Bicycle

I bought a bike. I got it on Craigslist about three weeks ago. I figured that I could conserve on gas and get a little exercise by riding to work each day. But as with all my best-intention-purchases (yeah, I'm looking at you rollarblades), things did not work out the way I envisioned.

I had been monitoring Criagslist looking for the perfect hybrid bicycle, 18-inches in height, girl's frame, at a good price, and I found one. I excitedly emailed the owner and negotiated the price down. I said, "I'll give you cash and pick it up tonight, if you you'll take $X for it." And she wrote back, "Done. Get here by 7PM and it's yours. My address is XX, Los Feliz. My number is XX in case you're running late." Now, Los Feliz is close to where I used to live, but not close to where I live now. (This figures into the story. Hang with me here.) I wrote back and said, "See you at 7." I actually got there around 6:30 and drove around the neighborhood then parked in front of someone else's house and probably freaked them out by sitting there for 25 minutes while reading a Publisher's Weekly. Now I know some of you are thinking, "Why didn't you just call her number to see if she was in?", but I always figure that if you agree upon a time then that time was convenient for the other person and just because you're schedule has changed does not mean that the other person should have to accommodate you. What can I say? I'm the last of a breed. Anyway, promptly at 7, I rang her phone (I couldn't figure out which doorbell was her's), and she brought the bike out. It's a blue Schwinn, female frame, with a basket. It was the basket that was the selling point. (Shut up.) I gave her the cash, she gave me the owner's manual, and the bike was mine! HAHA! I wheeled the bike over to my car and...couldn't get it into the back seat. So, I popped the trunk. Didn't fit there either. I climbed into the backseat and folded it down (thanks, VW!). It fit. Kinda. Well, not really. You see the basket and the front wheel were in the way of closing the trunk.

I owned a mountain bike back in Manchester. I paid $450 for a beautiful red number made by Trek. I loved that thing and rode it to the PD softball games. When I moved to New York, I left it in the possession of my roommate-at-the-time Audra and thought that someday, I might ask for it back. But then I moved from NYC, to Queens, to Hoboken, back to Bristol, then out to Oceanside, and here I am in L.A. And Audra moved from Manchester to Oyster Bay, Long Island to two different cities in Maryland. Where the bike is now, I haven't the foggiest. What I remember about that Trek, though, was that there was a quick release on the front wheel. You just popped the little thingy on the wheel, and -- did something else, I can't remember -- and the wheel would just drop off. Easy-peasy! And I noticed on this bike that there was also the quick release levers on the tires. So, I popped the little thingy, and...crap. The brake. That was the other thing. I got back into the car, grabbed the owner's manual and looked for the section on releasing the front brake.

Owner's manuals can be divine moments of intervention. For instance, a friend of mine just spent $330 on trying to figure out what was wrong with her brand new washer only for her husband to pull out the owner's manual and realize that their washer still had shipping attachments on it. Once the extraneous bits where removed, no more problems. (Ah, humans. We're cute when we're dumb.) But sometimes, the manufacturer is -- hmm. shall we say -- lazy. You get one manual that's supposed to work for six products. And the thing that really irritates the hell out of me these days is each paragraph is broken down four times: the first paragraph is in English then the same information underneath it is printed in Spanish then another paragraph under that one is in French then another one after that one is in German. I appreciate that we're trying to conserve on the trees. And I even appreciate that we're accommodating every non-English-speaker here and abroad so that they can use the product efficiently. I, however (and maybe I'm the only one), feel like I'm wading through a pool of letters trying to decipher exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. And like an illiterate, I just start looking at the pictures for guidance. Fig.1 shows a wheel. No, I don't need the wheel. I figured that out on my own. Fig. 2A shows the brake. AH-HA! Yes, the brake! But this brake doesn't look like my brake. Neither does Fig. 2B nor Fig. 2C. Which means, I must have Fig. 2D. According to the instructions, I need to release the brake from the tire by disengaging the thingy. I look for the thingy. I don't have a thingy. According the Fig. 2D, I should have a thingy. I read on a little further, and it says, that bicycle retailer should have shown me how to remove the front tire when I bought the bike. Which the retailer had done when I bought the Trek ten years ago, but according to the girl who just sold me the Schwinn, they didn't show her. (I know because, yes, I asked.) Which meant, I was screwed and needed to go to Plan B.

My car is a hand-me-down. It came to me through my parents which came to them through my sister, Kate. Kate lives -- metaphorically -- in her car. Kate is the type of girl who if you asked her to come pick you up in Canada she would. The car came to me with CDs, a Susan G. Koman lei, a tampon, a couple of hair ties, an expensive "easy-to-use jack," and a couple of golf balls in case I wanted to putt a few while waiting for AAA to come and get my useless ass. And twine. Plan B was to tie the trunk of the car down over the bike. Easy-peasy, right? Wrong. Seriously, I'm useless. I couldn't figure out how to do it and I doubt AAA would send someone for a bike emergency. I have seen the tie-down process done before. I've got a dad. You usually thread the twine through the trunk lock and it's hasp, pull down and tie. However, trunks are manufactured now to be entered with a keyless remote and easily opened from the inside in case you've been put into the trunk to be transported to the place where you'll be murdered and buried. This easy-to-release feature is great. Except when you just want to figure out how to tie your trunk down just to get a damn bike eight miles down the freeway. No matter how I tried to tie it, the twine kept slipping through and slipping off, and it just wasn't working. As you can probably guess, I had been in front of this chick's house for about a half hour, and I was on the verge of tears.

