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The
Alfred Jarry Memorial
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I
The sun was bright, the sky blue, the air sweet with
warm summer.
I straddled my bicycle at the crosswalk beside the busy
street, breathing easy after my five mile ride along
the Willamette river. As I waited for the light to turn
I watched the cars stream by, every window rolled down,
every sunroof opened. I heard laughter, and saw an arm
thrust out the back window of an approaching car. I
smiled-- and dozens of small, hard objects smacked against
my helmet, my face, my shoulder.
Pennies. A fistful of pennies.
II
The bicycle is a non-polluting, earth-friendly, human-powered
vehicle and riding one feels good-- philosophically
and physically.
Except when it rains. Or snows. Or hails. Or when it
does all three while an Arctic head-wind sandblasts
your eyelashes off.
But last winter, after choosing to defy the Weather
Gods and continue commuting by bicycle during the wet,
dark, cold Oregon winter, this puny mortal discovered
an amazing secret reward for riding a bike in bad weather:
lightheartedness.
Or, as it more likely appears to the objective observer:
mild insanity.
Drivers see me cycling in the rain and perhaps they
pity me, think me sadly impoverished, unable to afford
a car. Were they not blasting past at sixty-six feet
per second, they might notice that I'm whistling. Were
they not encased in sound-dampened, climate-controlled
boxes, they might hear me singing.
Want a secret tonic for the winter blahs? Ride a bike
along a river in a cold February rain and sing June
Is Busting Out All Over at the top of your lungs. The
ducks will be your chorus.
After a month of soggy cycling I had developed an extensive
and eccentric musical repertoire guaranteed to lift
the spirits; If I Only Had A Brain, from the Wizard
of Oz; Fats Waller's, Your Feets Too Big, and of course,
Singing In The Rain, the spirit of Gene Kelly with his
upside-down umbrella dancing alongside as I plowed through
three-inch deep puddles.
Drivers consider bicyclists slow. I must disagree. I
have personally achieved supersonic speeds more than
once when rocketing down a steep hill and belting out,
"When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way! From
your first cigarette to your last dying day!"
III
I approached the four-way stop just after the driver
on my left. She started to drive, then hesitated, so
I waved her through ahead of me. As she passed, and
I started pedaling, a driver behind her ran the stop
sign. He had seen me entering the intersection; we had
made eye contact. But I was riding a thirty pound bicycle,
and he was driving a two ton car at twenty miles per
hour. He knew I would stop for him.
I braked hard to avoid being hit, and as the car passed,
only inches from my front wheel, I punched the back
passenger window.
Of course, the driver immediately stopped.
He had not stopped for the big, red, octagonal sign
with the letters S-T-O-P on it. He had not stopped to
avoid running over another human being. He had stopped
only when I committed the unpardonable offense (often
a fatal offense, in America) of messing with his car.
He slammed the gearshift into park and snapped off the
loud stereo, ready to get out and do me violence.
But as he opened his door he hesitated at the sight
of a two hundred pound man in a helmet, dark sunglasses,
and black gloves-- growling.
He locked his door and drove away.
IV
Recently, at a house party, a woman dressed all in black
and wearing violet eyeliner told me how she considered
cycling clothing the sleekest, sexiest and most provocative
of fashions.
I kept my mouth shut and nodded in agreement.
I chose not to mention that my cycling wardrobe consists
of one pair of baggy shorts, bought four years ago on
sale for $5.00, stained from painting a porch and walking
a large, often wet and muddy, dog; one pair of black
tights with a tendency to sag in the posterior; one
pair of frayed black gloves; and for raingear, a ten
year old Yankees baseball cap, held together by staples
and duct tape, to wear under my battered helmet.
I keep 'civilized' clothing at work. Within minutes
of arriving, I'm dressed as inconspicuously as my co-workers.
Only my damp hair and crooked grin belie the exhilarating
five mile ride I've just finished. No one knows that
I'm beyond relaxed; I'm languid. Only I can hear those
exuberant endorphines dancing along my arteries in a
mile-long conga line. No one suspects that, at the slightest
provocation, I could take a nap, or make love, or listen,
really listen, while an eighty-four year old customer
tells me her entire family history, all the way back
to great-grandfather coming West through Indian Territory
in a covered wagon.
