My bike got stolen once. Actually I’ve had many bikes stolen from me. Not elaborate heists either. Just taken outside of a store or, like in this story, from my front yard cause I was too dumb or lazy to lock it up. Between the ages of 8 and 16 more than one of my bikes found themselves under some other dude. ONE is too many. Hand me downs from my big bro in some cases, but whatever. Gone. Growing up, this caused my parents no end of consternation. “Jesus don’t you care about anything?”

One summer afternoon, I ripped home and dumped my bike in the front yard. I raced inside ’cause I’m 10 mins late for dinner (again). After dinner? Eat. Read. Goof off. Annoy my older brother until he lets loose a stampede of Charlie Horses. Before you know it, bedtime. This night, however…I never put my bike into the back yard. Lost or stolen, whatever word you wanna use. It wasn’t just bikes though.

I lost shoes, books, toys, boots. I lost wallets. A velcro wallet with a zipper that wrapped around my wrist. I managed to lose that. I lost short pants, sweatpants, snow pants, regular pants. I lost full snowsuits for Christs’s sake, and all of the above in the plural. Didn’t matter. I didn’t lose one watch. I lost several over the course of my youth.You name it. If it was an item of clothing or a personal possession that my parents had provided, chances are I didn’t know where the fuck it was. When I was adopted, the adoption store threw in a baby blue elephant whose floppy ears were a pink and blue flower pattern. Gone in like, grade 2. I think it might be down Ronny Delmage’s basement in Yellowknife but y’know, it’s gone. In a landfill somewhere (and Momma don’t think I don’t think about that). Talk to my older brother Cayle Vermeulen for the full tally of wool mittens I misplaced in grade 2. In the North West Territories. Somehow I would come home mittenless. In. The. Arctic. Trust me, my big brother keeps this knowledge like a gun on his hip when we visit Carol Ferro. I can’t ask anyone where my phone is or if they’ve seen my earbuds. Even if I say nothing but have the APPEARANCE of looking for something, that’s when Cayle sounds the alarm. After 30 years without fail, some variation of ”UH OH MOM WE’VE GOT ANOTHER MITTEN SITUATION!”I never reeeeeally got the full weight of the shit my parents did for me. They would never attach a dollar value to raising me and my siblings. They never bitched and moaned about taking me places I reeeeeeally thought I needed to go, at least, not at my volume. We didn’t get everything we wanted but we sure got what we needed. The honest truth is they were loving parents and great providers.I sure I get it NOW as I fork out bucks for Talia’s stuff. It’s not even money, though. I realize now how much they were doing for me every time I have to get my ass up off the cou­ch to clip, cut, push, move pull, twist, measure, adjust, lift, drill, make, feel, bend, buy, check, hang, cook, bake, build, break, mend something, drive some­where or meet someone or tape something up or wipe away a tear from The Rotten Kid’s cheek. Its 10:00 pm as I write this and if I hear her say “DAD?” with a certain inflection right now I will fucking explode. AND I ONLY HAVE ONE CHILD. They raised four, each with their own wants, needs, pains, put-ons and proclivities. Each with their own personalities and all that those entail. Part of MY personality was that I was bit of an idiot. Back to the bike. They bought me a beautiful brand new Raleigh so I could roll with the neighbourhood kids and be part of something, however fleeting. Now I was moving from Humpty Dumpty banana bikes to the world of BMX, and this bike was really something. Structurally it was metal, like all bikes, but coated in gleaming chrome. The seat which sat high on a post was made of molded high density red plastic. Red brake lines piped out from dark red brake handles which snaked their way down through chrome past the cross bar (!) around the handlebar stem to red calipers. These brakes were ready to do my bidding as they clutched like claw around knobby red tires on silver rims. Across the lower bar were scarlet letters framed in black. RED BARON. Ho ho holy shit this baby was beautiful. This thing glowed. If it was noon under a Saskatchewan sun, you couldn’t look directly at it. It was Street Hawk. It was Bandit’s Trans-Am. It was an X Wing Fighter with foils locked in attack position. This bike, this bike, it was…It was no longer in the front yard…Raising a child, what I’m about to illustrate may never happen to you. If it does, hopefully just once or twice and that’s the end of it. You may hear something your kid says from the other room. They might make a remark to the TV or ask a question to some other kid or visiting adult. Could be when you’re