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The author and his son. Brooklyn, 2018.
I. First Ride
A cycling life begins in a blaze of glory. For hours or days or weeks, you still don’t know how to ride a bicycle. You wobble and lurch and wipe out, locked in a pitiful struggle with the pull of gravity and the weight and waywardness of the obstreperous metal machine. Then, suddenly, you are breezing along a road that stretches toward a limitless horizon. Or maybe, more likely, you’re pedaling in circles on a schoolyard blacktop. In any case, you’re riding a bike. There are few transitions in life more abrupt and definitive: you’re not a cyclist, then you are. The skill that eluded you moments earlier is now magically assimilated, and nothing short of blunt brain trauma or a neurological disaster will shake it loose.
In recent years, researchers have gained a greater understanding of the processes that guide our mastery of bike riding. Scientists have identified a nerve cell, the molecular layer interneuron, that controls signal output from the cerebellum, which translates a newly learned motor skill like cycling into a code that is engraved as memory elsewhere in the brain. It is an example of so-called procedural memory: like walking or talking or tying your shoelaces, bike riding is a motor function that, once learned, we can perform automatically, without recourse to conscious thought. In fact, cycling is the most famous example of procedural memory. “It’s just like riding a bike,” we say, describing something that becomes second nature, an activity we can pick up where were left off, no matter how much time has elapsed.
Most people learn to cycle when they are young. Just as “you never forget how to ride a bicycle,” you never forget your first bicycle ride, or so we are told. Proverbially, a child’s first bike ride brings an exhilarating taste of freedom and autonomy, a preview of the great escape that lies a dozen or so years further down the road. The first ride enacts the flight from the clutches of adult caretakers, when the kid pedals away from the grown-up who has been steadying the bike with a grip on the underside of the saddle. The French writer Paul Fournel, one of the bicycle’s most lyrical chroniclers, described the thrill of his first ride: “One morning I no longer heard the sound of someone running behind me, the sound of rhythmic breathing at my back. The miracle had taken place.”
Dramatizations of this “miracle” are familiar from movies, television, and advertisements, which for decades have portrayed the bicycle as an emblem of childhood. In the postwar United States, the historian Robert Turpin has written, “so pervasive was the idea that bicycles and children belonged to each other that there was little room for anyone else.” The notion that learning to ride a bike was a rite of passage akin to learning to walk or read was promulgated by the bicycle industry, which, having lost adult cyclists to automobiles, recast bikes as a mandatory purchase for parents, essential to the physical and moral growth of children, especially boys. As one California bike merchant put it: “Nothing equals the bicycle as a developer of sturdy bodies, strong lungs, ruddy cheeks, bright eyes, and self-reliance in your growing boy.”
There is a famous Saturday Evening Post cover illustration that captures a wholesome scene. Bike Riding Lesson (1954), by the artist George Hughes, shows a young boy on a bicycle careening down a leafy residential street while his father grips the handlebars and seat, struggling to keep the bike upright. Around the boy’s waist is a leather holster with a toy six-shooter: he’s a cowboy, riding a bucking bronco. That Saturday Evening Post archetype—bright-eyed children, bicycling through idyllic suburbs—is still part of pop culture, having passed through successive cycles of nostalgia and revivalism. In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg’s BMX-riding California kids gave the ’50s suburban imagery an exurban ’80s update. More recently, Stranger Things, the Netflix series set in ’80s suburbia, winked at E.T., putting its plucky protagonists on Schwinn Sting-Rays.
Today, across the globe, teaching children to ride bicycles is both a social convention and a policy priority. Governments from Colombia to Australia have instituted youth cycling instruction programs at the federal and local levels. In New Zealand, children receive cycling education in school and through government-trained instructors in local municipalities. France’s ambitious Cycling and Active Mobility Plan includes a program to ensure that every schoolchild in the country knows how to ride a bike by age eleven.
Meanwhile, the milestone of the first bicycle ride remains totemic. On the internet, proud parents upload videos documenting the triumphs—first rides in playgrounds, on front lawns, along driveways, on shady Norman Rockwellian streets with porches and picket fences, in Steven Spielbergian cul-de-sacs. These days, many children begin learning to ride on a balance bicycle, a bike with neither pedals nor chain nor freewheel, which you sit astride and scoot forward by pushing your feet off the pavement—a Laufmaschine, in other words. To teach a novice how to keep a bike stable and moving forward, Karl von Drais’s invention turns out to be far preferable to a bicycle rigged with training wheels. History’s original bike has returned as a starter bike.
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My own first ride is uncommemorated. There’s no home-movie footage, not even a snapshot. I’m reasonably certain of when it happened: I was five years old. I know where it happened. It was on Claremont Avenue, a few blocks from my childhood home in Morningside Heights, a quiet neighborhood, by Manhattan standards, that abuts the campus of Columbia University on the Upper West Side. Claremont Avenue is a particularly sleepy stretch of street, notable mainly for the looming neo-Gothic cathedral of Riverside Church and for a handful of grand prewar apartment buildings that serve as faculty housing for Columbia and Barnard College professors. I’m pretty sure it was neither my dad nor my mom but my “other mother,” my mom’s partner, Roberta, who was present at the illustrious moment—who jogged along the sidewalk with a steadying hand, and with a gentle push launched me into a biking life.
Beyond that, I draw blanks. I’m middle-aged: the memories are receding along with the hairline. Or it could be that my first ride wasn’t especially memorable. There have been a lot of bike rides: revelatory rides, humdrum rides, great rides, lousy rides, last night’s ride, this morning’s ride. As a kid, I rode up and down the block on West 121st Street. Our building stood on the north side of the street, almost exactly halfway up a hilly stretch of sidewalk that sloped down on either end to meet teeming avenues, Amsterdam to the east, Broadway to the west. I was under strict instructions to stop well before I got to the corner, and I enjoyed making the little bike skid when I jammed the pedals backward to activate the coaster brake. Years later, when I moved with my mother to Brookline, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, I would ride around the neighborhood, a place called Coolidge Corner. And I’d ride my bike down Beacon Street into Boston proper, to explore the streets and go shopping for weird records and vintage clothes—the talismanic possessions that were, along with the bicycle itself, essential armature, the stuff that distinguished me and, I imagined, made me cool, or at least offered some protection against the many slights and humiliations life held for a teenage boy.
