Banana Seat

Two wheel tales

When I was 9, my dad took the training wheels off my bike, put it in the back of our wood-paneled station wagon, and drove me up the street to the big parking lot at the Hollywood Bowl. Over the course of the next hour, my dad would push me while I tried to stay upright, experimenting with balance and pedaling and screaming. No more training wheels.

Thus ushered in the age of me and two wheels and it’s been mostly a good ride. Yesterday, after a long road trip, I was happy to find out I can still ride a bike.

A few years after the training wheels came off, I was in Aaron Brothers Art Mart with my dad — same street as the Bowl, other direction — and I found $80 under a table. A fortune! That’d be nearly $500 today. My dad made me give it to the cashier in case someone came back looking for it. My prayers were answered — no one did — and I parlayed that find into a brand new 10-speed.

We rode our bikes all over LA, even into the valley. LA is made for cars, but you can bike anything if you’re committed. I rode my bike every day to high school. It was 2 miles downhill, and if you got there late the bike pen was so full you had to chain your bike up to the fence in the corner.

I had the route down, and I would scream through it — no helmet required. A cop stopped me once for speeding and running a stop sign, but he didn’t give me a ticket. Going home up that hill was harder.

The 10-speed went back in the station wagon and up to Berkeley for college. I didn’t get into the dorms, so now it was 3 miles uphill to campus every day. In my first week, a guy opened his door in front of me and I ran into it, flipping over the handlebars and into the street. I was ok. The guy was a football player on the team, he was really sorry and we became friends.

In my first month, I was walking my bike across the crosswalk to campus and someone hit me. I was ok. Finally, I got into the dorms. I locked my bike to the rail of a friend’s apartment balcony (one of those Kryptonite U-locks) and it’s probably still there today.

I moved onto motorcycles. I saved up enough for a little red Yamaha 185cc. That’s a small engine, terrifying at freeway speeds but fun on surface streets. I was riding it down Sunset boulevard on this curvy stretch by UCLA when I went down on an oil spill, sliding down the hill until my bike jammed into the curb wheels first. I was ok. The bike wasn’t, so I started walking it down the street, only to hear a car spin out on the oil behind me, do a 180 and t-bone the bike. I jumped over the bike and turned around to see it squished under the car. Physically I was ok, mentally I was not.

A campus motorcycle cop came by to scold me. While I was trying to explain the oil situation, he went down. Big 1200cc Harley — with his radio antenna stuck up his helmet, and him under the bike, he understood the oil situation. My dad came and got me, we wrangled the 185cc into the back of the station wagon. He gave me an aspirin and dropped me off at my job at Swensen’s.

Later that summer I went to Jamaica with my friend Hugh. We escaped his aunt’s house in Kingston, taking the train down to Montego Bay for a couple of days. Players that we were, we schmoozed with our hotel neighbors over Red Stripes at the bar, and at twilight took off down the coast with them on rented motorcycles. It got dark and I hit a huge rock. The front tire turned into a pretzel. I was ok. So was the girl.

We walked the bike back a mile into town. The next day they showed me the switch to turn the headlight on. My Yamaha’s headlight was on all the time. Surviving the stupidity of youth takes luck. It took me a while to pay that mistake off.

I saved up my ice cream scooping money for a bigger bike — a Yamaha Seca 400cc. That bike was pretty. Black, curvy. I rode it up the PCH; it was good to me for my last couple of years of college. Except for that time I went for a ride to clear my head during finals. It was after a rainstorm and the rear tire spun out in a pile of slick leaves, catching my rear foot in the spokes. I was ok, limping around for 6 months with a bump the size of a golf ball on my ankle.

While the bike was good for dating, it wasn’t so good for marriage, so when our babysitter’s boyfriend offered to fix it and get it out of the garage I said sure. He had it running and sold the next day to buy new tires for his racing bike.

I went without two-wheels for a while until, nursing a herniated disk, I got a hand-me-down from my FIL and I started riding on the weekends. Old red steel number. On one of my first rides, the seat flew off and I very gingerly rode back home with a bar up my butt. I suspected my FIL wanted to kill me, but not that way. I gotta new seat and some flat handlebars and soon I could ride for an hour/10 miles! Then 20, and well, y’know how that goes.

That red bike now lives up in a mountain shed. Around 10 years ago, I splurged and used my $800 Microsoft stay-fit benefit plus a couple hundred out of pocket and bought a flat-bar carbon fiber bike. According to Strava I’ve now done about 400 rides / 10,000 miles on that thing.

I can’t get another bike. See, I can expertly Jenga this one into the trunk of my car with the help of a slab of plastic, that keeps the pedals from catching on the back seat, with about an inch to spare. I have been gifted some new tech for it — bike computer coupled with a shiny red radar taillight that beeps at me when cars are coming, even showing me where, with a Frogger-esque UX.

I run across more and more friends with e-bikes now; very shiny, but I’m ok.

---

These pictures have absolutely nothing to do with this story, other than I found them in the same envelope with the red Schwinn Sting-Ray with the banana seat and the ape hanger handlebars.

The two on the right are from my 10th birthday party, one month after the bike picture. The one on the top left, where I’m impersonating Elvis, is from that Mother’s Day. The one on the bottom left I just love both for my big sister and for my ongoing commitment to that spider shirt.