Saturday, May 12, 2012

The Huffy

Perhaps I should have started the blog with this story. My cycling passion began at one definable moment in the spring of 1970 during the third of my five years at Georgia Tech.  I had just moved into an apartment on Juniper Street in Midtown within walking distance of Tech. My friends and I had decided to break out of the dorm scene which was DEPRESSING. Because none of us had a car, Midtown was the only residential area close enough to meet our limitations. Midtown's cultural scene at that time could not have been more different than Tech's, which was all male, all engineering, very intense, though occasionally fun on the weekends if injected with enough alcohol. Midtown was loose and served as the counterculture center for the entire Southeast; the epicenter being Piedmont Park. The park hosted frequent events so foreign to Georgia Tech's culture you might think you were on another planet instead of only 10 short blocks away.

We started hanging out there a bit and took up throwing the Frisbee on the small golf course still open at that time. The course was on the Tenth Street edge of the park and had so few golfers no one seemed to mind our infringement. After a nice session with the Frisbee one Sunday, my roommate Todd and I, seeing a large interior crowd, journeyed deeper into the park to investigate. There was some type of art show, and just as we arrived we ran into a friend from Tech, Tommy Sims, who rode up on a bright new purple Huffy Super Ten. Tommy was the most outrageous guy we knew at Tech. He had long hair and dressed in denim overalls with no shirt. Great look. I had never seen a 10 speed bicycle before, nor had I ridden a bike since the 8th grade, which was seven years prior. I was in decent shape from playing basketball and chasing the Frisbee, as our sessions with the plastic disc involved a considerable amount of running. I asked Tommy if I could ride it and he handed it over, giving me a quick tutorial on how to shift the gears

I took it around the park, which, like everywhere else in Atlanta, is quite hilly and required me to use all the gears. It shifted like butter. It was unbelievably fast on the downhills and painless on the uphills. I felt as if I were on a magic carpet. This ride was very different from the one speed I rode on flat roads in South Florida as an 8th grader. I instantly loved it. When I returned and handed it over, I announced that I intended on riding one of these every day for the rest of my life. Within days Todd and I purchased the same bikes. We rode them to class at Tech regularly and also to Emory, where we threw the Frisbee on the president's lawn. With the coeds, it was a much more attractive location than the Park.

Somehow our main riding activity evolved into something that now seems bizarre; not to mention dangerous. Every night after we finished studying, we went out for ride. Of course it was dark and we had no helmets, no lights and no reflectors. We traveled all through downtown Atlanta, mostly enjoying the big building streets south of North Avenue. The lights from the buildings provided ample illumination. With the limited visual perspective at night, you feel you are going three times as fast as is actually the case. Of all the riding I have done, and I have indeed ridden almost every day since that day in the park, as I absolutely knew I would, night riding in a crowded city dodging traffic may have been the most fun. I intend on getting back to it when I find out I have a terminal illness. How we survived those nights, I haven't a clue!

The bike lasted through college. Todd and I  even rode them from Tallahassee to Miami in the summer of 1971, over 500 miles in five days. Prior to that trip we had never ridden more than 15 miles in any one day. We knew no one else who rode other than our two other roommates who also purchased bikes with us. We were the only guys at Georgia Tech who commuted to school and I never again saw Tommy on his bike.

I loved my Huffy as much as Picasso loved any of his 5 wives. Much like El Maestro, sometimes you just move on. I bought my Atala (that sordid story later) just before graduating, but I kept the Huffy and brought it with me to Med School in Gainesville Florida. In contrast to Tech, Gainesville was odd, as many students had bikes. If you left a good bike parked outside your class it could, and frequently was, stolen, despite being locked up. I never rode my Atala to school and rarely took the Huffy for fear of its theft. I mostly commuted on my sister's old JC Higgins one speed baby blue girl's bike with thick white wall tires she had received on her ninth birthday. I turned the wide handle bars upside down, put a 2 foot seat post on it anchored by a racing saddle and was able to ride with a fairly good 10 speed type positioning. Gainesville has two hills in the whole town so the one speed was not a problem. Theft was not a concern. I never even had to lock it.

So my one true love was relegated to irrelevancy. Perhaps the bike sensed this and wanted  to go out in some spectacular way. For some reason one morning circa 1978, during my training in Neurology, I decided to ride it to work. I must have been in a hurry and needed more speed than JC Higgins could deliver. Rather than lumbering on the side streets with many turns as I usually  did, I rode on 13th street which is Gainesville's main North-South artery. It is a straight shot with not that many  traffic lights. The City did have a bike path which was pretty sorry, nothing more than the sidewalk with a little concrete pads at each intersection to ease you down and then back up. The obvious problem with this design was the cyclist was almost  invisible to a driver going in same direction, putting one at considerable risk every time a driver made a right turn into a driveway or parking lot.

Being in a hurry I was moving faster than the aforementioned pathetic bike path allowed. About halfway to the the hospital, a car to my left and heading the same direction, passed me and simultaneously turned directly into my path. Before I could do anything evasive I slammed into the passenger side of the vehicle and landed on top of the car's roof. Fortunately, I maintained a semblance of control and managed to roll down the back hood as the car continued to move forward. I  somewhat gently rolled off onto the parking lot, tumbling just enough to avoid the full body slam. While on the asphalt I took a quick inventory of body parts. All parts were accounted for, seemed to be functioning properly, and not too terribly in pain.

Very quickly the scene to develop into one unsympathetic to my plight.  The driver, a 30 or so year old woman, was entering an office parking lot as other employees were arriving to work at the same time. Several of the driver's coworkers ran over and rather than coming to my aid, they were assuring her they had seen the whole incident, and I was the one at fault. I pondered getting up swinging or arguing. The former, punching a woman, was unacceptable and the latter was definitely going be difficult to do in short order, as I was still in a hurry to get to work. I quickly decided to adopt Plan C, conceived on the spot. This lady and these people needed to be punished.

I decided to play dead. Real dead. I had been to the morgue a few times and I knew how real dead appeared: eyes wide open, all muscles relaxed, and no movement, including breathing. I could pull this off for one to two minutes and not put me too far off schedule. It was about that time the driver finally came to inspect the carnage. When she saw that I was "dead" she immediately went totally batshit, wailing like an Italian mama sending her son to war. To a lesser extent, but with some musical harmony, her comrades joined her. While this wailing symphony was still escalating, I needed to breath and equally importantly I needed to get to work. So I jumped up, gave everyone a quick glance of contempt, got on the Huffy, and rode off. I was moving fast with the adrenaline pumping but noted the ride was a little off. When I arrived and parked the bike I saw than the frame was broken.

After work I rode home slowly like a dirge. Not a word was spoken. Kind thoughts between man and machine were exchanged, The Huffy was never again ridden.

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