I was crazy about bikes, but I was no expert. I knew gearhead kids who hung around bike shops and wielded Allen wrenches like switchblades—who were always revamping their bikes, making them badder and radder. I wasn’t like that. To this day, I can barely patch an inner tube. I wasn’t a masher who went on long rides and hammered up hills. I wasn’t a BMX kid who popped wheelies and shredded half-pipes. I rode to get my mind right. It was as if there was a vent in my skull, and as I pedaled and built up speed, the wind would whip through, clearing out the muck. It’s not that biking around made me sharper-witted or smarter. On the contrary, I was, like many males my age, confused about nearly everything important yet certain I had the world figured out, or could at least bluff my way through by affecting a certain swagger. I’m sure that bike riding made me more confident in these misapprehensions, a more self-possessed dolt. It definitely calmed me down and bucked me up. I could get on my bike in a fog of neurosis and dismount a while later feeling all right—brave enough, at least, to pick up a phone and call a girl.
I’ve always paid attention to the way bicycles look, so it’s odd that I can call to mind only hazy images of the bikes I owned as a child and young adult. I know that the bicycle I rode that day on Claremont Avenue was a banana-seat wheelie bike of some sort, a fitting first ride for a ’70s kid. The bicycles of my younger years rather neatly align with period trends. Sometime in the early ’80s, I got a ten-speed with dropped handlebars; in the late ’80s, I got a mountain bike. Along the way, there were other bikes, of varied makes and looks. Bikes came; bikes went. I must have had six or seven between the ages of five and twenty-five. I outgrew certain bicycles and wore out others—or, rather, mistreated them, locking them up overnight on the street all year long, even in the winter.
I love bikes, but I’m not precious about them. I’ve never owned an expensive bicycle. I don’t doubt that a splendid high-end machine would ride like a rocket ship, but I’ve never felt the impulse to splurge on one. As a kid, I admired my neighbor’s fancy Cannondale road bike, which looked like it had been assembled from bits of sky and cloud: gleaming cobalt frame, white handlebars, white saddle. But I also envied the piratical battered BMX Mongooses that kids zipped around on, with ratty tennis balls wedged between the spokes. Then as now, I was no connoisseur. I was, I am, something more along the lines of a bicycle glutton. If the pedals turn, I’ll ride it.
Not that I haven’t drawn certain lines. When I was young, I often spent weekends in Connecticut, at the family homestead of my father’s second wife, a big house on a hill above a bend in the Connecticut River. For decades, the house had served as an open-door retreat for my stepmother’s family, a large WASP clan, and for various satellite clans of friends and friends of friends. The place was packed with relics of past inhabitants and visitors, including, in the garage, a number of old bicycles of uncertain provenance. One of these was a vintage child’s cruiser, probably an early 1960s model. There was rust on the fire-engine-red frame, but someone must have done some maintenance work, greased the chain and trued the wheels, because the thing rode great. It was perfect for tooling around the roads that wound through the nearby woods.
It’s possible that the bicycle was formally bequeathed to me by some adult in a position to do so. One way or another, I claimed it: it was my bike on those weekends in the country. Technically speaking, it was a girl’s bike, with a step-through frame, but that didn’t bother me. There was a problem, though: the red, white, and blue plastic streamers on the handlebars. These struck me as goofy and shameful. Flapping around frantically as you rode, the streamers turned the dignified business of a bike ride into madcap child’s play. An alteration was called for. I can’t remember if at first I tried and failed to yank the things out of the handlebar grips. In any event, I wound up performing a more violent surgery. I found a big pair of garden shears hanging on a pegboard above a workbench in the garage, and I clipped the streamers clean off, snip, snip, like a groom docking a show horse’s tail.
II. Messenger Boy
July 1988. I had just turned nineteen and was spending the summer in Boston. I was living with my mom, who, now that I had (in principle, at least) reached young adulthood and (again, in principle) flown the nest, was enrolled at Boston University, pursuing a long-deferred dream of advanced degrees. My dreams were more banal, and more ridiculous. I was growing my hair long. INXS, the Australian pop-rock group, was at the peak of its international fame, in heavy rotation on the radio and MTV. I wasn’t crazy about the band—I liked them just okay—but I loved the looks of their lead singer, Michael Hutchence, with his big dark eyes and falling tresses and slithery dance moves. I decided that if I wore my hair like Hutchence’s, his Dionysian charm would rub off, and girls would start swan-diving into my bed.
By July, my hair had reached the length where I could pull it back into a stumpy ponytail. I had four piercings in my left ear, including one, jammed through the hard cartilage at the top of the ear, that was always getting infected. I had a guitar I didn’t really know how to play, but that didn’t stop me from bashing at it. I couldn’t sing, either, but I didn’t know that at the time, and I was convinced, dead certain, that I was a great songwriter, destined for stardom—more precisely, for niche stardom, the best kind of stardom. I didn’t covet the mundane global popularity of Michael Hutchence; I pictured myself as a cult hero, an artiste, showered with love by critics and a small but rabid audience that recognized my genius. I moved through my days with my head in a haze: that was one of my couplets, scrawled in the notebook I carried with me everywhere in case the muse struck. It wasn’t one of my better lines, but it was accurate. My mind was misted over with dreams and desires and grandiosities, with melodies and lyrics, with visions of fame and acclaim and girls and glory—all the triumphs to come. In the meantime, though, I was a middle-class kid, a college student heading into sophomore year, and I needed a summer job. So I got one, as a bicycle messenger.
