Never Help Dirty Hippies

I wrote a check yesterday. I wrote a check for one-hundred sixty-four dollars to my local county superior court. I wrote this check to pay a ticket that I received while in aid of dirty hippies.

It all happened a few weeks ago...

My buddy Vic is a bicycle nut and he helped me pick out my own brand new bicycle as a Christmas present to myself back in December. Since then I have been a sort of bicycle nut in training. I love my bicycle. I love riding my bicycle. I love lubing my bicycle's chain. I love rubbing my bicycle down with lemon-scented furniture polish to remove the grime from it and leave it smelling like citrus.

One Saturday Vic called me and asked if I would like to join him on a little ride out to our local university campus to a hippy commune where they keep the Bike Church. Vic made friends with some of the local bike nuts late last summer at a Critical Mass event and they turned him on to their Bike Church - an organization that promotes bicycling as transportation by empowering people to fix their own bikes and providing access to inexpensive parts and knowledgeable ministers. Anyway, these Bike Church people were having a work party on this particular Saturday to clean up and organize their space and Vic was going to lend a hand. He asked if I would like to go along. I agreed.

We met at my place and agreed that there was absolutely no reason why we would want to show up at the Bike Church work party completely sober so I poured us my last two extra big shots of Revoluccion Tequila (the bottle is wicked cool -- two revolver pistols mirrored against each other in glass relief on the back) and we sipped on them leisurely in the living room until they were gone and we were both feeling a bit tingly. We mounted our bikes and rode to the hippy commune on campus, a place I had never been.

We found a little community of geodesic domes near which was a huge metal recycling bin overflowing with old bent bicycle frames. One whole area of lawn was devoted to a huge pile of other, slightly more usable frames and parts. We wandered past this pile, up
to the tarp draped over tent stakes that constituted the sanctuary of the Bike Church.

Several people, mostly young, mostly male, mostly unkempt sat on folding chairs in a circle under the tarp. A couple of them held clipboards. Many of them drank from open bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A couple of them passed around a bottle of cheap pink wine. They discussed a list of tasks. Some of them greeted us. Some of them introduced themselves. Some of them offered us libation. We declined. We volunteered for a job as soon as it seemed to make sense. We were ignored for a moment when an argument broke out over the accessibility of the Bike Church logo (it features a pedal wrench and somebody was concerned that not everybody would recognize a pedal wrench).

The argument ended quickly and we were given our choice of jobs: moving bike pods.

For those of you that may not be aware, a bike pod is a large, heavy, concrete object that is sloped on its sides and holds at its center a space roughly the size and shape of an average bicycle tire. The idea is that a cyclist can park her bicycle by placing
a wheel of the bicycle in the space -- the pod will hold the bicycle upright and in line with other bicycles until the cyclist returns to claim it.

Our local university campus is doing away with bike pods. They are unsightly and the slightest pressure on bicycle in a pod can cause serious wheel damage. I soon learned why the Bike Church wanted the bike pods. Apparently the local police department decided that the pile (most of which I had seen in the recycling bin) was hazardous.

The Bike Church was told that if they didn't get rid of everything not usable and organize what was left, everything would taken away. The campus transportation authority turned the Bike Church clergy onto a big pile of bike pods that had been stacked up for removal and said that they may have them to use in their organization effort.

A young hippy named Owen piped up and said that he could provide his station wagon as a vehicle to move bike pods. Owen and a young Bike Church minister named Lyle said they would meet me and Vic at the site and the loading would begin. Vic and I rode our bikes to the site and sat waiting near the stack of bike pods for almost forty-five minutes. We discussed all the scenarios that could have caused the delay but settled on the following:

"Hey - we've got time to smoke a joint before we meet those guys... Hey - I'm hungry - that chick I shagged last night was making some killer soup before I left... I bet she'd give us some... I bet we have time before we meet those guys..."

That's how hippies are: short attention spans.

