Can a man going nowhere fast get there more efficiently with a folding bike? by Steve Friedman illustrated by Dan Zakroczemski Wanting a folding bicycle is like wanting a girlfriend. There is optimism. There is hope. There are fuzzy wildflow- ers and lilting melodies. Won’t it be nice to cease worrying about bicycle thieves? Won’t it be sweet to lose the 300-pound chain and its New York City-strength, tempered-steel padlock? Won’t it feel liberating to stop wast- ing time looking for bicycle racks and vacant parking meters? But let’s be honest. Have you ever seen someone on a folding bicycle? Circus bear on wheels, right? That’s the first thing you think. That’s the first thing I think. 54 OCTOBER 2009 OCTOBER 2009 55 Better to admit the truth: Wanting a folding bicycle has its dark will somehow bring me the contentment and serenity that has eluded highly trained professional journalist, I buckle down side. Isn’t it better to own up to that at the outset? A man seeking love me thus far in my life? How could anyone think that of any contraption? to the lonely, oft-times Sisyphean, painstaking work of I tell my shrink that I feel self- might tell himself that he’s after something life-affirming and species- Here’s another question: Do you know anyone who has ever owned both research. propagating, but come on! If he’s candid and just the slightest bit self- a Bowflex and a wallet OWL? This sad little man has. “Really cool folding bicycles,” I type into my com- conscious, that I delayed going aware, shouldn’t such a man admit that from a certain perspective, I have always been partial to miracle cures, have always invested puter and a week and a half later, sitting in the corner there is a better-than-average chance he is hurtling toward heartbreak in them the life-changing powers their sinister marketing majordo- of my tiny apartment is a hard plastic suitcase. It stares out on the folding bike and searing pain and eternal, shadowless, stygian, hellish gloom? mos want suckers like me to invest in them. As an eight-year-old, one at me balefully. for a week because I was sure What I’m saying is, my desire for a folding bicycle is not entirely glimpse of the Veg-O-Matic and its sliced, diced and chopped carrots Reading about the Bike Friday Tikit was cool. Watch- people would mock me. daffodils and kazoos. I want a folding bicycle because I want to exact was enough. I bought a Veg-O-Matic every year for my mother’s birth- ing the online video of the guy folding the thing in three a measure of revenge on the vast and uncaring legal system that has day and was always baffled and saddened when, within a week of ex- seconds was even cooler. But then the suitcase arrived, recently victimized me by declaring that I need to vacate the spacious pressing outsized delight, she lost it. and I realized I would have to put the thing together. and rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment in which I have been ille- What I’m saying is, my reasons for getting a folding bicycle are The suitcase sits for a week. gally squatting for 13 years. My revenge will be mostly symbolic (as many. First, storage space. Second, I’m too fat for a lock. Third, my The night before my first full day on my folding most of my acts of revenge lately tend to be), but it will allow me to daily forays into the Manhattan subway system seem to be growing bike, I practice folding and unfolding it for an hour or store my bicycle in my new dwelling, which is approximately the size increasingly stressful, and my nagging suspicions that global apoca- so. I take a few moments in my apartment to think and of a shoe closet. Speaking of symbolic acts of revenge, I look forward to lypse is imminent seem to be growing stronger, and I have been notic- to plan. I have already decided that I will not carry any pedaling past the apartment of my former girlfriend, who has recently ing more and more bomb-sniffing police dogs at the stations I most lock at all. I will be self-sufficient. I’ll be my own self- dumped me and, if memory serves, in the process mentioned some- often frequent. And my dreams about rogue talking elephants have contained, self-propelled transportation system. thing about a “sad little man going nowhere fast.” become more violent. The tusked mammals have been yelling at me. I wonder if anyone on the subway will make a crack Nowhere fast? Not this sad little man, who, as long as I’m being And my best friend, a voiceover actor turned waiter turned law stu- about my clown bike. I wonder if my gym will let me honest, is not so little anymore, having recently jacked up his already- dent, recently pulled me aside and told me he was worried. check my bike in the coatroom. The gym lets mothers bad pint-a-night ice cream habit to soothe his nerves about the change Why, I asked. bring strollers. Since when did being childless consign in apartment lifestyle and sudden girlfriendless state. Which means “You’re talking to yourself more than usual,” he said. “You keep people to second-class citizenship? I make a note to that even if I want to keep lugging around the heavy chain, it will be muttering, ‘They’ll pay, they’ll all pay.’” draft a letter to the appropriate legislative body in the difficult, because it no longer fits around my belly. I could take up Pilates, of course, or meditation. I could seek a big- following weeks. I wonder and I plan so much that it’s A folding bicycle offers a solution to many of the woes facing me, ger apartment, in which a nonfolding bicycle might comfortably fit, midmorning before I leave my apartment. I decide not which my shrink has suggested I think of as “challenges.” (She has also but that would require more money, which would require harder, or to take the folding bike out. That night, still planning, I suggested I stop using the phrase “stygian, hellish gloom,” because “it’s more, work. That sounds really challenging. That sounds stressful. I have a pint of ice cream. I walk to the store to buy it. really not helping you enjoy your life, or get any better, and it might be don’t need more stress. I could start walking or running, or volunteer The next morning, because I don’t want to risk carry- scaring off potential dates.”) at the neighborhood soup kitchen. Those are out (see “stress; more” ing my folding bicycle on the subway during peak hours, Why a folding bicycle? I’ll tell you why. After my ex and I split up, above). I could embark on a sensible and long-term program of recov- I sleep in. Then I’m so late, I decide I’ll just take a cab. I decided to spend some time healing. I did this by switching from ery of mental health, but I’ve never been one for sensible or long term. Walking home, I stop every person I see on a fold- Chubby Hubby to Mint Chocolate Chunk ice cream, because that fla- I could (and still might) get ahold of the Ursus Mark VI, the really very ing bicycle. “It’s changed my life,” a guy in his early 30s vor seemed lighter and more life-affirming. I also spent some evenings cool bearproof suit, made of chain mail, galvanized steel, titanium, says. He’s wearing a suit. He says he rides to the subway typing phrases like “life-changing gadgets” and “worst breakups in high-tech plastic and liquid rubber, and which was recently snapped from his Upper East Side apartment every morning, history” and “bearproof body armor” into my computer. When none up on eBay by “an American who works in consulting for military proj- takes his folder onto the subway, then rides it from his of that brought the fuzzy flowers and birdsong, I took a late-night ects” and whom I fully intend to track down. exit station to his office. “Best investment I ever made,” walk in my neighborhood, the Upper West Side. Or! says a book illustrator, a 27-year-old woman. “Anyone And that’s where I spotted the man on the folding bicycle. That’s Or I can travel to the new frontier of energy-efficient transporta- in Manhattan who doesn’t own one of these is either where I saw a guy hop off his bicycle, collapse it into a tidy little one- tion. I can reinvent myself as a pioneer in the brave new world of alter- very, very rich or merely silly,” says a guy with a rear- wheeled thing and roll it easily into his apartment building. That night native-energy transportation. It will help me. It will help the world. It view mirror attached to his helmet. (People on folding I researched folding bicycles. I learned that improved technology has will delay global apocalypse. bikes, like Mormons, PETA members and other apparently odd, pos- prototypes, he tells me, but he’d had that fixed. He mentions a screw rendered folding bicycles as energy-efficient and speedy as their non- “Going nowhere fast?” I e-mail my old girlfriend.