picking them up from or dropping them off to school. You’ll hear it and despite the training, teaching, showing, educating, explaining and lesson learning… Despite all of your efforts, you might hear them say something or see them do something and you will wonder to yourself…”Is my kid stupid?”This inevitably leads to other, larger questions like, “He’s 12. Is it too late to turn the idiot bus around, or will he be stupid teen?” Stupid teen begets stupid adult and that right there is when you’ll cease these thoughts and stamp out the vision of your child as a full grown adult, head down, wandering past multiple signs that read TEST RANGE as he searches the ground for unusually smooth or shiny rocks. You may never wonder this, but I know my Mom had concerns. Especially that night.“Ummm, Mom, have you seen my bike?”Mom with her back to me doing dishes. What she wanted to say is, “Why the FUCK would I know where your FUCKING BIKE is. I’ve been HERE all day and you’ve been out doing GOD KNOWS WHAT Mister GOOD TIME CHARLIE!” But she did not say that. She calmly puts her hands out on either side of the counter. Soap bubbles up to her elbows. The only sound in the world is a plate’s muffled bump as it hits the bottom of the sink. Never been religious, this woman. Least not since I’d known her. So like, a few weeks after I was born. I doubt however, there was a woman looked to the sky more than Mom when she dealt with yours truly. “How.” She must have wondered to [insert higher power here]”How? How among the hundreds of thousands of lone, orphaned and/or wayward children… How on earth did I end up adopting this tool?” I really put her and the Old Man through the ringer by virtue of being a clueless dolt for a great many years.Ok so the bike. I’ve misplaced it. It’s not as though it’s “a set of car keys now is it?” Mom still over the sink. Head down now, still praying for some hairy thunderer to please SMITE her son with a [I swear to god, Chris I wish a] BOLT OF LIGHTNING [would hit you and you’d snap out of it!] She began to rattle off one of about 8 or 10 places it might be. The first location wasn’t even out of her mouth, and I knew the bike was gone. I head out the front, heart in my throat as the screen door slams behind me. Mom still rattling off spots stream-of-conscious;“izzitinthega-RAGE izzitinthefront-YARD izzitatyour FRIENDS place”I’m now out of earshot as I wander the yard and pretend to search for something that I know is, by now, over the hills and far away. Dad is going to fucking KILL me… Night has fallen in suburbia and a small, doomed boy lopes across the lawn. I ponder running away.. But wait! Lo! Just beyond the cone of the streetlight, barely lit! What… What dim thing rests there? I stride over hoping the night had deceived my eyes, and all would be well again. What lay at my feet bore no resemblance to my shining steed. There in the gutter, half on and half off the sidewalk rested an old, beat up 12-speed.How am I gonna spin THIS one?I stood over the thing, bent down and pulled her up on her worn wheels. My mind was trying to understand how MY Bike Is Gone, but THIS Bike Is Here. I took stock. The shit had been beaten out of this bike. No way to tell if it was years of wear and tear or just a good solid month of ‘ride-it-like-its-stolen’ thrash. It had those gear shifters on the neck that stick up like two thumbs. Brakes looked like they’d been rewired, and poorly. Haywired would be the word, with a lot of frayed spindly splinters everywhere.It looked grey or else the paint was gone where there wasn’t dings. No rust, but this thing had seen some shit. The seat was crooked but I gave it a twist back and forth until it straightened out. It hadn’t been cared for maybe ever and nobody loved it. There had been SOME maintenance, I noticed. I don’t know if this was a Regina thing or a nineteen eighty thing or what, but at some point the bolt on the neck had been loosened, the handlebars had been pulled back up then the bolt tightened again. The bottom of the curved bars now pointed forwards, like the horns of a bull, if a bulls horns were wrapped in blue “GRAB-ON” foam and pointed straight ahead. I wheeled her into the sodium light, and held this behemoth out in front of me at arms length. It dawned on me. Who ever rode her past out yard must have purloined the Red Baron! I’ll never make detective.Y’know in those murder shows where the special guy/girl envisions the crime scene just by walking into the room? They see it play out as though they were there. I had a vision of this dude careening down the road in front of my house, freewheel spinning. Clicketty Clack Clicketty Clack. Suddenly on his left he sees a bike laying on new-mown grass. Chrome glistens under twilight. The star field in the wide Saskatchewan