Mishaps & Misalignments
By: Matthew St. Amand
Tags: Cycling, Memoir, Mental Health, Outdoors, Bicycles

Photo credit: Pinterest

Epoch: Riding.

Year: 2006.

When it all came apart, I was surprised how easily it happened.

For the bicycle, it was the right pedal.

For me, it was my barely-bolted-together sense of well-being.

The pillar of my mornings — scouring online job sites — lately seemed little more than a placebo. A stinging reality check burst within me, one morning, as I watched the garbage collectors from the front window. After dozens of applications — if not hundreds — over the course of eighteen months, I had landed not a single interview.

An advertorial about a local podiatrist awaited my careful hand. Among her services, she tended the feet of diabetics. During our interview, she had used the word debridement. Something about the term caught in my throat. Unsure why it bothered me. “… the removal of dead (necrotic), or infected, skin tissue to help a wound heal.” Diabetics required it. They demanded it. It was a vital service. The knowledge of it made breakfast impossible.

Ghostwriting the biography continued, but left me feeling more like a ghost than a writer.

On television, the weatherman forecast general malaise with scattered periods of high anxiety.

Time passed. As the weather improved, my bicycle expeditions expanded. To the bicycle’s detriment, I looked after it much as I looked after myself: zero maintenance.

It never occurred to me to look at the chain, much less clean and lubricate it. Never checked the tires beyond a quick, initial squeeze to see if they were mush. They seemed firm enough. I wasn’t much good at buying melons, either.

Never cleaned the bike after muddy rides. It was probably red when it began its life at the department store where it was first assembled. Now, beneath the dried mud spatter, the frame was the ominous deep rust red of crime scene blood.

The seat was hard as a boiled rock and its incorrect height put undue strain on my quads and knees. As a consequence, I spent more and more time riding standing up, the pedals enduring my weight all that time.

As I was soon to learn, bicycles do not announce their displeasure quietly. In their own passive-aggressive way, bicycles are quite dramatic.

Photo Credit: Chegg Study

During the ride, my mind had meandered back to when I was five years old, attending a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk at the local teachers’ college with my kindergarten class. It was my first experience with the Real Unreal. I knew Jack and the Beanstalk was a made-up story, a fable, but my certainty about that vanished the moment the theatre lights went down. The darkness scooped me up as my brother and I once scooped tadpoles with J.T. Hurley along his shore on Lake St. Clair. When Jack furtively entered the giant’s dwelling, a voice suddenly boomed from offstage: “Fee-fi-fo-fum…” I felt like I was in actual, mortal danger.

That, however, was not the most frightening part of the play.

Earlier, watching hapless Jack misuse his mother’s money to buy magic beans transported me back mere weeks, to a similar mishap I had experienced.

My mother sent me to the corner store with some money to buy a can of soup. To a five year old kid, the store was a labyrinth of cans and boxes and bags and bottles, the top shelves twice my height and virtually no label that I could read. Although the store wasn’t much bigger than our living room, it was so jammed with grocery items, the visual onslaught was unnerving, confusing.

Tony ran the store, a surly Italian dude in his thirties, who yelled at kids. God only knows what torments he endured from the neighbourhood miscreants to put him like that. Or, maybe he was just a natural born son of a bitch. Dad said Tony was a crook who kept a damp cloth on the corner of the scale on which he weighed cold cuts and sliced cheese.

In any case, when I couldn’t find the soup I was to buy, I reluctantly turned to Tony for help. He regarded me like a dog messing on his floor. I had only begun asking for help when he reached over the counter, took the money from my hand and thrust a candy bar at me. I protested, but was quickly rebuffed by Tony’s pre-verbal tirade sending me out of the store.

I walked home, stomach in a knot. The task had been simple and I had failed. When I arrived home with a candy bar instead of soup, and no change, I got the reaction I feared. I attempted to explain, and as it turned out, Tony’s well-known record as a son of a bitch seemed to outweigh my mother’s suspicion about my subterfuge. She took me back to the store, put the candy bar on the counter and —

— The pedal came off the bicycle, mid-stride, causing my foot to slam down onto the pavement, jarring my knee and hip. My sternum crashed against the handlebars. Somehow, I retained my balance and steered out of traffic, up onto the sidewalk. When I caught my breath, I walked back and retrieved the errant pedal.

