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Kora: Guy on the platform at Columbus Circle
Orchestration: Me
Consider this piece an amuse-bouche before the next big course.

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RIDE is now available in these fine formats

It includes “Night Ride,” my first crime fiction for sale since Ellery Queen’s published “Dead Gray,” which you can get for free if you’re an Amazon Prime member (or for 99¢ if you’re not).

Night Ride is long for a short story, about 50 pages, and it takes place in Inwood, where I live. (Inwood’s at the top of Manhattan.) It’s about fathers and sons. Here’s the beginning:

AT THE TOP OF THE RISE he waits for the signal from the bottom, and when he hears GO! he lets off the brake and pushes the pedals. It’s not a big chainwheel he’s got, so his feet are spinning at top speed in about three seconds—but by then he’s already flying.
      Last weekend he flashed past the dip at the bottom and got twenty feet up the other side before he had to stand out of the saddle. You had to stand when you climbed because it gave your legs more power.
      This time he’s going to hit the uphill with great strength, pump right up it, even the steep part, and then take the curve at the top without stopping, all the way behind the trees where no one can see him.
      GO GO GO GO the words whip past his ear and make him grin, sun and shadows strobing in his eyes, and then he’s ten feet up the shallow grade, twenty, thirty, the bike slowing so soon on the steep part and he’s up out of the saddle, fists clamped around the rubberized grips, King of the Mountains, polka-dot jersey. He chants:
      I-must-con-cen-trate.
      I-must-con-cen-trate.
      I-must-con-cen-trate.
      GO GO GO GO! behind him. YOU CAN DO IT YOU CAN DO IT CLIMB LITTLE MAN CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB CLIMB!
      Bobby is six.
      His daddy’s cheering for him. He climbs, climbs, climbs, conquers the little part where it’s steepest and you have to push your legs hard instead of just riding your bike, and then he’s out of sight where Daddy can’t see him, which is a great joke.
      Walking up the paved pathway toward him is an old man.
      “Hey, Bobby,” the old man says. “Remember me?”
      Bobby’s still looking at him when he hears his daddy’s bike come rolling up behind him.
      “Dad,” his daddy says.
      “Bob-by!” says his grandpa to his daddy.
 
“HOW’S HE DOING in school?” the old man asked, leaning in the kitchen doorway with a beer dangling.
      “All right.” Robert rinsing a pan.
      “That it?”
      “His teachers all love him. They call him ‘The Cool Kid’.”
      “Cool kid, huh? Sounds like he’s getting more pussy than you.”
      Robert set the pan on a dish towel and unscrewed an orange sippy cup. “He’s six, dad.”
      “Never too young. Less there’s something funny about him. You getting any?”
      “Me? I got a kid.”
      “Oh I dunno.” Robert Senior’s voice took on a lilt. “Didn’t slow me down…”
      Water ran, dishes clanked. His father looked at the walls—the messes of water damage and the gulleys of cracks along the corners.
      “So,” Robert said, “where you thinking you’re gonna stay?”
      The next voice was Bobby’s, saying, “Grandpa, this is my bike wrench.”
      “Oh yeah?” the old man said as Robert turned to check the interaction. “No shit.”
      “Dad.”
      “What,” his dad said, and the direct confrontation he’d been waiting for flared in the beered-up brown eyes. “Dad what.”
      A keg waited to be touched off.
      “Dad what.”
      Robert said, “Hey Bobby, whyn’t you show your Granddad all your tools?”
      “Yeah! Grandpa, come on!”
      “He carries ’em all around.” Turning back to the dishes. “Knows lots of stuff, how to fix a flat. He’s a strong little dude, but his hands are little so I gotta help him get the bead off the rim.”
      “Yeah, I’m a strong little dude.”
      “Yeah really, Buster Brown, you think so?”
      “Yeah, I’m really strong.” Bobby looked up at his Grandpa, so loving and happy, and Robert Junior’s heart broke.
      “You’ve made a friend today!” Bobby said.

