad’s oppressive reign, which is that we learned how to fix our bikes ourselves, so that our “crimes” could be kept secret.

But of course, this frayed cable incident occurred long before Bryan developed any proficiency as a mechanic. At the time he bemoaned his plight to our babysitter, H—, who took pity on the boy and intervened, calling our dad at work to soften the blow. The upshot was that Dad didn’t get angry with Bryan (or at least kept it to himself), but he also didn’t get around to fixing the bike for what felt to Bryan like a year. Needless to say, until the bike was fixed, Bryan was forbidden to ride it. Our bikes always had to have two working brakes.

I told this story to my younger daughter, who incredulously asked, “Why wasn’t Uncle Bryan allowed to ride with just one brake? One is plenty!” Now, before you decide that her attitude marks me as an incompetent parent, let me just say I keep a pretty close eye on the family fleet and proactively make any repairs necessary. The only time my daughter has ridden with only one brake is when she was off at college and burned through a set of brake pads on her Breezer while I wasn’t looking. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true because she sometimes borrows my mid-‘60s Triumph 3-speed, whose coaster brake occasionally fails for reasons I cannot fathom (much less fix). But that’s pretty rare. In general I am a stickler for bicycles having two working brakes.

(Here is a drawing, by my daughter, of her Breezer. It’s not pertinent to the story, but when your kid pays such a loving tribute to her bicycle, you kind of want to share it.)

Now, being committed to truth in these pages, I must disclose something: my dad’s strict rules notwithstanding, I myself became quite reckless about the two-brake rule, a mere three or four years after having so obediently followed the no-shifting protocol. Perhaps something about an over-strict parent encourages a wholesale abandonment of that parent’s policies. I was around twelve when I bought a 3-speed bike, a basic Sears model, used. Yes, Sears made bicycles. Don’t believe the Google AI Summary on this. In fact, here is a photo of a Sears bike that is the spitting image of the one I had.

Just as in the photo above, my Sears had two handbrakes (and I don’t know what this says about its age as compared to my Triumph). The rear brake stopped working (probably a broken cable) and I don’t think I even considered fixing it. By this point I knew how, but it just didn’t seem important when I still had a perfectly good front brake. (I also didn’t bother replacing the broken gear cable connecting the Speed Switch shifter to the Sturmey-Archer internal 3-speed hub, so this bike was always in third gear, which was the highest. For this reason its nickname was the Third Speed. Why do I mention the brand of hub? Well, so I could include some eye candy here.)

Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, so, I didn’t bother to fix that rear brake. Nor did I consider riding more carefully. Quite the opposite, in fact. Exhibit A: my bike ride to Mr. Tomato’s Pizza to meet some friends. Mr. Tomato’s was at the bottom of the gently down-sloping parking lot of the Basemar shopping center. It had a huge picture window, and from a distance I recognized my friends sitting right in front of it. I decided to give them a good scare, and started sprinting toward them as fast as I could. My plan was to slam on the brakes (er, brake) just in time to keep from crashing through the window. Two things failed to occur to me. One was the possibility of a pedestrian walking along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There was an overhang above this sidewalk, supported at intervals by big pillars that could easily obscure a shopper from view. The other thing I didn’t consider was the possibility of my one brake suddenly failing. This is what actually happened. Just as I hammered the brake, the cable snapped. There was absolutely no way to stop and I was less than ten feet from that giant window, carrying great speed.

It seemed as though all was lost, but just before impact I spied one of the pillars, which fortunately had a round cross-section and a smooth finish. I wrapped that pillar in a bear hug to at least keep myself from crashing through the window. Amazingly, as my momentum spun me and my bike around the pillar, the bike ended up pointed along the sidewalk at the moment it escaped my legs. It went shooting off forward, straight down that sidewalk, still at great speed.