I learned, later, that when bearings are dirty or damaged, preventing the pedal from rotating freely, pedals are designed to unscrew from the crank arm rather than lock, jarring the rider. Gotta say, the bike designers might reconsider that trade-off. At the time, all I knew was that the earth fell out from beneath me.

I walked the hobbled beast home.

It was a sunny, temperate day in an April that was still trying to get things right. There had been sleet two days before and talk of snow for Easter. Such were the morbid torments of the weatherman, evoking images of a crucified Christ with snow on his outstretched shoulders. Recalling, as a kid, my class in Catholic school first learning about the Crucifixion. We had seen crucifixes all our lives, but figured Jesus was hovering in front of it, or stuck to the cross like Spider-man.

“No,” our teacher explained, “Jesus was nailed to the cross, for our sins — ”

“ — Like hammers and nails?” a classmate blurted, echoing our collective shock.

“Yes,” the teacher said.

“But wouldn’t that hurt?” another kid said.

Before the teacher could reply, somebody else exclaimed: “You mean Jesus is hanging there on nails?”

As my class grilled the teacher on the gory details of our faith, I mused how the story of Easter could be greatly improved if Ultra Man, hero of my favorite Japanese sci-fi TV show, emerged in the Holy Land and saved Jesus. Then, shooting off into the sky with the miniaturized Christ on his shoulder.

No, there was no playing around with Jesus.

Recalling the look on Dad’s face when he found me and a buddy at his workbench in our basement. I had nailed two pieces of wood together and taken a spongy rubber Spider-man figure — whose leaping pose was strikingly similar to Christ’s pose in crucifixion — and nailed him to my homemade cross.

Dad had the timing of a seasoned straight man. He walked in just as I finished my bit of carpentry. Raised by a devout, widowed mother and having spent a year in the seminary at age nineteen, Dad was reasonably devout, himself, educated by the Basilian fathers in high school. He looked at me as though I held a severed head.

His horrified gaze moved from Spider-man to me. I braced for harsh words, but instead, Dad said in a strangled voice: “Son… take Spider-man down from the cross.”

Our primary school teacher tried easing us in to the Crucifixion by showing us the Stations of the Cross. Demonstrating that it was a process that led to Christ’s ultimate end. The comic book panels of the Stations were drawn in the trendy minimalist line-art of the 1970s.

The Stations of the Cross:

Peter Parker dons his Spider-man suit. Watches weather report presented by affable, unreliable meteorologist. Goes outside on his bicycle. Rides to the Jack’s Convenience Store to purchase a can of beanstalk soup. Pontius Pilate hands him a hammer and some nails, instead, and then chases Spider-man out of the store. Spider-man rides to Lake St. Clair and scoops tadpoles into his hands. Returns home to give his mother her change for the hammer and nails. Finds himself locked out of the house. Goes around back to climb in through a window that has a broken lock. The window comes down on Spider-man as he attempts to enter the house. Spider-man turns into Father Willy jogging along miserable morning train tracks. Father-Willy-Spider-man’s travails are witnessed by a passing motorist and his sons, who proclaims: “I think he’s nuts.” Weather report ends and TV news station goes to commercial. Spider-man is taken down off the cross. Joke is deemed not funny and is laid in its tomb.

You never realize how efficient you are on a bicycle until you have to walk home mid-way completing your route.

Traffic swept passed. Birds sang. I was many miles away.

“The Atomic Theory,” I said out loud, feeling a throb of pain in my right ankle.

Then I said: “What do you think of this, Art?”

“Arthur” was the name of Dad’s dad. My middle name is “Arthur”. Art Murphy thought these were interesting coincidences.

In his prime, Art Murphy was a robust beer-drinking man who owned a series of muscle cars. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he raced them with friends in Detroit in loosely organized illegal street competitions. One night, he was approached by a local denizen during a race in a particularly rundown part of Detroit and told: “The last white boy who came here ended up stuffed into one of them.” Art looked where the guy pointed and saw a rusty oil drum in which a meager fire burned. Message received.

Art had been a midnight security guard at a Windsor auto plant. He was active in union negations, so much so, that his car, during one set of talks, was equipped with a remote starter.

“In case somebody put a bomb in my car,” he said.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby: “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” The Atomic Theory meets Fluid Dynamics.

