The Birthday Bike from Hell

I was waiting for my birthday as I have never waited since. I was getting a bicycle and would be five and life could not be better. Oh, baby!

My birthday was about a month after Christmas and northern Indiana was brutally cold. It was so cold you could get an ice cream headache without eating ice cream just by walking to school. Fortunately, this was one of those rare birthdays that fell on a Sunday, and I didn't have to go to school. There are few things worse than going to school on your birthday. My birthday was always a letdown following Christmas anyway. But when it's dark and cold and your gift is a collared shirt and you have to go to school, they might as well send you off to the rubber plant clutching your Davy Crockett lunch pail and be honest with you. Your life is over kid, you're screwed. But I was innocent then, and my well-earned cynicism would have to wait until I was five years old plus one minute.

I had dreamt of this bike for months. When my parents said I'd get a bike for my birthday I started walking past the display windows of the Western Auto store by the courthouse and relishing their beautiful Western Flyers. They were like cruisers today, with big strong frames and fat tires and I wanted one that was red. You could fasten a cool white mud flap with raised black pinstriping and a big red reflector to your back fender and you were set for life. I decided not to spring for the optional streamers on the handle bars because that would make me look like a girl. I think streamers were actually standard on girls' bikes back then. This bike, however, was the boy bike of all boy bikes in my small town, and soon it would be mine.

So as Christmas passed and my birthday neared, my yearning grew and grew. I would sneak past Western Auto more often to relish my birthday gift. I was afraid I might see my mom and dad wheeling it out of the store, so I had to be careful and not spoil their attempt to surprise me. I would circle the courthouse, my stupid rubber boots squeaking on the sub-zero snow, to see if Dad's pickup was parked anywhere near. I also checked to see if a red Western Flyer in the store window had a SOLD sign on it but none of them ever did. I even wondered if they had already bought the bike and were storing it at a friend's. I searched for clues to see if people I knew were being evasive, but everyone seemed to keep mum. 

The Holy Feast of Bert's Big Birthday finally arrived. I woke up early, and it was miserably cold and dark. But my heart was warm with the fervent hope that only small children know. When I crept downstairs I thought I'd be swooning over the scent of fresh rubber tire wafting from my brand new bike, but I was wrong.  My parent's faces beamed with pride, however, so I knew I had nothing to fear. "Go out on the front porch," said mom with a sweet, beatific smile. I tore to the front door and threw it open. My heart was pounding, my was mind reeling, and my moment had finally arrived. Oh, baby!

My bare feet stung on the freezing wooden porch but I didn't care. I veered right where I knew it had to stand gleaming in its own self-shining light, and there indeed stood my bike...But it was a plain, used, sun-bleached, baby-shit brown Schwinn with no mud flaps, and with streamers dangling from its handles...My father said it was a good "starter bike" and that he had gotten a great deal on it because it's previous owner was a little boy who had died......

Yeah, laugh, laugh you fancy-ass bastards with your shiny NEW bicycles, and your rational, normal parents, and your pinstriped mud flaps with bright red reflectors. Laugh at 'tardboy riding his dead boy's bike in his stupid rubber boots. With training wheels. At least I wasn't wearing glasses. Yet. It even had a goddamned clown horn on it. Seriously. I can't make this shit up. I'm not that creative. 

I would have cried for my mommy if she hadn't been standing next to me seeming so completely pleased with this foul token of malignancy they'd torn from the grasp of a poor, dead child. Make a wish foundation, my ass. Just let me be raised by normal people, oh please, oh please, oh please...Shit!

In the end, I'll admit, I came to love that bike, but the streamers had to go. A year and a half later my Dad raised the training wheels so slowly over time that he fooled me into riding without them. So I had him take them off one day and I tooled around the block under the maple trees on that brilliant June morning, sticking out my tongue at a mean girl who'd teased me about the training wheels for weeks. It's one of the signature moments of my childhood. Thanks, Dad, for that. You redeemed yourself there and well beyond that many other times.

