Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 45    bike riding filled me where people couldn’t

Around this time, I quit the hardware store and got a good job selling tile at Century Supply in Arlington Heights. For the first time in my life, I began making genuine money and socked it away.

I bought a new 1978 Chevette which barely fit my frame … that car was so cramped that I had to move my knee to shift gears.

At 27, I was amazingly inexperienced in life and paid full sticker price and didn’t even take a test drive. What a dolt and my father laughed at me. Here I could stand face to face with practically any threat on the road, but didn’t have the walk-around sense for ordinary life.

My father and I were at odds constantly … it was his house and he fussed over the TV volume, my late hours, and the guy I rode a bike with three times.

I took my father’s cue about that guy and stopped hanging around with him, and interestingly, he quit the hardware store a week later, complaining that he couldn’t continue working since I ‘froze him out.’ … wow, was he another police ‘friend?’ Did my father and his wife key in on that? I don’t know, but another informer … bang gone.

Chicago was a lonely place. My best girlfriend left the year before because I wasn’t ‘going anywhere’ … and she was on the mark about that.

I couldn’t meet anybody new, but no surprise since all my time was spent pounding out miles on the road … and who else was doing that? Nobody was riding a bike across Chicago at night or in the winter. People rode bikes on the bike path on warm happy days. The rest of the time they drove around in cars.

Things boiled over at my father’s house and I moved out, spending two shivering nights in the Chevette using foam padding from a dumpster to stay warm until I found a one-bedroom apartment in Mt Prospect, 3 miles from work.

Store hours at Century Supply extended to 9PM so it was late before I left for the customary five-hour bike ride. And now I was getting home at 3 in the morning, sometimes later, but I loved riding at night … there were fewer cars and night-people are more respectful … maybe the socializers magically turn into people after dark.

Unlike most cyclists, I never stopped at gathering-holes to chit-chat … I just rode the long miles alone. That year I was riding across the Chicago River at one in the morning and found joy in the Christmas lights reflected by the falling snow … but realized this tiny sharing was the only human link I had that holiday. I was alone in every sense, and couldn’t break the pattern.

Somehow the bike riding masked that loneliness and inability to relate to people. I rode a bike because I felt separated from people, yet the bike riding separated me from people. Still, in a strange irony, I mostly enjoyed riding when other people were about so I could feel connected … I lived vicariously … it was all I had.

The summer before when I still worked at the hardware store, I stopped by the Northbrook outdoor velodrome one day. Bicyclists were all over the parking lot, on the asphalt track, and up in the stands … everybody wore little spandex riding suits and they were pushing bicycles around and talking. I could see the clustered egos and pecking-orders, but stood against myself and rode up in street clothes, putting the bike over the wall for a quick ride on the eighth-mile track.

I did three laps, and on the last one, got into a run with a group of racers, keeping up easily until the chain lopped off and caused me to slide back out of the race.

Clearly, my front end wobbled on the curves under full pedal stroke, and I knew what was needed: a lighter bike, pedal cleats, a uniform to glow out my ass, and hours of practice …it would be easy …

… except there was a group of people enjoining me to speak as I rode up to the stands. I disdained the social order because it was complex. Besides these people brought their bikes in a car.

They weren’t experienced street riders, they were ‘clubbers’ and ‘joiners’ and that wasn’t me. I lacked the desire to join an ego-peck of clubhouse interaction … it confused me and would cause me to fail, so I rode back out to highway 41. It hurt like an empty hole to disappear in the cars and tell myself this was my home, not the track.

I just couldn’t make the compromise … and that’s what society is … it’s people exchanging with others using a fantastic 3-D grid of knowledge and compromise, and I didn’t have that.

Simplistically, my pathology may have arisen from being a slightly autistic child with little emotional flexibility. A child that saw the world as a perfectly-made level playing field, but felt betrayed when society allowed unfair attacks, both by strangers and by an abusive father who angrily withheld praise and caring from his family.

On the other hand, maybe life is an ‘electro-magnetic fire’ burning across the face of the planet, not much different than the sun’s surface, and our individual actions are caused by electrically charged particles dancing through our genetics like flames consuming a log. And each person is a unique log that burns up differently than all others. Who knows?

I didn’t ride to be competitive or to join a social exchange … I rode because it was my relationship to the world. It filled me where people couldn’t.
Chapter 46) Gacy
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