Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 21-22)    a fledgling business is born    

For a short while, I pulled it together and passed out flyers door to door in the wealthy area, with a vague offer of unskilled services to paint and clean-up. I got a few jobs, and began clunkering aimlessly that direction, all the while making an influential client base. I obviously could talk better than I could work.

Nothing prevented compounding native stupidity however. I refused to work more than a couple hours a day, and clumsily tried doing everything without a vehicle … it was a disaster even though I was a pretty fair carpenter by then, having bought my first power saw at 14.

I was a tinkerer as a kid and knew how to cut wood and wire electric circuits before I was out of high school. But I was a rank amateur at working for people and getting their jobs done.  
 
It’s embarrassing to imagine what damage was wrought on those people’s homes. One house the customer bought the cans of paint, but I put the ‘paint’ on as the first coat then overcoated with the ‘primer.’ The same house, I stepped through a soft spot on the roof because I was stoned. I didn’t fuck up on purpose, I was a fool fresh in from the cane field.

Years later I ran into the man whose house I had painted so poorly, and he said he owed me the last payment. I said, ‘you don’t owe me anything, I didn’t do you any favors.’ I knew my work was lousy. It was twenty-three dollars, and maybe I was paying back somebody for the wrongs I hoisted on society, but it was quasi-integrity when you balance it with the sum of my youthful activities.

I built two pieces of furniture for my room. One was a wardrobe with coat-hanging space with two pull-out drawers. The other was an odd shaped set of drawers with some of my artwork glued to the top. I should’ve saved both pieces, but everything carries a memory, and I couldn’t afford the baggage. I was still searching and had to travel light.

The apartment manager discovered the laundry room ‘hot-wire’ that Bones and I installed to avoid paying a dime for the dryer. It was brainless, how much money did we save, forty cents? The manager had accumulated a list of social infractions, but the final straw was a false wall Bones built in his room to hide a hydroponic grow-pond. Nobody could prove my fingerprints were on that project too, but like I said, we were running like wild Indians. The manager put an end to the free rent, and we were told to leave.

In a parting gift, Bones threw a coke bottle through a window pane in my room, obviously making it look like I did it. He owed the manager something, but I thought we got a square deal … we got more than a square deal … even though it left me with nothing and nowhere to live.

Bones brought me the book, ‘How to live on nothing,’ and laughed when he and a friend handed it to me. Our friendship dwindled, and my contact with Dan the Informer increased. I stopped using drugs except marijuana which I continued off and on for three more years.

I got a new apartment with shared kitchen and bath. It was great. Had an upstairs attic where I set up a ‘shop.’

Bones came around wanting to get even with the old apartment manager. He got hell bent on shit. I should’ve told him no, but he would have done something serious against the guy with somebody else’s help. I suspect he would've damaged the guy’s car.
Somehow we decided to throw eggs at the manager’s apartment window, so we ran across the lawn and let loose a barrage. Bones was violent, and it seemed unnecessary. But to think Bones had called me ‘a violent mf’ more than once, makes me think now that it was him more than me.

After the first barrage, Bones wanted to go back for a second, but I said no. I wanted to see. Because I knew that manager was a lot more streetwise than Bones gave him credit. So we crept into the backyard of the house across the street and peered over the bushes. It took a few moments, but sure enough, that manager was sitting invisible on the lawn, right inside the shadow, just where the bright streetlight turned into shadow. It was perfect. I showed Bones, but he was unimpressed. He should have been. Even I didn’t know that trick.

I felt bad about throwing eggs against the manager because I respected him. He had dignity, and was a lot like a person I wanted to be. A few years later, he got killed a 4-5 blocks from the apartment in a car wreck. He always drove too fast down the back street, and somebody pulled out.

Chapter 21a
Hitchhike to New Orleans.
My girlfriend always went home for the summer. I’d been hearing some stories about her after she left. She wasn’t quite the purebread sweetheart she had represented to me. But then I wasn’t open with her about the crap that Bones and I were doing either.
We were like magnets around each other, but neither was a true match for the other, and it was her time in college, and college kids experiment with the world. I never asked. When we were together, it was our time, but the rest was her time. The problem was, she was involving some of my friends, and that’s too close to home. Her friend told me, maybe it was a ‘message.’

