Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 88  Steakhouse

My wife and I went to the local steakhouse one night, not the busy one but the quiet one on Avenue H. They serve a good steak and I like the homey atmosphere and prefer seeing the same regular people who work there. I don’t like those fancy-dan restaurants where everybody comes around spewing the company patter, but you feel they don’t want to be there any more than they wanted take tests at school.

The quiet steakhouse is quiet and we sat down with a few other people on surrounding tables. Everybody was spread out nicely with nobody breathing down anybody else’s neck.

I do most of the talking between my wife and me, and it embarrasses me that I’m so compulsive about talking, and too, I’m pretty loud because my hearing was wrecked by using power tools every day for 30 years.

I’m especially deaf off my right ear but I can still hear low sounds when they filter in, and the inaudible mumbling annoys me.

The table to my right was murmuring in low tones and my subconscious was evidently picking up on that because I started looking over at the lady sitting there. It was just an automatic response, I wasn’t looking at anything, I was just tracking the sound.

The sound kept coming back, and I kept looking over at a couple sitting there, but I didn’t focus on anything. I was just turning my head and saw a man and woman there because they were speaking in very low, near-inaudible tones. I didn’t look to see who it was because I don’t know anybody and don’t talk to anybody.

The episode of hate and the exposure of my friend Ricky as an informant turned me against associating with people. Obviously the community despised my personality and my bike activism, so they had their say. If they feel that way, yet my personality is what it is, then it’s best if I inflict nobody with that personality.

For christ’s sake, you mind your business and I’ll mind mine. But these people at the other table were talking about me. What the fuck do they want? I’m minding my business, and maybe I’m talking too loud or something, but what do these people want me to do, keel over and die because I making them uncomfortable?

I found myself looking in the glass window in front of me. Again it was just a knee-jerk reaction that anyone has when people are looking at them. I realized the same lady was in direct view through the glass, although the glass reflection was fuzzy and made the person appear far away.

The next thing I know, I look back at the glass and the lady is looking at me. I didn’t intentionally look to see her, I was just drawn to something and there she was, and she didn’t immediately break the gaze, so I used my eyes to ask her what she wanted.

What came back was the word ‘who,’ As if she was saying something about ‘who we are’ or ‘who we know.’ But I don’t know anybody and could care less about WHO, I’m there eating dinner, I’m not there to glad-hand a public that finds me despicable and would applaud if my house burned down.

So I go back to eating but a moment later I’m compelled to look over at the lady again. I had no intent to look over, but something is going on over there that’s causing me to turn my head.

I am looking at the back of the lady’s head using a pair of subconscious eyes that focus down to tiny spots but won’t let me see whole pictures. Those are the eyes I used to gauge people inside their cars to measure their change in balance and their intent toward me. I don’t know that everybody has those eyes or the ability to use their eyes like that to get information.

When I was on the road, I could read people’s intent from hundreds of yards away inside their darkened cars, and I infallibly used this information to intuit their intention.

I say infallibly as if my intuitions were truly infallible, but I doubt they were. However I stayed alive doing a very risky thing using only that talent for many many years. I knew when the driver was disgusted and would prefer to knock you over. I could read what he was going to do, and know what he was going to try. If the guy was going to pass and then come back in, I knew it. If he was going to pass real close even after being asked to back away, I could see that too.

I could see everything, but mostly what I saw on the road when demanding the full lane was anger. I saw total anger welling up in car drivers because they will not relent or give space to a bicyclist.  Drivers were outraged by my behavior because it attempted to criminalize their behavior while allowing me to skirt the law requiring bikes to cower off to the right.

People saw my actions as ridiculous. They hated me for doing my work and talked with each other in a growing rage about my behavior.

Index of chapters