Myth Madness & Mantra

When the Devil Came..., He was not Chrome, He was not Red, and he said...
Come with me.            -Wilco "Hell Is Chrome*"

What I'd wanted to say was, "...That the greatest music came from the 80's by the grace of god, and that the finest Bicycles were born in the late 90's when God was resting post Cold War Reconciliation. ...That all the colors of our dismantled Military Industrial Complex would soon be poured into a puddle of insouciant engineering who's brilliance gave birth to the millennial "Bicycle-Industrial-Complex". Consolidation moved swiftly to crush cottage bicycle brands. A few Titans, from humble beginnings themselves, began extracting ideas, by torture, and decimating cycling's soul. mixed metals, M2 and Crazy-glue yielded the first "Flat-Bar Gravel-Bike" craze. An Eighties kaleidoscope of primary reds & blues, became Neon-Nineties Mountain Bike fades.  Hideous Lycra was stretched over everything quite inappropriately. By 2000 all of cycling's colors would be melted down, mixed with glue, and fade to matte black."  Anyway, that's right about what I'd wanted to say, but because I'd been drinking Bordeaux with an old friend  ...all that I could manage to reminisce was, "Man, that was some magical shit Gary Klein made back then", "...And fuck I was such a fool to have ever lent Neil Kowalski my custom Black Klein." 
"Fuck Neil Kowalksi !"  "Fuck Man!, ... Just Fuck that dude".

In the mid to late 90's you could not sell a road bike. The Mountain bike was as hot as Hansel, and it became a king, a god, and currency. By 1996 (eons before the bromance with day-trading, pod-casting, and door-dash) Everyone was riding a mountain bike on pavement outdoors. As they phased VHS out, everyone was taping shit with Tivo, to watch AFTER they strutted about on their MOUNTAIN Bike. There were myriad options, but the smart money was on Klein. Klein was King.  
Everybody has regrets about dumb shit they'd done throughout their past, (perhaps in particular the 90's), but my second biggest adult-life regret may have been to ever have trusted that fucking snake Neil with any bicycle. 
In late 1996 Gary Klein built me a special one-off gloss black bike with a custom black strata fork, using a corrected MC2 stem angle, and a full Black-Forest "Tune" Kit -- Then... I blew it.  Boy did I ever blow it. We had just scored the last batch of Anniversary bikes, and another friend got one of those, So Black became our destiny, well before everything headed there. I lent my Klein to Neil and he skipped the country.
For decades I'd contemplated my revenge, when I'd eventually see Neil the back stabber, and get even. But before you think I'm an irrational hater, it merits mention that Neil didn't borrow a bike or two... His calculus was to borrow things like Quimby and promise to pay later.  That wasn't the main issue.  At the core was that Neil was buying and selling other peoples bikes, CD's, Jackets, Concert T's etc. on credit.  He didn't even like bikes. He was a snake who'd have predicted a scheme, even line up a buyer, well before "Borrowing" someone's shit, and selling it.  He would have something sold before he had it to sell. What is a bike if not to ride?  COME WITH ME...

Revenge was warranted.

But vengeance is a jacket who's sleeves tie neatly behind the back. And my commitment to revenge soon faded. I'd never see Neil again, along with several of my CD's. So while I'd also blamed myself, I knew killing Neil Kowalski would not bring my bike back.  I recall the sheepish tone of him on the phone, and knew That junkie fuckwit, had tougher times ahead of him.  Besides that,  his dad was a judge -- So alas I scrapped any plans for revenge. I also abandoned all hope to recover my lost bike, which was now somewhere in Chelsea -- 6365 kilometers from Chicago. I got my friend at Evil Trek to make me a new One-Off bike from honeycomb OCLV which I'd later have stolen mid-winter from my house.

---

Ex's and itches are far more difficult than one may think to be rid of, even if one could rub  them out proper -- And the thing of it is, that I'd wanted to make something good from my bitterness. So, soon I quit the bike biz, and started freshly forgetting "my precious".