I’ve been talking up the anthology as a whole, but that’s my story in it.

RIDE: Short Fiction About Bicycles

MY SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS and I ride our bikes to school and the greenmarket. We’re not political about getting around on two wheels; we just like it. No matter how much we’re pissing each other off when we leave home, it’s smiles and hugs when we get where we’re going: It’s hard to stay pissy riding bikes with your kids (or your dad).

THE RULES

1. Stay right.


2. No racing.


3. Watch out for the people, and go waaaaay around them.


4. Look where you’re going, not down.

Come to think of it, #3 might work better as “No buzzing.” I’ll try it out this week.

There are also two locations where I stop them and say, “What are the rules?” That means the rules for those specific locations.

• THE BUS STOP is forty feet from the subway entrance, on Broadway, and we’re usually through there at rush hour. People streaming from the crosswalk, from arriving buses, and toward the subway. (We live in a neighborhood that people leave in the morning.) The rule is: Go slow and watch out for the people.
• ELWOOD STREET is a descent along a row of apartment buildings. The rule is: Stay left (this keeps children on bikes away from people exiting blind doorways) and stop at the end of the buildings, NOT at the end of the sidewalk. This is because if someone steps out from behind the building, they could get hit. On the second block of the descent, the rule becomes “Stop at the end of the red metal,” which is a railing against some vegetable bins.

Now that they’re better and safer riders than last year, I’ve started riding in the street while they’re on the sidewalk. Which allows the additional fun of little boys cackling and blowing past Daddy at T-intersections when he gets stuck at red lights.

THEY’RE AWESOME LITTLE bike guys, and they use bike club chatter correctly (“Bike up!” “Car back!” “Hold your line!” “Clear!”) and know lots of rules for responsible cycling in the city—

And for that reason, I find myself yelling too much, because all it takes is giving 30 seconds of my attention to the slowpoke, and the zippy one will be a couple of hundred yards ahead, doing something he’s not supposed to do. Like, on the greenway, he’ll be over on the left. I have no love of rules for their own sake, but if you’re a seven-year-old going the wrong way where giants are known to whiz around corners, you need your little butt moved to the right. Like, now. So there’s lots of STAY RIGHT! STAY RIGHT! THAT’S NOT THE RIGHT! STAY RIGHT! YOU’RE NOT STAYING RIGHT! GET OVER TO THE RIGHT! Which not only sounds like anger just because it’s YELLING, but starts feeling that way, too.

And then if he’s so far ahead he can’t hear me (or is ignoring me, not an unreasonable response to somebody who yells at you all the time), I have to leave the other one and go sprinting up there to correct his position.

And then I don’t know what’s going on behind me with the slowpoke.

I STILL HAVEN’T solved that particular problem—but when I learned that one of the boys’ teachers was making little books of rules with him, to help with his focusing, I asked whether they could start one about being a responsible cyclist, and I could review and adjust it to fit how we do things.

They did a great job with it together.

Today he and I sat down in the dining room and added to it.

I didn’t coach him on the lane-marking diagrams, except to remind him what the sharrows on Dyckman Street look like. He doesn’t like sharrows, though, so he declined to include them.

None of us like sharrows.

CROSSING THE STREET

STRICTLY SPEAKING, THIS caption isn’t true.

It’s Daddy’s job to check for cars. It’s a kid’s job to listen for what formation we’re going to cross in, get his bike positioned, and walk when it when Daddy says WALK ’EM. That all sounds like this:

“SCHOOLBUS! CHILD B IN FRONT!…AND…WALK ’EM!”

These formations are my main reason for this post.

Crossing a busy street with two kids and three bikes, the potential for a very fast cascade of errors is frightening. You can’t hold their hands, you can’t let go of your bike, the WALK signal is blinking and the livery cabs are creeping. You can’t stop in the crosswalk, and you can’t patiently explain anything.