We had just about given up figuring out what happened when they rolled up. After much wrestling, scraping of knuckles, pinching of thumbs and general profane frustration we managed to get seven bike pods into Owen's station wagon. That left only forty-three more.

We let Owen and Lyle drive back to the hippy commune and we followed on our bikes.

When we arrived, we rode into a very passionate discussion among the clergy as to what should be done with this batch of bikes pods (figuring it out beforehand would have been very un-hippy). It was finally decided that they would be used for a donation area with the thought that people would gladly donate their gently-used old bicycles to the church to be reborn and returned to the streets under a worthy previously bike-less person. It's a nice dream. I'm not sure how it's working out, but dammit, those bike pods were in the donation area when I left them.

Phase two of the bike pod operation came about when a hippy called Frederick mentioned that he had a pickup truck. I recognized Frederick from the circle at the beginning of this madness and wished faintly, to myself, that he had mentioned the pickup truck when we were first planning the bike pod operation. I breathed deeply and waited patiently... probably another twenty minutes while Frederick went to retrieve his pickup truck. When Frederick returned with his pickup truck I found myself not at all surprised to find its bed full of rectangular red bricks.

"Hey, guys. I was thinking that before we go get those pods you might ride over to Hippy Commune #2 with me to unload these bricks."

Hippy Commune #2 was located in another part of campus. This is where I got stupid. I followed Vic and two other hippies into the bed of the truck. Lyle rode up front with Frederick. I knew riding in the bed of the pickup truck was illegal. I just couldn't fathom getting pulled over on a college campus on a Saturday afternoon for it. If I were a character in a novel, there would be some foreshadowing right here.

We rode to Hippy Commune #2 where we hopped out and assessed the situation.

"Where's the wheelbarrow?" I asked.

"There isn't one," Frederick replied, as if I were a little slow and he felt the need to be polite to me even though he found it to be a bit tiresome.

I stacked up about seven or eight bricks in my arms and the rest followed and about thirty minutes later we had the whole bed clear and a big pile of bricks in the garden of Hippy Commune #2.

I jumped back in the bed of the pickup truck with two of the hippies but this time Vic rode up front and Lyle jumped in the back with us. We made it over to the pile. I stayed in the bed of the truck with Frederick and we stacked the pods handed to us by the other three dudes. We managed to get thirty of them in the bed before the tires scraped the wheel wells.

For the ride back to the Bike Church, Vic took the front seat again and everything went pretty smoothly, those of us in the back chatting about very little and enjoying the pleasant weather, until the siren sounded. We had just turned the corner. I could see the Bike Church from the spot where Frederick pulled over. We were fucked. Caught by the Man in an illegal act.

The cop rode a motorcycle. The cop made a point of speaking to us in a rude manner.

He told us to get out of the bed of the truck and stand on the passenger side of the truck. He called for backup. Two more cops in a sqaud car showed up. Only two of us would admit to having identification on us. This made things take longer. Vic was the
only one not committing a crime from his place on the passenger side, so his claiming not to have his ID (because he didn't want his little marijuana pipe to fall out while retrieving it) caused no problems for the officers. We all received citations (except for Vic) -- Frederick got it the worst for driving with expired tags as well as a bed full of dirty hippies (and me).

We walked back to the bike church. I helped unload the bike pods. When it began to grow dark I realized that I had left my bike light at the apartment. I told everybody that I needed to leave in that I was having bad luck with the law on this day and I wasn't willing to risk any more traffic violations. The only flaw in my plan was a flat front tire.

I had not patched a flat bicycle tire since I was thirteen and then I had a lot of help from my old man. The good news was that the Bike Church was well-stocked with patch kits and in that I had sacrificed myself for their cause, they would waive the normal donation -- quite sporting of them really. Vic helped me patch the tire and I got the hell out of there.

Now I'm one-hundred sixty-four dollars poorer.

Never help dirty hippies.

Thanks for playing.

(Just so you know, I found all those that I met on this day to be swell people and if you're one of them and I hurt your feelings, that's what you get for being a dirty hippy and you should learn to laugh at yourself.)