When I was eight years old I was staying with my dad for the weekend and on the way to his house he stopped at a gas station to fill his tank and get some cigarettes. He went inside and I stayed in the car, on the passenger’s side with the window down. It was late spring or early summer. Some kids a little older then me, who had been riding their bikes together, had stopped at the air compressor to air up their tires. There were five of them, boys and girls. I remember thinking; these kids are cooler than me. I couldn’t ride a two-wheel bike, didn’t even have one. Just a tricycle and a Big Wheel that I was getting too big for. My sister had a two-wheel bike that my mom said I could practice on, but it was a girl’s bike, a chrome and yellow Schwinn, but the chrome was speckled with rust. Besides, even if it hadn’t been a girl’s bike, my sister was nine years older than me and if anyone had seen me on her bike, they would have said it was “buddy,” which meant “out of style.” Even if I’d had a bike, a BMX bike like these kids, I didn’t have any friends to ride with. I would have been afraid that if I’d rode my bike alone in my neighborhood, someone would have taken it from me.
One of the kids was airing up his tire. He was taller than me, skinnier than me, darker than me. I heard a dull pop, like someone stepping on a balloon as opposed to pricking it with a needle. The kid snatched his bike into the air and slammed it back down to the ground in anger. He’d blown an inner tube, “DAMN! Now I gotta walk home!” He was really mad, spitting cursing like a grown-up. His friends just stood there, each with one foot on the ground and one foot on a bike pedal. They were all smiling as if this wasn’t happening to someone they knew or cared about, like it was happening to a character on TV which made it funny. They all stood there until the kid picked his bike up off the ground, then they all kind of shrugged and pedaled off without him.
He just stood there, holding his bike with his head cocked at a forty-five degree angle, like he was waiting for them to come back for him. He seemed certain that at some point they’d all stop and turn around, like a flock of migrating birds changing direction. They’d laugh and yell, “Psych!” Then they’d wait for him to catch up, so they could all walk their bikes home together like a team. He knew that if he looked angry or sad or resigned to going home by himself, when they stopped, the joke would be on him. So he just waited until the kids and their bikes were small in the distance and then he just started walking home alone. He looked like a tough kid, but I think he was crying.
Had I been another kind of child, one of those spunky kids they used to build sit-coms around, I would have asked my dad if we could give him a ride. My dad would have said something very practical about how, in 1982, a grown man, even with his own son in the car, couldn’t just offer a ride to a strange kid. Then I would say something adorable and wise beyond my years and my dad would pull up along side the kid. I would tell the kid to throw his bike in the back seat and hop in. Once I knew where the kid lived, we’d walk to each other’s houses and become best friends. We’d stay close all through high-school and college and he’d be the best man at my wedding. In a rented tux with a glass of champagne in one hand, he stand up at the reception and tell my wife and her parents about how, when I was eight, I convinced my dad to give him a ride home when he caught a flat tire. My wife would lay her head on my shoulder and her parents would nod approvingly. We’d become an urban legend that people would endlessly forward in emails or PowerPoint presentations, only in this version of the story, the kid would have been planning to walk his bike home and commit suicide and the PowerPoint photos, culled from Google Images, would all be of white kids.
Alas, I was not one of those spunky kids that they built sit-coms around. I was a shy, awkward kid who didn’t get speaking parts in school plays. The drama teacher would pull me aside after auditions and tell me that I was a better actor than the kid who got my part, but I just didn’t speak loud enough. So I didn’t say anything. I leaned on the open passenger’s side window of my dad’s Deuce and a Quarter, with my head on my arm, sweat collecting between my cheek and my bicep, and watched the kid walk away alone, like Caine in Kung Fu or David Banner at the end of The Incredible Hulk. That night at dinner, I hardly said a word. I couldn’t stop thinking about that kid with the bike. I wondered how far he lived from the gas station and if he was still walking while I was eating. I didn’t tell my dad about that kid. I wouldn’t have known how. He probably took my silence as some protest of his divorcing my mom.
That kid has got to be pushing forty now. Unlike me, he’s probably been married and divorced and raised kids of his own, but in my mind he’ll always be pushing that bike, getting left further and further behind by the friends who abandoned him, and ambling slowly toward a home he will never quite reach. I don’t know what it means that I still think about that kid almost thirty years later, but it must mean something.
(Initially) Noticing the kid means you’re an observant person. Thinking about his human condition when you were eight, and that you still think about it 30 years later, means you’re a contemplative person. Writing about it 30 years later means that you’re a writer.
–Rae
this is the kind of stuff that makes me glad to call you friend.
It’s the lost opportunities to help one another that stay with us. I think all people with good hearts and souls have a kid with a bike somewhere in our memory. We should be grateful to them and for them, because they make us better people. So strong is the memory of that lost opportunity that you made a vow to get involved. You can dedicate your work for the lost, the hopeless, the disenfranchised, and the least of us to that boy on the bike. You’re not someone “writing checks and mailing them off,” you put yourself out there, you are on the front lines. And in some small way, it may be because when you were eight, you let a crying boy walk home with his bike. – Sis
Thanks, D.