In the 1980s, New York’s bike messengers were legendary, a new species of urban superhero: daredevils who threaded heaving Manhattan traffic at top speed. The difference between bike messengering in New York and in Boston was the difference between New York and Boston. New York is the big time, the matchless metropolis, huge and frantic and thrilling. Boston, by comparison, is the sticks. On a bicycle you can cross the town from north to south, from Charlestown to Mattapan, in about an hour. As a Boston bike messenger in the late ’80s, you spent at least half of your workday riding around in the same area of about two-tenths of a square mile: the downtown Financial District, a labyrinth of just a few dozen streets that twisted between Chinatown and City Hall Plaza. Some jobs sent you farther afield: west to Back Bay and Kenmore Square and Allston-Brighton, south to the South End, across the Charles River to Harvard and Central and Porter Squares in Cambridge.
It took just a few days on the job for these points to link up in your mind and for the mental map to snap into focus. Which is not to say that once you knew the streets, you knew the town. With its deep history, its tribal neighborhoods and neighborhoods within neighborhoods, its political progressivism, its profound racism, its festering town-versus-gown antipathies, its deranged sports culture, its unfathomable accents, Boston was and is fascinating and baffling. As a bike messenger, you were immersed immediately in the beauty of Boston, the graceful streets and sight lines and buildings, especially in posh Back Bay and Beacon Hill. You also learned quickly about the virulence of Bostonians, who—when driving automobiles, at least—were angry people, angrier than seemed possible or comprehensible in such a quaint setting. Boston’s traffic doesn’t rage quite like New York’s, but the drivers rage. The presence of bicycles on the road was viewed by drivers as an affront, and any hint of insufficient deference—any suggestion that some patch of road should be ceded, even momentarily, by the motorist to the cyclist—could provoke a vehement response. A driver’s side window would roll down to reveal a livid face, with veins as thick as mooring ropes bulging from the forehead. The words would pour out in Bostonese: cawksukkah, arhhshole, qwee-yah. You had to stay alert, ready to take evasive action when a psycho turned his wheels in your direction and floored it.
Despite these hazards, I loved the job. The bike I rode that summer was a Ross ten-speed. It wasn’t a great bike in the first place, and it had taken a beating under my care. But it wasn’t a jalopy; it rode. I’m sure I had to sign some paperwork indemnifying the courier company against injuries I might suffer in the line of duty. In exchange, I got a black messenger bag, a pager that I attached to the bag’s shoulder strap, a clipboard, and a sheaf of delivery logs to keep track of my jobs and collect signatures on pickup and drop-off. I kept a bunch of pens in my bag and a plastic baggie full of dimes, so I could call into dispatch from a pay phone when the pager buzzed or when I completed my run and needed a new assignment. You could start and finish work whenever you wanted, within reason. I usually began at nine sharp and knocked off around six. I’m not sure how many miles I covered in a day, but it was enough to leave me sweat-soaked and weary in an agreeable way—the kind of weariness a nineteen-year-old washes away with a shower before heading back out to meet friends and drink beer. It was the most time I’d ever spent on a bicycle, and it confirmed my suspicion that I didn’t really want to be off a bicycle.
The job was straightforward. You picked up a package from one place of business and delivered it to another. In those days before email—before fax machines, even—bike courier business was brisk. If a letter or memo or report needed to get across town fast, you called a messenger service, and within minutes a sweaty, smelly, disreputable-looking person showed up in your office to pick it up. Often the hauls included oversized manila envelopes or architectural blueprints, rolled up in bulky cardboard tubes. You’d collect the items and a signature, stick the cargo in your bag, head back outside, unlock your bike, and whisk the package to its destination as quickly as possible—the quicker the better, so you could move on to the next job. Bike messengers were paid a flat hourly rate plus a commission for every delivery. The more jobs you did, the more cash you earned. So you rode hard.
That was the idea, in any case. My MO was different. No way around it: I was slow. It wasn’t that I was lazy; it’s that I had another agenda. I was busy enjoying the ride, drinking in the atmosphere, and trying to write songs in my head. Sometimes I’d detour down an unfamiliar street because it looked interesting. There were other distractions: a shop window, a plaque marking a historical event, a fight in the street, a pretty girl in a crosswalk. If a particularly good lyric popped into my head, some great gift from the gods of song, I’d pull over to write it down. I might find a bench and stay there for a while. A financial services firm could endure a delay of a few minutes before receiving a notarized contract. But Art could not wait.
My leisurely approach to the job didn’t go unnoticed. Once, when I called into dispatch after a drop-off, the voice on the line had a harsh edge. “Don’t you want to make money?” the dispatch guy asked. “Yeah, of course,” I said sheepishly, but I lied. I had no rent to pay; my college tuition and living expenses were covered by my father. My bike messenger earnings provided some walking-around cash and maybe a little extra to stick in the bank. It was plenty.
Other messengers were more serious. For them, it was a career, or at least a real job, something they did while they figured out what their career would be. It was also a way of life, a subculture. I had heard that there were a couple of bars in Jamaica Plain where messengers hung out, but I was not sufficiently dialed in to know where they were, nor brave enough to inquire. I did know another spot where messengers congregated after hours. It was a little stretch of sidewalk on a small street not far from South Station, just steps from the dispatch office where I would go to drop my manifests and pick up my paltry paychecks. Every weekday at around six p.m., the block would fill up with messengers leaning on their bikes, sitting on the curb, talking shop, drinking cheap bottled beer, and smoking cigarettes and pot.
The scene was alluring but intimidating. I’d head over there after work sometimes and kind of linger on the fringes, in a spot where I could observe but not be observed. I’d flip my bike over, set it on the sidewalk so that it rested upside down on its seat, and pretend to be scrutinizing a wheel or attending to some other minor repair. If anyone noticed me, they didn’t care enough to acknowledge my existence or to be irked by it. Nearly all of these messengers were in their twenties, and most of them looked like punk rockers, like outlaws, with spiky hair and pierced ears and pierced noses. It was clear that these people were out of my league, both older and wiser. They knew more than I did about bikes and, undoubtedly, about most other things, too.
