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Re cycling

It’s 59 degrees in State College today.  I’m in my English department office and I have the window open.  I rode my bicycle to my seminar yesterday, and again to my office hours today.  I’ve never done that in a February.  And we didn’t even get hit by the record-setting snowstorm that covered New York and New England last weekend, so there isn’t any lingering snow in sight.  You know, I could grow to like this whole “climate change” thing.  Besides, there’s so much of northern Canada still underpopulated, and I hear Antarctica is a great place to raise a family.  So I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Riding home yesterday I had a bicycling flashback.  I’m not much of a cyclist, and I don’t have much of a bicycle (though I heart Janet for getting me one for my birthday two years ago; it’s definitely the best vehicle for getting to and around campus).  Just four speeds, but it looks pretty cool, being black and silver like the Raiders.  It’s the first bicycle I’ve owned in over twenty years.  Here’s what happened to the last one.

In 1981-83, when I worked as a word processor at Simpson Thacher Bartlett in midtown Manhattan, a new cadre of middle management human- resources dweebs arrived in the corporate world and began harassing the clerical staff.  By the time I left New York, the HR dweebs had outlawed Walkmen in the office, even though the word processors, in our windowless room, had no direct contact with attorneys (and thus no need to keep their ears open for orders, requests, demands, or ringing telephones).  They argued that listening to music distracted us from the task of revising all those loans, tax memoranda, and merger-and-acquisition documents.  They implemented a dress code.  They tried to drop the overtime “meal allowance” for night-shift WP staff from $6.50 (dinner) to $2.50 (breakfast) on the grounds that no one eats dinner after midnight.  The fact that no one in New York eats dinner for $6.50 somehow escaped them.  And this was in a firm that charged clients $500 per billable hour in 1981.  But I’m proud to say that I fought that one and won on behalf of all my brothers and sisters on the late shifts.  It was my only victory over the HR crew: the other issue on which I challenged them, their brand-new lateness policy, remained in place.

That policy penalized employees if they were more than five minutes late for the start of a shift three times in the course of a month.  I pointed out to the dweebs that with the exception of myself and two other guys (actors who had chosen word processing over waiting tables for their regular-income jobs), the entire support staff lived in the outer boroughs, and had no way of insuring that their various buses and trains would reliably get them to work right on the dot.  I asked for a fifteen-minute period instead.  The dweebs, being dweebs, responded that the support staff should simply plan to arrive extra-special early to avoid lateness penalties.

Yes, well.  I lived only four miles away from the office, but after one week in which two of my west side IRT trains broke down, leaving me late for work and within one five-minute mishap of suffering lateness penalties, I went and bought a crappy used bicycle for $100.  I called it the Plymouth Duster of bicycles.  But it got me to work on time.

More than that, it gave me tremendous adrenaline rushes once I got out of Central Park and into midtown each morning.  And the trip back home was even better.  For those were the years in which the city created bus lanes on Madison Avenue in order to ease the pressure on bus traffic heading to the Queensboro Bridge: through 60th Street, the right two lanes of Madison were off limits to all vans, cabs, trucks, and just plain cars.  Well, the bike messengers and I loved that.  We would slip into the narrow space between the bus lanes, which at 5 pm were lined with buses as far as you could see, and take off.  I thought of it as the urban-bicycle equivalent of surfing, and it was definitely tubular.  Getting out of the tube was tricky, of course, and there was always the possibility that a bus might creep out of its lane, which would leave a cyclist plastered to the side of the bus alongside the display ad, where he would doubtless remain until someone peeled his flattened ancient-Egyptian form off the bus a couple of days later.  But it was, to say the least, a rush.

When I moved to Charlottesville in 1983, I brought my bike with me.  I didn’t have a car, and I believe Charlottesville’s public transportation system consisted of one single bus making lazy circles around the county.  But one day in my very first week in Charlottesville, while I was riding my crappy used bike back to my crappy graduate-student apartment, I realized that I had never been in a left-turn lane before.  Three years of riding around Manhattan, and I’d never once seen a left-turn lane.  Damn!  And here I was trying to make this turn, and like a fool, I was on the left side of a left turn lane on busy four-lane US route 29.  So, looking behind me to make sure I had the room to cross over, I pedaled to the right side of the lane . . .

