Pushing Pedals

Los Angeles has been seeing a spell of bad weather the last few days. Bursts of rain have riddled the days and evenings with their melancholy dampness. In the winter the rain dowses the unquenchable heat of the summer, a delayed and inconsequential response to the wild fires and the Santa Ana winds. This city swings between poles much like the moody wrecks of humanity that drive through its streets like cynical land dwelling sharks. If as Joan Didion suggests, L.A.’s ultimate self image is one of self immolation, the rain could be seen as the city in rebellion against itself. All the Beach Boys imagery of the sun and the beach get dowsed by the pollution lapping rain that turns the golden sand into a brackish spray that coats your calves as you ride. The rain is the other side of Brian Wilson, the reclusive crack addict manipulated by an immoral psychiatrist.

Rain or no rain, I had to ride my bike. I ventured out once to test the air after stretching and the rain started drumming itself on the wasted land as soon as I stepped out. Relying on the weather on a night like this is like having a conversation with a contrarian. The crisp air cooled my enthusiasm immediately. After a minute I walked back inside armed with reasons to stay indoors. But the blank loneliness of my apartment compelled me to leave again. As I waited for the rain to quiet down, I found the address for a bike shop on Santa Monica Blvd and decided to ride out there. My bike seat keeps shifting about its axis and my gears are a clicky, unpredictable mess. A tune-up is as good a reason to leave my apartment as anything else.

Down 37th Street I rode, wrapped in an ugly green sweatshirt that you only wear if you want the life-lights to shine away from you. Along Korea-town the street edges at the intersection were filled with deep, black ponds of grease and street-sweat with bits of refuse at their bottom. My shoes and socks were soaked with their dark dye. I shudder to think of the creature that might emerge out of this water onto the grimy pavements on slithering new legs. Surely the end point of that possible evolution could not be man.

The bike store was predictably not open. The drizzles had started again by the time I reached it's shuttered, grill-armored facade that taunted me. Information on the Internet is never to be trusted and I half expected the store to be closed. I did not anticipate the depression that followed, however, simply because I had not thought about my course of action after this possible outcome. If I had dwelt too much on it, I would never have left home. Decisive action is always determined by certain necessary self-delusions and denials of negative possibility.

I had no choice but to keep riding, if only to delay the inevitable drink. If you delay defeat long enough, you can achieve a different sort of victory, but if you delay it too long, you will die. Santa Monica Boulevard in the poorer sections between Vermont and West Hollywood is a treacherous stretch of street. Its edges are warped and scaled like a crocodile's tail. Undulating bumps that look like boils suddenly erupt into fissures that can trap a bicycle's wheel in their death grooves. The rain had filled a full fifth of the rightmost lane with a poisoned stream that dangerously hid the worst of the erosion. To ride this oversized lane I had to take its middle, which made dodging passing cars all the more dangerous. My tires raised sprays of gutter water that would coat my legs and back. The droplets of rain on my glasses forced me to take them off and I foolishly stuck them in my right pocket. The pollution in the streets and a congenitally sensitive pair of sinuses require me to constantly clear my nasal passages as I ride. When I reached for a piece of tissue to blow my nose, my glasses slipped out of my pocket and onto the street. A few blocks later, sensing their absence, I turned back and found them on the broken tarmac, looking serenely at the street that I had passed earlier in a tearing hurry. Their arms were bent askew but the lenses were intact.

I felt now that I had to keep going, the nature of my mission had been revealed to me again. If riding was just the action of putting the foot on the pedal and following the deserted street it would mean nothing. But with adversity and the hint of death it becomes a calling. When you see a serious biker on the street (and you will know the difference as soon as you reach a set of lights) do not mistake him for a person like yourself behind your steering wheel. The biker takes calculated risks that you would never consider when you drive. Let us take for example the safest condition under which a biker can ride in Los Angeles - on a designated bike lane like the one that lines parts of Santa Monica Blvd. On a lane like this there are several ways you can die.

