KENNETH
I got to JFK in the morning, but I didn’t have a bicycle to ride. My precious little bike had been unscrewed and dismantled and taped together in a goofy shape so it could fit in a cardboard box. Now I had to breathe it back into form, but I didn’t really have a plan. I had just imagined sitting on a stinky curb and working away as herds of taxis flew by. A grassy patch somewhere would be nice. I saw a black man, wearing a suit, holding a sign with a funny name on it. A limo driver, here for a pick-up. He must know the place. He must have some ideas.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Man, I just know where to park my car and where to get my customer. I can’t help you.”
“But…you don’t even know what I’m going to ask you…”
He softened up a bit, told me about a dog run that might be suitable, but it was small and, surprise, full of dog shit. I told him thanks anyways.
So I just go ahead and start tearing apart the bike box in the baggage claim ballroom. It’s early in the morning and hardly anybody else is around. Workers in fluorescent vests walk by and I listen to their chatter as I throw together my ride. Occasional tourists come up and ask me questions. One couple from Minnesota is especially enraptured - they get that look in their eyes that some older people get when I tell them about adventures, the “Oh, to be young again” glisten. They wish me luck and offer advice: “Don’t take any wooden nickels!” I turn that over in my head and keep working. My hands are getting greasy and I like it.
Then the limo dude walks up. “Hey man, listen, I’m sorry if I was rude over there, it’s just early and I’m cranky.” I feel reassured. It didn’t bode well that the first New Yorker I had talked to told me to get lost. Now he’s nice and inquisitive, asking about my plans and marveling. I try to sell him on the couchsurfing idea, the philosophy of hospitality. I tell him that all over America, cyclists have been known to just knock on people’s doors and ask to stay on their lawns. He balks.
“I couldn’t do what you do”, he says. I feel dumb, and look up as he starts to explain himself. “Nah, go on working with your bike, you can just listen.”
So he went:
It’s not the same for a black man. He says he doesn’t know his ancestors, doesn’t know where he came from. Was one of two black guys at his private school, could talk that talk, but when he’s in the hood he can talk like a brother. Straddles both worlds, he says. There’s a lot of fear. He mentions Obama, says he saw in the paper that one of Mitt Romney’s guys wants to smear him because of his connection to Rev Wright. Says he also saw an article that for the first time, white births in the country are in the minority. The world is changing, he says, but there’s still a lot of fear.
The stream of consciousness continues as he keeps me company, but his customer never shows up. “Hey, well at least I still get paid.” He says he’s gonna head home to get some sleep, but he tells me he’ll give me his e-mail address so that I can tell him about my trip. “Alright” I say, “What’s your name?” Maybe he doesn’t hear me.
“My name is Victory.”
“Oh. Okay. My name is Dennis.”
“Nah, nah, that’s my e-mail. Mynameisvictory. It’s a song. My name is Kenneth.”
And so Kenneth the limo driver was the first face I saw on this grand ol’ trip I’ve started. The first of many fresh faces and new ideas. I feel good.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The whole time I’ve been in New York, I’ve been thinking about what my bud Greg noted about the city - that, to an Angeleno, it’s shocking simply how many people there are on the streets. They’re everywhere! Pick any main street and it’s buzzing. Maybe it’s a reflection of population density, maybe it’s that pedestrianism is more necessary or more encouraged. Whatever the case, with the masses pouring over the city sidewalks like they do, the place feels infinitely more vibrant, immediate and relevant. I can’t help but thinking, over and over, that this is the center of the world.
And while walking is the municipal pastime, I’m so glad I’m here on a bike. Riding around with my CouchSurfing friend Russ, I’ve seen so much more of the city than two legs could feed me, and I’ve digested the geography of it all in a way that walking doesn’t deliver. When I cover it all on two wheels, I can patch the neighborhoods together, get a sense of how this part of Brooklyn reaches over to that part of Manhattan, where the bridges are and whither the avenues run. I think about how much different it is than hopping from place to place on the subway. That way, you’re kind of poking your head out of the underground in different tourist hotspots, peeking around, and going back below ground to crawl to the next locus. In my head at least, that kind of sightseeing gives me a very jumbled sense of the place - none of my mental maps line up. They float around like puzzle pieces with shapes incompatible. Being on bike glues it all together.
