Jul 19 '06 - 1369 W, 3 I - Vote Good + 14 :: Bad - 12 Malcolm BMX: Good Ideas Don’t Leave You Stinky
Published July 19, 2006 by C.I.C.L.E.
Contributed by Brady Russell for C.I.C.L.E.
Rabbitboy
peaked around the corner of the alley to look up and down the street.
Without turning round to say it, he reported back to his compadres, “No
5-0.”
Malcolm BMX and Goliath walked their cargo bikes around
him and up the street half a block. BMX pops Rabbitboy on the back of
the head. “’5-0’.”
Rabbitboy moved in front of them, wheeling
his fixed gear to the front and taking out the thick, plastic card from
his vestpocket. The one BMX had lifted for him from one of the
building’s tenants. He slid it against a box near the door and pushed
the door in. No problem. Rabbitboy hit the handicapped access panel and
the two others wheeled their big bikes inside and let the doors close
behind them while Rabbitboy scurried behind them to get his own bike
inside.
They were in the entryway of an office building at 14th
and K in Washington D.C.. The space was Living Room sized, all marble
walls. It had a reception desk that no one sat at, elevators to the
right and a couple service doorways toward the back. Goliath moved
their stuff where it would not be so much in sight, Rabbitboy
duct-taped a large piece of black plastic in front of the doors and BMX
picked the locks to both the doors. It only took him about 20 seconds
each. They were just normal locks. Nothing fancy behind them.
The
first door opened into a hallway. BMX walked inside and picked one more
lock. It opened into the Engineer’s Room, a large space for mops,
building supplies, various control panels and the building blueprints.
This room was adjacent to the first lock he’d picked. BMX went back to
that, opened it up and found piles of sheet rock, ‘Wet Floor – Piso
Mojado’ signs and trash all over the floor. Atop all that sat a couple
of bikes. A sign on the wall said, “Bike Room – management not
responsible for thefts.” The room had no place to secure the bikes, so
both of the bikes that were left had locks through the back wheel and
the frame.
Rabbitboy and BMX moved all the junk into the hallway
they had opened. When they finished that room, Rabbitboy started
clearing out the Engineer’s Room. BMX started messing with the pipes,
but Rabbitboy didn’t notice because Goliath had switched on the
chainsaw. He was cutting a hole in the wall to the Engineer’s Room from
the Bike Room. When he finished, he had a doorway-sized hole. He
started putting up the skeleton of a door. They’d have to leave it
unfinished, though, because they had not brought a door. The management
would have a door. BMX had thought they might find an extra, but they
didn’t.
Rabbitboy asked, “I don’t get it. Shouldn’t folks just embrace it as part of living a saner lifestyle?”
“Gotta
meet folks where they’re at, Rabbitboy.” Malcolm BMX said. Rabbitboy
had asked him from the hallway, where he’d been struggling to get some
more sheetrock over buckets he’d set out first. He went back into the
Engineer’s Room to argue with the boss a little, and he found the
nation’s leading bike revolutionary sopping wet. He’d opened up a pipe
before shutting off the water to it. He’d thought he’d turned it off.
All he knew about plumbing he’d learned biking out to workshops at the Home Depot.
“Get me some of the pipes,” BMX said.
Rabbitboy
brought those back, and he also brought in some PVC. He started
assembling these large, rectangular cages. He knew what order to do
everything in. BMX had it all planned out, who did what, in what order.
It all went that way, too.
Rabbitboy set up four different
cubicles. Thin. Tall. Little bigger than a football player’s space. BMX
had spliced out two pipes that ran above them all. He assembled
his own webs of smaller, copper pipes. He had valves and spigots
running out of them. Goliath secured it to the wall, along with the
cages Rabbitboy had built.
Goliath unrolled another piece of
the garage door stuff onto the floor and built six inch walls up around
all its edges. He covered the inside of it with a solid sheet of
plastic that he hot glued in. It looked like a very big tray for sheet
cake.
Malcom BMX got out a large drill, and drilled a hole in
the floor. He carefully went in and cut a smaller hole in the
building’s sewer pipe, and fitted a drain into the floor. Goliath cut a
comparable hole into the bottom of his large plastic tray. They lifted
the cages up, slid the tray under, matched the hole with the drain and
fitted them into each other.
Then they unrolled hard,
opaque plastic between each of the cages. The stuff looked like garage
doors. Goliath secured these to the tops and bottoms, and the edges.
Rabbitboy started sweeping up.
The room already had a sink.
Goliath hung a mirror above it. He taped off squares on the wall,
suggesting for the management where they could put storage cubicles, or
even lockers.
Malcolm BMX went back to their cargo bikes and
took out four, plastic packets. He hung the two in the middle. Goliath
and Rabbitboy hung one to each cubicle on the end. They were hanging
very simple curtains. Shower curtains. Curtains covered in pictures of
little French people riding bicycles with baguettes and library books
in their baskets.
“Beautymous,” Goliath said, surveying their
work. BMX tested the showerheads and they all ran fine. Rabbitboy put
the two bikes back into the (now empty) Bike Room, left everything else
in the hallway and they locked everything back up.
What was
once an Engineer’s Room, was now a Shower Room for the building’s
cicylists. An extension of their underutilized Bike Room.
Outside,
they were met by two fellow-travelers, allies with alibis, who took the
cargo bikes and exchanged them for Goliath and BMX’s regular rides.
A
mile or so away, Rabbitboy questioned the purpose of their mission to
his captain again. “Shouldn’t we be filling up oil pipelines with sugar
or bombing bridge projects or something?”
Malcolm BMX let the air knock his dreadlocks around a little before he answered. Then, he looked at his sidekick.
“The
problem isn’t too few bikes, Rabbitboy. It’s too much sweat. We don’t
need to bring bikes to the businessman, my friend. The businessman has
a bike,” Malcolm BMX said, looking away from Rabbitboy and up 16th
street, where the moon hung bright and knifelike above Malcolm X park,
“what the businessman does not have is a place to shower before his
8:30.”
The End
Read Previous installments of Malcolm BMX
-- 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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Genius! Just get it done; it all contibutes to the revolution. Way to go! And, well-written.
Don (Email) (URL) - July 19 '06 - 13:58
ha! good oneb-boy - July 24 '06 - 11:50