Bicycle Play

by Dustin Hageland

The BIKER walks on stage, dressed to work out, phone in one hand, water bottle in the other. They approach an exercise bike in the middle of an otherwise empty stage, and hesitate, letting out a sigh before hopping on. They put down their water bottle, fiddle with their wireless earbuds, and press play on their phone. Their phone is projected behind them, showing an audio player with a timeline playing “Bike 4 U: Virtual Spin Sesh – The Hill” 

A pop-up appears on their phone, a text. The Biker clicks on it. It reads REMINDER: Your first session with Dr. Atkinson is scheduled from 8:00 am - 9:00 am this Thursday. Type YES to confirm or NO to cancel. The Biker takes a beat, then types: NO. Waits a beat, deletes it, then switches back to the audio app and presses PLAY. A voice recording from a workout audio comes on. Gentle at first:

Welcome to Bike 4 U. For our audio listeners that is the word Bike, the number four, and the letter U. For simplicity’s sake. Using the word Bike, the number 4, and the letter U saves us a significant amount of time in texting our friends about the wonderful benefits of Bike 4 U, writing an email to all of your colleagues about Bike 4 U, or distributing posters to your neighbors, informing them all about the miracle that is Bike 4 U. If you would like to try any of our virtual spin classes, or learn more about us, visit us at www.Bike4U.com. That’s www, the word Bike, the number 4, and the letter U. Now, let us begin with our Xtreme Spin Sesh: Punishment Edition – The Hill.

What?

For clarity, that is Xtreme, spelled without the first E, and Sesh, spelled S-E-S-H, and being short for session. Once again, for your simplicity and convenience. Now, we will hand you over to Hard Harold to begin your leg-busting, endurance-testing, will-destroying spin session.

No, no no no no –

The RECORDING changes and is suddenly aggressive.

Maggot! 3… 2… 1… Bike!

The BIKER begins pedaling desperately as if their life depends on it.

You’re mine now! We’re going uphill. Uphill until I say we’re not going uphill. For how long? UNTIL I SAY WE’RE DONE. Will you make it the whole time? Let me look at you… HAHAHAHA! I’m surprised you were able to make it to your bike at all with THOSE legs. I’d quit now and maybe find an exercise more your speed, like slowly walking downhill, or thinking about moving. Do what you can, I guess; I’m not going to give you the pleasure of my calming presence any longer. Don’t stop until I tell you to and keep pedaling in painful, painful silence.

The recording fades out, and the BIKER pedals in silence for a few moments. Biker speaks to the audience:

Does anyone remember that weird Peloton ad from a few holiday seasons back? The one with that woman who was, like, held hostage by her husband’s thoughtless Christmas present for a whole year? That isn’t hyperbole; the commercial spans a whole year. She bikes, and she bikes, and she bikes, and she never looks comfortable. Her words express gratitude and excitement; her face reads as if you should be watching her eyes to see if she blinks out “Help me” in Morse. Then the commercial, this thirty second commercial spanning a year, ends suggesting that she is going to continue on, full Stockholm, no choice, pedaling her days away because the little screen on her bicycle said her name once, which she either found exciting or merely reminded her that Peloton knows who she is and where she lives.

It’s terrifying because it looks like she has a choice, yet she keeps going anyway. She’s stuck in a life where the thought police live in the exercise equipment in her living room. It feels like she has a million options. She could throw it away, she could just stop, she could blow it up for god’s sake, but instead she gets up early to whirl that little motor around every day. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. Why? I obsessed over it; my days were filled with memories of this completely fictional woman’s face and her permanent tenure in the Tour de Living Room. Then it occurred to me: what quitting would mean for her. This was a gift from what is assumed to be her partner, a shitty gift, but a gift no less. To give that up would be hurtful, and maybe there’s something to that for her. It could break up their relationship; hurt their theoretical children; ruin what she wants for her life. Maybe this is her umpteenth time with an exercise bike, and she finally built a routine, and to give up would make her feel like a failure. To stop biking every single day could have worse implications than having to bike every day, and the biking gets easier. They say that the biking gets easier. And one day the bike will wear out, and she can say that she doesn’t need another one, insist even, and that will be that. She just has to hold on, get what she can out of the bicycle, and enjoy what the bicycle’s existence, no matter how truly, truly evil, adds to her day-to-day life. At least that’s the best explanation I can come up with. It’s an arduous ride, but it’s one that we all must endure. 