So wonderful is the design of a bicycle, it can travel a great distance with no rider, as my brothers and I had learned to our delight earlier that summer. Not wanting to damage our ten-speeds, we’d conjured up a beach cruiser whose sole purpose was rider-less travel. (Its Ashtabula one-piece crankset assembly had fallen out so we couldn’t pedal it around anyway.) That bike was called Ghost Rider, or Ghostie for short, and we spent many an afternoon getting it up to speed, one guy riding it and several others pushing, and when we couldn’t get it going any faster, the rider would jump off the back and send the bike flying down the street. It could go for several hundred feet before either tipping over or drifting into a parked car. Well, in front of Mr. Tomato’s my 3-speed surely set a new record, since its speed was at least double that of a kid running. It was amazing to behold it flying down the sidewalk along the storefronts. Fortunately it was a slow business day for that mall, with no foot traffic. Equally astonishing was that I was completely unscathed other than perhaps slight damage to my hands and arms, similar to rope burn. My friends regarded me through the window with complete bewilderment, slack-jawed and disbelieving. I guess the point of this story is that my dad’s lack of faith in my intelligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

Of course my dad never know about my near-death experience at Mr. Tomato’s, or indeed of most of the crashes my brothers and I had. But the very first days of owning our bicycles were not promising. The problem was, we suddenly had this new hardware but lacked the know-how to use it. As weird as this may seem, our dad made zero effort to teach us how to ride, and in fact I am deeply puzzled as to how he even expected us to learn before being presented with these sophisticated ten-speeds. Did he just think people are born knowing how to ride a bike?

Which brings me to how my brother Max and I did learn, or at least were given one lesson apiece, on how to ride. No parents were involved, of course. Max went first. It had come to pass that Geoff and Bryan realized Max lacked this important skill, and talked their friend R— into loaning out his bike for the lesson. It was a typical kid’s bike in that it was a one-speed with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. (We had a whole saying around this, that we would chant in mockery of these inferior bikes: “High-rise handlebar with a roll bar, banana seat, small wheel in front, big wheel in back, cool-dual frame, rusty old chain, with a slick, streamers from the grips and flower pedals.” I fact-checked this with Bryan and he remembered like half of it, and I added a couple details, and Max knew the rest. “Cool-dual frame” probably pertained to the two extra top-tubes of the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a popular model in those days. A “slick,” as Max eloquently put it, is “a rear tire with no tread for monster skids.” “Flower pedals” refers to “dust caps on the pedals that looked like daisies.”)

Actually, R—’s bike was somewhat unique in that it was an official licensed Boy Scout bike. But that’s neither here nor there. The more important detail is the single instruction that Geoff and Bryan gave to Max as they put him on the bike at the top of Howard Place, a long downhill: “Whatever you do, don’t turn!” Max and I remember it like it was yesterday. So ridiculous. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? They didn’t tell him how to brake. They just figured that his future would work itself out somehow, after he’d built up all that speed! They set him off, gave him a good push. Now, I just did some research with Google Maps, and this street ran about 450 feet at an average grade of 5.5%. With help from ChatGPT (because I’m lazy, not because I needed it) I just calculated that by the time Max crossed Ithaca Drive (which Howard Place T’s into), he had to have been going at least 20 mph. He dutifully followed the instruction not to turn, so it’s a good thing there was no traffic on Ithaca to run him over. Instead he crashed over a curb, with so much velocity the bike kept going, and then hit a low fence that stopped him so he tipped over into the grass, remarkably unhurt. He leapt to his feet, delighted, and cried, “I can ride a bike, I can ride a bike!”

Alas, that was Max’s only lesson before receiving his ten-speed, months later, on his birthday. I guess he just assumed his skill was still there. He jumped on the bike and managed to pedal it not only to the end of our street, Hillsdale Way, but to negotiate the right-hand turn onto Howard Place (the same street I mentioned earlier), which is a cul-de-sac. He rode to the top, managed to turn the bike around, and then came barreling back down. In trying to make the left-hand turn back on to Hillsdale, with my dad and my brothers and me watching, he clipped a pedal and crashed. He got up, winced at his road rash, and checked over the bike. A big divot of foam rubber had been ripped out of the brand-new saddle. Regarding this, he thought to himself (as he related to me yesterday), “Well, I guess now this bike is really mine.”

