Team

Riding a bike is inherently somewhat dangerous; I learned that the very first time I got on one and pedaled across my neighbor’s driveway, veered down their side lawn and ran into the drainpipe on my own house.

That was only a skinned knee and injured 6 year-old pride but it still stung.

Nevertheless, I got back in the saddle and continued riding all these years since, despite numerous other spills, resulting in sprained wrists, chipped teeth, bruised ribs, skinned chins, bloody appendages, and various aches and pains that generally have taken on the order of 6 to 8 weeks to have me feeling better.

I’ve also had the distinct displeasure of seeing several friends and acquaintances crash with injuries much uglier: busted faces, sliced-open foreheads, crumpled fingers—no, sir, I don’t like it, couldn’t we just turn back the clock a few minutes and try this one again?

But in each of those unfortunate incidents, I’ve also seen the best in the characters of the characters I’m with, imperfect people to be sure, who in those moments of need, behave with perfect competence and compassion, stepping up to help a fallen comrade with patience, care, and a sobriety you wouldn’t expect given the overall sense of bacchanalia with which events had been transpiring.

I hope I will never be the one with my bloody head in the lap of another rider as the paramedics attend to me; I hope no one will ever be that person again! 

But if I were (and here I’m burning some sage and spitting in my palm so as not to jinx myself), I would want to be among the usual gang of imperfect subjects, people who would stay with me from the beginning, would see I got to the hospital safely, would collect my bike and stuff, and who would, I hope, seeing I was on the way to mending, pedal on to the bar and toast my health together.

Recall

In spring of 1976, I was living in the attic of a ramshackle cottage near the end of the N-Judah streetcar line at Sunset Beach in San Francisco that I shared with my multi-pharmaceutical abusing roommate for $175.00 a month including utilities.

I had two hits of LSD in my pocket given to me by my glam-rock sort of boyfriend at the time who a few years later turned punk and became Larry Livermore of Lookout Records fame.

As I sat on the trolley waiting for it to start on its route to downtown, I began making eye contact with the only other passenger, a raven-haired beauty with a heart-shaped face who was curled up in the back-corner seat of the car.

Emboldened by love at first sight, I got up the courage to introduce myself with the opening line, “I’d hate myself forever if I didn’t come over here and say ‘hello’ to you.”

This being 1976, after all, I proposed that we drop the acid and go see the show that evening at the Laserium in Golden Gate Park. I don’t recall much about the lasers, but I’ll never forget returning home with my new acquaintance, a mysterious Italian woman, and sitting together under the parachute fabric in my bedroom as we came down from tripping, writing notes to each other in French.

I scrawled, “Est-tu une sorciere?” and I remained so bewitched by her that for weeks after our one magical night, when she had moved me into what wasn’t then called “the friend zone,” I would camp out in the pedestrian tunnel that ran under the highway in front of her apartment building and play my flute, imagining that she could hear me from her third-story window in which a candle burned.

Last night’s ride wasn’t quite so magical, but still, was pretty good, with an outdoor fire at an apparently doomed pit, no rain whatsoever, and old stories told, new stories made.