The Red Tandem Bicycle

Found at the Royal Ulster Museum, Belfast

When I was about 11 years old, my mother bought my sister and I a crappy old tandem bicycle one summer at a yard sale.

I remember getting on it and saying to my sister, who is almost two years younger than me, "Okay, so looks pretty rickety so don't brake when I'm pedaling or it'll rip the chain right off and that's our brake, so that would be bad."

I rode the tandem around on my own for a little while to test it out and to test the brakes, which were not good. If the bike was going at a pretty decent clip I had to stand up on the pedals and lean back to get it to stop in a reasonable amount of time.

Watching her big brother wrangle this thing to a stop must have made an impression on my sister because what did she do when we're halfway down Illini Road? Bombing down this fuck-of-a-hill? She jerks her feet back on the pedals in anticipation of the long stopping distance.

Now, the problem with this was that I was still idly pedaling forward. The conflict between the gears and the chain was violent and sudden. No sooner that my sister stood up on the pedals to brake than the chain leapt off its cogs and shot out behind us, clattering wildly into the distance.

I swear it's a miracle nobody was behind us. That thing could have killed someone. I imagined it going through somebody's window and decapitating some poor bastard innocently standing in their own house.

So, now we're flying down this hill with no brakes. The road terminates at the bottom in a T-intersection, which the tandem is not agile enough to turn into especially with no brakes to speak of.

I know this intersection though and I'm developing a plan. There's a good amount of grass on the other side of the intersection, so I figure that once we hit that it'll slow us down enough that we can come to a smooth stop.

So I shout at my sister, "We're going straight!"

And this is where she starts screaming bloody murder about how I'm trying to kill her.

Her specific claim was about how beyond the short lawn I was aiming for was not only a lot of brush and such, but there was also the neighborhood creek. A seasonal drainage ditch that was at that time about four feet deep and surrounded by thick brown mud.

Last time I had the temerity to try to cross it I lost a shoe in the mud by the shore. I walked all the way home with only one shoe, retrieved a shovel from the garage and walked back to excavate my shoe.

Some might wonder if it was worth it to save that lefty Chuck Taylor, but I argue that the retrieval of the shoe was more a story of man against nature than anything else.

Anyway, I try to reassure my sister that we won't make it to the creek, but the moment we leave the pavement and start cutting through the grass I realize we aren't slowing down quite as fast as I had thought we would have. Indeed, we are blasting across this short meadow straight into the creek.

On asphalt this rickety old thing felt like dragging a rusty saw through sandstone, but the minute it hits grass it slips through like a hot wire through styrofoam.

By the time the tires left the bank and we were soaring through the air at speeds impossible for this rickety old bike to go, I was also screaming. Now, I wasn't screaming from fear or anything like that, but more in anticipation and encouragement, you see I've got it in my head that we're going to make it to the other side of the bank and this is going to be an epic story to tell all of our friends. I could brag that on a rusty brakeless, chainless tandem bicycle I cleared the neighborhood creek like a Junior High Evel Knieval.

But it wasn't meant to be.

Rory and I dropped into the middle of the gently flowing stream and came up splashing and laughing our asses off. The relief of falling into the water was cathartic until we realized what kind of situation we'd gotten ourselves into.

The bicycle was resting on its side at the bottom of the stream, I could see it gleaming through the dirty water, and we were maybe ten feet from the bank, which meant that we were several muddy feet from getting out of the creek.

It took us an hour to extricate the bicycle and ourselves from the muddy creek and then another hour to find where the chain landed. Fortunately it had landed in someone's yard and had not caused any injuries, damage or death.

We walked the bike home, having had enough excitement for the day. Our shoes and clothes soaked in stinking creek water and slick brown mud. I remember my hair was spiked with trace amounts of clay. My pockets were full of silt.

When we rolled up to the garage back home my mother made quite a sound when she saw us. Something mixed between a gasp, a "what-the-fuck?" and a choked scream.