My brand new Nishiki Colorado was stolen from a bike rack on the UNM campus. A friend of mine said, I work with a guy who is a serious cyclist, maybe he can lend you a bike.
Later that week, my friend rolls this thing into my dorm room and my first reaction was, “A road bike? I say, what bullshit is this, old boy?” (note, it was 1991 and, ironically, only MTBs had any street cred.)
Furthermore I noted that the ‘thing’ had no derailleurs and no brakes. “It is a messenger bike.” my friend quipped in lieu of any useful explanation. It would be many, many years before the term ‘fixie’ insulted my lexigraphical sensibilities. I ended up having to figure out how to ride it without dying, absent of the expert tutelage familiar to many of today’s ‘fixters’.
I knew nothing of ‘skidz’, much less mad barspinzz until I was reminded of the bike dancing scene in Quicksilver (my brain is incapable of remembering anything that actor, whose name my brain is incapable of remembering, does). I rode it all over campus but except for a handfull of intrepid journeys to my weed connection, I considered it utterly unsafe and unsuitable for “street riding” since I couldn’t automatically switch over to free-wheel like what’s-his-name from Quicksilver.
It was also dreadfully un-popular, akin to wearing a necklace of shaved, dead kittens. As I rode around campus on the thing, people looked at me like I was a combination of stupid and retarded (unable to denigrate myself to such a degree, I considered my self something of an idiot-savant). I remember thinking, “I won’t be gettin mad bitchez on this ride. This shit is wack.” Indeed it was, indeed it was.
I rode it for a year-and-a-half until I saved up enough for a real mountain bike. By now it was early in the year 1993 and road bikes were no more desirable than a full jar of malarial baby diarrhea. So I promptly forgot about my bike, ‘The Thing’ I called it, for about 12 years until I noticed some douches riding around on similarly propelled craft through my neighborhood. “You’ll regret wasting your time and money on those deathtraps!” I silently admonished these reckless youths, flaunting their acheivements by way of cardstock cleverly wedged into their spokes.
Yet, that very night I began a quest to find ‘The Thing’ which I vaguely remember having traded for a half-ounce of Oaxaca’s finest schwag a half-decade earlier. Regretfully, I never located my formerly despised steed.
So I killed a guy I caught riding down my street on a lame conversion (I didn’t actually kill him, I bought his bike, though).
I was renewed.
