Lessons of the RU Screw

If you had only attended Rutgers University, and then decided to take a course or two at a community college, you would experience a moment of serene decompression. This is your body's natural reaction to not receiving the RU screw. The RU screw is more pervasive than you would ever guess. By your senior year you have probably internalized the very mechanism.

Take math for example. Math, specifically algebra, was a pyramid scam. If you didn't forget it soon, you were probably teaching it to the next victim. For money no less. It should have been shut down by the government.

In the summer before my senior year I decided it was time to take the math placement test.

Tradition dictates that you do this before starting your first semester, but that is a bad move. If you bomb the math, your GPA suffers. If you don't take it, you can maintain a higher GPA quite easily until after you apply to graduate school.

I thought it was best to wait until the last possible moment move when you're dealing with unjust institutions.

On the first day of class at Mercer County Community College, I quickly found a parking spot in their corn field sized parking lot.

The only thing I had planned for that day was to take the math placement test so I could enrol in a class. If I missed the first day of class, so much the better.

At the testing center there was no line. A small crowd had formed around the perimeter of the counter. Occasionally a hand would deliver a yellow form and a voice would patiently explain that "you need to fill this out first."

I, being a Rutgers man, refused to compete. The girl to my left was accompanied, and dwarfed, by her mother. The mother had come to advocate. "Yes, hello, this is my daughter, she needs to take the complete placement test and she needs the paper version, a couple pencils and a calculator."

Not even at Rutgers would she have received such star treatment. This wasn't Princeton. If you wanted special treatment, you had to connive.

The woman behind the counter calmly handed out another yellow form to the daughter. "She'll have to fill this out first." Then she turned to me.

"Is it even possible," I asked, "to take the math placement test today?"

"Oh," she said, "I'll have to check with my supervisor. There is a thirty dollar fee."

I looked at the crowd, then back at her. "Maybe it would be best if I can catch up with that after?" Of course, I had no interest in supporting the math regime.

"Good idea," she said. "Just make sure to stop by here on your way out." At Mercer, they think they have you over a barrel. Being the reasonable people that they are, they even feel sorry about it.

The supervisor walked me into the testing chamber, past the daughter who had stood next to me in line. She was all alone at a big table, taking the test. She had no calculator and only one pencil.

Soon the supervisor sat me down at a computer and explained the test to me. He even showed me how to find the computer's calculator.

About five minutes later, I scored into basic computation, and was skating the crowd at the front desk as if I had never been there before. I walked out the door with the same thirty dollars I had when I'd walked in.

Some might have considered this an act of stealing. I thought it was a noble gesture. I stuck it to math as best I could without being incredibly naive.

At Rutgers, I never could have made such a dent.

Flat Spots on the Wheels

I had been told by one of the conductors to stand with my Shogun in the vestibule. He said my bike was in the way, that it would fall over and tear some lady's panty hose.

My knees felt stiff and sore. I was on my way back from Jacobstown where I worked on Mike's closet. It was a ten mile ride each way and I was on my feet all day, spackling.

A conductor entered the vestibule and I already had my wallet in my hand with the ticket sticking out.

I was pretty much a robot.

I reached it to him and he plucked it out and punched it five times, very mechanically. What a waste of effort, I thought. Just tear it.

He was an old man.

"I know that bike," he said. "You were on the... this morning, at Princeton Junction, you were on the... eight forty express!" Isn't that right?"

"You have a good memory," I said.

"Eight forty, I remember that."

"Well, you have a good memory."

"I remember that bike. Shogun!" He laughed.

"It's a good bike. Is it okay here?"

Another conductor, much younger, entered the vestibule from the other direction. The old man joined him on the other side and they began to have a private conversation. It was very noisy in there, as the large steel wheels had many flat spots, which rattled against the tracks. They practically roared, but I could still hear what the conductors were talking about.

"Why do you think those black strips are on the tickets?" said the young conductor.

"Bad news. I know it."

"It's just a matter of time before they automate."

"Oh, don't I know it."

"It doesn't even matter what the union does, they don't need any of us!"