New York’s bike messenger corps was largely Black and Latino. But Boston being Boston, the messenger scene was very white, and very male. There were exceptions. One of the messengers who was always hanging around on the block after work was a young woman, probably in her early twenties, whose name I never learned. She had very blue eyes, a shaved head like Sinéad O’Connor’s, and an air of implacable cool. I found her fascinating. I didn’t have a crush on her, exactly. I didn’t want to be her boyfriend; I wanted to be her, or someone quite like her. Also, I wanted her bike. It was the ugliest bike I’d ever seen, and the most magnificent, a postapocalyptic junker—a fixie I think—that looked like a prop from a Mad Max movie. It was black—or was it? It was impossible to tell, since the frame was wrapped in layers of black tape and festooned with stickers from bands whose names I didn’t recognize. It seemed possible that the tape and the stickers were holding the bike together. There were scrapes and dents—scars that testified to untold feats of badassery. The bike looked like it had taken fire, zigzagged through war zones. As for the bike’s owner: she was a strong cyclist. When she rode off after having a beer and a cigarette, her wheels seemed to singe the pavement.
The effect of this scene was so powerful that for a time I considered buzzing my hair, maybe getting a nose ring, going full punk-rock pirate. I didn’t cut my hair, though. I kept growing it out. By August, I had a more substantial ponytail and was letting a long tendril or two fall in front of my face—a louche Hutchencean touch. The hair didn’t work its magic on any girls that summer, but I figured my luck would soon turn. In the meantime, I biked around, delivered some packages, and daydreamed. While I rode, I wrote my songs. The unhurried cycling tempos, the languid spinning of the pedals and wheels, the trees, the breeze, the way my breathing fell into time with the respirations of the bike and the surrounding scenery—it was musical, rhythmic, and it lent itself to the composition of tunes and lyrics.
After work one night, I went out with friends in Cambridge and stayed out late. It was well after midnight by the time I set out for home, but I didn’t go home. I kept riding around town, retracing routes I rode during my workday. Over the Mass. Ave. Bridge. Through the pretty streets of Back Bay: Beacon Street, Marlborough Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter. Up and down Beacon Hill, punishing climbs followed by dreamy descents. Into the nearly empty Financial District. The night was warm and windy, I’d had a few drinks, and the muses, it seemed to me, were belting out an astral chorale. As I rode, I wrote a song. It wasn’t a great song, but it was the best I’d written or ever would write. It had a good title: “I Love Romance.” Usually my lyrics were fussy and florid, clogged up with what I thought was clever wordplay. But in this case I tried to keep the words as simple as possible.
Ten thousand cars
Ten million stars
In the sky above
Shining bright
Oh what a night
I want to fall in love
May I have this dance?
I love romance
Down this road
A man once strode
With a coat and cap and cane
Beneath these stones
His yellow bones
Are wrapped around the water main
May I have this dance?
I love romance
Typing out these lyrics today—seeing the young poetaster’s lines spread out on the cold white slab of the laptop screen—I’m struck by both their solid craftsmanship and their overcooked ambition. I can’t recall exactly what I thought I was saying in 1988, but it’s clear that I was after something grand, straining to make a wry and knowing and artfully elliptical Big Statement about Love and History and Memory and Death—stuff like that. I set the lyrics to a slow swing beat and some minor seventh chords that I scratched out on the guitar, in my crude way. I was going for a moody and ominous and sophisticated vibe, Kurt Weill Weimar cabaret by way of Tom Waits, whose records I was listening to a lot in those days. “I Love Romance” was, I knew, destined to be track number four on my debut album. A hidden gem, beloved by the cognoscenti. A deep cut.
Today, I realize that the song is really about bicycling. It’s about the thoughts that flood your mind when you ride through city streets under a night sky—the sense of wild possibility, the Ah! Sweet mystery of life! epiphanies, which convulse the soul of a naïve, sentimental, pretentious, comprehensively self-absorbed young white dude—all enhanced by the steady cadence of the rotating pedals and the thrill of whooshing through the dark beneath a brooding skyline.
I kept “I Love Romance” in what passed for my repertoire for years. I wasn’t a very good bike messenger, but I was a better bike messenger than I was a musician. I’ve definitely never had a more pleasurable job. In late August, I headed back to school, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and moved with five close friends into a house in an off-campus student ghetto. I left the Ross ten-speed behind in Boston, but the day after I arrived in Madison, I went into town and bought a used bike for, I think, forty bucks.
III. Crash
When I was maybe nine or ten, I steered a bicycle over some pebbles, felt the front wheel catch, wrenched the handlebars, and tipped over, falling onto my left side and tobogganing across the blacktop. This was in the summertime, on a drizzly morning in Connecticut, on the old red bike whose streamers I’d lopped off. I was riding near my step-grandparents’ house, on a thickly wooded road which, at that time of day, was empty of any other human presence. The surrounding woods were deep and twisty, scenery I associated with the fantasy novels I was reading—a place you could imagine containing a colony of hobbits or a den of Narnian lions. I may have been daydreaming about something along those lines; in any case, I’d been moving fast, and it was a hard spill. When I hit the ground, I took a long slide, bumping and skidding on a diagonal course, leaving skin behind on the rain-washed pavement. I didn’t knock my head or break a bone, but the scrapes on my arm and thigh burned as if the flesh had been pan-seared. “Road rash” is what cyclists call it. My bike lay capsized about fifteen yards behind me, and on the stretch of road in between, the asphalt was painted with smears and spots of blood, like abstract expressionist drizzlings on a black canvas.
