He rides it, unabashed, all over our greater metropolitan area. He is a grown up man with his shit together I am serious.
When asked, Steve will boast that he bought this bike for $20 off of Craigslist; it once belonged to a college girl. He will then point out it is a girls’-frame bike, and probably also somewhere in there he will say “fuckin’ rad.”
The first time I saw the bike, I was picking Steve up from when he fell off the bike and busted his knee in the middle of the night. “Well,” I thought to my own self when I saw it, “I expected a perfect fancy mountain bike with important extra features I don’t understand. Not… what is this, a girls’ beach cruiser with a… is that a scrunchie on the handlebars? And some of it is purple.”
The second time I saw the bike, I was picking it up from bike valet at Earth Day. As I turned in the ticket, a volunteer asked me a few questions about the bike and its owner, to ascertain I was authorized to take it.
A few minutes later, the volunteer wheeled the bike up to me. “I don’t know what I was doing quizzing you about this bike,” he said, kinda chuckling in a friendly way.
“I don’t even have a bike, myself,” I said, wanting to laugh but also feeling fiercely loyal to the owner of the bike. “I mean this bike is better than not having a bike at all, right?”
“Maybe,” said the volunteer.
The third time I saw the bike, it was in my office, being stored after its owner attended my work fundraiser and didn’t want to ride home.
After three days, my boss inquired about the bike.
“Is this your bike?”
“Um no. It’s Steve’s bike.”
“Could it not live here for much longer, please?”
“Yeah sure.”
“I mean if it were YOUR bike of course it would be fine, but–”
“I don’t have a bike.”
When I called Steve, he was busy, but suggested I wheel the bike outside and lock it to a pole for him to pick up later.
“No way, dude. I don’t want to be seen with it.”
“Wow.”
I imagined myself, dressed in career-lady disguise as I am every day for work now, outside wrestling with the bike and maybe falling over and not knowing how to work the bike lock and everyone thinking I had a shitty bike with a scrunchie on it and no seat cover when I don’t even HAVE a bike… I felt shallow but I couldn’t.
Just a few minutes later, Steve came by to remove the bike (which I now realized I was thinking of as Bike, like it was a living being, a doofy friend… “Hey there’s Steve I wonder if he brought Bike!”) and later apologized to my boss. I felt inexplicably sad.
The next day at work, I missed Bike. I caught myself giving slight side-eye to my boss’s perfect fancy bike with important extra features I don’t understand, stored in his own office.
I did not completely miss the crumbly foam bits of seat stuffing Bike left everywhere, but I wished I had not minded about being seen locking Bike up outside work. And I smiled extra big after work that night when I saw Steve proudly unlocking Bike from a pole on our town’s most main-y main street.
“So is that a scrunchie?”
“Yeah, it used to hold on my bike bell but…”
“Yay, Bike.”
pixelskylines
prguitarman
2087
annaxmalina
areudirty
baratheonpilled