And as for you lucky ones who got your nice new bikes and ended up not really appreciating them anyway, you can go fuck yourselves and fuck the bikes you rode in on. I'm tired of dodging you wannabes in your cycling tights as you spill out of the bike lane while you're riding six abreast. And if you need any help fucking yourselves, I've got a used clown horn I'll sell you and the owner isn't even dead. Yet.

Mad naked summer night

Sometimes things were so great as a child I could not believe my luck. I was seven, and a punishing August heat wave drove us from our home one night. No one had air conditioning then, and since it was too hot to stay inside, my parents opened our windows and prayed like pagans to the wind for relief. We camped out on our porch, fanning ourselves in the vain hope of cooling off and saw others doing the same. Before long, impatience and weariness with the heat wore us down. It started with clusters of adults chatting, then laughing, and finally beer bottles clinking in toasts in our neighbor's gravel driveway. Kids began to cluster too, and a tinkle of small voices grew louder until, like the miracle of the loaves, pop and chips and pretzels appeared, and kids of all ages arrived. Everyone was staying up late.

The sky was sprinkled with stars. Crickets chirped and fireflies blinked as we rampaged blindly between houses, trees, and fragrant flowering shrubs. No one bothered to stop us and the night made everything new. There was no such thing as trespassing, or property, or propriety, because the boundaries we transgressed were concealed by the cover of night. The invisible walls between one yard and another that we honored and feared by day were forgotten, and we became whatever we wanted and went wherever we wished. Our defiance was intoxicating. Boys and girls ran at full throttle, breathless, sweating and brushing into each other as the sacred shroud of darkness winked and blessed it all. The din of our parents' celebration echoed in the distance but they never intervened. On this most perfect of all perfect nights, true happiness roamed free.

Several older kids organized a treasure hunt and left notes in countless places. I still marvel at how quickly and how well they created this wonderful gift. We tore from one house, one yard, one block to another, shouting and laughing as our flashlights sliced through the night. We finally ended up at my front porch, with a gang of twenty or more. Everyone was searching in corners, in the milk box, and under the mat for a note. Then Patsy, who was probably no more than eleven or twelve, put her arm around my shoulder and whispered in my ear. I shuddered with delight. "Right there, Bert, right there," she said pointing, with a final tender hug. She actually knew my name. And I shuddered even more. And in the middle of our porch in plain sight overlooked, stood a large paper bag filled with candy and cakes. I shrieked and grabbed it, and held it aloft as my comrades burst into cheers. We shared it under the stars in our front yard, and I knew this night could never be forgotten.

But it was. When morning arrived and I went outside, the world was recaptured by the lie. Bacchus had fled with his satyrs and nymphs and it seemed like only a dream. Our neighborhood had no fences, but our yards were once again discrete, as were all of us.  I asked a couple kids how they'd liked the party. "Oh, it was fine," they said, without a trace of excitement for the magic we'd felt the night before. Maybe it had only been magical for me. Was I the only one? Do people forget their trips to Narnia all or most of the time?

A couple weeks later Patsy's family moved. Her dad was transferred to New Mexico and they left our town for good. The day before they moved I saw her across the street and she waved goodbye and smiled. She actually remembered me, and I could tell by that look and that smile that she remembered the magic as well. Patsy, you dark-haired spirit of the night, do you remember that magic still?

Saved on the Sly

I must have been six or seven years old when Richie's mother pulled up in her Buick and told us to all pile in. "I'm takin' you kids to be saved!" she croaked in that hoarse voice common to heavy-smoking women. "But don't tell your parents, OK? Let's surprise 'em!" Richie sat next to her smiling, and motioned for us to get in. I'm just guessing I was six or seven because I think I would have been too smart to do this if I'd been much older. His mom was a once pretty now hardened woman who looked ten years older than she should. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses and was smoking Viceroys I'd bought her earlier that day. "Just tell Roy at the Texaco they're for Penny Jones," she had told me, and Roy handed them to me with a chuckle and went back to shooting the shit with his mechanics.