Our basic crosswalk formation is SCHOOLBUS:

We get more or less in formation while we’re waiting for the green, and no part of a bike is allowed in the street until I say WALK ’EM. If I have to skip a red/green cycle because somebody’s being sloppy with his front tire in the gutter, I do. We don’t go until it’s right.

When I say WALK ’EM, front boy keeps his front wheel lined up with Daddy’s. Back boy stays close behind him, not allowed to bonk tires.

Those are the only rules. It has to stay simple and unambiguous; we’re in a New York City crosswalk with the seconds ticking down.

Commands like “SPEED UP!” or “SLOW DOWN!” or “YOU THERE, THE ONE WITH THE HAT!” would be confusing—which boy am I talking to? To what degree are they supposed to execute the concept? Does a helmet count as a hat? Without exception, the wrong child will hear and follow the order—and now I’ve got two problems, and both boys are confused. So unless there’s an emergency, the only thing I need to say in the crosswalk is this:

“WHEEL CHECK!”

I have to say it a lot, because little monkeys have forgotten, but everybody knows what to do.

AN EXPLANATION HAS just been demanded for why there’s no trailer attached to the parent’s bike in that diagram.

If you would like, you may add a trailer.

THE OTHER TWO formations are used less often.

• LINE FORMATION is all three front wheels aligned, and is really just for not making anybody take up the rear.
• SINGLE FILE is for when the available space is too narrow for walking abreast—most recently when we had downed trees from storm winds.

THE DAD I had in my head, before I became a father, might have worked out if it hadn’t been twins. He listened more than he talked, he was available and patient, he probably dressed well. I’m not him. I bark orders and wear five-year-old clothing that sort of fits.

But as long as that’s what it is, these barked orders work pretty well.

AT THE END of 2010, I posted about learning a whole bunch of things that year. Some were things I’d pay not to have learned, but a few were good, like when I figured out that decisions are much easier when you’re resolved to ignore pain.

That’s useful. Right? It helps you make better decisions.

I learned that one on my first 600K brevet, which was also one of my last real rides to date. In early 2011, after DNFing my first 200K of the year by mere minutes, I was out on a training ride in New Jersey, pedaling in an all-out biblical deluge, and I couldn’t see anything. This was partly because of the wrathful downpour, obviously, but it was also because the antiglare coating on my glasses, which I crisped in 2009 because of some extra-clever thinking that would just slow down this narrative, is the very same coating that allows water to bead.

This was in April or something, and as I slowly navigated the roaring shoulders of Route 9W by ears and experience, I understood that I wouldn’t have a 2011 brevet season. There’d been plenty of indications already piling up, but this was the definitive moment: There was no way I could afford new glasses.

Sometimes you can do the unlikely anyway—give it determination and bravado until God relents and smiles. Other times, you’re just not recovered enough from the previous war’s injuries. Having apparently learned to be a graceful loser once in a while, I let go of my brevet season.

AROUND THE SAME time, I was learning to extend my print expertise into ebooks, which are not straightforward to execute well. (Dear ebook do-it-yourself loudmouth proselytizers: Good for you. Shut up.) My first few clients were mystery writers I’ve known for a while. Unexpectedly, the ebooks brought me more print work; and more unexpectedly, socializing on Twitter—mostly about bicycles—brought me more of both.

As it turned out, I spent most of 2011 building a profitable business—and simultaneously losing all my 2010 fitness.

Like, all of it.

So here’s the obvious thing I learned this year:

Sometimes you can’t do two things.

YES, MY REPUTATION as a genius is well-deserved.