I could (perhaps) ameliorate my psychic itch by keeping a tidy laminated wallet-size pin-up to stroke like a Gen-Z fondles a Frapuccino...
I'm not saying much about my maturity when I long for an ancient (if wholly obsolete) bicycle which many have so prosaically disparaged. [Thank you Pink Bike!]  I don't even own a photo of myself with this beauty, so the entire fuzzy picture framed in my infantile mind is make-believe at best. While I think of it often, the fiction in my head was likely an embellished version, A fictive beauty, which in retrospect would seem tacky, even useless by today's Bike Craft. But that bike was the bees knees, buttered toast, and Miss June all rolled together.  
I was never good at anything, but I'd loved bikes, and loved to ride them uphill and down. I cherished all of them, even the shitty lock-up bikes, and many never get over when they lose a loved one.
I think if I did have a photo with my precious Klein, I could ameliorate my psychic itch by keeping a tidy laminated wallet-size pin-up to grope like a Gen-Z fondles a Frapuccino, or a fidget-spinner, And I would do this whenever life brought me down.
I suppose I want people to understand only this... That when I was eight years old I threw a snowball really hard at a passing Red Cutlass, and the driver chased us down with such rage, and vengeance, leaving his car running, sprinting through slush -- Driver's door wide open, ...that I'd have thought he had actually split in two beings, releasing the devil himself to hunt us down. Later that night, I'd lay in bed actually shaking from his visceral rage, wondering why/how anyone could give a shit about a fucking car that much  -- that they'd be willing to kill a child to protect it.  I'd lost sleep for about a week, waiting for him to wake me. Later, (perhaps to justify the moment) I came to identify his rage as the product of a legitimate obsession.  A fondness which I would not personally know until the 90's.  Two years later at Ten years old, I would watch my first real tangible possession, unironically a yellow Schwinn Stingray, being stolen from the doorway of the Piggly Wiggly, by an older kid on my paper route named Ruben Padilla.  His nonchalance walking slowly up to my Schwinn, making eye contact with me still in the check-out lane, smiling, and then slowly riding off with a bunch of other kids, and my bike.  This was the moment when I'd understood the Cutlass owner's rage.  The Police did not give a shit, and for months I would occasionally spot my rattle-can  re-painted blackish Schwinn Stingray lurking about the neighborhood.  I would generate a dark amalgam of scar tissue from each and every bike I'd lost without a proper farewell.  Nostalgic bike lust pasting fuzzy images in the psychic scrapbook of my primitive brain where "lost bike" wanted poster pin-ups occasionally haunt me.  Like all the useless clutter in my top dresser drawer -- passe' bikes are somehow simultaneously sacred and  stupid.

My friends have warned me of this (my) dark psychosis. That, "Bikes, are like old skis or even older boots... That the old ones just basically suck". My Friend Pete says that the Mantra is a death-trap, actively working to kill it's rider, like a bull-ride, or a bucking-bronco. "Death or Collar-Bone is the only currency exchanged on a Mantra". I know all of this of course, (perhaps), but I need to reenter the cave to see if what was written on it's walls, could inspire me to alas forget about my loss. 

I have a Black Strata Fork, and a stack-adjusted MC2 Bar at the ready to re-explore my tawdry past.  And yesterday my replacement Mantra arrived in a giant cardboard carton, nearly as fresh from the factory as the paint betrays. 
​This is a Catharsis. This is an Experiment, This is Therapy,
​This is Nuts.

I'm knee deep in the process now, of remaking the ideal Klein Mantra, Restorative Justice you could say... and so far it cost me about half of what a new one did at retail in 1996.  I'm going to ride it of course -- And I'm going to see if it kills or cleanses me of the occasional surfacing  detest for how it all went down, thirty years back.  When the snow melts, I'll check back in, with you, and IF I have a sling supporting a busted collar bone, I'll likely blame Neil Kowalski.
COME WITH ME.
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END OF CHAPTER ONE.
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