Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Forget hamstering at the gym: I choose the challenge of the Urban Death Match!
Jan 25, 2002 | Waiting behind cars of other people waiting to get on highways, waiting to get in, to get out of the city, waiting at red and at green lights, too -- should be moving, more waiting, why? He doesn't know.
The guy in the Explorer next to me is getting angry, and at this point I imagine he'll soon be spraying the windshield with dung backed up into his throat. I wanted to help him, get out of my car and hold him, but he was yelling at the traffic and then singing to music and yelling some more; his music all beat and bass drum, meant for movement, getting laid, being heard, and that's why he's got his window open to the hot poison summer air. No air conditioning for him, he's big and proud, he guns the car a glorious 250 inches.
Unfortunately, our little New York jam on the Brooklyn Bridge has got him by the balls; no way out except over the side into the river; his whole manliness is in question. This is a national problem. There are places in this country where rush hour is starting to last all day.
Just then the bicycles come, and they are a relief to see: a gang of them, flooding, 10 of them, 20, hooting and obscene, heading back to Brooklyn, boys on BMXs and mountain bikes -- and they're riding not on the boardwalk with the walkers and the tourists like they're supposed to, but right down in the pit, on the tarmac, with the honking and the carbon monoxide. They ride no hands for three and four seconds between the fenders and trunks and hoods; they're like a school of fish passing many drowned hulks. I yell out the window in salute, and they say, "Awright, bitch!" And then they're gone.
It's an intolerable situation, the congestion that grows apace in our cities with no end in sight, the constant clinch and clench of people in each other's way -- not just on the roads, it's at turnstiles, in subways, elevators, in the stores, the bars, the restaurants, the life. It's madness, and produces madness: having the basic physical freedom of mobility constantly sniped at and frustrated. And yet somehow the vast majority of urban mankind learns to accept this dispensation in exhausted passivity, inured to the petty tyrannies of delay.
For those, however, who wish to live sanely in the city, for those who are becoming sick like our friend in the Explorer -- for those who feel that loss of mobility is tantamount to having one's gonads removed -- the question is how to bypass the swarm, and move: move fast, freely, spontaneously, voluntarily.
The answer, of course, is the bicycle, the only really stylish way to travel. It is a way out, too, for the millions of brain-damaged "professionals" in the tall cages of metropolis, the people who work too much and go to psychologists and physical trainers and buy SUVs for the sex, dunning themselves into debt -- a more or less simple and easy-access way out of the emasculating pallor of sitting behind a desk all day growing hips larger than one's shoulders. Take up the bike. Ride dangerously, like you did as a child.
There is no better place to do it, and die, or live proudly doing it, than New York City. If you have cycled in the hysterical warlike evacuations of a Manhattan rush hour, you have been initiated. The hum of the wheels, the click and whir of gears, the passage, the concentration, the fear of death, mutilation: attunement of senses -- they grow strong. Roll under arm of man hailing cab; hop the high curb; smack deep in a pothole, crackle through pebbled concrete; swerve, jump, lean, swing, run, race, bang bones, flap wings; sing at top of lungs "Look out, dummy!" to blithe pedestrian who thinks she's walking naked in her bedroom. Maybe fall once every few months, lose some skin on your arm, bleed in the rain or the snow (in piles of dirt ice that resemble the leavings of prehistoric beasts). You get to a speed where the cold wind catches one tiny drop off your arm, spreading your spoor. That sight, the wind sweeping up your blood, is delightful, it's grandiose, and from these high places, the rest of humanity -- imprisoned in their giant crawling bugs, huddling at bus stops in the rain -- seems almost a separate species, cursed somewhere along the helix, unable to evolve to meet the city head-on.
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