"I know, brother. I know that."

I couldn't blame them for being a little worried. I actually wished the ticket price didn't have to include extra salaries.

"This is skill!" said the young conductor. "They can't automate what we do! I'm talking about customer service!"

Now he was making me feel rather psychotic. Customer service? I thought, very skeptically. Without the conductors, I could have been sitting at that very moment.

In fact, I thought the entire world would be better off without the conductors.

"It's brutal," said the old conductor.

"What's that?"

Then somebody slammed on the breaks and I stumbled forward against the panel with all the buttons on it. I pushed some of them trying to catch myself. Orange and blue light flickered up from under the front car. Sparks, I assumed, from the wheels.

The old man made his way over my Shogun, which had also fallen. He stood over it so I couldn't pick it back up and he spoke into the radio on the wall. The train was still slowing and their screeching sounded like bats in a cave. I imagined the wheels growing bright red where they touched the tracks.

Another flat spot, probably.

He spoke into his radio again and got a response but I couldn't make out the hysterical squawking.

"Get that door open!" he said, but the young conductor just stood there, looking back and forth into the cars, probably looking at the passengers. "Get out of my way!" he said, climbing off my Shogun, finally.

He lifted a cover on the wall and stuck a key into one of the holes, opening the side door. Then he backed away and lifted up the floor panel, exposing steps.

He jumped down onto the crushed stone. "Throw that emergency break!" he said, bending over, looking under the train.

The young conductor kicked the button at the bottom of the door and it slid open. He went inside the car and used his elbow to bust the glass on the emergency break.

Now he was psychotic, practically a fascist.

He pulled down on the break. It was very quiet and the second set of break pads clicked slightly as they clamped down on the wheels.

Then he stood guard at the top of the steps, as if all of us passengers wanted to throw a prison riot.

Of course, I was still a little upset. I heard the old conductor scuffing along the stones. I pointed at the tracks between the cars. "Well they can't automate that service!" I said.

He looked at me and he looked sick, maybe disgusted. He responded by marching over to wall radio, turning it to intercom, and saying, "Ladies and Gentlemen, we apologize for the delay, we are experiencing mechanical difficulties with the track switch."

Fair enough, I thought. I scratched my head with both hands to calm myself down. Then I sat down against the wall, right across from a sign with the words: DO NOT RIDE IN THE VESTIBULE.

Then I realized that I wasn't sitting on my wallet and it was no longer in my hand. I must have dropped it wrestling my Shogun back into the corner. I stood up again and started hunting in the nooks and crannies.

The vestibule was a small space, so my search took about one second. "Come on!" I said.

"Calm down, boss," said the fascist.

"I can't find my wallet. I must have dropped it!" It probably fell between the cars.

"Calm down there, boss," he said. Then he bent down and picked up something from the steps. "This it?" he said, handing me my wallet. "Why don't you go find a seat, sir. We're gonna be here a while."

I found out later it wasn't a switch on the track at all, but we had run somebody over.

I snatched my wallet from his hand without saying anything.

a Friend to Lean on

I rolled up in front of my favorite cafe in Hightstown, New Jersey. It looked like it was going to rain and the rusty old bike rack was far enough away from the door to really get myself drenched if things got bad. So I leaned my Shogun on the shiny new street lamp just in front of the door.

Ned, who owned the cafe, was out there too, on the sidewalk, adjusting signs or some such nonsense. "Use the bike rack, Aaron," he said. "They just painted those."

"Uh huh," I said. I felt him watching me as I did as I was told.

Then I went inside and plugged in my laptop and I felt I was being watched in there too. It was rather obvious that I was setting up to live there for quite some time. And all I bought was a cup of coffee. I would have bought less if I could have gotten away with it.

I wasn't exacting my revenge for being publicly humiliated about parking my bike on the street lamp. Not necessarily. It was a necessity thing. I still had a paper due Monday and still hadn't started it.

I needed to make sure my paper was in the way. Not just in my personal way, but a real problem for as many people as possible. I had to feel people watching me, like I was a prisoner in one of those good old-timey panopticon prisons.

