To my four subscribers (you might be the first of four million), here is the first chapter.
I’d love to hear your reactions as readers, including what you have learned about Lenny or or things you felt.
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Outside his back door, the air was cool against Lenny’s face and arms. Summer coastal overcast usually lasted till mid-morning. The olive-green canvas Army surplus pack on his back, with its canvas straps and metal friction buckles and tips, held the heavy texts he hoped to resell.
In the garage, Lenny turned the combination dial left past zero to 27 and pulled the shackle open. He pulled on the blue plastic-covered chain so it freed the front wheel from the frame and then pulled the chain through the frame and the spokes of the rear wheel of his white Gitane. He wrapped the chain tight around the seat post, under the tire repair kit, and locked it. Then he dialed the first two numbers of the combination so he could unlock it quickly, if necessary. You could always cup your hand around the lock, as if you were just holding it that way, not hiding the dial. But if some people saw you do that, they could tell you were afraid.
Courage was a virtue, Sister Joseph said. It was funny how some nuns took men’s names. When he asked her her real name in second grade, she said her real name now was Joseph.
He mounted the front wheel to the front fork, seated it, rotated the quick-release paddle back half a revolution, then pressed closed the paddle with his thumb. He lifted the front of the ten speed a few inches off the ground and spun the wheel to see if it rotated true. It did. He squeezed the front brake lever, and the center-pull brakes instantly arrested the wheel. It would not do for his front wheel to fly off or for his brakes to fail when he was streaking down Farm Hill at forty-five miles an hour.
Then he walked the bike through the garage side door, across the little cracked concrete patio, testing the rear brake once, creating a tiny black skid, then up the driveway to Beech Street. He slid his left Converse into the toe clip, pushed off with his right leg, and then swung his right leg over the frame.
He had left the Gitane Interclub geared on the large front chain ring and the middle back cog. It took three revolutions, the first one a hard pump, to make it to the corner, where he turned toward downtown. On Middlefield Road, he passed the Public Library—he’d maybe go there after to look at Yosemite.
Jefferson ran pretty straight and flat toward the mountains. He passed the Salvation Army where women in uniforms played tubas and trombones. He passed John Gill School; kids called it John Hill. He passed Community Park—teenage girls would be swimming there this afternoon in swimsuits and bikinis.
Some guy passed him with his side windows down and yelled something. Lenny didn’t know what but figured it was queer or faggot. Serious racers wore tight black shorts, but he was wearing long Levi cords, the right cuff clipped with a clothes pin so he wouldn’t get grease on them, or worse, get the cuff caught in the chain.
After a mile and a half, he waited at the light at Alameda de las Pulgas. To the left, the Alameda ascended. Poppy Close lived up there. He knew which house because he had looked up the address and ridden by it and had the house number and phone number memorized but had not called her.
He held himself up by his right foot. The 60 cm. frame was really too large for him—the guy at Menlo Cyclery even said so—but that’s what Greg Close, a just-graduated senior rode, and the pack was the kind Greg wore, and he wore it the way Greg did with the straps fully extended. He knew Greg first and then discovered Poppy from him. She would be a junior next year. They said you were in the next grade as soon as you passed the last one, but you weren’t, not till the first day. You might as well say he was a college freshman, but he was sixteen, taking two junior college classes for high school credit so he could graduate high school in only three years. A guy had told Lenny about this—all you had to do was talk to your counselor to set it up. Everything at Sequoia was bullshit—everything everywhere was—so why not get out as soon as possible? But if everything was bullshit, then so was ‘everything is bullshit,’ so at least one thing was not. Either way, the universe was decidedly bullshitty.
The hard riding began a few blocks after Alameda—the six-hundred-foot elevation gain: Jefferson then Farm Hill—almost all uphill with few level breaks. As the incline began, he could only go a few dozen yards pedaling normally, then slower and slower until he had to stand on the pedals and pump, weight shifting side to side.
The breeze cooled the sweat on his face, but his back began to feel clammy under the heavy pack.
Then came the last and toughest. After a somewhat level stretch, the long, steep curving pitch rose forever—as steep as any hill in San Francisco—and you had to keep going because people couldn’t see you walking a bike up a hill like a wimp. Finally, his heart pounding and breath gasping, he crested the saddle at the entrance to Cañada, where the riding was suddenly easy for about ten seconds, then the whole ordeal began again up the even steeper one-way loop to the toppest point, then an easy, cooling coast down to where the drive intersected the two halves of the campus. His pounding heart slowed, breathing got easier.
He steered right and dismounted, walked the bike past the music building. Now the mountain range was so close. You could make out the individual redwood trees on Skyline.
He reached where his U.S. Government class met. Straight guys and hippy-types, button down shirts and peace signs, a woman in a mini-skirt and cowboy boots, Styrofoam cups and the faint drift of dope.
He locked his bike around a light post after removing the front wheel, and went into the classroom—it had an outside door—to take the final.
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