Return to the Scene of the Crime

Julia's timing was perfect. She called me just as I was stranded, awaiting the police, about five steps from where I'd met her. I needed a ride home, because the wheels that had brought me to the Table Mesa Park & Ride that morning were nowhere to be seen.

My ride, at least until that day, was a Cannondale Cyclocross bike that had been tweaked and transformed into a great little city commuter. I'd outfitted the machine with a series of upgrades; flat handle bars for comfortable, upright riding, a chain guard to keep my trousers free from spoke-trauma, and handmade wooden fenders that announced that my functionality was not without form. All of this combined nicely in the bike that I'd wanted for years. Unfortunately, it was exactly what someone else wanted, too. My lock looked to be the victim of some heavy duty bolt cutters, and my bike is now carrying some other, more nefarious, and hopefully accursed, rider. Bastard!

In a way, I should have seen it coming. Not because of any inherent belief that America is made up of a populace where one half lives to screw the other half, although that may in fact be the case. I had all the warning in the world when my friend Nuno opened his mouth that fateful morning. Instead of simply letting me ride my bike up to the bus stop, Nuno's gast was flabbered at the prospect of me leaving the bike locked to the rack. He dutifully informed me that his bike had been stolen from CU just a few years back, and that I might indeed be out of my mind by tempting fate. I assured him that I'd done it for a year, and that there was nothing to worry about. No one else had ever bothered to question me about my cycling habits.

Just as my bar fell from the wall immediately after Brian and I spoke about its precarious position, the bike was nicked the same day that doubt was first cast into the universe. Cast out your lure in the form of verbal suggestion, and see what bites.

I'm a big boy, and I can get over the loss. I've got renters' insurance, and luckily for me, a car. Abby the Subaru is a fine, if not altogether carbon neutral, alternative mode of transport. Things will ultimately work out just fine, and I'll employ my mother's state of mind whenever a dish was broken in her kitchen. She'd say, with a chipper, almost annoyingly placid calm, that when things break (or are stolen by some thieving shitbrain), you get to buy new stuff. A real glass half full kind of optimism. USAA, my insurer, should help me get two wheels back on the road, but even in the face of an insurance settlement that will likely set me nearly whole, I admit that it's occasionally tempting to indulge in those violent, vigilante fantasies of revenge.

My favorite, of late, is set against a pleasant, daytime stroll down the street. A double sided battle axe rests in my hand. Presumably, I'm headed to practice for my upcoming role in a Renaissance Fair. Why the hell else would I be walking down the street carrying an axe? I see the ne'er-do-well coasting smugly on my old beloved blue stallion, and in homage to baseball's spring training, happening in Arizona and Florida at this time of year, I take a little batting practice. Without going into too many gory details, the scene ends with the retrieval of my bike which has rolled gently to a stop in the bushes, and a thief, cloven neatly in two, lying in a deserved sanguine heap in the gutter.

Maybe that blood-lust desire for retribution is inherent in the unconscious male psyche. Braveheart, perhaps. Instead of paining my face blue and running around in a manskirt, I tap into some personal, experience based memory. My mom moved into a small rental house after she split from my dad. The small home was tucked away behind a row of mature pines and sycamores, its electronic contents as inviting to a thief as a shiny commuter bike attached to a rack.

The door was kicked in on three different occasions, each at the hoof of the same crook, and each in rapid succession. The boomboxes and televisions were all replaced, then all restolen. Every time my mom told me that we'd fallen prey to humanity's ugly material cannibalism, I felt the intense longing for my battle axe and that uninterrupted swing plane. Fortunately, as I've gotten older, that sense of disbelief and rage that accompany loss are less and less powerful. They tend to become only dates with nostalgia. "Oh hello," I'll say to my memory, "I remember how this feels."

I acknowledge the familiarity of my inner Mel Gibson. Then I become thankful that I don't have to follow the bitterness of material loss with a searing wonder of a thief's ability to take the terrible situation of recently divorced parents, and somehow make it even worse. There's nothing else to do but shrug and call the cops.

And in that same fog of memory at the pang of loss and victim hood, I stood at Table Mesa and awaited the Boulder Police Department so that I could file an official property loss report. Just before the arrival of Officer Granberg, my phone rang. Julia, and we're back to the start of the blog.

She said she'd come get me and drive me home. I waited for her to make the quick trip up from the University, and then I saw the silver glint of her Toyota. More nostalgia.

She drove up to me as I stood nearly in the same spot where I'd approached her those months ago. She didn't know me yet that day, but in brash ignorance of the fact, I simply approached her and told her she was pretty. We talked pleasantly, but before I asked for her number, I boarded a bus bound for Denver. It hadn't driven 100 yards when I asked the bus driver to let me off so that I could finish my conversation and beg for another date in the future. Fast forward, and then she and I were back at the scene of the crime, about to head to my house and then to dinner and a movie.