This isn’t a story about a bicycle, although it is understandable how people might get that impression.
I was there in July of 1969, when my friend Derrick (not his real name) received the most awesome birthday gift any nine-year-old ever received; a Schwinn Orange Krate bicycle, similar to the one in the photo. His was even cooler. It had the springer fork, and the 16” front wheel let him ride wheelies up and down the street with ease. But the gear-shifter that looked like it came out of a hotrod was simply the coolest thing in the history of ever.
Everyone but me was clamoring to get a turn to try riding a wheelie. My family had a rule that no one played with someone else’s toys on the first day, and I was abiding by that, even if it made the other guys think I was chicken.
Derrick was definitely the coolest kid in town that summer, riding his shiny bike all around and doing wheelies on demand.
Derrick was never the smartest kid, but he was friendly and generous, never hesitating to let someone try out his bike, or loan them a pencil or a jacket, or help yours truly off the baseball field with an ankle sprain. He was well-liked.
The years moved on, and it became apparent that Derrick wasn’t just “slow” — the word we used in those days for kids who couldn’t succeed in a normal public school classroom — but was “challenged.” Derrick probably shouldn’t have been in the regular classroom, but should have been in a Special Education environment. I don’t know why my school district did things the way they did; I was just a kid, but Derrick and a handful of other kids sat in school every day, falling further and further behind. There is no way they were passing the tests, but they moved up a grade each year. Maybe his parents wanted him in an environment with more kids and more friends, maybe the administrators didn’t know about resources that were available, maybe the school board said they couldn’t afford it, I just don’t know.
By eight years after Derrick received his Orange Krate, most of us had driver’s licenses and many of us were driving a family car, or even their own car to the high school, which was five miles outside of town. I was driving a rusted Pontiac Firebird with 130,000 miles on it, that I bought with $300 I had earned washing dishes and busing tables. Kids who weren’t “cool” had to ride the bus, and that included Derrick. In town, many of us still rode bicycles, but we had moved on to “ten-speeds” and twelve-speeds and racing bicycles. But bikes weren’t really cool anymore, and kids who rode bikes were kind of sneered at. And kids who still rode bikes with little bitty wheels; well, they were called lots of unpleasant names.
Derrick was still the same friendly, generous soul he had been at nine, but all of us had changed — not uniformly for the better. Whereas we might have sought him out that summer he was nine, in the hope we could ride wheelies with him on his cool bike; at 17, no one wanted to hang out with the slow kid, and the fact that he was still riding a little kid’s bike to the Post Office or grocery store made him seem pathetic to us. I will never claim that I wasn’t an asshole as a teen.
Three years after that, we were out of high school, and half of us had left that small town; gone away to college, or the military, or a job in the city. Only the farmers stuck around, and young adults with “no prospects” like Derrick. But as luck would have it, the 163-year-old high school janitor (age unverified) that had been nicknamed “pH” because his personality was so acidic, finally retired. Derrick’s dad was a cop, and he knew how to network, and he finagled the assistant janitor job for Derrick. I was living far away by then, and didn’t have a chance to talk to Derrick about it*, but a mutual friend told me how proud Derrick was to be holding a job and making his own money. He kept his uniform spotless.
Just after Christmas, 1979, the town received a big snowfall. The two janitors were scheduled to do some cleaning and maintenance on the furnace over the Christmas break, while the kids were away. Derrick’s cheap old heap of a car had broken down, and his boss told him he could just stay home. But Derrick was still new to the job, and felt he owed his employer and the kids his loyalty, so he bundled up as best he could, and wheeled his Orange Krate with its little bitty wheels out of the garage, and started pedaling the five and a half miles from his parent’s home to the school.
The county had plowed the road north past the high school overnight. There were towering banks of plowed snow on both sides of the road. And being so low to the ground on his little bike, Derrick rode along, unseen to a driver coming up from behind on a slight curve. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
It was another hard reminder of our mortality, something you really need at 19, no matter how unpleasant it is. He wasn’t even the first of our tiny graduating class to die, by a long shot. Alcohol and fast cars and rage had already claimed two of us; Derrick was the third.
So in the final analysis, what was the bike? Was it the best gift ever, showing how awesome his parents were? Was it the symbol of his deficiencies and how far he was falling behind his peers? Was it a cruel cosmic joke; heaven and hell welded together into an orange frame? Was it the object of his demise? These are questions that I am willing to waste my time on, and not pretend to have answers to. But one thing I do know; I don’t miss the bike, I miss Derrick and often think of him this time of year.
*Younger readers may need to reminded that cell phones did not exist then. There was not even a phone on my floor in the dorm.