#50 - MY BIKE

This new bicycle was a Raleigh, a dark shiny blue-green English racing bike. Before I rode it away from the store on 14th Street I had them change the handle bars from the bent-in attack-style racing kind, where you are so hunched over you see nothing but the road in front of you, to something like the Schwinn with wide handle bars that I rode in Connecticut before I was old enough to drive. With the wide handle bars I can lean back and take in what is around me – the trees, the water. Sometimes when I am on the runners/cyclers path along the East River downward looking joggers pass me.

Sometimes I rise at dawn and circle Manhattan, up along the Hudson, then down along the East River. One day there is a limousine waiting by the helipad on the Hudson for what is surely some mobster coming in from Atlantic City, a uniformed driver and a burly cat-eyed bodyguard standing by the limousine scanning the sky. There are some warm days now and sometimes there are nearly naked girls, some of them surprisingly pretty, on the lookout for Jersyites with cash who drive through the tunnel.