I was standing in front of my house with Diane and Jeannie when Richie and Penny drove up. The girls lived next door and we had just finished playing florescent light in their dad's shop. The light cast a strange unearthly glow and made a mesmerizing buzz we loved. We were open to suggestions. It was also a beautiful warm day, and only a few weeks into summer vacation. Our small midwestern town had leapt fully to life after the relentless rains of spring and getting out and around seemed like a good idea.

Richie lived a couple blocks from us and across the street from the Bible Baptist Church. He would have been called a hillbilly if he'd had an accent, but since he did not he was merely white trash which was fine. Richie ate laundry starch to quell his hunger pangs and his house always smelled of urine thanks to his two-year-old brother, Jesus. I thought it odd for his brother to have such a name, but I never asked about that or the starch. 

Richie had told me about his small cinder block church a couple weeks before and how they watched film strips during sunday school. "You're so lucky," I said with envy. At the Presbyterian sunday school I occasionally attended all we did was arts and crafts.

"Yeah, today they showed us one about little kids who were caught smoking cigarettes and Jesus cut off their hands!" He seemed pretty impressed. I tried to take it all in. I imagined little boys and girls with tears streaming down their faces, holding up their tiny blood-spurting stumps in horror. I imagined bone marrow in the middle of each of the children's stumps, like the bone marrow in the Sunday ham I'd just eaten. I even wondered about the artist who had drawn it, because it did not seem like something you would photograph. Like most kids I too was a literalist, and hoped Jesus didn't cast his net too wide when it came to children and tobacco. I did not interrogate Richie or discuss the different vision of Jesus I was taught on my infrequent excursions to church. Making crosses out of popsicle sticks was starting to look pretty good.

So the girls and I climbed in the car and travelled crosstown to a field by the foundry where all the real hillbillies lived. There was no revival tent but, instead, a makeshift stage and some temporary stands. There were a hundred or so people and most of them were kids. I'm not sure how many had been Kidnapped for Christ but my guess is probably half. I had no idea of what was going on and remember very little.

There was a man with a southern accent and high, dark hair on stage who talked about God and how God always helped him out. He spoke of driving "coast to coast" and discovering that God had put more money in his wallet every time he opened it. Then he held up his hand and sighed saying "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," and he fanned out one, then two, then three 20-dollar bills. I don't remember many oohs or ahhs when he did this. He was from an earlier pre-visual generation and while he may have only known radio, we had TV. Maybe we only had three channels and they were all in black and white, but we'd seen magic tricks on all three. He encouraged us to come forward to accept Jesus but none of my group did, even Richie, whom I presume had done it before.


When Penny dropped us off at home the shit hit the fan. "Where have you kids been?" my mother cried. "We almost called the police."

"We've been getting saved, Mom," I told her. "Richie's mom took us to be saved." 

And then I told her about the cigarettes.

I wish I had been old enough to understand the gravity of what happened next. It must have been beautiful. My dad stormed over to Richie's, our former-boxer-turned-minister from the Presbyterian church paid a visit to the Bible Baptist Church, parents called parents and yelled on the phone, the Texaco was off limits, and I never saw Richie again.  

Two or three years later, different people moved into Richie's house after his family had left town. I had my first paper route by then and when I went to collect for the previous week's delivery an old man opened the door and invited me in. As he shuffled around searching for his coin purse I noticed the house still smelled of urine. On the wall near the door hung a small sign saying "Jesus Lives Here." And indeed he had.

Hillbilly Heaven

I grew up with hillbillies in northern Indiana. It was a leafy small town in the ‘50s with a large limestone courthouse and a colorful fair in the fall. Hillbillies had moved there from the south to work in the factories supplying Detroit. Adults said hillbillies had not come there to work. They had only caravanned to Indiana in their beat up Cadillacs to live off our lavish welfare state. 

