Panpocalypse Week One: My Bike
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman takes to biking through a shutdown New York City in search for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart.
Robot Dictator
“This is a work of autofiction; some things are true, some things are made up. I am currently making this as you are reading it, and because of my various disabilities, I’m dictating it.”
Hi, this is a test. How do you like my voice?
This is a work of autofiction; some things are true, some things are made up. I am currently making this as you are reading it, and because of my various disabilities, I’m dictating it.
I think it’s going to work.
Robot dictation device, robot dictator, if you can learn my voice, if you can fix my mistakes, then we can write this book together.
Good little robot, good little dog, good little machine. Would you like us to give you a name? What do you want to be called?
Capitalize delete backspace backspace backspace.
I don’t know what to call you yet, so let’s see what happens. Little robot, I need you because of my muscles. Because the pain in my shoulder and my hips doesn’t go away. It’s worse during the pandemic, but everything is worse during the pandemic.
This is a weekly gift should you need it. I make it for us both so that we don’t go crazy, but honestly I’m already mentally ill. It’s for the community, because now more than ever we must make our own things and take care of ourselves as best we can. Let me know if you think of a name for my dictation robot.
Sometimes the robot breaks and can’t hear me, and I get fed up and type and hurt my muscles anyway, because that’s what we do—we work through pain. So you may experience disjointedness or breaks or spasms in the text and in me. They can’t be helped. Kids always called me a spaz when they wanted to fuck with me, and I’m reclaiming it. They weren’t wrong, they were just assholes.
Disjointed time, broken time, nonlinear time, lockdown time, sick time—I aim to fuck with time because mass illness has fucked time. We’re all disabled now.
My Bike
I buy a bike. A store in the East Village is open for the essential workers of the pandemic—delivery people on bikes, mostly immigrants, often undocumented. In line with me, there’s a man with a broken bike chain and two friends with a bike that needs new brakes.
A couple of homeless men wander by. “What are you waiting for?”
“Bike shop,” we mumble through our masks.
There’s a light drizzle. I fold and unfold my umbrella. It’s a gray day, not a riding day.
A man in a motorized wheelchair zips up too close to me to ask if the tobacco store next to the bike shop is closed.
“I think so, looks like it,” I say through my purple bandana mask with raccoons on it. My friend sent it to me. She’s with her wife uptown in the Bronx, where they live now. I miss her but can’t see her. I can’t see any of my friends, and I’m single and clinically depressed so I cry a lot. I have a few casual lovers, but I can’t get to them. I miss touch. Sometimes I feel abandoned by my friends. Friends who made queer germ circles without me, friends who left the city for country houses, friends who are married or coupled. I feel unitless, adrift on the waves of my own tears.
The man in the wheelchair speeds away and into the bike lane without replying. I love how fast people in motorized wheelchairs go, how many more I've seen in the street since the lockdown, alongside bikes, taking up the middle of the road. I like seeing people in wheelchairs in the middle of Second Avenue. It’s a glorious “fuck you” to the walking. A middle finger to the abled city, the not-sick city. The whole city is quarantined now.
My parents never got me a wheelchair, though in those last few years when things were really bad, I would have been better off with one. But maybe I didn’t want one. Maybe I was steeped in my own shame and refused myself one.
Inside the bike shop, a man in his late twenties or early thirties helps me. I called ahead to see whether they had a bike for me, and they did. He’s kind, sweet, and wears a green-and-yellow mask. I wonder if his partner made it for him.
I say, “I have a disability so my balance isn’t always great, but I can ride, though it’s been awhile. I need to be able to touch the ground with my feet when I stop and I need a cruiser with a wide seat and maybe more than three gears. I want baskets for groceries, and a color would be great.”
“I think I have a good bike for you.” He’s a total professional, not a bike-bro dick. He goes to the back and then wheels out my bike. She’s magenta, low, with cream-colored rims on fat-tire wheels. “It’s a step in, so you can get on and off easily. Really light too.”
“We pick out my seat and have an honest conversation about my ass. Maybe our masks make it easier for us to do this.”
We pick out my seat and have an honest conversation about my ass. Maybe our masks make it easier for us to do this.
“Some of us get very sweaty and some of us don’t,” he says. “It’s just about bodies and where your sit bones are located.”
“I get really sweaty and my butt is big.”
“Got it.” He shows me the widest, softest seat. I am also thinking about my pussy, and that she needs me to take care of her. More than anything, I want to feel good on this bike and I want to connect with her. I need endorphins because the pandemic has made me so depressed I’m afraid I’m going to have another breakdown.
We pick out locks, the baskets, a helmet. I choose the ventilated one over the cuter more old-school one because I know how sweaty my head and face get.