The greatest part is that this is just the beginning. Give me another month and this mental map of mine will be a solid string of mental images, 1200 miles long, across a few states. I’ll have my very own road map, and the places and spaces along the way will fill it in quite richly. It’s something to really look forward to.
MANHATTAN BEACH, NEW YORK
The original plan for the bike trip, actually, was to ride cross-country from Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn to my hometown of Manhattan Beach, California. I got a summer-school scholarship and scratched the plans, but I was still in New York so I had to give the doppelganger town a visit. It’s a small and understated neighborhood, oddly similar to the western MB - minus the shish kebabs and bagel joints. Befitting it’s quietude, the place had no big welcome sign for me to stage a photo. This was all I could get.
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
Who knew Newark, New Jersey has a major Brazilian diaspora? I got off the train at Newark Penn Station and found myself surrounded by “Portuguese Jewelry” shops and tapas shacks. I pedaled around confused, unsure if I was lost or just ignorant.
At Altas Horas, I ordered a cheeseburger with fried potato sticks, corn, and bananas on it. Get that grimace off your face - it was DELICIOUS.
MANHATTAN
A beautiful evening, a bridge, and a skyline like no other. Absolute infatuation and a temptation to live here forever.
RUSS AND JULIETTE
Russ was a CouchSurfing king. He was my first ever host, but I was definitely not his first guest - he’s had a hundred-fifty-plus. Out of his room overlooking the Coney Island funscape he took a giant posterboard, shaped like an oversized pair of shades, and he showed me where CouchSurfer after CouchSurfer had written their memories in scribbled sharpie. There wasn’t a single sad story to be seen. “Rus!” “Goose!” they all started, and then tales of Manhattan mayhem and Brooklyn foibles and fables of drunken nights, recollected all hungover-like. People from the world over had stayed here and left a note of love. It was like a human-sized yearbook page from the coolest kid in school.
We had a stupid amount in common - he spoke Russian and rode bikes and was itching to travel the world. We talked about him growing up in Azerbaijan, in Baku courtyards, but there was no kavkaz accent, just the dissapearing r’s of a Brooklynite and a serving of “fuck you”s for whenever some asshole got in our way. We drank Russian beers on the beach and ogled the hipster zoo in Williamsburg; in the Lower East Side we led a gaggle of French Canadian CouchSurfers to bars with names like “Fat Baby,” and in East Village we watched Ukrainian dudes do the sit-and-kick dance at a neighborhood festival. Russ took me to get a mindblowing bagel and this pizza that they dribbled olive oil all over and served with a plastic cup of soft pepper pieces and had pepperoni so thick the circles curled up into the shapes of bowls. He’d be a good tour guide if it wasn’t beneath him.
Juliette met Russ a couple days prior at a thrift store, where he bought a big ring made of coconut. I met her myself over that pizza I just mentioned, and on the spot I decided she was the shit. She was from England and had too-cute bangs. She might’ve been seven feet tall, and she played guitar. She was on holiday, as they say, staying with her sister in the city. She and Russ and I all biked around together on a pitch-perfect spring day. It was one of those weird travel-induced warps in social decorum, where you don’t even have to get to know each other because you feel like you already do. The sad part is that travel-friends happen fast and then the party ends. We all went our separate ways. Any couch of mine, though, is theirs if they need it. Karma is a common word in this circle, and with all my good luck with these folks I feel like I’ve got a debt to repay. Couches are the best kind of currency.
DUNELLEN, NEW JERSEY
“Can I take your picture”
(Muffled): “Yesh.”
“Who are you supposed to be?”
“I dunno.”
“Okay, bye!”
