BIKE (part 2)

Last week I described how when I was a kid in Queens New York my brand new orange Schwinn Varsity 10-speed bicycle, was stolen from me at knifepoint. In shock I watched a stranger ride off on my week old bike as I stood there holding the lock and chain that the robbers let me have after I requested that I could at least keep the stuff I paid for myself.

After the thugs disappeared I walked around the park till I found someone that could direct me to a police officer. My experience with the police was less like an action TV cop show and more like a slow paced episode of Dragnet. There were no Starsky and Hutch chase scenes in a groovy 1970’s pseudo-sports car racing down the merry-go-round steps in order to cut in front of the street thugs and run them off the road without putting a scratch on my bike. Instead I sat and gave the police descriptions of the guys that stole my bike as we slowly drove around the main park roads in their squad car looking for the robbers. After a short while the cops must have assumed the thieves were long gone and the search quickly ended.

I slowly walked home clutching my lock and chain. When I got there I told my brother Neil, the only person home at the time, what happened and he insisted we go back to the park to search of my bike. We wandered around for a couple of hours looking for the guys but I am not sure what we would have done if we actually found them. Neil was not armed nor was he particularly athletic or intimidating. In lieu of doing anything useful but feeling that he had to have us do something, Neil had us two geeks wander aimlessly around the park on the hopeless quest of somehow getting my bike back.

My Dad was great. Even though money was a bit tight, the next day he took me back to the Schwinn Store and he purchased me an identical Varsity including the leatherette pouch with the two metal snaps to keep my chain and lock in. Again, deep down I wished I were getting the slightly bigger and fancier red Continental that I originally eyed at the store but at this point I was just overjoyed to have anything.

Even though I ended up soon outgrowing it, I happily kept that bike for close to 20 years. When I moved to Florida, the bicycle moved from my family’s New York garage to our new condo’s small porch. The Miami sun was not kind to it; the orange faded badly and the tires started melting creating a bumpy leopard-skin pattern. The bike later followed me to college and then to the next five places I lived getting plenty of use along the way.

Years later I started making decent money and began to entertain thoughts of getting a new bicycle. I was hanging out in Brooklyn New York with my friends Maddie and Lori. Lori worked with a bunch of Russian immigrants at a stained glass restoration company and one of these guys casually mentioned that he had a couple of unique bicycles to sell. He said that before his new roommate defected he kept requisitioning bikes from the government. When he had 12 of them he fled the Soviet Union selling the bikes one at a time along the way to pay for his trip to the U.S.

One evening we drove to the apartment the Russian guy shared with three other immigrants in Queens to look at the last two bicycles he had left. They seemed in mint shape and since we both kind of needed new bikes, we thought it would be great to have these totally different, funky bikes with Russian names plastered on the side of them. The guy told us some sad story and made us a pretty good deal of $250 for both bikes. We agreed and crammed them into our little Toyota and drove back to Brooklyn.

The next day Lori and I started to realize that maybe we had been taken advantage of. The Soviet Union was not known for its quality workmanship and these bikes were no exception. I was loosening the bolt to raise the seat and it snapped in half. This was a bad sign especially when I went to a hardware store to replace the bolt and they could not find anything in stock that was the same odd millimeter. The Russian bike might not have ever been stolen but I think I was ripped off just the same.

The next few years I kept striping parts off my old faithful Schwinn Varsity to make repairs on the Russian bike. Eventually the Soviet bike had the seat, brakes, handle bars, chain and casing from the Varsity. None of the numerous repairs was easy because none of the nuts, bolts and screws on the bike were standard American sizes. Eventually the bike frame cracked and I was done with it. I ended up the completely frustrated owner of two non-functional bicycles. At that point I could not bring myself to rebuild the Schwinn and I eventually sold the two bikes to some guy in the neighborhood for $45 bucks. That was more then a decade ago and I have not owned a bicycle since then. I wonder if I should look around on E-bay for an early 70’s red Schwinn Continental. http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/park_photos/popup.php?propID=Q015&image=photos/Queens/Q015_1078859372.jpg