I bought a
bike. A used, blue mountain bike that I wanted to ride to enjoy being outside
in the sun and get some exercise. We made a good team out on the trail, my legs
pumping and growing stronger, the bike gleaming proudly in the sun.
This is
the story of how the bike turned on me.
On only my
second ride on the trail, I was going through a railroad tunnel. When you hit
the middle, its pitch black. The light from in front of you and behind you has
all dissipated and you are alone in the darkness, just the sound of the bike
tires rolling through the dirt and if you’re like me, your heavy breathing
because you’re fat and out of shape.
After
about thirty seconds of just me and the invisible things in the dark, a faint
trace of light illuminated my front tire and I saw a ridge at the edge of the
path. Then I saw the tire smile: A deep, snake-like grin. A licorice-black
tongue snapped out, grasping the edge of the path. The bike slid out from under
me and I went down, dragging my left leg through a morass of mud, gravel and
dirt. When I stood up I was filthy and bleeding from the palm of my hand, my
knee and from scratches all over my lower leg.
It didn’t
make me “mean mad” as Ma Joad asked in the Grapes of Wrath. I felt stupid: An
adult who can’t go on a simple bike ride. I did have questions about the bike
though. I had the whole damn tunnel to ride in so how did the tire catch the
only place that would send me to the ground? I didn’t want to believe the bike
was bad, didn’t want to make the obvious “Christine” comparisons, but then it
got worse. The bike lulled me into a false sense of security. I continued to
ride it for weeks with no problems. On the road, on the trail, took it on
vacation with me to the shore. I put dozens of miles on the bike without incident.
Except for one thing.
I had a
cut on my knee, a remnant of the crash, that wouldn’t heal properly. It started
bothering me again on vacation and continued in the weeks after until last week
when my own knee joined forces with the bike in a diptych of evil. Pus-filled
blisters started appearing around the original cut. I drained them, put on
ointment. But then, in a move straight out of the necronomicon, the demonic
pairing created a blister on the back of my knee. Of course I didn’t notice it
because who the hell looks at the back of their knee except for deviants and
the Dutch? The abscess soon swelled to the size of a golf ball. By the next day
my knee and ankle were swollen and hot and I knew. I knew that my bike had
corrupted my own body against me. In the libertine smoke of the early morning
hours, I had been infected.
I had to
alight to the hospital where I was put on nefarious drugs which broke my skin
out in hives. I was tortured by a tall man in a blue smock who resembled the
angel of death. With metal instruments he cut and poked at the bulbous growth
on the back of my knee, delighting a contingent of Dutch residents there to
observe and squeezing out tainted, hellish pus. By the next day, immobile and
itching, mercy was relayed to me by an angel with better drugs. I spent the
next 4 days sitting on the end of my couch, my leg propped up and hurting. My
cat used me as a bed and cleaning station. And all the while, from my spare
room, I could hear the bike laughing, low and wet.
And the
moral of the story comes from my brother: “It never pays to exercise. Put the
bike away and forget it exists.”
Sage
advice.