Plan C would have been to call a couple of friends of mine who live in Los Feliz. However, it was Friday night and I knew that the wife was at the Daytime Emmys. Which meant I would have to prevail on her hubby's good graces. Hubby is a lovely man and probably wouldn't have minded coming over and trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong. But Plan C was my absolute last resort because, goddammit, I'm an independent woman and I can DO THIS! ROAR!....And I haven't worked out that "asking help from others isn't weakness" issue in therapy yet. So, I went back to Plan A. I shifted around the bike a little more. Pulling it further into the car, trying to turn the handle-bars so that they faced backward. And somehow, through all this jerking and jimmying, the brake released by itself. HUZZAH! The tire came off, the handle bars spun around, and I was able to get the trunk closed. Yey, ME!

You think the story is over, don't you?

I happily drive over the freeway, pleased with my purchase, and smugly satisfied that I did it all by myself. (One should never be smugly satisfied. Its just asking for trouble.) I arrived home, pulled the bike and it's tire out of the car, replaced the backseat, and hunkered down to replace the tire. I flipped the bike over, dropped the tire in, and...umm. Remember the selling point? The basket? Yeah. The girl had said that the bike shop had put the basket on. Baskets on adult bikes are not like the plastic Easter baskets that get put onto the front of a little girl's bike. You know, the type with a couple of snap clasps over the handlebars? No. While there are some clasps over the handlebars, there is also two long strips of metal that attach to the front tire. I thought they attached to the outside. They don't. They attach on the inside. Which means, the tire doesn't just drop in. You have to wrench it in. By this point, I was so tired and frustrated that I didn't have the physical strength to even attempt wrenching. So, I dropped the tire in without the basket attached, wheeled it into the gate, and left it until the morning.

Saturday morning, I awoke feeling refreshed and able. I was going to ride my new bike if it killed me. I clambered down the stairs and within twenty minutes, I had the wheel and the basket attached. Because I am woman! ROAR! And then, the brake. If the manual was no help in dislodging the brake, it was even less of a help in reattaching it. Just by looking at it and comparing it to the back brake, it looked like the plastic C-shaped piece clamped onto the metal O-shaped cylinder. I tried using my brute strength but to no avail. (It hurt my soft, pink girly fingertips.) I thought, "I need leverage." A flat piece of wood, maybe. I scrounged the backyard. Nothing. "Pliars!" I thought, and I ran upstairs to grab my pink tool box. (Shut up.) I grabbed the needlenose pliars out of the box and tried to snap it on. However, I started to have bad visions in my head. Visions of me breaking the plastic C-shaped piece. Visions of me compromising the metal O-shaped cylinder. So I stopped. I packed up my pink toolbox and put the bike away.

Currently, our internet is down at home. Which means, I have to come to work if I want to get directions to the Staples Center, or if I want to work on the manuscript that is due in a couple of days, or if I want to Google the nearest bike shop. I wanted the bike shop to be close enough that I could ride the bike there (afterall, I still had the back brake) and be able to walk home. I mean, it wouldn't do to have to put the bike back in the car because that was the exact activity that got me into this position in the first place. The Bike Factory is on Woodman and Burbank, approximately six Los Angeles blocks from where I live (Los Angeles blocks are...big). But doable. So, the next Saturday, I got up and wheeled my bike out onto the driveway, mentally prepared to pay whatever it cost to fix the brake. I mean, sure, it kinda sucked that I talked the girl down only to have broken the bike within an hour of owning it, but these are the kinds of obstacles that consistantly pop up in my life. (Seriously, I've got a catalogue of stories like these. I'm pretty used to the monetary consequences of my actions.) I grabbed my wallet, I put it into my appropriately attached basket, and rode down to the Bike Factory.

The Bike Factory is a grubby little place that is obviously for "serious" bikers. People like me must irritate the Eastern European guy behind the counter. But, hey, people like me, keep guys like him in business because when something minor goes wrong on our bikes, we're bound to screw it up so badly that we're willing to pay a couple hundred dollars just to fix it. I wait patiently for the my turn at the counter and then show him the problem. The guy leans down over the tire and looks carefully. He grunts. He unscrews this little piece up on the handlebars, leans back over the wheel and clamps the plastic C-shaped piece onto the metal O-shaped cylinder, then rescrews the little piece on the handlebars. He tries the brake and it works. He doesn't even look at me. I say, "That's it." He says, "Yes." I say, "Umm, do I owe you something?" He says, "No." I say, "OK. Thanks." I wheeled my bike out of there and rode back home using both brakes, abashedly feeling less like a woman and more like a girl who needed a man to fix it and make it all better for her.

So, here it is three weeks later, and I've finally ridden my bike to the office which is exactly what I bought it for. I rode it here today -- on a Sunday -- to write this blog because it's only 90-degrees. And for the rest of the week its supposed to be over 100-degrees here in the Valley and if you think I'm going to ride my bike in that kind of heat, you're crazy. Despite the fact that gas remains expensive, I remain pudgy, and my bike is fixed, my best intention purchase is going to have to be put off for a little while longer because my vision of me biking to work did not include arriving at my destination drenched in sweat and smelling of B.O. like I do right now.