Did I do any better? Alas, no. My lesson was a year or so later. Perhaps having been spooked a bit by Max’s disastrous first effort, Geoff and Bryan didn’t start me down Howard Place. Instead, they put me on my friend P—’s bike, another lowly one-speed, at the top of a steep driveway facing Hillsdale. They gave me a big push and I flew down the driveway, absolutely frozen in terror, went straight across the street, and crashed into the curb on the other side. I hadn’t built up nearly as much speed as Max had, so the curb stopped the front wheel cold and I flipped over the bars. I didn’t quite clear the sidewalk and landed roughly on it, but was no more hurt than on any other day, what with all the various skirmishes kids faced during that era of free-reign bullying. But I can’t say I’d learned any biking technique at all.

So when, about six months and zero follow-up lessons later, I got the Fuji Junior, I really didn’t know how to ride. But there was no way I could just stand there and look at the bike, with my dad seeming so expectant (apparently notwithstanding Max’s fiery wreck on his bike’s maiden voyage). So I just winged it, riding down the sidewalk, pedaling furiously because the one thing my brothers had managed to get across was that speed was the key to balance. I made it about two houses down before veering off course, heading straight for a mailbox. I managed not to run into it, but raked my back across it rather painfully. Somehow I kept the bike upright, and I guess by that point I had the hang of it. But this first ride on the Fuji Junior couldn’t have impressed my dad, and may have reminded him of Max’s similar misadventure, and this is perhaps why my dad decided to declare my bike’s shifters off-limits. Maybe he felt I had my hands full just learning how to steer the bike. Fortunately, I did figure out the brakes.

Well, once my fear abated, I fell madly in love with the bike. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages (in the notes to my “Corn Cob” poem), my Fuji had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Subaru Outback Expert Sport-Trac, L.L. Bean Edition). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

One day when the bike was still new, I rode all morning, from my house up to the end of Howard Place and back down, then all the way down Hillsdale and back up, then back up Howard and back, over and over again, whistling the whole while because I was so happy. I happened to notice Mr. S—, who lived on the corner of Hillsdale and Howard, looking at me funny. He was out working in his yard and every time I went by he glared at me. What was his problem? I just shrugged it off. Well, later that day, another neighbor, Mr. D—, confronted me, asking if I’d vandalized Mr. S—’s house and yard. I was like “WHAT?!” It happens that Mr. S— had described at length to Mr. D— how I’d vandalized his place, and then rubbed it in by riding by again and again, whistling merrily to showcase my Schadenfreude as I watched him clean it up. I was mortified at this totally false accusation, and declared my innocence to Mr. D—. He advised that I’d simply have to go over there and knock on Mr. S—’s door and explain that I wasn’t the vandal. This I did, despite being a very shy kid, and I was so upset I was crying throughout my denial speech. My river of tears, it seemed, was mistaken for remorse and contrition by Mr. S—, who clearly didn’t believe my story of riding by again and again just because I liked to ride. At least my blubbery speech mollified him sufficiently that he didn’t see fit to involve my parents. This was a big break, because my parents never seemed to believe in my innocence, either. My mom once made me go apologize to yet another neighbor for being part of a cruel pack of kids that relentlessly teased her dog, even though I told my mom over and over that I wasn’t involved. Can you imagine how soul-crushing it is to apologize for an act of animal cruelty you are entirely innocent of?

Okay, time to move on. It was the toward the end of the summer when, on a day I now see as momentous, Max taught me how to shift my bike’s gears. We’d pedaled up Table Mesa Drive and were about to descend Vassar Drive, which is a 5.5% grade. Max, surely tired of waiting for me as I coasted down such hills (first gear being way too low to be of use), pointed at my stem-mounted shifters and told me, “Grab those two levers and push them all the way forward.”