I pay in cash. I can’t tell you yet how I got the money, not yet anyway, but it’s more money than I’ve ever had in cash, and I’ve just blown it all.
My bike guy seems excited for me. “I’ll call you. It’ll be ready tomorrow.”
I’m numb when I leave, panicked about the money. I am still waiting for my stimulus check, which I’ve already decided to give away, but there is suffering in the world and I have bought an object.
First Ride
At lights I stop. I stick to the bike lanes mostly and just pedal. It’s sunny and I’m sweating. My leg muscles tingle and my heart beats harder in my chest than it has since the lockdown began. Before I really know what I’m doing, I’m at the mouth of the Williamsburg Bridge. I stare up at the incline. Can I do it? Should I try? I take a picture of it with my phone and text my friend and ex-husband, Guapo, that I’m going to try. He knows my disability better than anyone except maybe my mom.
“Do it!” he texts back.
The incline is long but not steep. I pass walkers and shift gears. When bikes pass me, I’m pulled toward them like I’m on some invisible puppet string. I will have to think about this, but I don’t stop. My legs burn and I switch gears. Panting, but riding. Going, going, gone.
What if I never go back to Manhattan?
What if I stay in Brooklyn with my friends?
What if I find a secret bar where people are allowed to touch?
At the crest of the bridge, I wave and talk to the river. “Hi, East River. Hi, garbage barge. I love you.” I count masks and remember that bikers are queer and cute, at least the ones coming at me from Brooklyn. Black bandana mask. Black cutoff jean shorts. Rainbow flag mask. Mullet and red bandana. Black mask. Black mask. No mask. No mask. No mask. The Citi Bikers have fewer masks, are taller and white. Straight men and their tall women. Nothing can touch us, their maskless faces say. Orthodox women and their teenage daughters walking, never riding, maskless.
My muscles burn and I get off to rest at a little inlet on the bridge before the decline into Brooklyn. I’m almost to the other side, where nothing is open, and no one can see me. My heart keeps pounding out of my chest. I’m happy. For once, in the last two months of depression, anxiety, and worry, I feel joy.
There are two women on roller skates in the inlet. Their skates are gold and they wear hot pants and crop tops. One says to the other, “Got it go!” and starts to film her. The starlet waggles her tongue at the camera and shoots the duck, pumping her leg to keep herself moving. I smile at them through my mask, but they can’t see. I keep forgetting that no one can see my mouth and nose, no one can see my expressions. I have walked this city for twenty-five years full of expressions. I have smiled, frowned, laughed, and yelled, and now I am faceless.
You are so pretty! I want to shout at them, but I don’t because I don’t want to bother them and I don’t remember how to speak in public.
I keep riding down the slope on the bridge and into Brooklyn.
When I get home a few hours later, I look at the queer, sad, desperate, lonely dating app, Lex. This isn’t an insult. It’s just how it is for single queers right now or maybe since the beginning of queers. Longing all around.
A new post, an unlinked-to-anybody account. No pics. Are you lonely? Do you want to fuck and be fucked? Do you want to touch each other underground like they did in Paris at Le Monocle in the 1930s? Shhh . . . it’s against the law.
I type a quick message into the ether, “Yes, but how?”
In the morning when I check my phone, the ad is gone, but there’s a message. “We’ll find you.”
A Brief History of Bikes
My first bike is beautiful. A sparkly green Schwinn with a cream-colored banana seat, tall handlebars, and white streamers. I love that bike, but learning how to ride it is an early confrontation with the fact that something is wrong with me.
My father takes off the training wheels, runs alongside me, and let’s go, like you see in the movies. Except I fall. Again and again. We try on the sidewalk, in the street, in parking lots, over and over again, in every corner of this small, dying Rust Belt town. We try for two years. I fall so many times my knees and shins are perpetually scabbed. I eat gravel and my dad pulls it out of my bottom lip with tweezers. My mom puts peroxide on my wounds and I listen to my skin sizzle and bubble, crying and wincing.
The neighborhood is either rooting for me or against me. I can’t tell, but I’m definitely a watched object. My parents and I wonder out loud if I can do it, can I learn how to ride a bike? At that point, we don’t know what’s wrong with me. There is a long search. One doctor says cerebral palsy, but my parents don’t believe him and they’re right not to. But for the longest time, I am a mystery. I can do a lot in the morning and very little at night. It’s totally weird, even to me. Two years pass.
I learn to balance finally. My mom and I are on the track at the local community college. She’s wearing an orange sweatshirt. My dad jogs slowly. My brother zips along on his bike. He’s three years younger but learned to ride in a day. I hate him for that, for not having what I have, for being well and fit, my parents’ dream child.