That may or may not have been my first bike accident. I’ve had a fair number, possibly more than the average cyclist, and, again, these memories tend to blur. Some mishaps have left marks. When I was sixteen or so, I went flying off my bike and broke the knuckle on my left ring finger. To this day, that finger is misshapen, with a bulbous swollen joint. (When I got married, I had to buy an extra-large wedding band to fit over the knuckle; a jeweler soldered metal stabilizer balls on the inside of the ring so it wouldn’t slip off my finger.) Another accident, in college, left me with a lump on my shin the size of a ping-pong ball. I have no memory of the crash itself, but I do remember sitting with that leg up in a friend’s off-campus apartment, icing the swelling with a bag I’d grabbed from the freezer: Birds Eye mixed vegetables.
My wife says that I’m accident-prone, and while the stats may support this thesis, I don’t quite believe it. It seems to me that the law of averages is at work: if you bike around a lot, you’re liable to bump into things now and then. This is especially true if you do most of your biking in New York City. Over the past couple of decades, the city has created hundreds of miles of bike lanes; there are plans, supposedly, to add hundreds more, and to increase the number of lanes that are protected from motor vehicles by barriers. But for now, New York’s bicycle infrastructure is inadequate, and cyclists are forced into roaring traffic on streets where motorists operate with something close to impunity.
Thousands of bike riders are injured by automobiles in New York each year, and only in rare instances do drivers face legal repercussions. The same is true of cases in which cyclists are killed. New Yorkers have grown accustomed to seeing ghost bikes, memorials to lost cyclists that pop up at the locations of fatal accidents. Ghost bikes are painted entirely white; often, they are adorned with flowers or a laminated photograph of the deceased. A glimpse of one of these shrines never fails to deliver a throb of dread. It reminds you, as you pedal past, of your total vulnerability. The cars and trucks growling on all sides have the power to deliver swift judgment; no matter how seasoned and cautious a city cyclist you are, it may merely be dumb luck that determines whether you reach your destination. Should you meet a violent end, a ghost bicycle will arise where you fell; otherwise, New York will greet the news with a shrug. Occasionally, city leaders squeeze out a few crocodile tears in response to fatal bike accidents. But it is clear that these deaths are viewed, by New York’s officialdom and by a large proportion of its citizenry, as unfortunate but inevitable—a predictable outcome of doing something as foolish, as illicit, as riding a bike on streets that belong to automobiles. “Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?” was the question posed in a 2013 Times op-ed. The answer, the article’s author, Daniel Duane, concluded, is yes: in the United States, we have a “justice system that makes it de facto legal to kill people, even when it is clearly your fault, as long you’re driving a car and the victim is on a bike and you’re not obviously drunk and don’t flee the scene.”
New York, in other words, is a very American place. The car is the great unifier, one of the last shared passions that bind a fractured body politic, just as the Interstate Highway System binds Portland, Maine, to Podunk to the Golden Gate, from sea to shining sea. New York is often thought of as the exception to America, a city-state that floats off the coast of the continent and operates according to its own, vaguely “European” rules. The city’s relationship to automobiles would seem to be a case in point. New Yorkers own 30 percent fewer cars than residents of other large American cities. Driving a car in New York is presumed by many to be impractical and inapposite—antithetical to the spirit of the town.
But cyclists know that New York is as car-centric as anyplace west of the Hudson. Car culture bridges New York’s political chasms. The Upper West Side liberal whose hatchback sports a think globally eat locally sticker, the Staten Island Trump supporter who flies a thin blue line flag from his roof rack—these natural foes are united by a belief in free curbside parking, by opposition to congestion pricing, and by disdain for the human gnats that buzz around on bikes. Car culture is written into the city’s statutes and the columns of its newspapers, notably the Murdoch-owned New York Post, which is relentlessly anti-bicycle, portraying bikes as a safety hazard, to pedestrians in particular. The tenor of the coverage does not differ greatly from that of 125 years ago, when the diabolical scorcher slalomed through the columns of Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s scandal sheets. This may explain why so many New Yorkers regard cyclists as a great threat to their peace of mind and their persons, when both data and common sense demonstrate that the real danger comes from the three-thousand-pound hunks of steel that have the run of the streets. New Yorkers are, of course, far more likely to be hit by a car or truck than a bike, and with far graver consequences.
To ride a bike in New York, in other words, is to face both peril and hostility, and many residents who under other conditions might happily pedal around town will never dare. But more than a million do ride, and the number is growing, thanks in part to Citi Bike, New York’s popular bicycle-sharing program. A New York cyclist rides warily, defensively, strategically, and picks up the little tricks of the game: how to ease off on pedaling and surf through the jolt when you hit a big divot in the pavement; how to scan the sideview mirrors of parked cars, in order to spot a driver who is about to pull out or fling a door open.
A certain mind-set is called for. You cultivate a breezy fatalism, telling yourself that you, as a bike rider, are merely more aware of the doom that lurks everywhere—more wised up than the boulevardier who might at any moment stroll under a falling piano or stray into the path of a car that has jumped the curb. It’s certainly true that cyclists understand automobiles better than anyone, especially those who drive them. “Cars make you stupid, the way wealth makes you stupid,” writes the essayist Eula Biss. “They are like important men in conversation with other important men. Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.”
The conditions faced by bicyclists in New York are therefore a blessing as well as a bane. They bestow upon the cyclist gifts of insight and acuity that are unavailable to those who strap themselves into rolling boxes and face the world from behind a windshield. On a bike, wrote the journalist Bill Emerson, “Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal.” It might also be said that a city becomes extra-cityish, more seething and carnivalesque, from the vantage point of a bicycle. Danger is a sensory intensifier, supercharging the scenery, making everything appear volatile and alive. Viewed from the saddle of a bike, New York reveals its old ungentrified face, mutating back into the decrepit, volcanic city of yore: old-school hip-hop New York, punk-rock New York, jaunty but menacing Damon Runyon New York. That may not be a great argument for steering a bike through the lethal rush-hour flow on Queens Boulevard. But for those of us who have bicycling in our bones, the arguments against it are worse. Bike riding can kill you, but to trudge through your days without biking—that’s no way to live.