If I had tried to keep it a secret and do it at home, where nobody could see me, I would have had to ask for an extension.

And then for an endless string of extensions.

Without getting in the way of a whole business, I would start down a self abusive path that could only end in academic suspension. Possibly incarceration.

Again, I needed to be watched and that need was stronger than my sense of friendship. It was also stronger than the notion that you have to buy things in order to justify your seat in a coffee shop.

After many hours, I thought I would force him to close his shop and I was okay with that. The only thing that mattered was doing my paper.

Of course, my paper was only as important as it was dangerous to his livelihood. That is to say, once I was done, I would never read it again. Probably nobody would ever read it. Not even my professor.

He made a sweep of the front, collecting empty cups as a group of teenagers left. "Refill?" he asked.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm so broke. I'm wrapping it up." That was a bold faced lie.

"I can tell you're stressed out about something," he said. "Tell you what, it's on me. Just cream, right?"

I was still upset. "No, mostly coffee."

He laughed, which softened me a little. Ned had a rough sense of humor.

Outside it started to rain and then it really came down, just as I had feared. The street lamp became wet and it looked slippery and cold as ice. I thought you couldn't possibly lean a bike on that. It would slip right off and fall over.

The bike rack, on the other hand, was all rusty and such. It had just the right kind of friction. The kind my Shogun needed to lean on in order to stand up.

Of course I had money to pay for my refill, so I walked up to the counter as Ned poured. I put my last two dollars into the tips jar. "Look what I found."

Up Against the Wall

I'm sitting on the couch with the overhead light on, even though sunlight is pouring through the blinds. I have the laptop on my lap but I'm looking past the screen at my Shogun. It's leaning against the bare white wall like a piece of artwork, except of course, bicycles don't qualify as art. Or do they, I wonder.

I'm trying to keep my mind off of the task at hand, which is doing my paper. It is supposed to be a well crafted piece... of art.

"You'll have all day Saturday," she said on Wednesday, "to do your paper." She said that in order to convince me that it was okay to hang out with her like husbands and wives do from time to time. I much preferred hanging out with her to doing my paper, so we made plans. But there was a problem with our plans.

If I were still in high school, I would have called it "planning to blow off school." I would have been setting myself squarely on the path to delinquency. I would surely have become a bad person altogether and not a clear headed individual.

Now that I'm married it's called "being there" for my wife, which always wins, against doing a paper that probably won't be read. So, Wednesday night we went to the Garden Theater in Princeton and saw the movie Juno. Now it's Saturday morning and I still haven't started my paper, which is due Monday. I'm really in a tight spot, I suppose.

I keep staring at my Shogun, hoping for Windows to crash again. That would be a reasonable reason why not to get started. Seeing that the laptop is ten years old, and has been giving me the blue screen more and more frequently, it seems that every moment it continues to operate is another miracle. But a miracle that is not really in my favor.

I suppose that makes it more like a curse.

I was there for her on Wednesday night. We had a good time and that's what you want when you're married. But I still feel as though the rules from high school still apply. I am a hardened delinquent. A lifer.

"You have all day," I say to myself. I go over to the Shogun and pick it up. Despite its steel frame, it's incredibly light because of the special rims with their paired spokes. The frame is too small for me, but with the seat post all the way up, it barely fits. Or rather, I accept it as it is. I suppose it is a piece of art after all.

Transferring Components

When I brought home the Shogun for the first time, I faced a dilemma that threatened to change our lives forever. There was nowhere to keep it besides the basement, which was expressly forbidden from our personal use. If I started keeping bicycles down there, I feared the landlords would have grounds for evicting us.

Mimi carried an armload of boxes across the street, heading to the apartment.

Of course, that fear of mine was what my professors would have described as hyperbolic. That is to say that instead of evicting us, the landlords would have been far more likely to kindly ask us to remove our crap from down there.

Be that as it may, my walk from the car to the front porch was fraught with terror. This was finals week at Rutgers and the rent was due and we didn't have the $1,100 in our checking account to pay for the rent quite yet. Nor did I have a job. Eviction seemed quite likely.