Since this was an all-white town, hillbillies filled the niche that people of color filled elsewhere. Locals said hillbillies were lazy, stupid drunks who had too many kids out of wedlock. Hillbillies lived on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, and within walking distance of the factories they avoided. 

Hillbillies had their own culture. They joined the Civil Air Patrol while other kids joined the Boy Scouts. When the Civil Air Patrol marched in the parade at fair time, I’d hear smirking comments I did not understand. They also liked country music. A hillbilly girl ran up to me on the way to school one day and got in my face singing “Hey good lookin’ whatcha got cookin’?” I was equally frightened and excited. If you had a southern accent and were poor in that town, you would never be accepted and a barbed wire fence of suspicion always blocked your advance. No one ever invited a hillbilly to a party, and I can't think of any that finally graduated. They were just absent from class one day and were never seen again. People barely noticed. 

Ralph, for instance, was poor and slow and prone to self-mutilation. On occasion he exposed himself to us. A girl once saw him do it and he was drug out of class to the office. Sonny was poor, slow and mean. I stood up to him in a fight one time and he backed down in shame. I was a hero to my classmates, but I felt bad for popping his bubble. As he slunk away his humiliation was obvious. No one ever feared him again. The fright he'd engendered was all that he had and I had taken it from him. Ruby was poor, slow, and large. She was tragically plain and always smelled of corn chips. Other kids said she had cooties. Her dad was a deliveryman, and she stole most of her food from his truck. 

For Christmas in the third grade we were paired with other kids in a gift exchange and Ruby was my partner. I had asked for a brand new baseball with raised red stitching. When she handed me a humble rubber ball instead and said, “Here’s your present,” she smiled nervously, then averted her eyes with shame. At that moment the whole world stopped and fell silent. 

I don’t think I have ever felt more deeply the suffering entailed in my own or someone else’s shame. It was staggering. She was robbed of every possible avenue of escape or denial. Her poverty and vulnerability were obvious to us both. I hated how she had been cornered, and I hated myself as well. I have since discovered the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is feeling bad about the things you have done. Shame is feeling bad about being who you are. I was feeling guilt, while she was feeling shame. And then there was Shirley. 


Shirley was the prettiest and smartest girl in school. Everyone admired her and wanted to be her friend. For some reason, though, she never invited anyone over. I loved her more than anything I knew, and I was only eight years old. Whenever I thought of her, flowers bloomed inside me, so I was shocked to unearth her secret. Undetected, and lured by the presence in the light behind her eyes, I followed her home from school and saw her enter her home, a dilapidated hillbilly house near the smoke belching rubber plant where all the rest of them lived. She didn't have an accent, and she didn’t smell like corn chips, but she was poor and her parents were hillbillies. 

I never told anyone, and I have kept her secret for 50 years, out of the love that a boy can have for a girl when he's only eight years old. 

Living the dream in Tucson

The only good thing about the bad news from Tucson last week was remembering the great things that happened when I lived there. Among those things was baseball.

For fourteen years I’d dart down to Hi Corbett Field with my friends for Cleveland Indians spring training games. While snot still froze in your nose up north, Tucson bloomed with warmth and light. We’d discreetly pass herb high up in the stands along third base as a gentle breeze shielded our sin from discovery. Mountains loomed beyond the outfield walls, the sky was the bluest of blues, and palm trees rose up vividly against them. An occasional U-2 spy plane from the Air Force base would silently circle the field and the crowd would tumble into awe. We’d drink beer in the hot sun and grab Mexican food when the game was over. The entire universe conspired to make every game perfect. I always wished it were my Detroit Tigers I was watching, but at least it was baseball. It was someone else's dream, but it was a good dream.  