The BIKER indicates their bicycle.

You know what the sad part is? I bought this AFTER seeing that ad, after obsessing over the woman who came to be known as “Peloton Girl.” It’s fiction. I know it’s fiction. It’s a poorly crafted attempt to get the general public to exchange their hard-earned money for a big hunk of outdated transportation secured to the ground so that it can’t actually move you anywhere, but instead supplies a halfhearted promise that you might look better naked. It sounds dumb, but it works, doesn’t it? At least it worked on me. I mean, this isn’t a Peloton, and I got it second hand, but it kind of worked.

The BIKER takes a moment to catch their breath, still pedaling.

I guess I got it because the routine didn’t… seem that different? Like, it felt familiar, so how could it be worse, right? At that point, I might as well. People say it’s great. They do. You always hear about how great someone’s spin instructor is. Or at least I hear that you hear. I don’t know that anyone has ever told me directly, but I believe someone has told me that someone else has told them about a really great spin class. I guess… in that case you hear that someone heard that someone heard…

It’s a ridiculous thing if you think about it. You have someone describe how you are biking while you pretend to bike. “Hard now uphill.” “Take it easy, we’re on a straight-away.” “Watch out for that pothole. ” It’s bizarre. And it was “invented” and sold as if it was this genius thing, this new advancement in exercise technology, but… do you know what they called spin classes before there were spin classes? Biking. It’s just biking, a two-hundred-year-old form of transportation, with all the reality, all the life, sucked out of it, and why? Because it rains sometimes? Because this is slightly easier? Because inconvenience is terrifying?

But who am I to talk, I guess? Here I am, inside, pedaling a nonfunctional bicycle, while outside the sun shines. They got me.

WAS THAT BRUTAL ENOUGH, YOU WORTHLESS, EMPTY, MEANINGLESS BAG OF GOO? Good, or bad, depending on your answer. I can’t hear you, this is a recording, but if I was there, the sounds of your suffering would be music to my ears. Well let’s crank it up a notch. UPHILL 3… 2… 1… NOOOOOOOOOW!!

The BIKER ups the resistance and begins to struggle harder to move the pedals, going slower, but continuing on.

At least I haven’t fallen off yet. You know, silver linings and all. I have a habit of falling off bikes. Real ones, of course. Most of my scars are from falling off bikes. This one (pointing to right arm) is from an ex’s overexcited dog, and there's an itty bitty one here (holding out thumb) that is a cooking, more specifically chopping, mishap, but these – (pointing to left knee) – these are from bikes. This smaller, but deeper, one was from an actual bike. I was biking home. On gravel. Like, big gravel. Chunky gravel. Gravel you probably shouldn’t be biking on, which is why it shouldn’t have been any big surprise when there suddenly wasn’t a bike underneath me. Just a couple feet of open air between me and thousands of pretty significantly sized angular rocks. And you know, in that second where time freezes like you are the Wile E. Coyote who has been tricked, once again, into running full force off a cliff, standing on air, defying physics, you know that you are going to fall. There’s nothing you can do but psychologically prepare for the next step. Which, fortunate enough for me, was only pain.

I got up and began to examine myself, my bike, my surroundings. I was what, 14, 15 years old, and I remember a single car driving by, in it a guy who had clearly seen my less-than-graceful landing onto a less-than-hospitable surface, and he slowed down. He didn’t lower his window; he didn’t stop. He just looked at me, granted with a look of minor concern, and gave me a thumbs up.

A thumbs up can mean many things, of course. It can be an affirmation of something you did well, like saying “good job.” However, it was clear to anyone who had seen my crash or who saw me bleeding that I had just done anything but a “good job,” so it wasn’t that.

A thumbs up can mean agreement, as if you are saying “yes.” I didn’t see much for the man to agree with, unless he was agreeing with the general idea of children falling off bicycles and hurting themselves, but in that moment I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that wasn’t what he meant.

