The Last Bike Story

One day, when I was in my early teens, my brother was gifted with a brand new skateboard. I was on my third or fourth bike by this time and if my memory serves it was a Huffy. My brother, Mr. Hentai and I went out to the street to try out the new skateboard by doing as many dangerous, wacky and idiotic things 13 year old boys are want to do when given a new toy and no adult supervision. I brought my bike just so I would have something to do when it wasn’t my turn to attempt breaking my tailbone on the skateboard.

We were like the Three Musketeers, only crazier.

Oh, just in case you didn’t already guess, none of us knew how to ride a skateboard so we were doing far more falling down than standing up. Add to this that we were doing our skateboarding experimentation in the middle of a fairly busy one-way street and perhaps you’ll begin to understand the danger we were needlessly and unknowingly putting ourselves into. Also, keep in mind that we had no safety equipment whatsoever, since at that time no one even knew what safety equipment was. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because no self respecting 13 year old boy in my neighborhood would have dared wear that safety stuff because they wouldn’t want to be seen as a ‘sissy’ by the neighborhood bully.

Oh look, widdle, baby GeekMan’s wearing a helmut. Did your momma wipe your ass for you this morning, too? Oooooo. You gonna cry now? Are you gonna run home to mamma and cry? That’s right! Run, sissy-girl. RUN!

Anywaste, luckily for us very few cars came down our street that day, so we didn’t need to worry about becoming road kill. In fact, I don’t remember any cars passing us while we were rambunctiously flinging ourselves down the street on a thin piece of wood supported by four casters and no breaking mechanism other than hitting one of the cars parked along the street and praying we didn’t set off one of those newfangled car alarms. We only set car alarms off late at night when we could fully enjoy watching a fat, angry man come outside in his pj’s, cursing a blue streak, start his car, turn off the alarm and go back to his apartment swearing to catch the ‘fracking kids’ in the morning.

We’d wait 15 minutes and then set it off again. FUN!

Back to our story, at some point Mr. Hentai got the bright idea of combining the speed of my bike with the thrill of riding a skateboard. He decided to try riding the skateboard while hanging onto the back of my bike and I would then peddle as fast as I could and, should he maintain his grip, speedy thrills would ensue. This sounded like a fabulous idea to all of us and without further discussion, we set about making the unreal, real. Mr. Hentai stood on the skateboard, grabbed the back of my bike seat and I took off.

We laughed at the thrill of it all.

Mr. Hentai, unsatisfied with merely hanging on to my bike, began to slalom on the board. That is, he began a vigorous left-to-right-to-left motion on the skateboard behind me which had the unintentional effect of making my bike fishtail. One moment, we’re setting a two-man, bike/skateboard land speed record and the next I’m out of control and headed towards one of the parked cars. At full speed.

If you are male, stop reading now.

If you are still reading this, let me describe exactly what happened during this crash so that you’ll fully understand how painful this was for me. My front tire hit the car on the front passenger-side door, which promptly ejected me from my bike seat face-first into the car window. I remember this vividly, because the rest of the crash unfolded for me in the passengers mirror with the words ‘objects in mirror may appear closer than they are’ emblazoned along the bottom of my sight like the TV captions on Saturday Afternoon Kung-Fu Movies. My forehead smacked the window with such force that my eyes nearly flew from their sockets as if I was one of those dolls whose eyes pop out when squeezed.

Inanimate Objects – 1

GeekMan – 0

Having hit the car, my body began to fall backwards towards the ground but something interfered with the normal gravitational pull of the earth on my body, my bike. You see, my bike’s momentum had made it flip forward, but as I have already mentioned, due to my body having met the door of a car the bike had nowhere to go but directly into my scrotum. The bike seat attempted to invade my groin as if it were reenacting Germany’s invasion of France during WWII in the span of 1/1000 of a second.

Hard and fast, like a jackhammer on soft clay. It makes me wince just thinking about it now.

Of course, having expelled all of its energies and momentum into the soft flesh of my gonads, the bike promptly fell back to the ground. My body was of course forced forward again by this cowardly attack on my manhood, and my face once again met the window of the car.

Inanimate Objects – 3

GeekMan – 0

My body, now sending flashes of blinding pain to my brain as if to say, “Attention. You may want to avoid doing this in the future.” Began to fall back to the ground. Of course, rubber wheels on bikes make them slightly ‘bouncy’ so as I was falling down, the bike was once again coming up. My gonads and bike seat met in what would have been a lovers embrace had the situation not been so painfully non-embracing. I swear to you, I actually thought every single sperm in my body screamed in terror as they saw the bike seat heading towards them again.

It was like my ‘nads were Tokyo and the bike seat was Godzilla.

Well, to make this narration a little shorter, and to avoid reliving this as it is beginning to cause me actual physical pain, allow me to give you the final score.

Inanimate Objects – 9

GeekMan – 0

My brother and Mr. Hentai laughed like hyenas as I walked, splay-legged, into the building. Managing to maneuver the four short steps to the elevator without falling down was the bravest thing I’d ever done in my life. When I got upstairs my mother asked if I was alright and somehow, I don’t know how exactly, I managed to say I was fine and just needed to use the bathroom. When I got in the bathroom, I removed my pants as carefully as I could and that’s when I saw the blood.

I remember thinking, “Oh. Blood. That’s not a good sign.”

I was still receiving waves of rolling pains that began in my groin and expanded outwards to my brain, so I just sat there for a while and cleaned off the blood with toilet tissue. After sitting in the bathroom for 10 minutes or so, the pain was almost bearable and the bleeding had stopped completely. Using the bathroom mirror, I didn’t even see a cut, so I figured I would be fine as long as I took it easy for a few days. I never mentioned this accident to my mother because I wouldn’t have been able to show her my ‘boo-boo’ and if we had gone to the hospital I would have died of shame and embarrassment.

On the spot. Dead, just like that.

After this event, I decided that riding bikes was not really for me. I took it as a sign from above that my future did not involve any two wheeled mode of transportation in any way and I decided walking would do fine until I was old enough to have a car. I’ve ridden on bikes only 5 times since then and let me tell you, my groin and I are on very good speaking terms. Very good speaking terms, indeed.

Now, you tell me. Should someone like me be allowed to buy one of those Segway thingies?