So I ride on, and occasionally trouble veers into my path or charges up from behind. In the mid-1990s, while pedaling on Tenth Avenue in Chelsea, I was rear-ended right in front of a church: the Church of the Guardian Angel, no less. The driver took off, and two nuns came running out of the church’s parochial school. I was scraped up but not seriously hurt—Deo gratias. About a decade later, in June 2006, I was struck from behind again, this time by a rip-snorting SUV on Cadman Plaza West in Brooklyn Heights, a busy roadway packed with vehicles moving on and off the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the worst accident of my life. The force of the fall severely dislocated my left shoulder; the labrum, the ring of cartilage surrounding the shoulder socket, was shredded to bits. An engine company from the nearby firehouse was the first on the scene; one of the firefighters told me, “Your arm’s not where it should be, my friend.” A few days later, a surgeon screwed the shoulder back into place and reconstructed the macerated labrum using tissue grafted from elsewhere in my body. Today the range of motion in my left arm remains impaired, and an ache in my creaky glenohumeral joint forecasts changes in barometric pressure.
I can’t blame all of my accidents on city streets. There was the spill in Connecticut when I was a kid and that pratfall with Danny MacAskill in the Scottish forest. But some crashes are definitionally urban. The city cyclist’s archenemies are car doors, those monstrous heavy-metal appendages that swing out to clothesline pedalers as they pass. I’ve been doored several times, most grievously on Eighth Avenue near Fiftieth Street in midtown Manhattan, when a man burst out of a yellow taxi just as I rolled level with the passenger-side rear door, delivering a brutal knock to my left kneecap. How I limped away from that scene without broken bones I’ll never know, but it took several weeks, and half a dozen trips to an acupuncturist named Dr. Chan, to get me off crutches. My main memory of the event is the sound. I heard the accident before I felt it—a nanosecond before the sensation sped up the superhighway of the spinal cord to register in the brain as pain. First came the squeak of the door rotating on its hinge. And then an appalling crunch, like a pecan splintering in a nutcracker.
IV. Locking Up
There are other misfortunes that can befall a bicyclist in the big city. In the summer of 1999, I stepped out of the building in the East Village where I’d been living and saw that my bike was gone.
It was six a.m. The previous night, I’d locked up in my usual fashion. I threaded a steel link chain through the spokes of the front wheel; I twisted the chain around a green sheet-metal pole that held a parking sign; I snaked the chain back through the center of the diamond frame and wound it around the top tube. Then I pulled the chain taut and dropped a solid steel padlock through two of the chain links, cinching the bike to the pole. This was on Avenue B at the corner of East Tenth Street, opposite Tompkins Square Park, just steps from a twenty-four-hour bodega. That morning, when I discovered the bike was missing, I asked one of the bodega’s employees, who was stocking bins outside the store with bouquets of cheap flowers, if by any chance he’d seen someone steal a bicycle that had been locked to a pole—to that pole, right over there.
Yes, he told me; yes, he had. Two hours earlier, at around four in the morning, a couple of guys had pulled up to the curb in a truck with an open flatbed. When they stood on the flatbed, the men were at a height where they could reach out and touch the parking sign at the top of the pole. One of the guys took out a wrench and unbolted the sign. His colleague then lifted up my bike, whose front wheel was still chained to its frame, and together the men shimmied the machine up and over the pole, some twelve feet off the ground. They put the bicycle on the flatbed and they drove off.
The bodega guy reported these facts in a straightforward but weary manner. It was clear that the incident had aroused only mild interest on his part. It certainly wasn’t an event he’d felt moved to interrupt on a technical point—e.g., that driving around town stockpiling bikes that don’t belong to you is neither nice nor, strictly speaking, legal. In fact, the thieves were more civic-minded than the witness. The man who had removed the parking sign bolted it back in place before leaving the scene.
Bicycle theft is a worldwide epidemic. Tens of millions of bikes are stolen each year. In the United States, stolen bikes account for approximately 5 percent of larceny-theft cases, and those numbers only begin to tell the story—most bike thefts go unreported. To steal a bike does not take much in the way of skill or cunning. Bicycle locks can be sawed or whacked or clipped; they can be pried open with pliers or frozen with compressed air from a spray can and then smashed with a hammer. In most cases, the police are ineffectual, viewing stolen bikes as too minor a problem to warrant the allocation of manpower and resources. In short, bicycle theft is a crook’s dream: easily accomplished and almost completely shrugged off by law enforcement. It’s crime without punishment.
This is one of the reasons I’ve never bothered to invest in an expensive bicycle. If thieves will patiently dismantle street furniture to swipe a piece-of-shit cruiser, how long will a pricey beauty last in the wilds of Gotham? A few years before that theft on Avenue B, my new bicycle was stolen, just hours after I’d picked it up at the shop. It was a Trek 800 Sport, an unlovely mid- to low-end mountain bike that cost just $250. But it was brand-new, with an unblemished shiny green frame. That evening, I rode uptown from my apartment in Chelsea to visit my mom, who by that time had moved back to New York and was living in Morningside Heights again, just west of Broadway on 114th Street. I found a pole on the end of her block, near Riverside Drive, and hitched up the bike with a Kryptonite U-lock. This was dumb: U-locks are notoriously easy to crack. (On the internet, you can watch instructional videos demonstrating how to pop one open with a ballpoint pen.) I had dinner at my mom’s, and when I came downstairs—poof.
Easy come, easy go. Tonight I’ll lock up outside my apartment building, looping a hardened manganese steel chain around the wheels and the frame and padlocking the bike to a streetlamp. It’s a heavier-duty, theoretically more thief-proof version of the setup I used on Avenue B. But if some enterprising scoundrel with the right set of tools and the nerve to see the job through comes along, the lock will not hold. Tomorrow I may wake up to find the bicycle where I left it, or it might be long gone: stripped for parts, or repainted and pawned off to a fence, or totally intact but now someone else’s bike, its pedals rising and falling under a stranger’s shoes.