The easiest way is if a passenger in a car that is parked ahead, on your right in the parking lane, decides to exit his car from his left door. The door opens seconds before you reach that spot and you have no time to react. I had about 5 seconds tonight at 15 miles an hour to swerve out of the way of an opening cab door. As I saw the door swing out in front of me like a trap I started to say softly to myself in fear "Son of a.." As I passed him my voice turned loud, going from surprise to expressive anger in the time it took to complete that phrase. If it had been a downhill section I would be in a hospital in a pleasant Opioid haze. The one satisfying outcome to emerge from this scenario is the possibility that I hit the passenger's hand and cleave it right off with my front tire, as I get thrown off my bike and crack my skull five feet ahead. Perhaps I should install giant thorns on the front of my bike to ensure this happening. High velocity alone is not a sure killer and the bike needs an extension of sharpened claws. Surely if Batman rode a bicycle he would have such an attachment.

The series of doors to a biker’s right that could open out unexpectedly are a constant source of anxiety that he must ignore in order to go faster. Each door presents the possibility for horrible disfigurement or death. Every door successfully passed is a small victory and a realization of the holiness of the ride. On the most thrilling rides you do not pay any attention to these doors. They represent unavoidable death and there is no point worrying about that.

The next likely possibility is that the driver of a parked car decides to join traffic without first consulting his mirror. Given the scarcity of bike lanes in L.A. and the rain that cuts bike traffic down to a minimum, it is likely that on a night like this, many drivers regard the lane as just an empty space between themselves and the "real" street. Taking into account the fact that I don't have any lights or reflectors (my bike has been stripped bare multiple times and I am too broke to get it fixed and the store was closed and my dog ate my homework and I don't give a shit), I have noticed that drivers are pretty good about looking back. But then, before tonight I have never had any experience with the first incarnation of death that I described earlier. Later on in the night in Echo Park, an area reputed for being more conscious of bike culture, I came close to this kind of encounter, though there was enough distance between me and the car that I wouldn't call it dangerous. My standards of safety are somewhat lackadaisical though.

The third way is at the intersections, when the car on your left cuts you off as it tries to make a quick right turn. S.U.V.'s, trucks and vans are typically the worst offenders. Their drivers are more likely to want to cut you off, but if you watch for turn signals and slow down at intersections then this is an easily avoidable fatality.

Sometimes the bike lane ends abruptly and if you are not the most experienced of riders then there is no place to go. You panic as the bike lane merges with the traffic. Combine this with cadaverous streets that split like seismic fault lines at their seams and you have yet another way that a rider can crash. I chicken out of the streets a lot myself, even in non-lane situations if I feel unsafe and can understand the fear of a new rider in a situation like this. I have read about it being a serious problem on Santa Monica Blvd. in several L.A. biking sites. The bike lane simply disappears for sections of the street with little or no warning.

It takes a steely nerve to maintain your lane when ton-heavy, lane-wide trucks slide alongside you impatiently. The position of the bike rider on a street without a bike line is at the fringe of the street with the craters of the street sniping at him to his right. Death awaits you in a variety of possibilities.

Crouched in this position, with my shoulders swaying slightly from side to side I rode through gigantic puddles as a police car rode ahead. Curtains of water rose from my tires and stung my grinning face, like the jets of hose pipes hitting the corner children in summer. Just past West Hollywood the street-lights start to die out. Trees and shrubbery start to appear, which in L.A. usually signals the presence of money. I had reached Beverly Hills. After pedaling for a couple of miles, at the Beverly Gardens Park I made a right and entered a street filled with sprawling, tree-lined Bungalows. These people are going to ride out the recession like it was a petty bet whose outcome is inconsequential. The wager must seem mildly annoying to them because of the anxiety of the poorer betters. What is financial speculation but playing golf with the average man's balls? Surely a pair will get lost, here and there, but the game must go on.

I was headed back home now through the back streets of Beverly Tills. Hunger was starting to gain on me and I felt dizzy. I have realized that the endorphinergic rush of exercise combined with low blood sugar makes me as rash as when I drink. I make spontaneous, risky decisions like running red lights against a wave of oncoming traffic when I am in this state. I knew I had to get some sugar in me before I headed back and I made a typically whimsical decision to stop at "Million Milkshakes" in West Hollywood. Ever wondered what a 5 dollar milkshake tastes like? I was about to find out in the gayest milkshake bar in the world. Million Milkshakes had bright pink signs and walls. Inside this neon conflagration, above the toppings bar, a giant TV played a Beyonce concert with the volume turned way up. At the condiments table I saw a flyer for a UCLA research team looking for volunteers to test "rectal hygiene products". Yeah, this place is that gay! For a moment I considered becoming a subject for UCLA's advanced rectal research team. They pay 250 dollars after all. But I decided that you probably need to be gay to qualify and yet another possibility for a promising career came to a premature end.

