Bike Gang

Way back on Wednesday, no, actually Tuesday B.F. (Before the Flood), Aaron Cometbus showed up in my neighborhood. We met at the corner cafe and sat there drinking coffee for a while, but then he invited me along to pick up his bike from the repair shop. Aaron has a habit of inviting me on exciting errands. Last time I saw him, practically the first words out of his mouth were, "Dude, come with me to the UPS store!"

I suspected Aaron of having an agenda, which is generally a safe assumption, and in this case, it turned out that he had decided it was time I bought a bike. The thought has crossed my mind numerous times this summer, especially when waiting in vain for recalcitrant trains or wishing I could whip silently and swiftly through the late night streets to Greenpoint instead of slogging along on foot for the better part of half an hour.

But I kept putting off on the grounds that a) bikes are too expensive in NYC; b) I already have a perfectly good bike in California which one of these days I'll theoretically manage to get shipped out here. But Aaron was keen on this bike repairman/dealer who operates out of his garage on Lorimer. "I think he's the real deal," he says, which is about as full-on an endorsement as you're ever going to get from Aaron.

And sure enough, before I'd been there five minutes, I was being sold a not particularly lovely but perfectly functional bicycle for $50, which included a quick clean-up and spruce-up, a new (well, only slightly used) back tire, new handle grips) and a heavy duty (albeit slightly rusty) chain for locking it to lampposts thrown in. No, it's not quite as nice as my OG bike, purchased in Willits, California for $75 in 1993, but it's coming in a lot more handy.

Like tonight, for example, when I was tied up on the phone for quite a while, making me rather later for the Gravy Train show over on the North Side. No problem: onto the bike I went, and was there in maybe five minutes, ten minutes max. True, in my bike riding clothes consisting of baggy shorts and muscle T, I was a bit out of place in the finely kempt and coiffed crowd of rather glossy hipsters who half filled Studio B (the rest of the audience consisted of, if you believe Jackie O. gay boys and their fag hags, or if you trust my impession, lots of little lesbians and a sprinkling of young men of indeterminate orientation).

For there allegedly being no lesbians there, Jackie O. sure got chatted up a lot, which was more than you could say for myself or Unlovable Frank, who stood morosely around the edge of the stage and greeted me on my arrival with, "Great drummer, eh?" He was referring to the woman playing drums for the first band, Love Or Perish, who turned out to be one Molly Neuman, late of Lookout Records, Pee Chees, Bratmobile, riot grrrl, etc. etc.

She is a very good drummer indeed, and seems to have gotten even better since the last time I saw her. The rest of the band? They were very good, too, or rather they played very well and looked good. The songs were a bit forgettable, though, and the last one went on for an unforgivable five or six minutes.

That crime paled, however, compared with what was at least an hour's wait for the next band. This being Williamsburg, of course, nobody in the crowd had to go to work the next morning (except Jackie O. and Unlovable Frank, and yes, I'm being sarcastic about the rest of the audience, too). Jackie explained that the reason we'd been subjected to this seemingly interminable barrage of cheesy dance music (which actually started out good but plummeted rather precipitously downhill for a very long time before it finally stopped) was that we were being graced with a "celebrity" DJ, namely J.D. Samson from the band Le Tigre. Why someone supposedly knows how to be a DJ because they play in a band has always baffled me, but I'm giving J.D. the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she was responsible for the good dance music in the first half of the hour rather than the reprehensible codswallop in the latter.

I also discovered, lurking in the front row, the long-presumed-vanished Rop, also formerly of Rice, the Pee Chees, Lookout Records Mail Order, and a host of other activities. The last time I saw him, in Park Slope in the year 2000, he was leaving for New Mexico, and most people I knew assumed he was still there. "Actually, I never left Brooklyn," he breezily informed me. "I just didn't come out much for a while." Unlovable Frank introduced me to the writer/illustrator Cristy Road, who I'd been hearing and seeing so much about, and we had a nice chat about Florida and books and all sorts, and STILL there was no sign of another band playing.

Okay, they finally did come on, "they" being something called VIP, which turned out to be three manic gay white rappers, two of them sounding as though they'd swallowed helium balloons in the vein of MC Chris. The gay disco Beastie Boys, I opined, whereupon Unlovable Frank responded with, "A high school talent show in Chelsea." I found them a lot more amusing than Frank did, and he eventually sulked off to the bar to wait them out.