sky spins above as he ghost rides the whip, a beat up 12-speed. It slows wobbles but before it even falls near the streetlight he’s already on the Baron and gone. All full piston pumping action go go gone off into the night.Could I blame him? I saw this interview once with a con artist. I don’t remember most of it but what stuck with me was, when he had decided on someone as target or a ‘mark’, he’d see the Rolex and think to himself, ”Thats MY watch. it just happens to be on your wrist for now…” Whether the bicycle thief felt he owned it upon first sight, we’ll never know. Standing on the sidewalk I thought, “He sure as shit owns it now”. And I own this.Speaking of con artists, earlier I wrote, “How am I gonna spin this one?” and I think its fair to tell you that I used to be be quite creative with the truth. I’d lie to get out of shit. I’d lie to get INTO shit. I’d lie about this, I’d lie about that. I’d lie in a rhyme like The Cat in the Hat. Some kids in my kindergarten class asked why I was black (or brown, I can’t remember). I told them IT WAS BECAUSE I’M FROM HAWAII. Now everyone was fine with this, even the teacher. We coulda just kept crooozing along with me as the King Kamehameha of my kindergarten class. But NOOO! My meddling mother had to go and stick her nose in MY business during a parent teacher interview. The teacher asked why (in hell) we would come from Hawaii to Yellowknife, NWT. Wouldn’t be the first time my bullshit caught my parents flat-footed. At this point, in grade 6 I think, I was a prolific purveyor of half- truths, lies of omission and full on boldfaced falsehoods, each with their own intricate and intersecting webs of lies layered upon layers of lies. You can’t BE that way without an active fantasy life. I was a voracious reader of fantasy books in those days and I knew two things, right then. 1) It had been written in the stars and foretold by the ancients; This bike was my Destiny. 2) Taking ownership of this bike right now, fully and completely, would allow me to walk inside and, when Mom inevitably asked me “Did you find your bike?” I could, with unflappable confidence and ease reply, “Yes.” Dad would obviously see the thing in the garage. A garage also curiously absent of one Bloody Red Baron. “The truth will out”, as the bard once wrote. The bike was mine and it remained so for a number of years. Shit went down. I got busted. I took whatever pain and punishment I got. Probably still in Dad’s ‘Bad Books’ for that one. Thats not the point of the tale. Before the lie was discovered, there was a weekend where I took that beast out for a rip (are ya bud?). I’d gone from trike to Bump-Mobile (another tale) to banana bike. My BMX phase was rather short lived, but I now rocked a 12-speed built for a Full Grown Man. This was Quantum. I had EVOLVED. That weekend, myself and David Gaffney took turns tearing up Windfield Road. It was a revelation.We’d start from Dave’s house ‘cause he had a steep driveway. Haul ass in lower gears up the street. The Vermeulen home was on the left about 8 houses up the and at this point I’m cooking pretty good. Shift. I Keep pedalling I keep cranking the gears up and I’m now at about 8. Now 9. No real readout for the gears, I’m guessing. If I had looked down I’d have missed seeing Andrea Gibson‘s place ahead on my left. I shift up now to 12. Holy shit Shauna Kazeil’s place is a blur on my right. The speed and the danger was incomparable to anything I’d experienced. I could have easily been killed.In “The Right Stuff” (1983) Sam Shepard plays Chuck Yeager. In one scene he takes an F-104 to the very edge of the atmosphere and peeks into space. It’s so dope. You should watch it. Anyway thats what it felt like, but better ‘cause remember, my handlebars were up and back with brakes on them like laser triggers and that made it feel like I was flying an attack ship off the shoulder of Orion.Nothing holding me back. Now what I do is I pray to some God my parents don’t believe in that there will be no cars as I lean, lay it down low and move left up and across a T intersection. I make the turn wide. It’s all me now. I get upright. On my right, Riverside Memorial Cemetery whizzes by. I’m literally whistling past a graveyard. A boy atop his rough beast, speeding towards Bethlehem. There was an arcade game at the local waterslides called “Lazarian”. Like many games of that day, Lazarian required sharp reflexes to turn and dodge while firing weapons. Dave and I were obsessed with it. A soon as he’d taken it for his first spin, that’s what he christened the bike. DECADES later we met up. We’d finally finished filling each other in on our lives for the last 30 years. There was a long pause. I smiled and asked him, “Hey remember Lazarian?” “Holy shit.”, he responded.