Now, you probably think we’ve finally reached the crux of this story, after so very many diversions, and will now get to the really important, life-changing bit, and that’s almost true, but first I need to pause yet again to explain about these shifters. If you’re old enough to have used old-school stem- or down-tube-mounted shift levers, and remember how they worked, you may have raised an eyebrow just now when reading about Max’s instruction to push both levers forward. On almost any ten-speed-type bike, pushing the right lever forward would put the chain on the smallest cog in back (making for a higher gear, exactly as intended), but pushing the left lever forward would put the chain on the smaller chainring up front (making for a lower gear, at odds with the rest of the shift). You’d also wonder why, since I always rode in my bike’s lowest gear, both levers would have been down at the moment Max issued his instruction. On almost any bike, this would have meant my chain was on the big chainring, corresponding to the higher gear range. The only way you might have thought, “Oh yeah, of course, this makes sense” is if you’re the kind of bizarrely knowledgeable bike maven who would recall that the Suntour derailleur line-up of 1978 included the Spirt model, which worked backwards from most other derailleurs. As it happened, Max’s instructions were perfectly accurate for putting my bike in its highest gear.

And this begs the question: if my front derailleur (and thus left shifter) were essentially backwards from most others, how is it that Max’s instructions were correct? Wouldn’t he have assumed my bike worked the same as his? When I started this post, that question wouldn’t stop nagging at me. Now, if you’re wondering if I’m just remembering it wrong, think again … after all, this was a life-changing moment, forever seared into my memory. The highly specific action gave me, even before the gear shift actually took effect, a very powerful feeling. I knew that these gears were the key to somehow going faster, though I didn’t have any idea how (because when you think about it, the behavior of a bike’s gearing only makes sense after the fact, when you know empirically how gearing works; before that, the notion of differently sized cogs and chainrings affecting a bike’s speed is highly, highly abstract). The idea that I was somehow about to unleash great speed was tantalizing, and to achieve this by taking one hand, applying it to two levers, and pushing them both all the way forward in one go … it’s like pushing the throttle control forward on a fighter plane, or, better yet, remember the opening scene in “Risky Business,” when Tom Cruise’s character pushes all the levers on his dad’s stereo’s graphic equalizer all the way up, so he can totally rock out? It was just like that.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I had to find out if it was possible the front derailleurs on my brothers’ bikes, meaning Simplex derailleurs (these being Motobécane Nomades), might have also been backwards. This could have been a convention, after all, because this arrangement just makes sense. You have one consistent rule—pushing lever forward = higher gear—instead of the conflicting rule of pulling the left lever down = higher gear while pushing the right lever forward = higher gear. This conflicting behavior stymies cycling newcomers. On my wife’s road bike, I actually put “H” and “L” stickers on the down tube near the shifters to show which way to move them. It’s one of the more confusing things about pre-pushbutton shifting.

I couldn’t reach my brothers right away so I consulted ChatGPT. It assured me that, in fact, Simplex derailleurs were also backwards (vs. more modern shifters), just like the Suntour Spirt. GPT confidently declared, “The circa 1975 Simplex shift lever was pushed forward (toward the front wheel) to move the chain to the big ring. As a result, the lever would end up in a vertical or forward-leaning position when in the big ring.” Had it stopped there, I might have been fooled by a classic AI hallucination. But GPT went on to say, “This action corresponded to pushing the shift lever forward (since the shift lever pulls cable as it rotates forward).” Of course this is wrong. The shift lever pulls cable when you pull it down. So I asked it to furnish photos and diagrams. It provided a photo of a mid-‘80s Shimano Dura-Ace front derailleur (useless); a drawing of a Simplex rear derailleur (also useless); a photo looking from the left at a ‘90s-era triple crankset (ditto); and a photo of a bottom bracket with chainwheels in the background (noticing any trend here, i.e., useless?). Then it described these visual aids in exhaustive, needless, and useless detail.

