Born to Destroy
by Bill Ketzer

I grew up in the pillowed suburbs of affluence, or at least that's how it feels in retrospect. Back then it felt about as 'pillowed' as a valium-free endoscopy, hoofing my spray-painted banana seat bomber down to the ball field at Cook's Park, or to the playground at the schoolyard to take a few dirt jumps with my contemporaries. My steed, or rather my stubborn mule, was hi-gloss, fire engine red, with the fenders (yes, I said fenders) painted black as driveway sealer. It may have actually been driveway sealer, for all I know -- my old man was not, as they say, the handy sort.

The kids in my neighborhood, smirking contemptuously and pumping their condescending little hineys to the pedal, table-topping off the berms, spewing grit and madness into my face, confirmed my impending insignificance with alacrity. Punks! Perching and conducting daily acts of terrorism upon Diamond Backs, Redlines and PK Rippers, all mag-wheeled and crash-padded, wilting my desire beneath such an obviously un-airworthy rig. So, I played the only card I had, usually a bag of weed or a bottle of some grotesque schnapps pilfered from the dank recesses of my parent's liquor cabinet to ease myself into their marginal, albeit reluctant, acceptance. Thinking back, their disdain may have been imaginary, or at least unecessesarily magnified, a fear-borne pathogen of an addled youth, but considering the refined, almost paranoid intelligence of we bike folk, well, you know....

There is a theory out there in the filthy daily regime considered, amongst other things, 'over-compensatory syndrome,' and while it certainly could be debated ad nauseum in brisk legislative chambers as to what other variables kick a kid in the ass of youth, it seems common that one who is deprived of certain things at an early age is sometimes doomed to initiate a lifelong endeavor to accumulate such items pathologically and dangerously if or when they acquire the financial or sociological means for such. As usual, I have neither researched the matter in depth nor consulted the DSM-IV, but instead use as proof the fact that I now own more bicycles than Fausto Coppi, Lance Armstrong and the entire editorial staff of every cycling magazine in the nation put together. No kidding.

There's a sad story behind this. My mother, god bless her, was as tight as a drum and twice as loud. To this day, ol' George Washington squints when he comes out of her pocketbook, and there's an even sadder story there. My father, upon meeting my mother in 1958, had five children from a previous marriage, which he conveniently forgot to mention until after their marriage in 1963. Talk about selective memory. He made good money as a power company man, but I rarely saw any of it, insomuch as frills and fringe benefits. I never went hungry, not in the physical sense. But I wore hand-me-downs and Tuffskins from Sears, and after I graduated from a used Big Wheel about the same time the original Alice Cooper Group released Billion Dollar Babies, I inherited the aforementioned red and black bomber from one Lyndon Jones, a disheveled but talented school board president's son that lived next door. His mom was a recluse, so it was very easy to keep up with the Joneses because they never went anywhere, and hadn't purchased a new vehicle since the end of the Korean War. They were even more mechanically inept than my father, who despite his squinty expressions of determination masquerading for know-how figured out how to tighten up the headset and throw some 3-in-1 oil on the chain, the smoke from a Marlboro streaming into his eye the whole time.

When not-so-obvious things happened to the bike, however, I was on my own. When I lost a pedal, I learned how to pedal with my foot curled inward, eventually wearing a hole in my K-Mart sneaker. I considered the nook a benefit -- it fit the crank arm snuggly. This of course felt logical and apt until I attempted a jump or a wheelie to the amusement of my brethren. I went home much dirtier than most, a trait that would follow me down all the years, as some have been quick to point out. Soon, I would stop humiliating myself at the stomping grounds altogether and deem the schnapps my true vocational calling, until the bikes returned into my life in the form of a stolen Peugeot I got for 75 bucks and a dime bag, but that's another story.

Suffice to say, the shit gets buried deep, and it's easy to forget where you left it. Gotta be like one of those esteemed hounds that can sniff out the Black Diamond truffle amongst the acorns and pull-tabs, those drunk-finding artifacts abandoned by the industry under heavy environmental lobbying and occasional gunfire. One tends to forget all the jungle-gym posturing, the fist fights, the ramps made with construction refuse and supported, to the sheer horror of adult bystanders, by a rotten tree stump or perhaps several 2 x 4s tied together with an old T-shirt. You file these memories to dedicate your energies, I suppose, to more mature events, like marriage, wanderlust, engineering or federal prison, depending upon where your skills lie.

I still question my skills, or at least my priorities. For example, last Thursday, I woke to what was surely heavy artillery fire, but it was merely the unnerving din of several jackhammers decimating every single sidewalk within ten city blocks of our house: MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA- MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA-MANA and that's no exaggeration. What can you do? I took a shower, downed six cups of coffee and left for work, and did the same the next day, my brain addled with the residue of crumbling concrete.

