Muscle Memory
Today I met these cool young filmmaker/journalist/activist women in Boyle Heights, while working on a story about how folks are organizing against violence against women.
They said they wanted to check out my blog, and I gulped, knowing I hadn’t updated it in ages. So, this one’s for you, Amanda & Heidy!
I commute by car during the academic year, so, as soon as I submit final grades, I start pitching stories that I can report from my bicycle and set off on two wheels.
The best thing about biking is that it never leaves you.
The muscle memory always returns—flipping my right foot in and out of the toe clip at traffic lights, reaching for the downtube shifters as gradients change, hopping my hands from the tops to the hoods to the drops of my handlebars, casting myself back and riding hands-free, like I first learned how to do during a Critical Mass ride that took over a major bridge in Seattle.
No matter how out of shape I am, I can still summon the strength lift myself out of my saddle to climb a hill, burst ahead of traffic at the turn of a green light, and keep a steady pace on those long straightaways on 7th into downtown or 1st into the Eastside.
On one of those long slogs, my chain came loose while I was downshifting—my own fault for not cleaning and greasing it in months—so I maneuvered to the curb, grabbed the fork and seat stay and flipped it over so it sat wheels up. I remembered just how to work the derailleur to untangle the chain and fit it back over the gears. It felt good to have grease-stained hands.
I remembered that I love biking because you move more slowly through the world than you do in a car. You notice things, like the hand-painted signs on storefronts, or how empty the 1st Street Bridge is at noon and how cavernous the cement basin of the L.A. River looks below it. You also have so much more autonomy on a bike. You can weave through backed-up cars and ride through closed-down streets instead of taking the detour. It feels like you get everywhere faster.
But there are other things I don’t love.
There’s not one time I’ve ridden through downtown L.A. that I haven’t felt like I could die any second. Busses barrel out in front of you at green lights and cough exhaust at you in their wake. (I have no quarrel with busses. I know our battle for the same space in the road is unjust. Still, it gets scary.) Cars swerve into your lane to make a right turn and then brake abruptly for pedestrians in the crosswalk. The driver’s side doors of parked cars could swing open in front of you at any moment.
At one point, a minivan on Spring Street sliced into the green-painted bike lane right in front of me to poke his nose into the line of cars waiting to turn right. I’m always waiting to be doored or cut off, so I saw him coming and stopped easily. Still, I was pissed. My left hand flew up and slammed down on his dark grey, shiny hood with an open palm. It was a practice I had picked up when I commuted to a coffee shop job in downtown Seattle—hitting cars that cut me off and chasing down drivers who ignored me—back when I was in my early twenties and thought I was invincible.
It used to give me an adrenaline rush, but this time it didn’t feel so good. The driver threw up his hands, like Jeez, sorry! and I cocked my head at him like, Watch it, asshole. But I wondered if I could get busted for property damage for hitting his car, or if he might run me down in the next block once he realized he hadn’t actually hit me.
Later, as I crested the 7th Street hill coming out of downtown and started to cruise through Westlake, a guy in a car stopped at a red light made a kissing noise at me. Long and slow. I looked over and saw that he was wearing a reflective vest.
I thought I was past the point of getting cat-called, because it so rarely happens anymore. But that’s probably just because I’m almost always in a car, not on the bus or metro, or walking, or one my bike, moving slowly enough through the world to be seen. Anybody will get cat-called. All you have to have is a body.
I had just sat in on a presentation about the patriarchy—the women in the circle explained that it’s about power, that it’s all around us, and that we can defy it.
I whipped out my right middle finger as I rolled through the green light. Didn’t make eye-contact with the guy in the vest, just held my hand up as I passed him by, kept it up until long after I had cleared the intersection.
I still had the muscle memory for that, too.