. . . and flipped completely over my handlebars, heels over head, and smack onto the back of the flatbed truck that had stopped in front of me.

I broke my sunglasses—but nothing more, miraculously enough.  Traffic stopped, and I picked myself up and dusted myself off, apologizing to the truck driver, who, for his part, couldn’t believe that a dumb-ass cyclist had done a 270 onto his flatbed.  (He was extremely kind, actually.) In response, I thanked him for having a flatbed, and for making sure that the payload area was empty and ready for my arrival.  Because, needless to say, if he’d had a mess of equipment back there, that would have hurt; if I’d hit a car instead, I would have wound up on the trunk or the roof, where I probably would have slid off and into the street; and if I’d hit any ordinary truck, I would have gone right into the back end, head first.  Was I wearing a helmet?  Of course not!  Why would anyone need a bicycle helmet?

I’m glad I lived through my first week in Charlottesville.  And I learned how to be more careful with a bicycle, too.  But to this day, I remember that accident vividly, and I’ve always found it kind of pathetically comic that I survived three years of biking in Manhattan, riding the bus-lane tube, dodging thousands of pedestrians and suddenly-opened car doors, and twice being deliberately jostled by crazy cabbies on Park Avenue at 15 mph or so, only to fly over my handlebars and onto the back of a flatbed truck within days of arriving in sleepy little Charlottesville.

Here’s to mild weather and bicycle safety.

Posted by on 02/16 at 02:07 PM

  1. Forgive my ignorance, but… So how does one turn left in Manhattan?

    Posted by Jon  on  02/16  at  03:48 PM

  2. Michael:

    I heart cycling, and your C-ville story reminds me of my undergraduate days there.  I used to noodle around campus--er, grounds--and occasionally even venture out to shiflett-land for a rural ride.  My most memorable (sober) two wheeled experience was not long after buying and installing toe-clips--I pulled up to the light in front of Mr Jefferson’s rotunda just above the Corner, nestled among five or six cars, started to put my foot down, realized-too late of course-that it was attached to the bike, and fell over.  I think there’s a rule that these kind of doofus mishaps must occur only at busy intersections, with plenty of witnesses.

    But Southerners must be rigorously trained not to exhibit mirth in such circumstances, because I too was the red-faced benificiary of several solicitous inquiries, and to my recollection, no one was even cracking a smile.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  04:00 PM

  3. $100 for a “crappy” used bike in 81’?

    Maybe its the Chicago cost of living in me but, yikes.

    Did that bad boy come with a flux capacitor?

    That would have solved your dweeb problem.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  04:03 PM

  4. In Miami, if it was 59 degrees everybody would complain about the cold.

    Posted by Shaquille O'Neal  on  02/16  at  04:34 PM

  5. So how does one turn left in Manhattan?

    Oboy, I can’t resist.

    Same way you get to Carnegie Hall, Jon.  Practice, practice, practice.

    Seriously?  There are only a handful of two-way streets, and none of them (to my knowledge, or in my experience) have left-turn lanes.  On those streets you just have to hang out on the right-hand side of the road and then cut across.  With your left arm extended, of course, not that anyone pays attention to that. . . .  Otherwise—let’s say you’re heading up 8th Avenue—you can just ride on the left side of the road, and treat it like a right-hand turn.  Which is, I suppose, what I thought I was doing that day in C-ville.

    $100 for a “crappy” used bike in 81?

    OK, it wasn’t all that bad.  But I got pwned, just the same. 

    Posted by Michael  on  02/16  at  04:43 PM

  6. Why would anyone need a bicycle helmet?

    Exactly, i have never understood that one.  All these laws to protect what?? Maybe when they start making all the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Paris-Roubaix riders wear them i might begin to think it means something.  After years of road racing, toodling around busy cities, commuting to work in the high Sierra, and a dozen or so major crashes---all without helmet, i just hate the idea of now being legislated against.  The radical in me will continue to bike for my right to (more severely?) damage my head. 