On Saturday, however, I woke to cries of unmitigated joy and pure gratitude. "We have been liberated!" I cried.

"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it," my roommate said in a stricken, authoritative tone.

I threw a wrench at him, which flew clean out the open back window and into our landlord's pool -- kerplunk! In Rwanda, a small peasant boy tells his father he is tired of harvesting sorghum and that he would like a bicycle for Kwanzaa. At Mount Snow, Leigh Donovan carves her way through her first trial run of the day on the downhill course that put over a dozen people in the hospital last year.

A solitary crow cries in the distance.

Synchronicity.

"No way that just happened."

"Dude, that was my new Pedro's wrench."

After years of sobriety, I still catch exorbitant trails off of brightly-colored objects.

Dano stuck his head out the window and I followed suit. To our surprise, not a single child in this fertile valley, stuffed with life and leaves, did present a countenance of anguish and ambulatory misery wrought forth from the sheer end-over-end, like-a-lead-pipe-traveling-at-terminal-velocity force of a 15mm pedal wrench betwixt the eyes. This was a good deal, because our landlords had the only swimming pool within a five-mile radius, and you know what that means. Normally, children literally dropped from the skies as if from handgliders into that patch of yard, trouncing the weaker members of their species in murderous games of dodge ball or a new torture-penalty enhanced version of Marco Polo.

This day however, the accolades and emissions of wondrous joy, normally reserved for when someone threw a cat into the pool, came not from the backyard, but from the middle of the empty street, barricaded and sequestered like a scene of a gruesome crime. Like children ourselves, we scrambled to the windows on the west side of the house to make sure that they weren't teeing golf balls off the dead body of an old Italian guy. They do that sort of thing around here.

"By the gods!" Dan exclaimed.

"Sweet Blessed Abnegator!" I cried, for there, in the middle of Buchanan Street, don't you know, was the most tremendous pile of gravel I had seen this side of the one in the bedroom I rented from a cranky Christian woman while trying to finish high school! It was as if God himself had descended from the heavens and packed the berm by hand, at the most appropriate angle for big honkin' air, for a sweet tailwhip, for a punctured lung! And from that fresh mound young, unwashed turks of every color and poverty level pounced and flew like lemurs, unhampered by the inconvenience of traffic, bemused and beatific in their scraggly shirts, screaming and throwing elbows. Best of all, they all own crappy, horribly-wrenched department store-bikes, worse in some ways than the ones I had as a kid, the only difference being they could give two shits about that fact. They suffered none of the raised-ranch afflictions I bore as a 12-year old, insignificant on my 50-pound Sherman-Tank-on-Two-Wheels. Why, all the better to thrash it up, to smack it down into a pile of smoking, poorly-welded refuse, to punish, and they did so with a determination that was unrelated to the arrogance of my childhood friends.

We watched from the window as they crashed every which-way and spiked their shins with bear-trap pedal cages.

"God bless Phase 3-12 of Albany's Community Reinvestment Program," I said putting some coffee on.

"Yes, our fine mayor, he's OK in my book," said Dan the Man.

I went outside to survey the damage in my boxers and little else, still stupid from sleep and slouching like the homeless (I used to be homeless so I can make fun of them). The street looked like downtown Baghdad in '91 after a particularly vigorous carpet-bomb sortie. The sidewalks were simply gone, roped off with yellow tape. Large trenches hollowed out each corner of every intersection. City trucks were parked haphazardly, apparently at random and dusty, abandoned for the day by their cursing, pot-bellied, heavily-bearded drivers. (And how's that for a stereotype?)

Adamant residents, pissed at the inconvenience of an endeavor of this magnitude, parked upon laws, in front of fire hydrants, hiked up on the exposed trunks of enormous maples. Down the street, you could smell bacon and fortitude wafting from the basement kitchen of the Baptist church on the corner of North Allen. Its congregation sang in great choruses, rocking loudly with anthem after anthem, with hands held toward the pale blue morning sky, knowing and understanding the necessity for triage, the frail wit of those who govern, the cynic laughing in the debt of the slipstream.

And then I heard Dano shout, "Yo brother, your pager is vibrating off the table up here!"

That damn thing. I should have thrown that in the pool, instead.

I ran back upstairs, not to see who called but to choose a weapon from the rack. The rack can only hold five bikes now, Dano and I having retrofitted the beast to better suit the cramped spaces of our latest living quarters. From the middle hook, I grabbed the Haro Supra, a 20-incher made especially for abusive, conscience-be-damned dirt jumping if there ever were one. It's the only bike I left completely stock, no upgrades, just borne to destroy, uh-huh. As I gave the tires a little air, Dan shook his head in my peripheral vision and went back to bed. He'll be the first one to tell you he's a pro at that maneuver.

Me, I put my Vans on and went back out there. In my boxers.

"Bill!!" they cried. "Look! Look at the jump!"

