I Want To Ride It Where I Like

"Paint my chopper-bicycle green, please!"
"What shade of green?"
"LIME green!"

As a child, I was slow to do just about everything. For instance, I took my sweet time learning how to crawl: According to my mother, in my pre-crawling days I simply dragged myself around on my stomach using my arms – any upper body strength this action potentially gave me quickly melted away after I discovered television. I was slow to talk, as well - I didn’t learn to speak for a good long time, which gave my parents cause to wonder if I had some sort of brain damage, and then, when I finally did start talking, they knew for sure. But the delays in those areas weren’t especially out of the ordinary – worrisome, sure, but I was only late by a matter of months in each category. The fact that it took me 19 years to learn how to ride a bike, however, is a little more troubling.

I was not the five year old whose knees were always banged up and who was always covered in mud. I was almost painstakingly cautious in everything I did, and I washed my hands whenever I even suspected that I had dirt on them. I was like the Adrian Monk of my kindergarten class, and I mean that right on down to my social skills. The point is, I had a really strong sense of self-preservation back then. If I sensed that something would hurt me, my response was to stay as far away from it as I could, because back then I could see no way in which a thing that hurt me could do me any good whatsoever. Take, for example, my chicken pox vaccination. Yeah, I knew that I didn’t want to get the chicken pox, because it sounded like a horrible, horrible sickness. However, I also didn’t want to get pricked in the arm, because as far as I was concerned, the cure was worse than the disease – if I didn’t get the shot, my arm wouldn’t hurt and there was a good chance I wouldn’t get chicken pox. However, if I did get the shot, there was a 100% chance that my arm would hurt, and I didn’t like those odds one bit.

So take that kid and tell him to sit astride a two-wheeled machine that requires 1) Physical coordination and B) Speed to balance, and just see how enthusiastic he is about your proposition. More likely than not, he’s going to politely excuse himself and go watch The Brave Little Toaster.

It didn’t help anything that all my friends were learning to ride bikes at this point, and they had spectacular cuts, bruises, and casts to show for their efforts. With the benefit of hindsight I realize that most of my friends were pretty big fuckups anyway, but at the time my impression was that grievous injury was just as much a part of learning to ride a bike as vomiting is a part of the college party life. It’s like the scene in the Vietnam War movie where the new recruit gets off the plane at the air base in Saigon and sees a bunch of body bags and guys with their arms and legs cut off getting on the plane to go back home, only for me that scene lasted for about seven years, and the dead bodies and horribly injured veterans are laughing at the new guy for not wanting to learn to ride a bike. Or, I mean, go get shot in the jungle. Shit. Let’s move on.

There came a point in high school where I realized that learning how to ride a bike probably wasn’t as dangerous as I thought. This was most likely in those magical years before I had my driver’s license, when I was eager to find any form of transportation that didn’t involve my mother* in some way. It was then that I started reconsidering the whole bike proposition and weighing the benefits of finally doing what countless people one-third my age were doing.

*No offense Mom – it’s just that I’m still haunted by memories of the time you had to drive that poor girl and me on my first date. You didn’t do anything embarrassing, but… But you were there. And you were my Mom. And it was a date. I… I just can’t talk about it right now.

At that point, though, the problem lay not with my fear of learning to ride a bike but my fear of being seen learning to ride a bike. The thing is, everyone looks just about the same when they learn to balance on two wheels. They start out wobbly and scared, and then gradually they get their balance, and next thing you know they’re grinning broadly and riding down the street, and Mom and Dad are standing a few yards back, arm in arm, Mom wiping away tears and Dad firing up his pipe. And all that is fine if you’re six, but at the time that I was getting over my fear of bicycling I had been shaving for a few years. These sorts of heartwarming scenes do not work well with teenagers – teenagers are clumsy and oafish, and seeing them attempting to do things that are heartwarming for youngsters gives the impression that they had been really cute as a kid and aren’t cute anymore, but are still trying to capitalize on some former cuteness. I didn’t want to be seen as one of those guys, so I simply continued to not learn how to ride a bike, waiting until such time as I had a private gym in which to learn, where nobody could watch my relentlessly heartwarming coming of age story.

Now that I’m living off campus next year, though, I really can’t afford to find excuses not to ride a bike anymore. This was why, a few days ago, my parents and I took one of our bikes and went out behind a nearby middle school where there was a gentle asphalt slope, and I spent the next 20 minutes or so coasting down the slope on the bike before eventually working up my nerve to start pedaling, grinning broadly and riding down the street, Mom and Dad standing a few yards back, etc, etc. It was undoubtedly one of the most heartwarming things to ever happen behind a middle school, and fortunately the only people besides my parents who had to bear witness to this disgustingly precious affair were two nine-year-old girls who watched quietly the whole time, and afterwards mentioned offhandedly that they’d learned to ride when they were four.

A lot of my self-preservation instincts remain – for example, I’m still absolutely terrified of needles. I was so keyed up about my tetanus booster shot that after giving it to me, the nurse made me keep lying down for another 10 minutes because she thought I was going to pass out. But, looking back, the whole thing was pretty stupid, because I got really worked up and anxious over something unpleasant that took, at best, maybe 15 seconds. I can say the same for bicycling – I was scared of it, for one reason or another, for 19 years, and when I finally decided to sack up and just do it it was really nothing at all.

The sad thing is that I find that I actually kind of enjoy bicycling; this is great on its own, but most of my friends have known how much fun biking is for a good 15 years, and so at this point me trying to talk to them about how cool it is to ride a bike is like me asking if they’ve seen Toy Story yet.

Truman Capps had two options for the title of this update: "Bicycle Race", by Queen, or that stupid, overly literate hip hop song about riding your bike with no handlebars. He feels he made the right choice.