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?

A few months after I finally learned how to ride a bike without training wheels, my bike was stolen. I was so sad that it got stolen I believe I kicked a mailbox and maybe even cursed the sky. Well, losing a bike is one of the perils of living in the big, bad city I guess. Even though I loved that bike, it was gone now and I had to find a way to get another or I would be forced to bum rides on the handlebars of my friends. So I did what every kid in the world does when they want something they know they have no right to have and no means to acquire.

I pestered my mom, day and night, until she caved in.

My new bike was a real beauty. It was cool blue, sleek and damn sexy, but not in a girly-sexy way. In fact, forget what I just said. It wasn’t sexy at all, it was cool. Manly-cool, like Batman Underoos or the Millenium Falcon. Just because it had multicolored streamers hanging from the handlebars and metallic sky-blue paint didn’t mean my bike was for girls. So Daid K., wherever you are, you’re still a poopy-head and my Alchemist Smurf could soooo kick your Smurferman’s ass.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, sorry.

I don’t know if bikes today work the way my bike did, but my bike had no handbrakes. In order to stop, I had to press backward on the pedals which would stop my forward motion and bring my bike to a halt. One fun side effect of such a braking method was the almost immediate discovery that one could ‘Skid Out’. Skidding out, for those who don’t know, meant riding as fast as you could and then hitting the brakes while turning the bike almost on its side and sliding to a halt. The longer the slide before the stop, the better the Skid Out.

I was a Master Skid Out Artist.

One day I was practicing my skidding technique outside on the street when something ‘bad’ happened. Back and forth, up and down the block I would go, tearing up the street and skidding out to my heart’s delight. I was going faster and faster and faster, having bigger and bigger Skid Outs, until suddenly and without warning something went wrong. To this day I don’t know what it was, but as soon as it began I clearly remember thinking to myself, “Oh, this is going to be bad.”

No, really. I did.

You know how the pedals on bikes have little teeth on them to help keep your feet from slipping off? Well, in spite of those teeth, my left foot slipped off and hit the ground in front of the bike. The pedal, blissfully unaware that my foot had fallen from its rightful place, continued on in its revolution and came down on my calf like a hot knife on a stick of room temperature butter. Keep in mind that the pedals have teeth.

Sharp, pointy teeth.

The pedal tore through my pants, ripped apart my sock like tissue paper and bit into my leg like a rabid wolf bringing down a sickly deer. The pain was immediate and blinding. I fell down and did the sucking-of-air-through-teeth thing that everone does when they’re trying really, really hard not to scream/weep in agonizing pain. Had I been going any faster, I’m sure I would have severed my own Achilles tendon, but luckily all I did was rip the back of my leg to shreds.

I’m proud to say that I did not cry.

Somehow, I not only managed to hobble home, but to also drag the bike along with me. After all of the expected hysterics had died down and we had come back from the hospital, I had a moment alone to reflect on my day. It was then, and only then, that I allowed myself to ask the question that’s probably running through your head right now. Would I have a scar? Not just any scar, but a cool scar to show off to all the hotties at school and maybe get some ‘play’? Could this tragic accident somehow lead to an increase in my cool factor and finally get Stacy V. to notice me as more than ‘The Dork With Cooties’? Would she touch my leg in class, or my arm at lunch like she did to James? Would she (gulp) kiss me?

My testicles dropped that night and by morning I had not one, but three pubes.

Sadly, my lusted after tryst with Stacy never happened. My damn body wouldn’t let me off that easy and it healed completely, with no visible scars, probably just to spite me in my vain attempt to become cool and get some sweet-lovin’ from the fly honeys in school. Since I didn’t have anything to show for my pain, I didn’t get any cool points for my accident from anybody, not even my closest friends. The cute girls continued to avoid me like the plague and flock to my brother like bees to honey.

No, I’m not bitter at all.

To this day, if I flex my calf you can feel the lump of scar tissue under the skin that is the only reminder of my last day as a Master Skid Out Artist. A few months after my accident, the Bike of Blue Death was also stolen and I was not at all sad to see it go.

Stupid, stupid bike.

This week is all about bikes and pain.

When I was a young boy I had a fabulous pedal-powered dirt bike. It was a specific type of bike known as a ‘Chopper’ that I don’t believe is made anymore. It had a low-rider type seat and three gears (speeds) to choose from. You chose your gear by shifting a lever that sat directly in front of the seat, between the seat and the handlebars. If you’re a guy, think about that placement for a moment and you might understand why these bikes aren’t made anymore.

Yeah, I know. Ow.

Anywaste, one day my father decided I was too old for training wheels and I should learn how to ride a bike like a real man. Not wanting to disappoint him, I hastily agreed and we removed the wheels, went outside and started to ride. Remember, this was long before such things as safety helmets or elbow pads and we were on the cement sidewalk outside my apartment building next to a very busy street.

I tried to be brave.

After a few minutes of trial and error, my father had the bright idea of holding onto the back of my seat and running alongside me while I got the hang of balancing myself without training wheels. At first we went slow and my dad did most of the balancing for me, but after a few tries I was getting better. My confidence on the rise, I asked my dad if we could go a little faster.

The twinkle in his eye should have been my first warning.

He held onto the back of the bike this time, so he could keep up, or so he said. I started pedaling as fast as I dared and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was really riding a bike without any help. I yelled back to my father, “Look at me go dad!”

From far behind me I heard my father yell, “That’s the way son!”

I laughed out loud and thought how great it was to be riding my bike without training wheels, even if my father was holding onto it so I wouldn’t fall. I was a real man now, I could ride my bike for real! I was so proud of myself. Maybe next time I’d try riding without my father holding on to me. Maybe I…

Wait a second.

Stealing a quick glance backwards, I saw my father standing about 50 feet behind me, smiling like a merciless inquisitor in a medieval torture chamber about to hear a ‘confession’. Looking forwards again, I saw the end of the block coming up fast. Suddenly, I didn’t know what to do. In my head, I knew that I should stop or scream or something, but I just couldn’t seem to remember how.

I also conveniently forgot how to steer.

I was coming fast to the end of the block. On the end of the block, directly in my path, there stood a lamppost. Of course, I was headed straight for the hard, painful looking, steel base of said lamppost. At speed.

Face, meet post. Post, this is face.

I don’t remember much of the actual crash, it was a blur of motion, a glimpse of steel, the sound of a large bell quickly followed by the cracking sound of something soft hitting pavement and finally silence. I remember my fathers footsteps as he ran up to where I was lying, unmoving in the street. He looked down at me and I opened my eyes and looked up at him. I opened my mouth and he leaned down to better hear my words.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“Remind me to kick your ass in twenty years.”

He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the sidewalk next to me and wipe his eyes.