By the time I knew him, Art was long divorced from my mother-in-law. He was in poor health, gaunt and pale, suffering with diabetes and had a smoker’s cough that would shame the Marlboro Man. To the end, however, he possessed a prodigious head of hair. At thirty, I had more gray than he did.

Art never remarried. He lived with his mother, and sustained himself on home-rolled cigarettes and endless cans of diet caffeine free Coke.

“So, you’re just interested in the stuff that makes it brown,” I joked with him.

Art’s cremated remains are in a box that sits in the “W” section of my bookshelves. There is no significance to it being in the “W” section. It just fit there best.

Beyond the name “Arthur”, we had much in common. I was in love with his daughter, Grace, and was soon to marry her in those early days. Art and I both enjoyed movies, we had an interest in the JFK assassination, and loved the music of Johnnys Cash and Rivers.

Art was so affable, the best part of our conversations was when we disagreed. To his mind, the only thing better than Johnny Cash, was the music of Billy Ray Cyrus.

“Wait — what?” I’d said, nearly driving us off the road when he told me. “Like ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ Billy Ray Cyrus?”

“Yep.”

His favourite store in the world was Consumers Distributing, whose demise he still mourned.

“Were you ever able to actually buy anything there?” I asked him.

“Oh, sure,” he laughed.

The pain.

Many of my early attempts at shopping were made at Consumers, that twisted tease of a retailer. Their catalogues were amazing, whole tomes of products any human being would want in abundance. Their tidy show rooms held endless, empty promise.

The merchandise they actually carried was stored in the back warehouse.

To make a purchase, customers went to a chest-high table, similar to those found in banks of decades past, where deposit and withdrawal slips were filled-out. The Consumers’ table was stocked with “request cards” that stood in mocking piles surrounded by a potters’ field of dull, stubby pencils.

Customers had to work for their purchases, scribbling the product description in the cramped space provided, the SKU number, checking various tiny checkboxes with those infernal stubby pencils. My already-agonized penmanship was further distorted by the pencils’ perpetual dullness. My completed cards looked like they were traced in dirt with a stick. Then, presenting the card to the counter person — merchant of disappointment — who disappeared into the back, returning moments later, uttering Consumers’ motto: “Out of stock.”

Still grit my teeth remembering when I tried buying a basketball, there, when I was about ten. Filling out card after goddamned card, only to have the counter guy come back each time and briefly shake his head, like a doctor wordlessly indicating the patient could not be saved.

“Could I have that one?” I said, finally, in desperation, pointing to a basketball in the showroom.

“No, it’s a display.”

“Well, I just want a basketball,” I said.

“Fill out a card.”

Back to the chest high table and the familiar result: “Out of stock.”

“Do you have any basketballs?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Which ones.”

“The leather.”

Well, no shit — the leather basketballs cost $99 and weren’t meant for outdoor use.

Art laughed. “Yeah, I filled out my share of cards.”

Part of me hoped that Art had purchased the mountain bike at Consumers Distributing, but the company had gone under years before.

Art loved watching movies. Grace and I had worked in video stores while going to school, each in our own, separate timelines, before we met. Having seen more classic films on tape, than at the cinema, I enjoyed hearing about the experience of seeing those movies on the big screen — people going into hysterics and passing out at The Exorcist. Dad saw Apocalypse Now at the cinema and said it sounded like the helicopters were flying right through the theatre.

“I took Grace’s mother to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Art told me, as I drove him over to our apartment for dinner. My mother-in-law was a sweet, gentle-natured woman who looked like the fourth Charlie’s Angel. Love Story was more her speed, or What’s Up Doc, or Murder on the Orient Express.

“What in God’s name possessed you to do that?” I asked him, laughing.

He was surprised by my reaction, then smiled. “She didn’t like it.”

When a friend came to the house to watch Dawn of the Dead with me, he asked Grace if she would be joining us.

“Uh, no, I think I’m OK!” she said.

Mom told me of the time Dad took her to a movie when she was pregnant with me. It was early 1971 and Dad took her to see A Clockwork Orange, probably thinking it was the story of a clockmaker who inherits an orange grove, and manages to save the local orphanage while simultaneously falling in love with the young, new school teacher in town.

It’s a marvel I wasn’t born that night in the Royal Theatre.