    A $100 for a used bike in ‘81, crappy or not-crappy, would still seem a bit much.  Course that is in relation to today when $100 barely gets you a good wheel.  Riding/walking still makes for a great commute; which is why my captcha word seems appropriate---"feet"

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  05:49 PM

  7. Spyder,
    Ever since a couple of training and racing fatalities all professional racer, and I believe all sanctioned amature racers, wear helmets. This would suggest that a trip to the LBS is in order.  In 1979 I purchased a brand new Trek 350, I think it was, for around 300, for whatever that is worth.  Just as by the way, it is, in fact, possible to ride year round, snow or no snow, I do and it is more fun that “bitch-slapping” D’ Ho

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  05:55 PM

  8. Bikes are teh 4w350m3. I just got my first new crotch rocket in over twenty years [actually it’s not “new”—it’s a rebuilt Bridgestone road racer with brand new wheels and five speeds (all for only $300!)], and I must say: this bike freakin’ pwns LA. I wish I had found it years ago.

    To everybody out there who doesn’t own a bike: get one. Pronto. It will make you happier, healthier, more attractive, etc. Plus you’ll be wasting less money on gas. Good for you, good for your community, good, good, good.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  06:26 PM

  9. Michael, I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but every fall semester at Illinois brought a spate of bicycle/pedestrian collisions on Wright St., often by the English building. People would invariably walk into the bike lane and promptly get Schwinned. Yikes.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  07:01 PM

  10. Crazy:
    President ‘Just Fine’ With Cheney Explanation

    http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,185062,00.html

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  09:45 PM

  11. Tom Bach is correct, racers have been required to wear helmets for the past 2-3 years. If the race ends in an uphill finish, the racers can take off their helmets at the bottom of the last hill, but not a minute before.

    And, for the sake of safety, you want to be dead smack in the middle of a left-turn lane when you make a left turn. This discourages drivers behind you from trying to pass you in the middle of the turn (which, besides being illegal, increases the risk of being swiped by a driver who lost track of where you’re at). Better to make them wait until the turn is over, and then move over to let them pass.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  10:00 PM

  12. $100 for a used bike in 1981? I’ve never paid more than $100 for a bike in NYC, and this is just talking since I moved here (1999). You got taken.

    Of course the bikes I bought sucked.

    I stupidly tried to pass a stopped cab on the right on Park Avenue late night in Dec 2000. Of course the door opened and I believe I went over it and landed on my back: although I remember nothing. Once the cabbie realized I was a student, he decided to be nice. I watched while he used the car jack to bend his door back into place, and we both marvelled at the unhurtnessitude of my bike and me. And then we talked about the ecletion for a while.

    This was pre-Helmet days. But after that spill, and a couple bike-destroying spills on the W’berg Bridge, I decided to just get all dorky and safe.

    Here’s hoping when I finish I get a job someplace nice and flat and easy to bike in. Because someone who drives like me—someday I tell y’all about the time I totalled my bug on an armored car—shouldn’t do anything but bike.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  10:26 PM

  13. Yikes! Don’t scare us like that, Michael! Who’ll write our fake news for us if you hurt yourself? Who’ll go up against Horowitz in the great Academic-Freedom Ragnarok?

    Posted by Ancrene Wiseass  on  02/16  at  11:36 PM

  14. Charlottesville bicyclists tended not to use headlights, I noticed, which was I hope a habit you didn’t adopt, if you biked at night. If they “made” you as a graduate student, they tended to be kindly to you, in most circumstances. I do remember my roommate, also a graduate student, had one of the first recumbent bicycles in Charlottesville (circa 1983-84) and that *was* remarked upon.

    I rarely rode a bike. To fit in, I drove a Galaxie 500, which was well accepted by the locals.

    Actually I remember Janet’s Subaru Brat (a Subaru never mentioned on this blog?) but not your bicycle.

    Posted by david ross mcirvine  on  02/17  at  12:42 AM

  15. Dang, David, how could you remember the bicycle?  It was damn near totaled in that accident.  And I met you about six months later.

