I had to call in on the local bike shop the other day to have my sons bike looked at. It took some finding though; I had never been there before and couldn't find any phone book listings. Infact the only listing of the place I found was online and happened to be a blog by the owner dating back a few years. Maybe that should have told me what kind of place it was - a shop that doesn't want to be found by any that doesn't already know where it is. Global recession anyone?
I did eventually find it, tucked down a side street and only marginally bigger than your standard men’s toilets. It was crammed full of bikes, thus making it a bike shop alright, but it wasn't the kind of welcoming place you would expect a place selling recreational goods to be. Right from the moment I walked in I felt like an outsider. Maybe it was because my calves are too small to ever be mistaken as a cyclist, who knows? Whatever it was I was out of my depth. I knew it and everyone inside knew it.
I had to wait in line behind three other people who weren't it transpired waiting in line, they were merely talking gear ratios with the guy pumping up the tyres on a mountain bike in the corner that looked like it might spend its evening moonlighting as a Transformer. Eventually I worked out he was the owner but then that was easy given that the other person in the shop looking anything remotely like a staff member was a 10 year old girl stuffing a subway sandwich down her gob whilst surfing the internet on the shop PC.
Unable to contribute anything of substance to the gear ratio discussion, I waited patiently until the large, pubescent lad who arrived not long after me and who looked like he might be a good advert for why you should always wear a bike helmet, noticed me. He worked there too apparently, or at least I hope so. I pointed out the broken brake on my son’s bike which he took to with a pair of pliers in such a way that left me thinking 'fuck, well I could have done that'.
Almost apologetically I had to point out that I suspected the inner tube of the front wheel had a hole in it too and would need to be replaced. Sensing that he might have attacked it with the same tool in the hope of appeasing me with a quick fix, I let him know he could keep it over night and I'd be back tomorrow. As I left I took the time to mentally note down some of the accessories they had for sale hanging from the walls so that I might refer to them the next day in a desperate attempt to make like I knew what the fuck I was talking about.
I shouldn't have worried, the owner recognised me the next day and despite having a deep and meaningful with a woman (who's calves were decidedly bigger than mine) served me pretty much straight away. But only after he had finished spinning the wheels on another SUV of a mountain bike in a way that I can only fairly describe as homo erotic. It might have been doing something for Ana Bolic and her impressive calves but I was unmoved.
My sons bike had been taken down to the workshop it transpired, something we only worked out after he had run through a list of bike manufacturers in the same way I would footballers when trying to work out just how much another self professed expert on all things football really knows. My son's bike was none of them and I felt that admitting that we had bought it from The Warehouse was not going to do anything favourable for my repair bill. I eventually described it by colour and was sent across the road to the workshop to locate it myself, thus banished from the shop that good customer service forgot.
It all made me think back to some of my good mates back in my college days who were right into their mountain biking. Sammy and the other Belmont boys coveted mountain bikes the same way I did girls and whereas I was getting into trouble with the fuckwit of a deputy principal for having girls in bikinis on my book covers, they were suppressing stiffies under their desks over the Cannondale’s on theirs.
They would ride their $1000 bikes to school each day and walk around carrying their seats from class to class, possibly because they never rode with them on in the first place, but possibly because they feared they would get stolen. As I always explained it to them, this was Naenae and if one of the brothers was going to go to the trouble of stealing your bike it was going to mean shit all to him if the seat was on or off.
I remember traipsing up some god forsaken mountain with them one weekend to watch madmen catapult themselves down a couple of kilometres of dirt track. We perched ourselves midway down one of the biggest stretches of track and spent the time between flying madmen by discussing shock absorbers, pegs and fuck knows what else. I spent the whole time torn between hoping somebody would crash and worrying that if they did we would be right in the firing line. There eventually was a sensational spill, one further down our stretch of track. Disappointingly there was only the one.
When did cycling - particularly mountain biking - get so serious? One minute we were happy hurtling around the place on bikes either ridiculously too small because Mum and dad couldn't afford a new one, or ridiculously too big because it was a hand me down from your older brother. Or sister, which wasn't cool if you were a boy. You might have spent most of your bike riding childhood cursing the very bar that crunched your nuts most of the time but it was better to have a bar than to have a bike with none at all. Spokeydokeys were all the accessories you needed back then and the only adjustments you ever needed to make was to take those ridiculous padded handle bar protector things off when you came of age to be too cool for school.
For a long time I had an HMX, a yellow one that was neither a BMX nor a GMX. It was H for Hardcore as far as I was concerned. It could have been H for Homo as far as the neighbourhood gang were concerned and they would have thought that way too if it wasn't for the mother of all accessories I had strapped to the ball bar; a loudspeaker with a hand piece that played three different types of sirens. Why even today when I hear just such a siren it makes my nipples and all four of the shiny, black hairs that poke out from them stand on end.
I wonder if some day my son will think back on his bike as fondly as I did mine at the same age. But he'll have to wait till I take it back to get the gears fixed. Back to the shop where skinny calved former HMX riders are welcome, but only just.
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