A thumbs up can also indicate that you personally are doing well, are of good health, good spirits, and are having a fantastic day. I also didn’t believe that this man was bragging to me that he, driving safely in a car, was having a great day while I, having just fallen off my bicycle, didn’t seem to be.

I concluded that this was a much rarer kind of thumbs up: a question. He was asking “Are you ok?” and as I stood there, bleeding from the knee, half doubled over, I considered my options. The answer was clearly no, but what did I do?

The BIKER gives a thumbs up.

And he drove off, his duty to this injured child fulfilled. Unable to finish my bike home, I called my mom for a ride; later that night I got stitches for my knee, and that was that.

I think… I think people, whether we realize it or not, give a lot of thumbs ups like that. Not literally, well maybe literally, I’m not talking literally. Let’s say you just had the worst day of your life, doesn’t matter what, you lost your job because your dog ate your homework, so your partner left you, which gave your mom a heart attack. Picture it, you got it? Picture it.

Now, I walk up to you, and I say “Hi, how are you?” What do you say?

“I’m good.” “I’m fine.” “I’m alright.” “Thanks for asking.”

The BIKER gives a thumbs up.

And that’s it; you don’t give me a real answer, and to be honest, I probably wasn’t expecting a real answer. If you had dumped all your problems on me, that might have made me really uncomfortable, and you wouldn’t want that, god forbid that. Bottle that shit up. So, you give the empty “good” and you move on your way. Wouldn’t want to share that responsibility.

Easy, easy. There it is… the peak… The very top of the hill, the mountain. Take a moment. Breathe. I’m not a monster, drink some water, breathe, live through this, dammit, you have a long way to go. Don’t look down, though. It’s all downhill from here.

Before I really knew how to ride a bike, I just took it around our driveway. Doing little circles on a little bike, back and forth across the bumps and cracks in the cement. Helmet on, of course, but there was never any real danger. The training wheels were on.

I couldn’t tip the bike if I tried. I guess I could fall off, but I had enough supervision that even if I did, I’d have whatever scrape, owie, boo boo taken care of in seconds. There was no risk, just fun.

Yet I cursed those training wheels, you know, cause they were limiting, embarrassing.

Once they came off and I REALLY knew how to ride a bike, there was no end to what I could do.

I could go faster. My coefficient of friction would drop dramatically, even if I didn’t know what that meant. It felt like it took an eternity to get from my door to the end of the driveway, but that would all change once I had the balance I needed to let those two little bolted wheels fall off.

Plus, the end of the driveway? Forget it. I could go anywhere that my little legs, pumping those little pedals, could take me. I didn’t know where I wanted to go, really; I had some aspirations of going to 7-11 to get Slurpees without parental supervision; but it was the symbol of freedom more than anything. It’s about what the training wheels represented. Safety? Sure, of course they represented safety, but who needs safety? What mattered was they represented limitation.

And not just limitation, VISIBLE limitation. There isn’t any way to hide them; they jut out on either side like an embarrassing haircut.

Growing up is missing the limitation, the safeguards, the haircut. You find a new bike, a series of bikes. You fall off. You get scars, you get hurt, you tumble down the hill once or twice. And maybe sometimes… sometimes you wonder if you really know how to ride a bike at all. Looking down that hill, with its promised turns, its promised speed, its promised finality, you might beg for those training wheels back, because everyone promised you’d get to the bottom, but you realize they never promised how. But you don’t need the training wheels, right? You don’t need the help; you never needed the help.

Are you ready?

Drink your water. Say your goodbyes. It’s all downhill from here.

The Biker prepares for the ride to come.

3… 2… 1… Downhill. Downhill. Downhill. As fast as you can go. GO!

The Biker pedals on violently.

Did you know that Bicycle Day is celebrated every year on April 19th? Not World Bicycle Day, mind you, that’s on June 3rd. Bicycle Day isn’t about bicycles. Don’t get the two confused. It’s very important that you don’t get them confused. If you go home and tell your kids “Hey, we should celebrate Bicycle Day on April 19th,” that would be a mistake. I promise. Unless you run a cult, which is a different kind of mistake, but probably more the intentional kind of mistake. I don’t think people run cults accidentally, just join them accidentally – I’m getting off track. Bicycle Day, April 19th, is not about bicycles at all.

It’s the anniversary of the first time anyone did LSD.