MY DAD WATCHED sports, and the whole family once went through a blessedly brief Chicken Fat phase. Unless you count my not paying attention to a short run of Little League games I was allegedly in, I don’t come from athletic people. I came to randonneuring not as someone experienced in physical pursuits and looking to step crosswise into a new one, but as someone who found himself mounting an unfamiliar staircase toward the whole general idea. My six-mile bike commute made me think the Five-Boro Bike Tour might be possible; the Five-Boro made the Harlem Valley 50 not unthinkable; the 50 meant maybe I could finish a century. Then the rest-stop food extravaganzas and arrows painted on the street got kind of old, so what else was out there?

On a recent training ride (not a long one; I’m not back up to significant mileage yet), I had the second half of what was, apparently, only a partial epiphany on that 600K. I realized that while the ability to accept pain is useful, to really get somewhere, you need to enjoy suffering outright.

Which, it turns out, you can decide to do. You don’t just have to be a natural masochist.

So “enjoy suffering” is my 2012 resolution. I’ve never made one before.

I’m still overweight from a year of sitting on a bed with a laptop and eating buckets of horrendous crap on all-nighters, but there are some little bulgy quads in the tops of these legs again, and I didn’t gasp much on Next Day Hill this weekend.

I seem to accomplish more when I go into things saying We’ll see than when I pound my chest and declaim, so: Hopefully by April, I can be doing two things.

We’ll see.

I will not discuss three at this time.

RIDE at Amazon

I should probably mention that it includes my Northern Manhattan story, “Night Ride,” which is my first new fiction for sale since “Dead Gray” ran in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2007.

Hey, look at that. There’s a GIVE AS GIFT button over on the right.

…a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption.

None of us? Not one? Really? Or are you just talking about yourself and the herd, David?

Because I don’t disagree that you and the herd are cowards.

IF I EVER have two seconds before a meteor hits me, and I want to tell my six-year-old boys what a man is, this is what I’ll say:

A man stands up.

If I misjudged the meteor and I have another thirty seconds or so, I explain that when I say “man,” it’s because of my personal associations with the word, not because women are excluded from the thought, and that because I have boys and need to address what they will do when they are men, I’m being specific with my language and we’re all male.

If it turns out it wasn’t a meteor, it was just a Nerf ball with orange streamers taped to it, I retrieve my glasses and return to my point:

Standing up is difficult. We’re trained since childhood to be good, be nice, be respectful of authority, do what all the other children are doing, strangle our natures for the good of the collective and the sanity of the teacher. Sheep training begins on day one of preschool. Sit still, don’t speak without raising your hand, don’t yell, don’t hit, don’t object, don’t allow yourself to be triggered when your sense of right and wrong is activated. Never take responsibility for halting an injustice. Leave the scene, find a teacher, and assume authority knows better than you do. Be a social animal. Go along to get along.

Here’s what I guess nobody ever taught you, David Brooks: To know you’re going to stand up, you have to decide what you’re going to do in advance when you walk around that corner and find that child being abused, because that’s the very moment when your herd mentality and your subordination to authority and fear of physical harm are going to kick in. Yeah, you got that much right in your article: You are going to feel those pressures and fears, your adrenaline is going to go crazy, and your moral blinders are going to slam shut.

But none of those—not one—is what you’re going to do next.

So what are you going to do next? Do you know? Apparently the answer is yes: You spent a whole Times article forgiving yourself, in advance, for doing nothing.

But you don’t speak for the grownups, child.

I DON’T THINK you even speak for the children. I think you speak for the Times writing you a check to get people mad.

BUT LET’S SAY I’m wrong, and you write things you really believe, with no consideration for the number of comments and page hits a little button-pushing gets you.

You invoked the Holocaust: I invoke Oskar Schindler.

You invoked Rwanda: I invoke Gisimba, Wilkens, and an unknown army major.

You invoke you: I invoke me.

The main difference between us, I imagine, is that I know who I can stand to be afterwards. I don’t know whether I’m strong enough to do it when an army is approaching—I haven’t been tested, hope not to be, and frankly doubt I’m up to that—but I know what I’ll do if I see a child being raped.