    And don’t worry, Ancrene.  The trip from my house to my office is blissfully short, and almost free of traffic.  The only danger is that I might Schwinn an innocent pedestrian on campus.

    Which brings me to Paul.  To understand what he’s talking about—and I realized in composing this post that everything depends on a reader’s ability to visualize street minutiae—you have to know that the bike lanes at Illinois, near the English building, were actually separated by curb dividers from Wright Street.  You had the street, then a curb, then the bike lane, then a curb, then the sidewalk.  In fact, the bike lanes throughout Urbana-Champaign were generous and clearly marked.  But—and as Pee Wee Herman once said, this is a big but—the C-U and campus buses (which were wonderful) dropped people off at those outer curbs, so that people got off the bus and walked right into the bike lane.

    And I think the failure of progressive politics is summed up right there.

    Posted by Michael  on  02/17  at  01:13 AM

  16. 59 degrees in Centre County in February? A perfect opportunity for some fly fishing on Penn’s Creek. It’s times like this that I wish I were still living in PA.

    Posted by The Continental Op  on  02/17  at  02:02 AM

  17. "The only danger is that I might Schwinn an innocent pedestrian on campus.”

    Schwinn? Is this some sort of Wayne’s World reference?

    London cyclists ignore stop lights. But then, everyone else on the road ignores cyclists. Fair’s fair.

    Well, not everyone: in a weird parallel society sort of way, the cycling police pay attention. I once saw a cycle courier go through a red light, only to be overhauled and stopped in a white-knuckle chase by a cycle policeman. Last I saw, the courier was getting a stern talking-to.
    My only regret was that the cycle policemen do not have small blue flashing lights, a la Kojak, which they affix with a suction cup to the tops of their bike helmets when in a chase.

    Posted by  on  02/17  at  07:23 AM

  18. Cyclists who jump red lights are letting the side down, and I’m speaking as someone who uses their bike as their main mode of transport around town.

    As for taxis, well that’s how I’m going to die, they’re so unpredictable, I once had to ride on the wrong side of the road to avoid U-turning taxis, twice, on the same stretch of road.

    Finally, helmets.  For mountain bikers, yes, but for around towners, no, they’re unlikely to help you if you get hit by a car and they feck up your hearing which is one big safety feature of not being in a glass/metal/plastic cage.

    Posted by Simstim  on  02/17  at  10:19 AM

  19. 59º in PA in February??? Feh!  Down here in always sunny FL we actually had solidified water on the windshield Tuesday morning. Now how do you deal with THAT here in the tropics?

    Posted by  on  02/17  at  01:16 PM

  20. Ah, Michael this explains everything.  Simpson Thacher!  No wonder you have become so radicalized and now bring down America from within. Frontpage obviously missed this key cognitive insight!  What was David H. thinking?

    As a veteran of and refugee from another white shoe legal factory in the City, I understand completely.  Almost nothing is as soul destroying as the 250th Revised and Amended Master Collateral Agreement.  I say almost, because believe it or not, sitting in on the conference calls actually can be worse.  And every year the N00B first years pondering if they should use ‘shall’ or ‘will’.  Like the kids in ‘Gallipoli’ going up the ladders for obliteration at the sound of the whistle. Oh the humanity!

    I always thought that the American revolution post 1975 would start from the oppressed masses in the legal factories.  Ridley Scott could reprise his 1984 Apple commercial.  They rise up against the droning Managing Partner to shake off the golden zirconium handcuffs, crying out for Freedom and Life.  But their false consciousness and tardy time sheets keep getting in the way.

    Toujours, toujours la mark up!

    P.S. Congrats on your victory over HR.  You should have seen the ‘levee en masse’ from the law firm gentry when the IRS threatened to start taxing Dial car service as undeclared income later in the decade.  Faintly comical.

    Posted by Leo Strauss  on  02/17  at  05:29 PM

  21. Michael, thanks for your reply.

    “hang out on the right-hand side of the road and then cut across.  With your left arm extended, of course, not that anyone pays attention to that.”

    You see, that sounds rather more tricky and death-defying to me… cutting across a couple of lanes of moving traffic.