That summer she wanted me to come down and visit. I’m not sure why because she already made up her mind about me apparently.
I had no money, but I could hitchhike, so I did.
It was quite a trip, literally because the second day out of Nashville, I dropped some acid. It was the first time, and ill-advised.

My girlfriend broke up with me in September of that year. She had a right to grow; it was her last year of school and I offered nothing. But I was crushed and threw myself into work … not at the usual ‘9 to 5’ like regular folks; instead my work became the bicycle.
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Chapter 22    I became a bicyclist that year 1973 / the informer and I steal ladders

I became a bicyclist that year 1973, not a basketball player or bricklayer. I was an athlete and honed my skills, and could cobble over curbs without hands and swerve in and out of traffic at will. My terror manifested itself on the community and I belonged nowhere. I found a new state of mind.

Pirates live by a code, and I was no exception. My rules took nobody into concern, and I took no prisoners. If I chose to run a stoplight or roil down a sidewalk full of people then that was my choice as a free man.

How is that any different from a coach pushing their athletes to find the extreme because the opposing team doesn’t care?

Yes that’s right. Cars do not care. They rush for yardage, willing to crush anybody to gain an inch at the intersection. Well that’s not exactly true, but true enough when you’re on a bicycle.

I introduced bike-riding to Dan the Informer. And also to my younger brother. Both men came to see bike-riding as a requisite in their lives because neither had a car. My younger brother became an expert cyclist and the physical motion helped his arthritic back, and it added a proud accomplishment to his life that he still enjoys today.

My relationship with Dan was complicated. He was a local boy who had fallen behind the herd and had no job and developed a theory about life: ‘the best way for seeds to grow is to cast them at arm’s length on un-toiled soil.’ I guess that meant he didn’t want to work, but we stole two aluminum ladders and went into the painting business together.

The informer and I stole two aluminum ladders! Why did that go unreported?  Did Dan want a job? Did he violate impeccable ethics for selfish gain? But then again, ethics are just a measure of rash desperation aren’t they? There is no right or wrong. All actions cause change, and that’s all there is.

Does Dr. Gray think he would not steal my loaf of bread to feed his starving children? Of course he would, and ultimately what difference do those tiny accounts make? Life can be chiseled down to a simple formula: all men cause change, and all change to become men. And that’s all there is; everything is ‘change.’ Just like inside Wayne’s cave where every man made his mark over all those that preceded him; man must mark his change.

In Wayne’s cave, there is no memory of which man was honest and which stole a hamburger. All that remains is the mark, and mankind innately understands this, otherwise why do people make a mark to begin with. Why else build a pyramid?
 
The only immortality available to man is the change you cause by scratching into the cave ceiling with your torn fingers before you drown in the black water, and even that is eventually lost to time.

So did it matter that Dan the Informer stole two ladders with me? Or did one unlawful change in property ownership allow a positive change when we used those ladders to find useful work in society? I’ve always said, there’s no sense shooting two Christians to save one … although I don’t know what that means.

I had occasional work from the Bank’s trust department and bought a ’55 Chevy pick-up truck for $200. I went gliding about town showing off my new rust. But that old truck couldn’t go faster than 35 mph.

I moved into a house on Washington Street that shared common areas and I made a zoo of new friends.

Somehow our Washington Street group started an evening volleyball game that attracted young people from all around the area. I had the final say on the teams because I made them equal. I could divide up sides and make them equal, and people accepted that about me. They looked to me to do that at the beginning of each game.

Down deep inside, people just want equality and fairness. That’s what people really want.

Inequality is the cause of every fight, and I was about find one.

Trouble was coming, and that trouble would be the first seed in a long fight for bicycle equality on the road.

Chapter 23    James and a full-blown felony from a bike infraction
Index of chapters