You say you don’t?

I accept that.

So many people do nothing while witnessing ongoing crimes, psychologists have a name for it: the Bystander Effect. The more people are around to witness the crime, the less likely they are to intervene.

THIS IS TRUE and incontrovertible.

It also doesn’t support your premise. It’s about groups. It has little bearing on one person encountering one person committing an atrocity on one person.

May I, and those who believe as I do, be given the opportunity to prove ourselves. Because it will mean that when someone needs help, we—not you and the herd—are there.

For some of us, it’s a test we will feel the need to rise to.

Some of us won’t.

Some of us will.

The RIDE blog is up and running—and the first post is:

I’m very pleased to announce the authors of RIDE!.

On last year’s 15K, one of my five-year-olds DNF’d (“Did Not Finish”). So he got to suffer through watching his brother receive the sole award. This year, the suffering started a couple of weeks before the ride, but I was the one feeling it—because the two medals in my dresser, engraved with the names of two six-year-olds, wouldn’t be handed out for participation. The only way to get one—to even see it—would be to finish.

October 15, 2011

Ride start: Filling out brevet cards

THE CLOUDS WERE beautiful and fast-moving, so every few minutes the weather changed. It would be flat gray, and then we’d find ourselves riding through a strobing of sun and branch shadows.

The boy who DNF’d last year surprised me a month ago by suddenly becoming a good climber on the little hills in Inwood. He’s light, which is an advantage in climbing, and physically capable of racing his brother up Staff Street with some effort—adults walk their bikes up it—but whining and giving up were his two favorite hobbies this year. After his brother the Drift King got a brand-new rear tire because he’d deposited most of his tread on various sidewalks, the complainer started challenging himself to pull off longer skids, which somehow conflated itself with better hill work.

So I was able to tell him: I think you’re going to finish this year. You rode sixteen miles in one day at Summer Streets, and a 20K is only thirteen. And—it’s flat.

I think you’re going to finish.

So do I, he said. If I start the fourth lap? I know I’ll finish it.

THE VIDEO TELLS the next part of the story, so don’t skip it. They’re both small white boys in brown vests, but he’s the blue bike. Drift King’s is yellow.

THAT EVENING AT home, we talked about his different medals. He has two little plastic ones that he got at school for being tidy or something.

“Does this one feel different?” I asked.

It was still around his neck—he would eventually take it off at bath time. He rubbed his thumb over the front of it and looked thoughtful.

“I mean,” I said, “in your heart. Does this medal feel different from your other ones?”

He looked a little uncertain and rubbed it against his chest.

“Uh,” I said, “No, I mean…do you feel different about it?”

He wanted to give me the right answer, but he really had no idea what I was talking about. “Your feelings,” I said, “do you feel the same about this medal as you feel about your other ones?”

He slid his thumb over it again, doubtfully.

I took another couple of stabs, but I’d pointed him in the wrong direction, so I let it go and he wandered off.

A minute later, he brought his cheap participation medals into the kitchen, and said, “These ones—I don’t really like them, and I never even play with them, so I think I’m going to throw them in the trash.”

They were in the trash and he was gone before I could say anything.

NEXT OCTOBER: The Rockland Lake 25K.

These little 16″ bikes will be long gone by then.

* Until a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed even a great little six-year-old rider could pull off a twenty-foot skid, but on the way to the greenmarket—I’m on the street, they’re on the sidewalk—I hear the usual schhhhhhhhhhhhh behind me…and then I still hear it…and then I turn to look and he’s still skidding. Seriously, a twenty-foot black stripe. [back]

If the playback widget isn’t working, click here to go to the track.

Riff and commentary: Boy on left
Train status: Boy on right
Saxophone: Some guy across the tracks on the uptown side while
we were waiting for a downtown train.

Vocals and saxophone recorded on iPhone.
Thanks to Paul Heitsch for pointing out some mixing stuff.

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