V. Cycleur
And yet. For all the hazards and aggravations of cycling in New York, there are those of us for whom cycling is the essence of a New York existence, who know that to live in New York without a bike is to only half-experience the city—to view it at a blurry distance, as if peering through the glass of a snow globe that has been given a good shake. It’s not just that bike riding is the most efficient and, mortal peril notwithstanding, most enjoyable commuter option, the best way to beat the gridlock and go about your business. It is also the best way to comprehend and imbibe New York, to make sense of the place, to gulp the town down.
A bicycle teaches you the lay of the land, apprising you of basic topographical facts. Four hundred years of digging, dredging, and excavating have reshaped and flattened out the landmasses of the New York City archipelago. But many streets in the five boroughs still rest atop the slopes and peaks of glacial moraines and slabs of Triassic crust. “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. A bike reveals the terrain behind the names—Brooklyn Heights shows you its heights, Murray Hill its hill. A New York cyclist, laboring up and whizzing down the gradients pedestrians and motorists may barely notice, connects to the immemorial past, before this place was Dutch, before it was Lenape land, before mastodons roamed. Your two wheels tell you a New York story that unfolds on a geologic time scale.
But biking is also the best way to penetrate the mysteries of today’s town. The Mexican-born writer Valeria Luiselli, now a New Yorker herself, coined the term “cycleur” to describe a bicycling flaneur, one who moves through the cityscape with purposeful purposelessness, on a free-flowing dérive. “[The cycleur] has discovered cycling to be an occupation with no ultimate outcomes,” Luiselli writes. “He possesses a strange freedom that can only be compared with that of thinking or writing…. Skimming along on two wheels, the rider finds just the right pace for observing the city and being at once its accomplice and its witness.”
What is just the right pace? Once upon a time, the bicycle promised blazing speed. (The first name to gain wide currency, velocipede, comes from the Latin velox pedis, “swift of foot”; the meaning is preserved in the French vélo.) Today, many prize the bicycle for its slowness, espousing “slow cycling” alongside other decelerated lifestyle choices (“slow food,” “slow sex”), while championing the bicycle as an antidote to the warp-speed information age.
But for a New York cycleur, the ideal pace is neither fast nor slow. It’s a stately in-between tempo that allows you to scan the landscape, in Luiselli’s phrase, “as if through the lens of a movie camera.” Your trip to the grocery store becomes cinematic, a tracking shot that sweeps the skyline and street and sidewalk. You catch sight of the office tower stacked against the horizon, a pair of Chuck Taylors slung by their shoelaces over a telephone wire, a squirrel scampering out of a trash can with the remains of a bagel. You vacuum up shopfronts and signage, advertising slogans, graffiti, hundreds of faces, and hundreds more faceless heads bent over cellphones. A bicycle ride offers the best of travel by foot and by motor vehicle. You can take in the panorama in its blurry breadth or slow down to consider the details.
To put it another way: the seat of a bicycle is a fine perch from which to watch the world slide by. Sitting on a bike seat, you reach the altitude of LeBron James. I tend to raise myself up even higher: I do a lot of standing up on the bike, balancing on the motionless pedals as the freewheel spins. This puts you at a height from which you can gaze down on the roofs of passing SUVs. Unless you’re on stilts or a pogo stick or piloting a pedal-activated biplane, it is impossible to gain as lofty a view while traveling under your own power. New York looks good from up there.
VI. Turkey
As for how I look up there: it may not be pretty. In a technical sense, I don’t know how to ride a bike. An expert cyclist—a sport cyclist who cares about riding fast and well—might look on my form and render a harsh judgment. In cycling slang, a clumsy rider is a “turkey.” Undoubtedly, I’m one of those. I’ve never been concerned about correct posture, proper pedaling technique, or even optimal frame size. I set my saddle height according to a remedial formula, placing the pedal in the six o’clock position and making sure that my knee is more or less straight. That’s the extent to which I attend to technical matters.
When I face hills or headwinds, my performance turns graceless. There is a good deal of unpleasant wheezing and grunting. I’ve been known to put off visits to the mechanic, and eventually my bicycle, too, begins to cry out: the gears grind, the chain rattles, the brake pads let out a stuck-pig squeal. So much for the silent steed.
Yet these niceties are beside the point. My biking practice—year-round, all-weather urban commuting and wayfaring—is its own kind of rude art, and I’d put my skills up against anyone’s. I’m adept at slipping and sliding through congested streets. I know how to work with, and against, the flow of traffic. Shortcuts; gas station rights; quick lurches into the narrow gap between the fenders of parked cars, then up and over the curb onto the sidewalk—I execute these and other maneuvers without thinking, with a master’s resort to pure instinct.
It may not make an aesthetically pleasing spectacle. But who’s watching anyway? A bicycle, says Valeria Luiselli, “allows the rider to sail past pedestrian eyes and be overlooked by motorized travelers. The cyclist, thus, possesses an extraordinary freedom: he is invisible.” That’s not quite true; but it feels true, and that’s good enough. On a bike, you escape the surveillance of others and the withering gaze you turn on yourself, especially if you’re the kind of person prone to staring down his reflection in every other shop window. When I ride my bike, petty vanity fades. I reach that Zen state, that place of grace, where I don’t care if I look like crap.
VII. Phantom Limb
Bikeless days are a bummer. They do happen. Rain drowns the city, or snow dumps down. You have appointments to keep, and you have to show up looking more presentable than you would after an eighty-block bike ride. Maybe your bicycle is in the shop. Maybe your bicycle has been stolen. When you’re used to traveling by bike, the condition of bikelessness is disorienting and debilitating. Without wheels, you feel like an amputee.
