Ol' Blue

"NICE BIKE, BITCH!!"
The carload of miscreants sped through the left turn lane as I waited casually at the corner. My heart swelled with pride. "You're goddamn right", I thought. I suspect the one who yelled it saw my bike and found himself uncontrollably blurting out his praise but, fearing certain ostracization from his friends, hastily added the somewhat ill-conceived "bitch" at the end. Whatever. I never tire of getting compliments on my bike, ill-conceived or otherwise. And you know why? Because my bike deserves it.

I named him "Ol' Blue". He was born of extreme fiscal irresponsibility at the height of my youthful impulsiveness in 1982, my sophomore year in college. I was suffering from a bad case of bike envy; my buddy Jeff had a cool bike: a single speed Cook Bros. BMX with a 26" frame and I decided, without giving it much thought which was par for the course back then, that I would purchase a cool bike for myself, an idea that made perfect sense at the time. I went to the bike store on MLK Boulevard and, much to my mother's later consternation, bought everything the guy recommended. For $625 I walked out of there with a deep blue, custom-built SE Racing OM Flyer with chrome Landing Gear forks. Ol' Blue was born and he was glorious.

Suddenly, I was mobile and free in the big city of Austin, under my own power and unfettered by things like "traffic laws" and "designated transportation areas". I was connected to the city and to myself in an exhilarating way that driving a car could never produce. I went wherever my legs could take me, wherever I pointed the front tire. Ol' Blue got me home from the clubs at 4:00am when I was falling down drunk; he took me from one end of the state capitol building (with a wheelie through the rotunda) to the other on a boring Sunday afternoon; down whatever staircase I chose; on countless visits to Barton Springs; and on sweaty, late night summer rides around downtown. He was good for my love life, too: a cute girl once left a flirty note on him for me. Sure, Ol' Blue and I had our share of spills - dislocating both shoulders during a not-very-well-thought-through jump attempt comes to mind - but these just added to the richness of the adventures. My life would never be the same, and not because I didn't get to go to Europe upon graduation because I had unknowingly depleted my college fund by buying things like bikes. No, I had discovered the joy of urban biking with my trusty steed. Little did I know that things were going to get even better.

I graduated and moved to Chicago where I found a veritable biking utopia. Here I roamed an area one mile wide and six miles long, flat and full of interesting things to see and investigate. I pulled wheelies under the Calder sculpture on Mies van der Rohe's Federal Building plaza, I rode up onto the sloping base of the giant Picasso sculpture on Daley Plaza, I explored the abandoned railyards just south of downtown, I logged hundreds of miles along the lakefront and dozens of trips to Ed Debevic's for meatloaf and waitress watching. I was sitting on Ol' Blue outside Wrigley field on August 8, 1988 when the first night game was played. I stood alone with Ol' Blue in city hall late one night while a freshly-deceased Mayor Washington was on display in his casket. In the winter I would bundle up and head out into the icy, slush-filled streets, stopping for a Subway sandwich, and eventually making my way out across the frozen tundra of Lincoln Park to the edge of the shore. I'd sit protected from the wind and driving snow by the base of a sculpture of some colonial American patriot, eat my sandwich, and contemplate the barely visible jumbled ice block surface of Lake Michigan in the inky blackness. All the while Ol' Blue was there with me, waiting for the next adventure.

Then, just like that, he was gone. Stolen. Some determined asshole climbed two floors up the outside of my apartment building and probably used a car jack to break the balcony railing Ol' Blue was locked to. I was stunned and heartbroken and I imagined, as I rode around searching in vain on a hastily-bought, $15 piece of shit 10-speed, that the thief had been immediately hit by a bus as he'd made his getaway and slowly dragged to death over several blocks. I spent a couple of weekends searching, a photo of him in my back pocket as evidence of prior ownership, to no avail. Suddenly, Chicago went from being a great place to live to being the place that Ol' Blue got stolen. It made the decision to move to Los Angeles a month later all that easier.

It took 17 years, the invention of the internet, the development of eBay and craigslist, and me entering low-cost midlife crisis mode before a lightbulb went off over my head and I realized I could and should own Ol' Blue again. I began searching in 2004 and quickly realized much had changed in the bike world during the last couple of decades. SE Racing, originally started by Scot "Old Man" Breithaupt, entrepeneur, BMX racing legend, and designer/namesake of the OM Flyer, had been sold to a Japanese conglomerate and, while they were technically still making OM Flyers, the design had changed substantially, the quality had plummeted, and these new-era bikes were considered a joke in the online old-school BMX community. Meanwhile, original edition OM Flyers from the early '80s like mine, now rare and cherished, were selling for $2,500 and more. I looked for months on eBay with no luck, only finding bikes with the wrong color paint or ridiculous gold-colored parts and accessories. Then, in May of '05 a search on craigslist turned up a blue one, perfect, and it was in Venice, no less! I went to the guy's house and let out an audible gasp when he wheeled it out. It was like seeing a ghost or, rather, like when your beloved dead dog shows up in a dream. I fought back a couple of tears as I took it for a ride and couldn't believe it when he said he only wanted $750 instead of the $1000 it was listed for. He explained that he could tell I'd be giving his bike a good home and he was right. I know it sounds silly, but that was one of the happiest days of my life.

In general, Los Angeles is a shitty place to ride a bike. The streets are wide and ugly and full of people driving fast while busily eating, shaving, reading, applying makeup, talking on the phone and/or composing text messages while giving scant attention to people on bikes. Venice and Santa Monica, where I live and work, have the same highly distracted drivers but are different in feel - more small town-ish, more like Austin. I've enjoyed what has to be one of the most pleasant commutes possible - 2 1/2 miles, mostly on the car-less beach bike path, usually partially clad, to my office where I can sit and stare out the window at Ol' Blue parked across the street. I watch as people walk by and eye him, sometimes stopping and pointing, sometimes getting excited as they, too, bore their friends with tales of their own long-gone bike glory days that seeing Ol' Blue has conjured up. Over the past four years I've ridden him to work more and more often until finally last December, when the lease on my car was up, I decided to make him my primary mode of transportation and go without a car. It's been wonderful and I've made it a point to not take it for granted because these sorts of things don't last forever.

Actually, they only last until next Thursday as that's my last day of work here in our Santa Monica office. When I get back from my vacation a week later I'll be driving the car I'm buying tomorrow to our new office in Sherman Oaks and it'll be Scott's turn to have a nice, short commute for the next five years. It's the end of an era, but what a great era it's been. Of course, this all may strike you as sappy, maudlin, and thoroughly ridiculous: a middle-aged man using masculine pronouns to address a bicycle in what is basically a love letter to an inanimate object. But that's ok. Ol' Blue deserves it.








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