Be all of that as it may, I had to fix the bike in order to make it to my next class. So I needed to set up shop somewhere for a couple of hours, just long enough to transfer the components from the totally busted Lemond to the slightly less busted Shogun.

The Shogun was ridable as it was, so technically, I did not need to transfer the components. But we were packing up to move. If I didn't transfer them now, I ran a high risk of losing them in the move, due to my packing and organizational technique.

Mimi returned to the front porch, rubbing her forehead. "We have to pack up, babe."

I stood at the bottom of the brick steps, admiring our neighbor's fixes gear bike. He was a graduate student at Rutgers and he left his fixy right out on the porch all year round. "I'll be right in, babe," I said. What a luxury, I thought, not to worry about rust - bike cancer - eating away your rear derailer.

"Okay," she said, and there was a tone in her voice. I couldn't blame her. She was married to a guy who didn't have a college degree, who didn't work, didn't clean the house, and ogled bicycles with a Dungeons and Dragons intensity. I figured there was no point explaining my problem of where to set up shop.

Since we were already packing to move, I realized, my whole fear of eviction was a freestanding pyramid scheme. I sneaked that Shogun and that Lemond around the side of the building and right down into that cool damp basement. Let them evict us, I thought, as if committing to a life of high crime.

I was directly beneath our apartment and I could hear Mimi walking back and forth, probably packing. I thought I could sense frustration in the creeks between the floorboards.

I was already taking too long.

I shook the old Lemond right and left by the seat to watch the broken frame bend wildly. Then I abandoned it and the Shogun, propping them discretely against each other against the wall. I headed upstairs.

She was in the bedroom, loading our winter clothes into boxes, not even folding them, not even closing the boxes. "What time is your first test tomorrow?" she said. "Don't you need to be studying?"

"I do," I said. But instead of leaving, I grabbed the tape gun and pulled a box aside. I wadded the sweater sleeves up and squished them down inside and ran the tape gun over the top. Then I did the next one and the next one, squishing down and folding the flaps and screeching that tape gun.

Acquisition

We pulled up with the old bike rack clinging to the trunk like a mosquito. The rubber pads had long since been levered off. The sharp corners of the pipes and swivel feet cut right through the old balled up socks.

We were meeting my friend Rod at the Treehouse coffee shop in Collingswood, New Jersey. He had trash-picked an old ten speed when he found out my Lemond frame had cracked. He was giving it to me today.

"Here," said my wife, Mimi, handing me a batch of cookies she had baked to thank him for the bike. She had made letters out of the cookies and they were all jumbled up inside a freezer bag.

"Thanks, babe," I said.

Rob texted me, "WHERE THE EFF ARE YOU, PUNK?" He never abbreviated.

"He must be inside," I said.

We went around to the front door. He already had a table. His bike was leaning against the wall at the back of the stage and there was another bike on the wall behind his. Apparently he had ridden his fixed gear and pushed my new bike all the way from his apartment in Barrington, six miles away.

I set the bag of cookies on the table in front of him. "Payment," I said.

He picked up the bag and inspected. The letters had expanded so much in the oven that they no longer resembled letters.

Mimi put her hand on his shoulder. "They're supposed to spell, 'Thanks Rod for the bike,' but I ran out of cookie dough. It just says, 'Thanks Ro.' Sorry."

He gave her a coy look and then looked at me the same way. "Payment? Payment is unnecessary. Taking care of confused kids is my j-o-b." He worked at a school for the mentally disabled.

We bought coffees and rolled the bikes around back.

"Nice rack," he said. "It's gonna' scratch up your new ride." For a thirty year old bike, it was unnaturally shiny.

"You trash picked this?" I asked.

"I was on the inside track. I knew the guy who used to own it. It lived in his mother's garage since forever. Then one day he challenges me to a drinking contest and it ends at his mom's place, with him crashing this mo' fo' into a dumpster. Maybe ten feet. He was like, 'This crazy bike sucks!'" and Rod waved both of his arms over his head, in a sloppy body slamming motion.