I pointed out its error, challenging the notion that pushing a shift lever forward would ever tension the cable, whereupon GPT completely backpedaled (pun intended, couldn’t resist) and recanted everything it had said earlier, saying, “You nailed it!” and providing a totally new answer to my original question: “No, Simplex front derailleurs (like the Prestige models used on Motobécanes in the mid-1970s) were not reverse-spring designs like the SunTour Spirt.”

But wait, I’m not done. Disgusted by ChatGPT’s blithe ineptitude, I asked it to furnish a diagram and a photo to illustrate its revised explanation of Simplex’s shifting. Look what it came up with:

Can you believe that? For all its detailed description (running over 1,600 words in all), ChatGPT apparently had no concept of the cable actuation. Look at the arrow pointing from the “Cable” label … it has no head, goes nowhere! No cable is shown! And look at the arrow showing the motion of the lever: it’s 90 degrees off of the actual motion. And since when is the lever mounted directly to the derailleur? Where would the cable even be?

Actually, in fairness, I know of at least one front derailleur that was actuated by a handle instead of a cable. It was on an ancient Schwinn Collegiate that I bought from a police auction. The rear derailleur had a normal shifter and cable setup, but that front derailleur had a handle. At least it did, for a while, until my pant leg caught it one day during hard pedaling and ripped it clean off the bike. But this wasn’t a Simplex derailleur; I’m pretty sure it was a Huret (though it was labeled “Schwinn Approved” in keeping with the fiction that this was an all-American bike). That derailleur looked something like this:

Getting back to ChatGPT, its drawing wasn’t even the worst of its crimes. Look at this fake photo it generated of what it imagined that Simplex front shifting system looked like:

I thought for a second this was an actual photo of some bizarre ill-fated real-life setup, but look at the ersatz brand stamped into the shift lever, in a nonexistent alphabet. The entire rendering is just grotesque. In fact, for me, and I suppose anyone else who has great familiarity with bicycle components, this mock photo is deep into uncanny valley territory, to the extent it’s almost nauseating. Also note how the derailleur cage doesn’t clear the chainring teeth. Artificial intelligence my ass!

Suffice to say, Simplex derailleurs of that era weren’t backwards and nothing can explain Max’s spot-on instructions. When I asked him he simply admitted, “I don’t have an answer for you. Geoff and Bryan probably made the observation so it must have been common knowledge. I know I didn’t discover that on my own.” Bryan theorized that Max had taken my bike out for a few joy rides and discovered it that way; Max could neither confirm nor deny this. The perfect accuracy of his instruction shall have to remain a mystery.

But oh, when I pushed those levers forward, and that bike went from first to tenth gear … it was breathtaking. I mashed the pedals with everything I had, working hard to get on top of that 52x14 top gear, until I was just flying down Vassar. I’d had no idea just how effective pedaling in “the big meat” (as a bike’s highest gear is known by racers) could be. It’s like if you had what you thought was a Fred Flintstone car, propelled by your feet paddling the ground, and then one day you discovered that this car had an engine. What a game-changer. It was like I went from patsy to made man in the span of a minute.

Not only did this sudden knowledge change my cycling, but it forever changed how I regarded my dad’s authority. Not only would I use all my gears from that day forward, but I’d have this secret I’d be keeping from him. It was impossible for me to revert to the lowly, gutless, quaking obeyer of rules; I was like, fuck that guy! He kept this gearing magic from me! He kept me down! I felt like Toecutter in Mad Max: “The bronze, they keep you from being proud.”

As it turned out, I never did get in trouble for defying my dad. An absentminded fellow, he evidently forgot he’d ever issued that prohibition. Or who knows, maybe on some level he wanted me to take some initiative. But most likely he’d intended to one day teach me all about shifting, but just forgot. Maybe he’d have thought a little harder about this if he’d had any inkling that his silly rule, coupled with Max’s intervention, would turn me into a lifelong rebel…

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