He waited in vain, however, as they were back to share the stage with Gravy Train in the night's big production number, and also appeared in a music video/short film which aired in between bands and during the entire time Gravy Train were playing. At least Gravy Train didn't make us wait for hours; they came clattering on to the stage rather quickly, in fact, led by a rubber-limbed and gurning Brontez, who as usual was the life of the party. Seth (Hunx) and the ladies lurked behind the keyboard at the back of the stage while Brontez hectored and harangued the crowd into a frenzy, and both boys were down to not much more than their underwear (well, Brontez was down to his tighty-whities and nothing more) well before the set was finished.

Although Jackie O., Unlovable Frank and I had all arrived separately, we left together and simultaneously discovered that we'd all come on our bikes. Off we went, through the back streets of Williamsburg, like an incredibly diverse (in terms of ages, genders and orientations) bike gang with a total membership of three. It was a relatively short journey before Frank had to peel off for the bridge and Manhattan, and Jackie left me in her dust and headed off to Bushwick.

But for about ten minutes it was one of those timeless rides, mostly in silence, where we seemed to fly in formation and the streets and sidewalks belonged to no one but us, a few moments when biking through the back streets on a warm summer night seems like the best - hell, like the only - thing in the world to do. Earlier in the evening I'd been talking to a different kind of biker - his Harley was parked out in front of my house - and he told me how he and two buddies had, on the spur of the moment, ridden off to Philadelphia to get cheese steaks one Sunday night. And that's how it felt on my bike tonight: I just wanted to keep riding and riding until nothing short of the ocean or the Continental Divide put a stop to my meanderings.

But instead I came home and wrote about it just for you.

Biking To Gilman

So there I was in Berkeley for the first time in a few years without access to a car. True, I never drove all that much when I did have a car, but there were certain destinations - and especially certain times of night - when using public transportation was a miserable and/or impossible prospect.

Remind me, while I'm on the subject, never ever to complain about the New York City subway again. After a couple days of depending on the Bay Area Toonerville Trolley, misleadingly known as Bay Area "Rapid Transit," it was easy to see why the streets of Berkeley and Frisco are largely deserted at night. It's just not worth the hassle of going out.

It used to be that while you had to wait a long time between trains (but hey, what's your hurry, there's nowhere to go anyway, so you might as well just kick back, smoke another joint and munch on some sautéed bean sprouts), but at least BART kept to a schedule, which, if you weren't too stoned to figure it out, meant you could generally show up at the station just in time for a train. No longer, though; in its ongoing crusade to punish the people of the Bay Area for being such gullible dupes, BART has now taken to canceling trains without notice and leaving people hanging out on the station platform for up to half an hour, by which time many of them could have walked where they were going. Except of course that they've already paid to get in the station and there are no refunds.

It used to be that you could take a train straight to San Francisco Airport, just like many real cities, but that made too much sense and was too easy. Now you've got to take three trains, including an 11 minute wait on the platform while other trains that are going almost but not quite to SFO pass you by. Brilliant transit planning, BART guys. Let me guess: you never actually ride the thing, do you?

At least I could get to my mom's and brother's houses in El Cerrito pretty easily. Six minutes on the train and a 10 minute walk at either end made it almost as quick as driving. But even that got a little tedious, so I decided to follow my other brother's example and ride a bike there. The last time - years ago, I must admit - I tried riding to El Cerrito I followed the same route I'd normally use if driving a car, and it was harsh: up and down some very stroppy hills. I was completely exhausted by the time I got there and ended up bringing my bike back on the BART.

But this time I thought things out a little more carefully and on doing so realized that the bicycle freeway - aka the bike path or the Ohlone Greenway - that passed near my mom's house was the same one that passed very near my Berkeley HQ, and that it was pretty much a level run all the way there.

I'd ridden the path many times before, but only as far as Gilman Street, which is what, for old times' sake, I'd done on Friday night. I was hoping to run into Jesse Luscious there, being that he'd posted on the PPMB that he might be stopping in to see Social Unrest. He didn't show up, as it turned out, but quite a few other old-timers did, including, of course, SU guitarist James Brogan, who I also knew from his days with Samiam.

Then there was Gary Gutfeld, formerly of the Hi-Fives, who seemed a semi-unlikely candidate to be playing drums for such a proto/über-punk outfit like Social Unrest, but who acquitted himself masterfully (I shouldn't be surprised, really; Luis Illades, best known for his efforts on behalf of the poppier Pansy Division and Plus ones, turned out to be a totally solid punk rock drummer when he linked up with SF's re-united Avengers).