V
Every year, 40,000 Americans die in or from cars. About
8,000 of the people who die are pedestrians or cyclists,
many of them children.
Cars are among the fastest objects moving on the surface
of the earth. They weigh tons, and there are hundreds
of millions of them.
Humans, with their binocular vision, excellent depth-perception,
ability to track multiple objects, judge speeds, distances,
and trajectories, are well-adapted to piloting large,
fast-moving machines.
In fact, I've observed many humans who are so well-adapted
to jockeying cars that they feel under-stimulated by
driving. They address this lack of challenge ingeniously.
Some choose conversation as an extra stimulant, and
make phone calls as they drive. Others, of a more literary
bent, go in for reading while driving. (Clearly, only
an under-evolved Homo sapien weenie would need to pull
over in order to study a map or scan the morning newspaper.)
Our society condones eating, drinking, smoking, or doing
all three simultaneously while driving. Running late?
Shave, or apply your cosmetics while driving. Why else
would there be mirrors inside a car?
Astride my bicycle at a red light one afternoon, I observed
a woman come to a halt directly under the light. She
had a small calculator, her checkbook, and a dozen canceled
checks spread across the steering wheel. She proceeded
to balance her checkbook. When the light turned green
and drivers behind her impatiently beeped, she accelerated
briskly, checkbook and checks in one hand, pen and calculator
in the other, steering wheel somewhere between.
I waited until she was out of sight before I started
pedaling.
VI
Alfred Jarry was a not very prosperous French author
of absurdist plays and proto-science fiction stories.
At the turn of the last century, Jarry would bicycle
through Paris, outfitted with a brace of pistols which
he frequently fired into the air. (No doubt as an expression
of his intense joie de vivre.) Jarry also carried a
fishing pole which he deployed from bridges over the
Seine to catch his lunch or dinner. (No doubt an expression
of his intense joie de eating).
In the 1880s, Thomas Sullivan, an American journalist,
rode his high-wheeled bicycle around the world. And
I use the word "rode" in a very loose sense,
as there were often no roads in the America, Europe,
Asia and India of Sullivan's time, and he would carry
his 70 pound "wheel".
In Sullivan's journal of his solo world trip, he tells
how--without any provocation on his part--drivers of
horse-drawn wagons all over the world would attempt
to run him off the road. This, more than the fear of
lions-and -tigers-and-bears-oh-my, was why, like Alfred
Jarry, Thomas Sullivan also carried a pistol.
To ride a bike is to be vulnerable.
For example, one clear, moon-lit night, a pickup truck
came hurtling out of a parking lot without stopping
(illegal, but commonplace) and entered the road on a
collision course with me. Attached to my helmet, body
and bike I had four strobe lights, a headlight, a reflective
vest and six reflectors. No matter. I made an emergency
stop, half-falling off my bike. As the truck passed
two feet in front of me, its driver, invisible behind
dark windows, blared his horn.
Momentarily crazed from fear and adrenalin, I stood
in the road, some weird figure with flashing red and
yellow and white lights attached to his body, and screamed
obscenities that did not contain a single witty historical
or literary allusion.
As I got back on my bike I began fantasizing of carrying
a gun. A paint-ball gun.
I imagined the next time a driver indifferently cut
into my lane, pulled out inches in front of me, or crowded
me off the road. I would take aim, and fire. Splat.
Over the passing time and miles, I've embellished that
basic fantasy. After reading about the social-athletic
clubs so popular at the turn of the last century, I
dreamed up The Alfred Jarry Memorial Literary and Cycling
Social Club. There would be chapters of the Club in
every major American city, each with an arsenal of paint-guns.
Picture this: a car runs a stop sign and forces several
cyclists off the road. Accelerating past the shaking
cyclists, the driver blithely extends his middle finger
( the only salutation I've ever seen drivers exchanging),
as his car belches exhaust fumes.
Yet, only minutes later, the driver is caught in a line
at a stop light. He suddenly finds himself surrounded
by those same cyclists. Safe inside his glass and steel
compartment, he sneers.
Until he sees the guns being drawn.
The next instant, splat-splat-splat-splat-splat.
Sweet, Kandinski-ish, revenge.