Since I moved back to San Francisco in March, I've had the privilege of working a 30 minute walk away from where I live. My daily walk to work takes me down the block of Green St. wordily renamed Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd. Here at the star-burst intersection of Green, Stockton, and Columbus, I have seen the same sight every day since I started taking this route: a dark red Centurion LeMans bicycle with blue bar tape locked to a pole. It has been there every day now for five months.
I like to tell myself stories about this bicycle.
At first, the story was that the bicycle owner's schedule matched mine in such a way that the bike only appeared to be always there, but that it did in fact come and go every day. Its rider simply arrived before I passed by and left after I passed again on my way home.
After only a few weeks, though, the bicycle was knocked to the ground. It lay there, looking wretched, for several days....long enough for me to decide that no one was, in fact, riding it on a regular basis.
Perhaps because I pass the Green Street Mortuary just seconds before the bicycle, I often imagine it's owner lying dead in a sunny apartment near by. White walls, white curtains shifting in front of the open windows, a featureless body on the bed, limbs tangled in white sheets.
After three months of wondering about this bicycle, a seat cover appeared stating "Your Bike Is Money." The same day I saw this, I noticed a note stuck in the handlebars. I hoped the note's author would ask the same questions I had been wanting to ask...
Who are you?
Where have you gone?
Do you have a new bicycle?
Does it have blue bar tape?
Or...
I am going to take your bike one week from today if you haven't moved it.
But it was just scribbles, gibberish. I stuck the note back on the handlebars and in a few days it was gone.
I showed the bike to my girlfriend, who was just as shocked that no one had stolen it. We toyed with the idea of breaking it free in the night. But then she thought up a story of her own. "What if it's an elaborate sting operation orchestrated by the cops?!" We are both avid This American Life fans, and recalled the episode "Bait and Switch" in which a man innocently breaks into an abandoned car in front of his house to discover who owns it and finds himself arrested. We imagined that as soon as we broke the lock on this bicycle, we would be surrounded by sirens and flashing lights.
Then I imagined night after night of arrests by the SFPD. A perpetual sting operation that had nabbed hundreds of bicycle thieves over the past five months, all for going after this same blood red bicycle with the blue bar tape.
This same neglected bicycle.
Night after night.
Day after day.
How long can this go on? I'm certain that this bicycle will not stay locked to that pole forever. One day, I'll walk by and it will be gone, and then I will tell myself some stories about where it went.
