3Flushes wrote: ↑November 16th 2023, 7:36pm
conjurer wrote: ↑November 16th 2023, 6:33pm
jason_recliner wrote: ↑November 15th 2023, 7:40pm
US$2,500 should be the price for a good dualie, pre-discount, not a discounted price on an entry-level model.
Twenty-five hundred bucks for a
bicycle? You might as well buy a fucking car.
Conjurer-rant over.
Had a Varsity - it was outstanding - how much better could the new stuff be -no bicycle should be more than $259, by golly.
Back when I was a young shaver, growing up in Maywood, IL, we had this old duffer that everyone called Old Adolf. He was stout, elderly, and wore a weird umbrella hat (on the Fourth of July, he'd have small American flags coming out the top of it.) We used to see him most days, riding a tricycle type bike, muttering to himself. My mom, who tried (and usually failed) to be kind, referred to Old Adolf as "a poor soul," or, "mentally retarded" (this back in the 1960s, when this was an accepted term). Once in while, when Old Adolf was peddling down 5th Avenue and holding up traffic, my mom would lean on the horn of the old Pontiac and mutter, "stupid village idiot."
My dad, who didn't even try to be kind, was more direct in his appraisal of Old Adolf. He sometimes called him "a stupid bohunk," or, even less charitably, "a goddamn Nazi, probably. Those flags in his umbrella hat don't fool me." Interestingly, both my parents made sure all us kids should keep a good distance from Old Adolf--not because he muttered to himself, or wore a stupid umbrella hat--but because he was a grown man, who still rode a bicycle--well, tricycle. To them, an adult either walked, rode the bus, or drove an enormous sedan with a V8 under the hood (anything smaller denoted a goddamn communist.)
"Be careful of that stupid old bohunk Adolf," my dad once told us over the dinner table, where my mom's overcooked pork chops steamed on our plates like blowtorched shoe leather. "He rides that commie trike. A kid get's too close to him, he'll snatch 'em up and take them back to his squat, and probably cornhole the shit outta them."
Possibly so. One summer, Old Adolf simply vanished, never to be seen again. Some of the adults whispered about him, where he went, what happened to him. Us kids wondered, too. But after that, growing up, we never saw an adult riding a bike again. And parked in every driveway up and down our block were American sedans, except for one guy who had a VW Beetle, but he was a goddamn hippie, and possibly even a
fanook.
THE END
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