ja_koniga

On 9th East, just north of 17th South, there’s a house with a sign over the door displaying “Bike Guy”. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and pushed through a gate into the backyard and started picking through the many bikes piled around the yard. It reminded me a lot of the mounds of metal I often saw at train stations in Europe, although not nearly as unorganized.

We found some really old bikes for around twenty dollars each. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard before. SML and I both picked out female framed bikes and exclaimed how “cute they are with their fenders!” We paid an extra fifteen dollars so the Bike Guy would tune-up the bikes and for the entire weekend, every half-hour and sometimes every fifteen, SML would ask, “Has the Bike Guy called yet?”

The worst part about getting these bikes was telling SML’s parents that we had them. After we mentioned the bikes it was met with a silence equivalent to that of the silence you feel after you find out someone you know is dead. His father later actually said, “Seriously. Seriously. You need to wear a helmet.”

SML and I talked this over quite a bit because we weren’t sure we wanted to wear helmets. We don’t think that they’re very “cool.” We both have somehow stored an amazing amount of adolescence in ourselves to actually say those words. “It’s not cool.” Like perhaps having a helmet would make us the worst possible candidates on the next Teen’s Choice Awards.

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