Sleep, Pray, Drugs: The Hobby-Horse

I rode a bike last week. Through early-evening, late-winter streets. The sky was mostly grey except for the sunset pink towards the west. ---The air was cold, the traffic warm and too loud. I pumped my legs and felt the chill in my lungs. It had been more than eight months since I felt strong enough for such a casual joyride, and it was like being reunited with an old friend.

The summer after I graduated college, I took a 3-month internship in a small town in northern Germany. This country's enthusiasm for bipedal locomotion bordered on the obsessive. Bicycle lanes, bicycle parking, bicycle permits, bicycle sections on every tram and train. Bicycle bars, bicycle punks, bicycle graffiti and bicycle parties. Bicycle babies and bicycle geriatrics. Tandem bicycles, and shiny, Mercedes-engineered Bi-Cycles. Unsurprisingly, this passion is centuries old, as it was a German who invented the contraption: The archetype of the bicycle, the draisine, dates to 1817 and was alternately known as the dandy-horse or the hobby-horse. It was moved by foot-on-road-push-power, a sort of strange running while two wheels were awkwardly arranged between your thighs and a wooden plank was jammed snugly against your butt.

I bought a bike one weekend at the town's flea market, a place that doubled as the meeting place for the Expat Arab Reunion Tour. Dark men hawked everything from tools to T-shirts, and numerous portable radios spewed exotic melodies that smashed together with the harmony of tzatziki on kabob. I saw the sweet, old-school silver cruiser flashing in the sun like a beacon, with a chain guard and back-pedaled brakes, and bought it for a hustler's price of 20 euro. The bearded man who sold it to me had the uncanny ability to bark and smile simultaneously. After money and pleasantries exchanged hands, the topic of our national origins arose—both of us being strangers in a strange land. He was from Iraq and he no longer wanted my money; he wanted to pummel me. He demonstrated this with a sort of acrobatic air punch. Multiple times. For emphasis, I suppose. As he did this, he intoned Bush's name, as if casting an incantation embodied by the hated dictator.

His curse was to make itself evident a few weeks later.

I spent the day of the calamity thinking about bike accidents. Later, I would wonder if this was a premonition or merely a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end it really made no difference, as the outcome was equally the same. On my way home from work, I was happy and young and carefree. I smiled like riding a bike was as good as flying. But all too quickly I was lost, really incredibly stupidly lost. An hour passed with a sequence of actions spinning in constant repetition: pedal fast, slow to a wobble, swerve to a stop, look at map, turn around, repeat.

I don't have any recollection as to why I looked over my shoulder at that particular moment. Likely the distraction was so embarrassingly banal that my mind won't let itself remember, an act of pure mental self-preservation. I turned back around just in time catch my startled reflection in a parked, bright-red VW as I headed for the car's side mirror. A panicked twist of the handlebars had the opposite effect of avoidance and spun me full body slam into the driver's side door. The laws of physics motivated me to continue upon my trajectory, and I charmingly flew forward and over and smashed into the pavement below.

After the shock wore off, it was time for a body scan. Teeth? Check (except that small piece of one I spit out). Blood? Yes, lots of it. Location of injury? Chin. My internal instincts were screaming "Holy fucking shit oh my god!" but externally I was quite calm. Calmer, at least, than the man who walked over to check on me with a face full of terror. I asked him where I was. Not the "Who am I? Where am I?" kind of post-accident dazed questioning of a likely concussion, but in the much more rational "Shit I am still lost and now I am bleeding so could you kindly tell me how the fuck to get home." He didn't know. He was not from this town. All he wanted to do was call a Krankentransportwagen (ambulance) or run away. He chose the second option without a second of wasted hesitation after I picked myself up, explaining that, "I'm fine, just fine. Save your goddamn Kranking transport wagon." When I eventually made it home and mustered the nerve to face the mirror, it became clear that The Man Who Ran Away had reason to be scared: I could have fit a slice of watermelon in the gaping cut on the bottom of my chin.

Getting stitches took a tremendous amount of effort, and I realized that German Efficiency is a bold-faced lie. The main entrance to the terrifying-sounding das Krankenhaus (hospital) was strategically hidden, so I accidently entered the children's ward, frightening innocent juvenile cancer patients who likely thought I was the monster that had been living under their beds. A sign in the distance said "intensiv," and I headed toward it, logically assuming that it meant "intensive care" in this language that resembles talking with a mouth full of marbles. But it was closed and locked and deserted, and I began to think this place either had a great record (everyone is cured within minutes) or a terrible one (everyone dies) because it was becoming increasingly vacant. The rooms, the beds, the wheelchairs—all empty. Eventually, a group of nurses appeared vaporously, as if out of thin air, and stopped to stare at me. In exasperated explanation, I ripped off the band-aids to expose the bloody horror that was my face. Pity sounds pretty much identical in all languages.

The next day on the train to work, I could feel the blood rushing toward my chin, putting pressure on my new dark blue stitches and making me dizzy. The scab had grown dark, and the stitches resembled a goatee with just a little too much accuracy. People were groping me with their eyes. "It's OK," I thought to myself, "They're not staring at you, they're staring with you." They shook their heads, as if musing, "What a shame, dark whiskers on such a lovely girl. She really should do something about that." And then I remembered that I got my facial hair by hitting a parked car, and it became much more difficult not to die of humiliation.

After a week, I went back to the hospital to have the stitches removed. A man hobbled down the stairs looking just like the guy from Frankenstein with the catch-phrase "maaaaster.” His head was too big for his body, his glasses magnified his rolling eyes, and a smile exposed multiple extra rows of yellowed, crooked teeth. Luckily, this was not the doctor. The actual doctor looked more like a fish out of a Dr. Seuss book, and he grinned at me lustfully. “It will cost 50 euro to remove the stitches here. Perhaps you want to find a cheaper doctor in town to do it?”  I nodded, “Can you give me directions to one?” They stared and then laughed and then I was led upstairs. I had somehow unintentionally bargained the price down to free. And I still have the scar to prove it.

Santa Fe Reporter