There was Brendan and Danny, two little Irish brothers, our landlord's kids. There was Alex, the kid across the street whose parents were borne of clear white trash and had a dog that I had wished death on once, planning its demise with baker's chocolate, but it escaped and was killed by a Toyota Camry one winters eve. There was the Proverbial Red-Headed Step Child, some kid named Devon and Geraldine, a tough little Puerto Rican girl who can skip rope like nobody’s business and is, truth be told, the toughest kid out of the lot of them.

I looked at the jump, again.

"Let me get in there, suckers!" I yelled, but inside I was like Mel Gibson before the one man ambush in The Patriot: "Lord, make me fast and accurate."

They all watched excitedly (for mine was a rare appearance) as I hoofed towards the mound and flew off carelessly, almost stacking up on the way down.

"Whhoooooooaaaaa!!" they said.

If it hasn't already been determined, the reader should know that, due to such ridiculous circumstances in youth, I'm a downright frightening BMXer. In fact, I'm bloody horrible. I learned the mountain and the road through years of abuse, climbing and coughing as I followed friends who knew much more than I how to blast a switchback, how to clean a fallen tree, how to draft another rider, so many things. Not so with the Haro. I bought it to cruise around town, to sip coffee and ogle the sociology, and while I would love to pack heads with images of young children gaping ghost-faced at my adroit, unencumbered style and ease, it is simply not so, as evidenced by my next run.

"Do it again!" shouted little Brendan. "Do it again!"

Brendan's' hero is Matt Hoffman. He and his brother Dan maniacally collect those little finger bikes that are just as collectible as Magic Cards nowadays. I adjusted the headset on his little green Huffy almost every day last year when I was jobless and still in college, and here he was upon it still, after it spent a very soaking wet summer outside in the yard. The chain was sepia and strangling the teeth of the poor crank, like a dusty fossil. The knobbies were bald and smiling with patches of dry rot. He and Alex were the only two who wear helmets, the former being an immense green dome three times the size of his noggin, with eyes. He is a sweet kid.

But do not be fooled.

My second jump was less successful, to say the least, ending with a splendid crash after my foot slipped off my pedals. Forgot I wasn't clipped in. See the danger?

"Hahahahahahahah!" the little boy wept, falling over on the ground he was laughing so hard. His head nodded and got down on all fours like an elderly midget having an angina attack. "Oh man, oh man, I wanna try that, hahahaha!"

They all made good sport of me for a bit as I rose, bleeding from the elbows and knees. Did I mention I was in my underwear? I got back on the thing and smiled.

One by one, they hit the jump, hysterical, crashing. They wore the expressions one sees on an adult experiencing a vibrating bed for the first time. Geraldine, on a very over-sized yellow Giant hybrid with pink tassels (I know, I know) performed like a champion, sticking her foot in the fork to perform a wicked nose-wheelie.

"Oooooooooooh."

I looked at their bikes and remembered how I felt at 12. Every one of these pint-sized mongers had bikes cheaper and less hardy than mine. Brakes were ripped clean off bosses, wrong size seatposts ensured consistent standing, those that were geared clacked incessantly and threw chains like they were supposed to. Maybe that's how they thought it was supposed to be -- the bike will try to beat you. Don't let it. Do what ever you can to stay on it. If someone tries to take you out, punch them in the nose.

Upstairs the phone was ringing, but I was busy organizing a trials course, the crack of my butt no doubt visible and steaming as I labored, piling refuse here and there on the scooped-out fairway that used to be a sidewalk. My landlord, a truck driver named Bob, came to the door, likely to protest for the safety of his kin, but he went back inside to the television. He's smarter than I am.

I lined them up, one by one, to bash through chunks of concrete, over exposed roots and into tricky mounds of sand. I even put a large piece of particle board on the hood of my car so we could bounce off onto the steps of our shared porch. I was having the goddamn time of my life. I was filthier than a French peasant. It only took 15 minutes for the pain of falling down repeatedly to become just another fascinating experience. And over the bars we went, clamoring, sweaty in the morning chill.

After another call from upstairs I left my bike with little Brendan and went back up to find out the phone calls were from my girlfriend. I had forgotten I was supposed to meet her for breakfast and hit some thrift stores. This is what happens. First a year of relentless sexual experimentation, then the thrift stores. I was in the damn doghouse now. The return call wrought forth a litany of expletives that would have shamed even the most sea-hardened sailor. What could I do? I went and got her. We did breakfast and then I bought her some shoes. Big deal. That's all most women really want, but men refuse to accept it. Shoes. Shoes and a steadfast maintenance schedule, however shoddily they stick to theirs. Keep them in Nine Wests and Steve Maddens and call 'em on the regular -- they're happy. Take them to breakfast. Say something nice. Indeed, we have been liberated.

Now where the hell is that pedal wrench?

© Bill Ketzer