The joy I feel as I take off cancels out that hate. I leave them all behind as I circle the track. I pass my father, who is cheering. My mom jumps up and down. The wind blows through my bowl cut. I’m free. I can leave them behind, but I don’t yet. They are watching me and it feels good.
Somebody steals my green Schwinn. I park her on the side of my house, near the kitchen window. I’m in a hurry because I have to pee, so I don’t put it in the garage. In the morning I sob when I find out she’s missing. We drive around the neighborhood looking for the person who took it. My father is livid. He has a thing about our stuff, our lack of respect for the objects he buys us.
“You have to learn your lesson. If you won’t take care of your things, who will?”
My mom can’t help me because my dad has already decided my punishment. “You’ll have to save your allowance,” she says, and hugs me.
Sometimes, when my parents fight about how dirty the house is, he relents and agrees to help clean. My mom leaves for the mall to get a much-needed break, and my dad yells, “If you don’t pick up your fucking toys in an hour, they’re all going in the garbage!”
It works, but I cry as he dangles my Barbies over the trash chute. I understand that I’m not allowed to break and lose my things, but he is.
Eventually I get a shitty orange-and-yellow-colored bike from Kmart. The name, Prairie Flower, is stenciled on her frame. She sucks, but I ride her anyway and pretend to my friends that she’s amazing, even though her chain falls off whenever I pick up speed.
In high school I get a cream cruiser with a brown seat. At some point my brother steals this bike from me and sells it. My parents don’t believe me, but he confesses it to me in the family room, where we keep and tell our secrets. It’s also where he gets wasted and I let two boys fingerfuck me so I can wear a tampon. I have a clear goal and I need their willpower to break my hymen. Boys aren’t difficult like girls—they’re always willing.
College for me is bikeless. I usually take the bus except for one time when I ride my roommate’s ten-speed in the middle of the night because her boyfriend sits on my bed and won’t leave. The rest of the house is asleep. I say I have my period and he lets me go. The tires are totally flat, but I keep going until I break the rims. I pass the dark cemetery and pray he’s not following me. The seat hurts my crotch and I can’t maneuver the curved handlebars. I make it to my boyfriend’s house just as the sun is coming up. He’s trying to break up with me and has banned me from his apartment, but lets me in because I’m so scared.
For a long time I associate bikes with boys. My boyfriend in my twenties, the first man I thought I would marry, is a cyclist, Austrian, austere about food and exercise. I am my usual chubby self and still at war with my body about exercise, which I find shameful and disgusting. We live in New York and I’m in awe of the subway, so I don’t understand why anyone would choose to bike when we can take this marvelous, disgusting, fascinating system of tunnels anywhere we want to go.
“You’re always riding away from me,” I tell him. He never officially dumps me but increasingly removes himself from my life until I’m living alone in a sublet where I get robbed and mugged in the same week.
In my thirties my husband Guapo and I buy bikes together. He cajoles me into riding. This is before the city has bike lanes, and speeding trucks and cars rattle me. I’m out of shape and the big hill in the Prospect Park loop feels like a defeat to me. When we separate, we sell our bikes.
Dopamine
I still struggle with how to describe it and what to call it. The technical name is long and needs repeating. People sometimes like to write it down. It’s not something even your average neurologist has heard of. It’s a movement disorder. One in two million people have it. I don’t make enough dopamine, so I take synthetic dopamine. I do okay now. That’s what I say if I don’t want to talk about it, or if I don’t know you.
“If you are not in pain, you can forget what it feels like. If you are in pain, it colors and shapes everything.”
If I feel open to you, I might say, I couldn’t walk very well until I was eleven. I might say, I was very sick. I hardly ever say, I wanted to kill myself I was in so much pain or, I made a plan for how I might do it. If we eat a meal together, I will say, I take a lot of medication, just so you know I’m not just popping pills. The hardest of all to say is I am sometimes in a lot of pain, because then people want me to describe the pain. It’s a tender gesture, but it takes so much effort to describe pain. My muscles are tight, I might offer to get people to stop asking, because pain isn’t describable. It is there or it isn’t. If you are not in pain, you can forget what it feels like. If you are in pain, it colors and shapes everything.
As I write this, I have a terrible headache. I am hoping it will go away because I took my medicine.
When I buy my magenta bike, I’m in pain. Pain decides to buy a bike. Pain wants an escape. Pain doesn’t give a fuck about money. Pain will spend your money. The wonderful essayist Sonya Huber titled her essay collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys. Damn, is she right about that. A pain woman is not rational. She takes what she needs.