I was thinking it must have been nearly 20 years since I'd last seen Social Unrest, and if it wasn't quite that long, it's got to have been at least 15 or 18. And while I was remarking to someone on how remarkable it was that a band could still have so much youthful punk rock energy after 25 years, it suddenly occurred to me that they've been around even longer than that, more like 27-28 years. Wow.

I was especially impressed by singer Creetin K-os, who looked and carried himself like the kind of half-glam/half-gritty rock stars who used to front punk bands back in the glory days, and of whom Operation Ivy singer Jesse Michaels once said, "Basically, I ripped off his vocal style to a major degree. If people hear Creetin K-os sing, they'll be like, 'Oh, I see where he got all his shit.'" The guy's obviously a few years older than he was when he first fronted SU, but without getting right up front and examining him closely, you'd be hard pressed to tell.

It being "punk" night at Gilman, the troglodyte element was a little more evident among the audience. Actually, there was no more than a handful of serious old-fashioned moshers trying their best to make a circle pit while simultaneously trying to slam into and knock down as many innocent bystanders as possible. One particular goombah, who couldn't have been more than 5'4" but was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, especially delighted in blindsiding and sending sprawling anyone unwise enough to let his or her eyes stray toward the stage instead of the pit.

Forgetting momentarily how old and comparatively scrawny I am, I briefly mulled over stepping into the pit and sorting him out, but fortunately sanity returned before I took any such action. Back in 1987 or 88, when I was skinnier and crazier, but also 20 years younger, I single-handedly muscled a large obstreperous skinhead out of the pit and out the front door before he or anyone else realized what was happening. I've never understood how I got away with that, unless it was simply a matter of the guy simply being in shock that he was being manhandled by a guy half his size.

Gilman being Gilman, nobody did anything about the homicidal slam dancers except grumble to themselves or surreptitiously shove back when no one was looking. It kind of reminded me of the club's attitude toward smoking: it's one of the last public places in California where people are allowed to smoke indoors, even though smokers are now a tiny minority.

It wasn't always that way: a few years back, the joint reeked with great clouds of cigarette smoke as mobs of teenagers declared their freedom from mom and dad by puffing up a storm. But for some reason, that's no longer the case, which makes it all the more obvious how one single smoker can stink up the air for a couple dozen other people nearby.

But no one would dream of telling Mr. Smoker to take it outdoors, because that wouldn't be "punk." Ah well. I had to move a few times because some clueless dink parked himself right next to me with a slow-burning and especially stinky cigarette which he then used to strike elaborate poses meant apparently to illustrate just how cool he was but, um, failed miserably. Hey, that's Gilman. You take the tacky with the ultra-cool.

Anyway, the bike ride there and back was so pleasant and easy that the next day I high-tailed it over to El Cerrito over an as yet unexplored (except on foot) stretch of the Greenway. I thought it was especially cute how at Eureka Street in EC they even had an on ramp just like car freeways, complete with a mini-sized Yield sign. Again, the ride took me about the same amount of time it would have taken if I'd traveled by BART or automobile.

Had a nice time walking around EC with my mom, but when it came time to zip back to Berkeley and then on to BART for the trip to the airport, a great foul and chilly wind had sprung up, one of those winds Frisco and the near East Bay often get this time of year that makes it feel almost worse than midwinter. It was also blowing straight in my face all the way to Berkeley, and tearing right through my flimsy little jacket that by all normal logic should have been more than adequate for the last days of May. It didn't help, either, that I'd just checked the weather back home in New York and learned that it was a sunny 88 degrees there.

I wish I could have figured out a way to pack my bike up and ship it out to NYC for something less than the $75 it originally cost me back in 1993. An amazing bike it is, too: I've done virtually nothing to maintain it, it's sat outside through over a dozen Bay Area winters, and yet with little more than some air in the tires and a smattering of oil for the gears, it ran like a charm. I can't imagine what sort of additional comfort people who spend a couple grand on a bike are getting for their money.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to figure out any economical way of getting the bike here to NY short of hiring a big truck to drive it and all my remaining California possessions across the country, so in the interim I guess I'll have to look for its $75 equivalent on this side of the country, because after braving the wintry gales of a Frisco "spring," the idea of cruising the hot summer streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan suddenly seems a lot more appealing.

Oh yeah, while I've always enjoyed arriving in New York after a lengthy airplane ride, it's about a hundred times better when you know you're coming home and not just for a visit. It being sunny, warm and the start of what looks to be a long and lovely summer is that much more icing on the cake.