The milkshakes with names like "Brangelina shake" and "Paparazzi shake" seemed to play off the urban gay culture's obsession with pop icons. I find mainstream gay culture's embrace of celebrity culture and conspicuous consumption hard to accept because it is a segment of society that has had to battle marginalization and hatred by the majority. Why then would it want to align itself with the central, capitalist mechanism that has sustained the culture of hate for centuries? I similarly find Rap's unquestioning embrace of materialism hard to swallow. What were historically cultures of protest (Black Power and the Gay Lib movement), aligned with the radical left, have all become subsumed by the marketplace. This is a result of the complete failure of the New Left at the end of the 60s to address the concerns of minority groups like feminists, blacks, Latinos and gays. In retrospect, it seems that sections of the gay culture and the new generations of black militants had no choice but to embrace capitalism. They instinctively understood what the New Left didn't grasp, that the battle was not a social but an economic one. If you could not convince the masses of the righteousness of your cause through protests and sit-ins, then make your cause cool and sell it to them as a commodity instead.

Why did I choose to come to a milkshake stand? Imagine being sopping wet, with hands numb from the chill and the rain. The last thing you want to drink is a frozen treat. A milkshake in the rain was the most ironic thing that I could think of. The absurdity of my decision made me smile idiotically as I sucked at my straw and considered being buggered in the name of science. When I left the store I was shivering like a man in the middle of heroin withdrawal. Seeing a bus going downtown I almost gave in and hopped aboard. I stopped momentarily to check my wallet for singles while the driver kept going. He seemed to hint that I finish what I started and I grudgingly agreed. I jumped back into traffic and tried to stay warm by speeding up. I covered the 6 mile stretch back to Vermont relatively quickly and decided to keep going to see where Santa Monica Blvd. led me. Less than a mile past Vermont it coils around and snakes into Echo Park. The fancy stores start to reappear as does the bike lane that disappeared just after West Hollywood ended. Bike lanes and well maintained streets apparently are reserved for wealthy gay men, Beverly Hills millionaires or hipsters. The Armenians, El Salvodoreans, Mexicans, Blacks, Koreans and Chinese that live in-between these two have to use the worst stretch of road North of Venice Blvd.

I followed Santa Monica past "The Echo" and later found out that I came within miles of the gorgeous Elysian Fields park above Dodger's Stadium. I stopped at a run-down grocery store for a 2 dollar tall boy of Bud, thinking to myself that I was a fool for believing that a little shop does not want to rip you off. This guy needs to rip me off even more than that gaudy milkshake store. Outside the store, I chugged my beer, blew my nose and turned once again toward the churlish winds. The little hills of Alvarado are perfect to practice climbing late at night, when the traffic dies down. Macarthur Park lies dark to your right with the vacant allure of an undercover policewoman in a tight dress. I passed it quickly, not without a little temptation to explore its unlit corners. I stopped to buy a case of beer at the Ralph's on Adams. I must have looked like the returning Time Traveler in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, covered from head to toe in wet sand with the odd spots of dark grease. The plastic bags were too small to fully hold the case of beer, so I had to hang the case askew and balance it precariously with the fingers of my left hand for the short ride home. I decided to take the sidewalk just to be safe and protect my precious cargo.

Three corners down, with the pedestrian signal in my favor, I started to ease into the street when a car suddenly rushed out of the night. I barely managed to stop safely and yelled out - "Look at the sign asshole," which made the driver of the car pull back to allow me to pass. I congratulated myself on safely making it back through the streets that night and slowly came to the corner of Jefferson and Vermont. I made a right at the pedestrian signal to cross over to the other side of the street when yet another car nearly rammed me. I fell on my right knee awkwardly, dropping the case of beer that split open shooting out two beers onto the street. Again I had the signal in my favor and I was tempted to really scream at the woman driving the car. I didn't do that. I ignored her "I’m sorry", nodded my head when she asked me if I was alright and started to pick up my beers. An older Mexican couple helped me bag my case and I headed for home.