In the subway, you’re cooped up, shifty, bored. In a taxi, you stare resentfully at the bikes sliding past. On foot, you may have the feeling that you are fording a river of quicksand. Travel by bicycle reveals hidden New York truths, but it also lies about the city, giving mistaken impressions of distances and dimensions. Trips you make in a flash on your bike become epic schleps when you have to walk or rely on public transportation. Off your bike, New York is larger but less magnificent, a place designed to frustrate and defeat. The scenery looks duller. Your mind feels duller.
The consolation comes at night. In your dreams, you’re on your bike again, cruising familiar streets. Or perhaps those streets have turned psychedelic and you’re pedaling a flying bicycle through a sci-fi city, a New York that has levitated into the Milky Way, where stars roll out like a carpet under your tires and planet Mars is speared on the Empire State Building’s spire, like a cherry on a cocktail toothpick. In 1896, H. G. Wells wrote about the way a cyclist keeps biking through the night: “A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.”
VIII. Meet You at the Corner
My older son learned to ride one weekend afternoon. That morning he had heard the news: his closest friend had been seen riding a bike around the neighborhood. My boy had been slow to take up biking, but the idea that his friend had reached this milestone first was too much to bear. He learned to ride that day. He was six.
For years, he had been a bike rider, but not a cyclist. He was a passenger on my bike, my traveling companion on rides around town. For a while I towed him in a trailer, one of those little chariots you hitch up behind your bike and drag through the street. Later, I switched to a child bike seat that put him mere inches behind me. We went all over the place: to school and to the park, north to Williamsburg and Greenpoint, over the bridges into Manhattan. Uptown, downtown. As we traveled, we’d chat: about New York, history, school, Chinese food, bicycles. Once, I mentioned an article I’d read about a long-distance cyclist who had set the goal of biking the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back. My son wondered if we could do the same: How many journeys from home to his elementary school would equal a round trip to the moon? We crunched the numbers and came up with a rough figure: about five hundred thousand commutes. We decided to set a more manageable goal.
But then he learned to ride himself, tasting freedom and danger. On our new journeys around town, I rode in the street and made him stick to the sidewalk. The idea was that he would ride parallel to me, mirroring my progress from the safety of car-free terrain. But he had no patience for this routine. He would outrun me, gunning along the sidewalk and reaching the end of the block before I did, while I sat stalled behind cars. “Meet you at the corner,” he’d say and then, zoom, he was out of sight. For a while I insisted that he stop at the corners and wait for me before crossing the street. But soon it became clear that this was pointless. He was careful, he said; he wasn’t going to get hit. Besides, I was too slow. Why should he have to wait around for me?
Today he’s a big, handsome teenager, nearly my height. He’s graduated to a retro-style BMX bike with a slick white frame and twenty-six-inch wheels. He’s taught himself to wheelie and pogo and do other tricks. More often, he simply bikes around the city, seeing friends, hanging out, doing who knows what, who knows where, all over town, at all hours of the day and night. He’s reached that stage of adolescence where he’s here but not here, a spectral presence who drifts into the house, eats, sleeps, maybe does a little homework, exchanges a few words, and then drifts out again—hops back on the BMX and heads off to parts unknown. The anxiety of parenting a teenager is intensified when your kid likes to scream around New York on his bike. But I’m in no position to tell him not to do it, and besides, it could be worse. He could be driving a car.
Recently, I had the strange experience of bumping into my son on his bike. He was riding alongside a friend, about a dozen blocks down the street from our home. It was a novelty, a rare sighting of the teenager in the wild. My wife and I were out for a walk with our younger son, and then, suddenly, there he was, steaming up in the crosswalk: my big boy, looking more like a young man than ever. It was a brief encounter. “Hey guys,” he said. And then, after a few pleasantries: “We gotta go.” And they went, my son and his friend, zipping up the street and out of sight.
We still bike around together, sometimes. There are occasional family rides: my son leading the way, my wife and I trailing behind. We’ll caravan like this, across Brooklyn, to a bookstore or an Asian restaurant. There is still a child’s bike seat behind me, but it has a different occupant now: my younger son, who hasn’t yet mastered his own bike. He’s been hesitant about learning to ride, but he’s getting too big for the child seat; it’s just a matter of time. Soon he, too, will be on his way, heading for the corner.
IX. Graceful Aging
I saw a news item not long ago about a woman in rural Chile named Elena Galvez. It was one of those inspirational stories that goes shooting around the internet. Galvez, who is in her nineties, bikes hundreds of miles a week, transporting her hens’ eggs to a market. The eggs are her only source of income; her sole means of transportation is a beat-up cruiser that Galvez calls her “companion and friend.” “I am nothing without her,” Galvez says. She maintains that cycling is the secret to longevity. If she makes it to one hundred, she insists, credit must go to the bicycle.
You can grow old on a bike. Many older people stay active by taking up genteel sports like golf. But those pastimes pull you away from life. A golf course is a sham Elysium, a walled garden cut off from the wide world. A bicycle can help keep an aging body fit. But more importantly, it keeps that body out there, where the action is.
When I fantasize about my life as an elderly person—when I conjure an idealized picture of my so-called golden years—I return to the same soft-focus images, which run through my mind like a montage in a cheesy movie: me and my wife, biking together in the twilight through placid New York streets. It is mortifying to recall the vainglorious visions I held in my head as a young man. But I have to admit that not so much has changed: today, more or less the same stuff kick-starts my daydreams. I no longer crave rock stardom—a good thing, for me personally and for the community at large. But bicycles still loom front and center, and, I guess, I still love romance. A great city; a decent bike; a body spry enough to work the bike; my wife, on her bike, pedaling alongside. That’s the ride into the sunset I want. If my luck holds, if I’m not flattened by a cornering truck or sideswiped by a driverless Uber or I don’t suffer some other misfortune on or off two wheels, I may yet become that great and noble—or maybe it’s humble but dignified—creature. An old man on a bicycle.