Young and in flux at sixteen. A small, typed ad on the job board caught my attention walking the halls at Marquette High. I was old enough now to work a job other than the Milwaukee Journal paper route I’d recently sold to my brother or the under-the-table dishwashing position I had at Ingrilli’s Pizzeria. It was spring and I was thinking about what the summer would bring. There was a brother in the counseling office who handled inquiries for the college-bound and requests for young men interested in working summer jobs. The position he stuck to the board was a new one, Position: bicycle mechanic. I read the details, there was an address and a phone number and I called and they asked me to come in for an interview on Saturday.
“Do you know where that is!” My dad always shouted when I came up with a new idea. “It’s in a really dangerous part of town. I don’t know if we can let you go there.” At this point he would usually give me the you’re-an-imbecile look and head out of the room. The pattern would become thus: dad yelling, me squirming uncomfortably for a while until he was out of sight and then me waiting some place unseen, my room, outside, in the garage taking apart my bicycle for the twentieth time, and my mom would intervene and then ask me to talk to him again.
The bicycle shop was on the north side, 23rd and Fond du Lac Avenue, next to a motorcycle shop that specialized in Motoguzzis. Dad was right, it was a dangerous part of town in what folks from other parts of Milwaukee called the ‘core’. I was to learn later that there were robberies, shootings and drug dealing, but what struck me on the bus ride down to the shop was that all of the white people got off at Wisconsin Avenue, the stop where I always got off to go to Marquette, and the all of the black people got on. For the first time in my life I was a minority.
Jim King owned King Cyclery and he rented the shop from the Motoguzzi fellow next store. Jim was exotic. He grew up in different parts of the world, son of a military man, and told stories of men kissing in Afghani theatres and challenged everything that I thought I knew about the world at sixteen. “You’re Chris?” “Ok, I want you to take this boxed bike here and build it in that stand. Do your best and Marty will take a look at it when you’re done.” Two hours later I had finished and Marty proceeded to twist my bars, seat post, wonder at the crooked wheels and the mis-shifting derailleurs. But the test wasn’t that the bike would be perfect, the test was how I dealt with the critique of the build and whether I could correct my mistakes. I could, it just took me a long time to do it. That was fine, I would get faster, and I had the job.
We would wash our hands in a dirty sink behind the attic stairs. Jim preferred Lava liquid soap which cleaned by removing a layer of skin from your hands, so I washed only occasionally, when I had a new bike to build, new bar tape to install, or to wait on a customer. The smell of that soap brings back a flood of memories now of that quiet back room, in the old building with plastered walls and two rows of bikes separating two repairs stalls. I was ensconced after a few weeks in the far stall and in the nearer stall was my English teacher, John Horlivy. Thick black beard with a rosy mouth and horn-rimmed glasses, he was short, a tad pudgy and quiet-spoken. My freshman year, he had caught my attention reciting the scene from the Merchant of Venice where Shylock demands his pound of flesh, and we all knew right then how horrible a demand that was.
Yesterday I found out that John had paid his pound of flesh. He died of pancreatic cancer at 69. I had lost touch with John, but the soap brings me back to John at the sink, carefully washing his hands. I remember that he wrote a poem for me when I crashed at a criterium and lost most of the skin on my left side. We had long talks, John, Jim, Marty and I, in the back room and I realize now that this was me growing up, crossing the bridge to my adult life, tied to these people by my love of cycling.
I’m washing my hands. The master link in my Campagnolo ten speed chain needed replacing. It was getting old, maybe had 15,000 miles on it and there was a slight catch in the drivetrain every three or four revolutions, nothing severe and most people wouldn’t have noticed. John Horlivy would have and he would have focused on it very intently, deciphering the mystery and fixing it, before moving on to something just as important.
Posts
