How I Learned to Love the Bike
By: Shane Byler
-September 14, 2016
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We’ve pow-wowed in a stranger’s house, then fought in the basement. We’ve wrestled drunk in Big A’s kitchen, then took turns kissing his monitor lizard on its scaly lips. We’ve vandalized handrails and left more tire marks on the sides of buildings than I can count. We’ve known peace. We’ve known fear. We’ve known loathing.
“You took too much. Too much… too much…” said a couple of goons after offering me some Kool-Aid at a party. It was a joke — no LSD in that drink. But for a moment I was concerned about what they meant. Hunter Thompson hadn’t entered my life yet. Fear and loathing was a word combination I had yet to hear, much less understand.
The meeches toying with me were Miles Rogoish and Drew York — it was in the kitchen of the house they rented with John Swab a block and a half from the University of Tulsa.
Freestyle BMX riders and parties. Typical, right? A common conception mainstream society has regarding aficionados of this particular subculture is that we don’t take life too seriously.
…We don’t.
Many make it a point to not take things more seriously than need be. But that’s not to say hard work is totally absent. Most BMX riders I’ve met work very hard, put in overtime to stay satisfied, to stay loose and keep the flow. We’ll get to that later, though, all in good time.
There’s no doubt a few other people I met through BMX were there that night… Big Aaron, James Thomas and Justin Coble were regulars. A few others and some out-of-towners might have been there as well. It was a solid crew I’m proud to have been part of — practically a club of some of the best and rowdiest bike riders in Tulsa.
And we would get rowdy . . . raging to some heavy metal music or even an album by The Doors. If there were enough of us, we would occasionally start yelling and jumping up and down (somewhat) in sync. We’d look like a bunch of wasted degenerates attempting to mock a Native American spiritual dance. Once, we had a group of about thirty going at it in a complete stranger’s kitchen, jumping and shouting something like, hoy-ah hay-uh. And then we got in a fight in the basement and had to leave. Savage times, accompanied by a savage stench of cigarettes, booze and blunts.
Fast forward a few years and characters haven’t changed much…
…To underscore the significance of this and the other photos, I’ll just say that the Tulsa BMX scene evolves like a family, which means Big A is coming into his prime as the godfather…
Indeed, things are much the same as they were several years ago, including some of the lifestyle perceptions.
To be sure, one hackneyed misconception that can be difficult to overcome, is that the point of extreme sports is to show off. For the most part, that’s simply not true. The point is to have fun.
Having fun... Living an enjoyably raunchy lifestyle with torn jeans and tattoos. Whiskey, cigarettes and [road] trips. Pushing the limits of what you can do with a bike between your thighs — whether grinding handrails, shredding cement bowls and box jumps at skateparks, or traversing big gaps between lips on dirt trails.
But the inglorious means to get that high include sweat, blood, blisters and bruises. Once when I was learning how to double-peg grind, I missed my pegs and landed atop a steel bike rack. My wrestling coach became enraged when I showed up to practice with a huge black and blue bruise covering my left hip.
I never purchased my tight black jeans with holes already in them. No, they got worn out from hard spills on pavement and packed dirt . . . from pedals slamming into my shins, which have more than a dozen fading quarter-inch scars up and down them. Most were caused by seemingly minor slip-ups. Indeed, tail whips are a bitch to learn — they involve taking your feet off the pedals and spinning the bike around while holding onto the handlebars. Often, if you plant one foot back on a pedal but not the other, that other pedal is going with the full force of your weight into the lower leg of the foot you missed. This kind of thing happens so much there’s a name for it: pedal-bite.
And Blisters… they come easy from the wrenching death grip you have to maintain to keep from slamming your stomach, chest or face into unpadded handlebars, or the ground.
But for many riders, the shovel is a worse foe for the hands. Trails take a lot of time to construct and dial in. Dirt’s heavy. Wooden shovel handles are unforgiving. Moreover, trails need hours of maintenance per week to keep them nice. If they’re heavily ridden, they need work before and sometimes during each riding session. Not to mention after each rain. Otherwise, lips and landings diminish and dirt loosens. Unpacked trails can easily result in soiled clothes and a mouth full of dirt, a bloody elbow and sore everything.
That said, some of the most fun and productive riding sessions I’ve had were followed the next day by debilitating soreness and stiff joints; maybe a six-inch bruise on an ass cheek, which is terribly inconvenient for doing just about anything.
More than once have I landed directly on my shoulder from an eight-foot free fall. But that’s nothing compared to what some others have endured.