That’s right. Albert Hofmann spent years exploring what his peers considered a dead end; specifically, a hybrid mutation of a highly toxic fungus. They hoped they could use it medically, but every version of lysergic acid diethylamide seemed to do nothing, so the scientific community abandoned it. Not our friend Albert. He kept synthesizing the stuff. And synthesizing, and synthesizing, and synthesizing… nothing. Until he encountered LSD-25, the stuff you and I know and love. After the initial experiment he felt… funny. He saw funny colors, cool pictures, just neat stuff in general.

This was puzzling to our good friend Albert, so, like any good scientist he went about figuring it out. He thought it might be the chemicals he was using, so he huffed some of those, to no effect. He decided he must have consumed some of the compound, some of the LSD, and that caused his hallucinations.

Naturally, a few days later on April 19th at, and I’m not kidding, 4:20 pm, Albert Hofmann dropped acid. For science.

Just a little bit, though. He wasn’t crazy. Just a little, little, little bit. And he tripped major balls.

Given the circumstances of the situation, it wasn’t a great trip. As far as he knew, this state was permanent. So, like a ten-year-old who drank one soda too many at his first sleepover and then called his mom, he wanted to go home.

The problem being that he had taken his bicycle to work that day… so he only had one option: He biked. Hence Bicycle Day.

Experiencing a nonstop deluge of psychedelic colors and dizzying sensations, he pedaled his way home during what may have been the very last hours of his life –  he was dealing with potentially deadly toxins here. I absolutely can’t imagine. I don’t want to be here and I’m stone sober, and, like, 90% sure I’m not dying. Actual adversity? That sounds unbearable.

He got home, wobbly, flopping on the couch, and immediately took the universal fix-all for poison in 1943: a glass of milk. His doctor came and told him, though his eyes were a little dilated, he was otherwise fine. So, Hofmann waited to die, too high to record anything about his experiences, but by the time his wife came home he was fine. He even felt pretty good.

Hofmann died in 2008, ten days after the 64th anniversary of his bike ride. He was 102.

That’s a long ride.

AND STOOOOOOOOOOOP!!

The Biker brakes hard, coming to a stop.

Look around you. You’re here. The bottom of the hill. Beautiful… stunning… breathtaking. Not because what’s around you is anything special, it’s a hill, you’ve seen a million hills, it’s that you conquered that hill. That’s your hill now, nothing can take that away from you. Revel in that, you worthless sack of subhuman garbage. Take a moment and take that in.

The Biker does take it in.

NOW GET BACK UP IT!! WHAT?! DID YOU THINK IT WAS OVER?! DID YOU THINK IT WAS DONE?! I’M NOT DONE WITH YOU YET. YOU GET BACK UP THERE AND –

Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. NOPE. NO! STOP!

The BIKER stops the recording and gets off the bike, defeated.

How do people do this?  Because people do this. Everyone does this. They say “You never forget how to ride a bike.” “It’s like riding a bike.” It’s the universal metaphor for something that comes naturally. Universal! Metaphor! I don’t get it.… People… people do this. Everyone does this…. Without help, no handouts, no substance… they just get up every day and do it like nothing can stop them.

But here I am…

Stopped. Stopped, goddammit, stopped.

Why can’t I… ? They aren’t better than me. They can’t be better than me. That sounds conceited; I’m not the best, I’m just… I’m just not broken… am I? Sure, I’m here for the uphill, the downhill, and I… I managed, I can clearly manage, I manage, but… look at me. Do I look like I have another hill in me? And I need to have another hill in me.

I need to have another hill in me.

I need to have another hill.

I need another hill.

So, goddammit, someone help me up this hill.

The RECORDING has returned to the soothing voice.

Congratulations on completing your first spin session with Bike 4 U. That is the word Bike, the number 4, and the letter U. We know it’s tough to get started, so we’re glad that you made this start with us. If you would like to check out other spin classes, both more difficult and more manageable, check out our website. We are so excited to see you next time. It only gets easier from here.

The Biker stares at the phone. They take a moment, reveling in an unanticipated emotion. Then they switch to their text messages, go to the message from their doctor, type in YES, and send. They take another moment.

It only gets easier from here.

[end]