    Anyhow, though it’s not warm here, it’s sunny.  I’m inspired to get on my bike…

    Posted by Jon  on  02/17  at  05:47 PM

  22. Cool bicycle story.  But you had me at “cadre of middle-management human resources dweebs”, which has induced a series of nasty flashbacks from my own law-office-clerical-staff history.  Now I am not feeling very well.  Jeepers, I wish that when I’d spun out of the path of the HR-dweebmobile, there’d been an empty flatbed truck for me to land on.  I’m still tumbling from that life-changing smackdown.

    Know what I got for Valentine’s Day?  A lovely bottle of Laphroig single malt.  I am going to pour myself a bit right now.  Otherwise I might hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.

    ("A vague disclaimer is nobody’s friend.” I have never slit anyone’s throat, nor will I ever try to slit anyone’s throat.  I swear under penalty of perjury that the preceding is true and correct.)

    Posted by  on  02/17  at  10:30 PM

  23. as soon as you looked over your shoulder to work left i knew it was coming. a 270 yet and onto a flat surface. chapeau!

    Posted by ebw  on  02/18  at  03:59 PM

  24. Hello from Charlottesville, and congratulations on making over the wall. I, too, arrived here in 1983, fresh from Colorado, where I was a very serious bike rider. In all of Albemarle County, then, I figure there were sixteen guys who owned real road racing bikes and had real road racing skills, and three of us were grad students from the Centennial state. Outwest, the Front Range communities were I (and most Coloradoans) live are pretty flat, and the weather is very, very dry. I commuted all over Fort Collins on a fixed gear bike with fenders, all seasons. Would go to work, home for lunch, back and home after work, sometimes carrying things using both hands. No problem. Wide streets, no sweat. Literally.

    Charlottesville was like and alien land, with a hilly topography, twisting roads loaded with ignorant, impatient, unfriendly drivers, and the summer climate of the Everglades. When I graduated, and bought a house in town a mile from work, and got a mountain bike, I’d still commute, but I was a rare one, and I was just going a mile. Now, there are bike lanes, but it’s still mostly students who ride bikes and commute. No one rides on US 29, Michael. Even I understood that, in 1983.

    There did develop as serious road and mountain bike community, which started growing about the time I arrived. I used to go all over Central Virginia on training loops. It was quite fun, and I got to see rural Virginia before it got all NoVA’d, since we’re suddenly being exurbed into the general blandness of commodified community development. I wish I’d spent more time considering the beauty of the land, instead of staring at the rear wheel of the rider in front of me.

    But, hey! It’s not all bad. Since you and I graduated grad schools, the University has built up a plush athletic department, with support facilities that would put the luxuries of Persepolis to shame, onto which it can cling as it busily sloughs off its undergraduate teaching duties to adjuncts while jacking tuition up to Ivy League levels.

    Also, the town has an ice rink, now.

    Posted by  on  02/18  at  07:18 PM

  25. Yeah, I could have used the preview button and fixed the typos, but I was livin’ dangerously. Me and Dick Cheney, debbil-may-care men who live and die quick.

    Posted by  on  02/18  at  07:19 PM

  26. Glad to read that you solved your lateness problem by buying a bike. 

    I haven’t solved mine yet. 

    I don’t have a car and rely on the bus to get me to my substitute teaching job. This means I could get a call to go to any school in the city.  I bike may also solve my transportation problem, since the main routes are only several blocks from my apartment.

    Posted by  on  02/20  at  01:07 PM

  27. Michael,

    Congratulation!  I just read in The Nation that you made David Horowitz’s list of the “most dangerous academics in America”.  Well done!!

    I realised that you were dangerous when you used to horse around in The Regian office in high school, but I had no idea then that that trait would eventually lead to such valuable public service.

    I also read some years ago in the NY Times a great review of the book that you wrote about Jamie.

    Now in retirement from teaching, living as a Jesuit donne’ with the West Side Jesuit community, I currently have as one of my roommates Eric Stoner, an intern at The Nation.  Hence the happy accident of seeing your name in the latest issue.

    All the best, Michael.  God bless you.

    John

    Posted by  on  02/24  at  01:30 AM

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