I bumped into rookie Cory Snyder once, picnicking with his parents under a tree outside that park. It was so sweet and innocent, one boy in a million living the dream for millions more.  I chatted with Hall of Fame outfielder Frank Robinson when no one else was there and I tossed baseballs back to Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller as I walked around a practice field. He threw a ball back to me one day saying, “Keep it kid, you earned your pay.” I even taunted crusty old Cubs coach Don Zimmer--from a safe distance--and called him “The Gerbil,” just as Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee had done. He almost climbed into the stands after me. I guess it hit a nerve. 

I also discovered why some say baseball is a fantasy world. I’d peddled to the park on my mountain bike well before the game and there was no one there but a girl and myself.  She was obviously there to meet a ballplayer, any ballplayer, but it wasn't what you'd think. She was simply life itself. She was radiant, athletic, intelligent, and kind. She was beyond the reach of words. I knew I was nothing, still she spoke to me from her dream world as if I too were a part of her dream. She reminded me of Remedios the Beauty, from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, who walks through the world untouched by its hazards, and is reclaimed by the sky while folding freshly laundered sheets. 

I was dazzled, and I knew I had to leave, because something sacred would soon happen here, and I did not belong. Captured by her fragrance, some worthy dreamer would find her and together they would ascend into heaven to fold laundry for angels who comfort children on deathbeds and young men on battlefields who are crying for their mothers.

I mean no disrespect when I say this, but baseball is as holy to those who know it as the Blessed Virgin is to those who have faith. I can't unravel the grace and mystery of baseball any better than I can unravel the the grace and mystery of faith. Both are gifts from God.

Scuttered by six or seven beers by the time the game was over, I biked down alleys all the way home. I was only jolted from my stupor as I peed on a wall by a rich man’s house. Above me the sun warmed my face, and around me angels swarmed, shielding my sin from discovery.

Oh Canada

I have always envied Canadians, and it started when I was small.

We were on vacation in Kentucky at a rustic motel in the woods and it was 1959. The motel's small log cabins were set back from the parking lot in a stand of tall trees, and its gift shop featured lewd figurines of topless hillbilly girls whose breasts were whiskey jugs. A boy named "Artie" and I were playing in a grassy clearing amidst the cabins. I was having the time of my life, and dreaded the eventual goodbye. It was like Artie'd become my best friend in just an hour, the brother I'd never known.

When it was time for him to leave, his parents emerged from their cabin. His dad was like a movie star and his mom was like a model, with stylish sun glasses and a colorful scarf wrapped around her head. They were so young and beautiful that I was astonished. Parents only looked like this on TV.

"Artie, it's time to go," sang his mother, "and say goodbye to your friend." When she turned and smiled at me my heart melted. His two sisters, equally beautiful and having fallen no distance from the tree of their goddess mother, waved at me and hopped into their parent's new convertible with Ontario plates, folded down the top, and sped off down the gravel driveway toward a great life of endless vistas, prosperity, and Canada. When they turned onto the main highway, Artie cupped his hands and yelled, "see ya 'round Bert," and they were gone forever. Their plates were black and white and had a crown imprinted on them. God, they're like royalty, I thought. They might as well have been Princess Grace and Prince Rainier for all I knew.

Then during the Vietnam War I was envious of the Canadians I'd meet. I'd be at a party and the conversation would turn to "what's your draft number?" and some guy would invariably be Canadian and tell you he didn't have one. Heads would turn, the room would go quiet, and the envy was tangible. How lucky to be Canadian, I thought. You have all the benefits of being an American without any of the burdens of policing the empire and dying in a war. When the party was over the Canadian would leave, untroubled by a care in the world, and I would trudge out into a heartless night, worrying about the number 72, and hoping to avoid a terrible fate. Once again it was Princess Grace and Prince Rainier leaving me behind in a cloud of Canadian dust.

And then there's Boxing Day, an extra day of Christmas. Sigh...