Personally speaking, however, I dare say it paid off.
See, it’s all in the name of a quest for something many, if not most, people will never know… an exhilarating (I know, cliché) rush of fear and adrenaline. Occasionally there is a “showing off” factor, sure, but pushing the limits serves a higher purpose: the more you do a trick, the easier it becomes, the less effort, focus and adrenaline it requires. Doing the same thing over, over, and over again, you begin to feel like a bit of a lame duck.
Reaching a new height, or landing something perfectly, while it’s still a fresh experience: that’s golden. That is what it’s all about: breaking the barrier, properly, for the first time. You know it when you feel it, and it feels damn good.
But when you do something like tear an ACL, it feels as if you’re a tree and you’ve just had an axe stuck in your side. It’s immobilizing.
I did it twice, with the addition of my meniscus the second time. Some of the worst injuries can come from the dumbest mistakes.
Nevertheless, that — I mean those — injuries led to a lot of contemplation on my part. A dumb mistake, a slight lack of focus, left me with a recuperation period of six months before the doctor released me for return to normal activity.
…A week or so of taking two hydrocodone every four hours . . . after a few days, one hour of physical therapy three times a week for about 69 weeks . . . fun times…..
And then six months later, bam, happened again.
This time, I was forced to confront myself. I had to ask, “What now…?” I hadn’t developed another skill that could really take me anywhere and I started to realize that riding bikes wasn’t quite going to do it.
After starting to attend college again after a break from school (I flunked out after a year at community college, turning to riding and working — as a Quik Trip clerk much of this time — for a year and a half), anyway, some awful questions churned in my gut.
Did I waste all that time and effort for nothing? If so, why? What the hell couldn’t I see?
At one point after my second recuperation while I was messing around on my bike, some mixed emotions hit me. They were mainly feelings of distraught hopelessness due to back-peddling so much since I couldn’t practice for a long time. I became so frustrated that I actually threw my bike — which I had literally built piece by piece to fit my preferred specifications, learned from years of experience — in the trash bin.
Now, I thoroughly regret that mistake and I’d like to have that bicycle back under my crotch, where it belongs. Hopefully a trash collector snagged that beauty and gave her to his son so he could experience some of the sharp pain and gratification she’s shown me.
In retrospect, though, BMX wasn’t my demise so much as it was my savior. I was a poor student from as early as I can remember. In later years, especially, I was deviant (often snuck out at night and almost always got a tardy slip in the morning) and I was bad about studying; moreover, I refused to make friends with most of the wind suckers at that goddamned Catholic high school. A majority of my evenings were spent at skateparks and riding around the streets with various people.
Cruising downtown Tulsa at 1 a.m. on a summer night with a group of knuckleheads on BMX bikes is a surreal experience. Especially if you can wrangle up Alex Vasquez. Man, Alex knew every spot in and around town. He was a wild one, too. As genuine and colorful as they fucking come.
Freestyle BMX tends to attract uniquely hyper, off beat, and frequently bright and talented weirdoes. More importantly, the sport has a knack for showing young people how becoming invested in something can really take them places. It inspires this way. For instance, Rogoish began his career as a freelance videographer by filming his friends riding BMX, which eventually led him on a trip to the South of France. Most can’t and won’t follow his exact path; however, it does illustrate how a lot of practice and dedication (and a little hustling) can pay off.
Seeing such a career develop can sway a lost cause toward believing in the notion that finding even a general niche to occupy and master can provide a means for becoming successful, traveling the world, meeting dope people. Yes, literally people who like pot, but also very interesting people with an array of talents. It can sway a disillusioned youth from a state of wandering and wondering to realizing that a real career and legitimate life can be had astray from the beaten path.
To this day, I am more fond of the friends I made through riding those squat bikes with wide bars and fat tires than 99% of the people I have met elsewhere — it would be nice to see them more than a few times a year. Perhaps I’ve become distanced from them somewhat due to attending college in a different town, but I still respect the living hell out of those meeches, nearly as much as the good doctor.
So to those drug-doing misfits who ride little kid’s bikes and get high all day… Thank you for constructing those squalid paintings of the finest quality. Thank you for showing me how to work and play. Thank you for disproving the image that people of your sort are not just simpleton dope-fiend dropouts. And, more importantly, thank you for helping me grow as a person.
Artistic expression. Drunken deprivation. Playful maturity. Enjoying one’s self to the highest elevation. Doing work. Ah, the people you meet at a skatepark…..
Who Is IT?!?
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…No, I won’t explain what meech means, but it was good talking. Nice door.