Then he reached in for the letter O, which looked like a normal cookie with a dimple.

"So it's like, brand new," I said, "from the seventies."

"Word. Check it out, cub scout. This frame is double butted. The insides of the tubes are hourglass shaped." He gave the universal sign for the female form. The word Shogun slanted down the down tube.

"Nice," I said.

"It was made in Nippon, bro. That's hot."

"Hot like a ninja sword, man."

Then Mimi said, "Wow, thanks, Ro!"

"Dude," he said, "you gotta' take care of this bike like it's your best lady." He pointed to the part of the bike rack that was cutting through the sock and into the paint job. "At least better than this."

"He will," said Mimi. "I'll make sure."

Single Speed

"Babe," she said, "that light is killing me. Can you change it?" She couldn't stand the overhead light. Depression lighting, she called it.

"Uh huh," I said.

"Hey babe," she said, "so how are you going to get to Mike's tomorrow?" Mike was her friend and I was building a closet for him. She was sitting next to me on the couch, with the old laptop in her lap. She reached up behind her head and stuck the wireless modem in the blinds trying to find the Internet.

"Maybe I can finally use my bike for something practical, for once." My bike was a beautiful burgundy Shogun and I kept it in the hallway just below our apartment.

She checked the signal. "Mmm, where are you, Internet?" She adjusted the modem. "You would ride all that way for me? You're the best." She leaned over and kissed me. "So, I can have the car tomorrow?" Her new job was in Hillsborough, twenty-one miles north. Mike's closet was twenty-four miles south west, in Jacobstown.

"I used to do like, forty miles in like, two hours." The words came out a little unsure, but only because I couldn't remember the exact miles and hours.

She gave me this look. Of course, now I was twenty six and I had taken the Shogun down to a single speed. There was a slim chance that the ride would kill me.

"Light, please." She was crazy about that light issue. Plus that look of hers really got to me.

"I can just haul ass," I said.

"I'm just trying to see something," she said, waiting for a page to load.

"I can totally do it."

"Look, it's only ten miles from Bordentown. You could take the big train to the River Line to Bordentown." She sounded sweet about her suggestion, but it was not sweet. She was suggesting that I couldn't make the twenty-four miles. The modem fell out of the blinds and went behind the couch.

The train route she suggested made a huge inefficient arch halfway across New Jersey."It's kind of on the other side of Mike's." It didn't make any sense to take such a circuitous route when I could cut straight there on the Shogun.

She gave me that look again. Not the evil eye, not quite. Just skeptical about something as she found the modem again.

"I can totally make it, babe."

"Or, I can drive you down the Turnpike and you can 'haul ass' from there. It's what, fourteen miles?"

I was starting to hate that old laptop. It didn't even have a battery anymore. "I don't want to make you get up at like, six to drive me that far south."

"Oh, come on, babe. You'll be tired all day. Why did you take all the gears off, anyway?"

I wasn't really sure why, but I said, "Because shifters and gears, all they do is wear down and break. It's just simpler and more efficient in the long run."

"I'm not going to make you ride all that way with just one gear." She probably thought she was being nice and she was nice, but she was also strangely nice.

"I don't care if it takes me all the damn day! Babe!" It came out like I was kidding, but I was a little serious too.

She just smiled at me and said, "I'll buy you a coffee if you take the train?"

"Really?" I said. That was a good point. If I rode, I wouldn't be able to get my morning coffee. "Okay."

Before we moved out here, to Hightstown, we lived in Highland Park, which was all city riding. The gears were a complete pain. Of course the reason we moved was because we couldn't afford Highland Park so I couldn't afford to take the Shogun down to a single until we moved to the burbs, where you probably wanted gears.

She turned the computer off, and turned on Family Guy. "Why don't you put the rack on the car tonight?"

She was strangely persuasive. I got up and turned the lamp on and then I crossed the room and turned off the overhead. I would put the rack on, but I didn't want to miss Family Guy.