Sep 19 '06 - 1191 W, 3 I - Vote Good + 9 :: Bad - 14 Malcolm BMX in “Do Good, Mentor a Child”
Published September 19, 2006 by C.I.C.L.E.
by Brady Russell
The morning rush had come on strong enough and Malcolm BMX had to make his way out of Georgetown around Washington Circle. D.C. has all of these gigantic roundabouts that cars and bikes have to weave past. They are places for greenspace and statuary, but most people making their way through town see them wasting their precious D.C. time. Some of them have tunnels so you can sink under and pass without much slowdown, but, for whatever reason, the City has never dug a tunnel for Washington Circle’s busiest street, K Street.
K Street is where all the lobbyists in town work. In other words, it is where everyone in town works and every-single-one with a gigantic ego (much, much bigger than the egos in elected office – these ones told the folks who’d survived real elections what to do). So getting from posh Georgetown to K Street every morning is a big priority to a lot of big deal people.
And Malcolm BMX had to make it to K Street that morning, too, because people at the Sierra Club wanted to see him and talk to him about reaching some of the communities that listened to him when they wouldn’t listen to them. He could always talk organizing with the good guys.
He got to the circle and tried to weave toward the middle lanes of traffic, but the traffic was slow and a big bread delivery truck, making its way to a little French bakery at the outer edge of the business district, had cut too far over to one side for him to slide past it between lanes, so he went behind it, to the inside, just past the bumper of the car following it and tried to pass the truck along its left side. He found a cab there, without enough room again, so he wove behind the cab and now he was faced with the sidewalk.
Fine, he thought, the traffic is moving slowly and he still had a lot of circle to go. He hopped up onto it. When the traffic hit a lull he would make a way across it, into the lane that continued on down K Street - rather than continuing to follow the circle. That’s a great thing about a bike, he thought.
He thought about how cars get stuck in lanes and have to double back or extend their routes in roundabout ways. He couldn’t think of the last time that had happened to him.
Traffic had sped up a bit, though, because of a light a ways up ahead. So he slowed down a lot and proceeded around the edge of the circle on the sidewalk. He knew he could time it so that he could roll back down into the traffic, make his way across the two lanes while they were crawling again and get out the way he needed to. He just had to watch the cars up ahead. It would be twenty or thirty seconds yet.
Then he heard the creaky crank of a poorly maintained mountain bike behind him. Fine, he thought, ‘love that kind of company. He maintained the center of the sidewalk because, after all, no point in leaving room for the other cyclist to pass. Nowhere for him to go just yet.
But the other cyclist tried to pass him. That is, he drew his front wheel up along the street side of BMX’s back wheel, and Malcolm could just feel the guy fidgeting to get past his flank.
Malcolm BMX stopped his bike, turned his front wheel in, dropped his feet to the ground and caught the handlebars of the cyclist behind him. He was a thick young executive assistant or paralegal type. He looked way too impatient.
“Which one of us looks like an old school cyclist?” BMX asked. BMX wore cut-off shorts and a raggedy old race jersey with a long sleeve t-shirt under it. His skin made him look like he’d seen desert warfare, then, of course, the bandannaa around his neck and the one around his head. Of course, the dreds.
The young man sneered at him.
“You just pulled your wheel up alongside me on the same side you know I’m going to turn onto. I mean, where do you think I’m going to turn from here, into those bushes?” BMX pointed at the brush on the park side of the sidewalk.
“You’re impatient. You think I’m slow. Guess what, you’re in a hurry to nowhere. You’re going to rush past me and then sit up there at K Street and wait for the traffic to slow enough – only you’re going to need it to stop, because you’ll be at a standstill and unable to move in easy.
“See where I’m getting? I like you, kid. You’re on a bike and that’s aces with me, but I was timing this so I could slip through this garbage like a lubed up chainring through a new derailleur. You gotta read traffic at a spot like this. You weren’t reading. You were fidgeting. If I hadn’t heard your rusty ass machine here, I might have turned in and sent you sailing into, I dunno, that Oldsmobile there.
“So next time you see a guy looks like he’s ridden some going slow somewhere, get behind him. We are not a poky breed of puppy, you know? You might learn something.
“Riding pushy like you’re riding, that’s dangerous stuff. Dangerous stuff is for assholes, and assholes get to work in cars.
“We’re bikers. We’re nice people.”
- The end -
Read Previous installments of Malcolm BMX
--Malcolm BMX: Charisma, Please
--Malcolm BMX: Good Ideas Don’t Leave You Stinky
-- Malcolm BMX: The Bulldozer
-- Malcolm BMX: Dupont Circle Adventure
-- Malcolm BMX: Being Neighborly
-- Malcolm BMX: Meet the Boss
-- Malcolm BMX: Pedaling Revolution
Brady Russell works in politics. He has been a national
organizer, a local organizer, a campus organizer and is currently an Organizer with the Philadelphia Unemployment Project. He started writing in elementary
school and never stopped. In fact, he remembers his second grade
teacher scolding his class for not trying any of the writing exercises
she had put out for them, which she finished by saying, "except for
Brady and he's done all of them."
Sometime in high school he decided he would not pursue studies in writing and just try to do it himself. Brady had a few opinion pieces published in some small magazines around the country, but so far he's largely been writing in a closet and keeping his work there.
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