The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist / Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

1. The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist

I started getting fat right out of college because I had no idea how to take care of myself. In school my friends and I played basketball and soccer — not well, but competitively — and the food was at best fair in the cafeterias.* I’ve always tended to portly, especially as a kid, but puberty had done a pretty good job of leaving my body issues mostly in my mind by the time I graduated. Then, suddenly, I was underemployed, drinking too much, and expected to feed myself. I ate a lot of burritos. I ate a lot of pizza. I sat on my ass a lot. I think I must have gained sixty pounds in just three years. I do know I quit weighing myself when I saw 240 on the scale. (I’m 5’9”, for reference.)

* Jesus, we complained about that food a lot. Sometimes I remember the things I used to say or think when I was in college and I kind of shiver. To bitch that the free, twice-daily buffet didn’t taste good enough? I was Marie Antoinette’s spiritual heir. I’m lucky nobody chopped my head off.

I was a 24-year-old kid whose knees creaked and popped when he crouched down to pick something up off the floor. I got winded walking up the one flight of stairs to my studio apartment. I had the sort of back pain that usually plagues men in their 50s. It was a bad scene, man. Pretty pathetic.

There was never a moment when I decided, I am no longer going to be a fat sack of crap. At some point, I acquired a recumbent exercise bike and would ride it, very slowly, deep into the night — sometimes while drinking beer at the same time. Then, one day in the late spring of 2004 or 2005 (I no longer remember), I tipped my fat ass onto a bicycle, and rode it down my driveway, out through Little John Lane (my neighborhood was, for reasons that still escape me, Robin Hood-themed, as though I lived not in Oregon but at Disneyland), and fifteen miles over the rolling scrubgrass of the high desert. I stopped at a little market in an unincorporated town — really just a house, a church, and a gas station — called Alfalfa.** I bought a Payday bar. Then I rode home. Three or four times a week, all through that summer, I would ride this same route, so often that I came to know intimately everything about it. I knew the good spots to stop and pee. I knew the blind corners. I knew which hills were murder in the summer heat.

**Edited to correct the spelling. My mom texted to let me know I'd got it wrong.

It was an act of sheer will, done without planning or cunning. Often I rode through 95-degree heat, guzzling water, stopping in almost every shady spot to catch my breath. Sometimes I weathered the furious swoop of self-righteous truck drivers who took pleasure in terrorizing cyclists who had the temerity to ride out along that road. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw a stray cat kill a bird. I saw a dead steer, being consumed where it had fallen by a swarm of flies and a hopping, cawing flock of crows. A few days later I saw some young men hauling its torn carcass onto the back of a truck.

I don’t ride that route very often anymore, mostly because I moved away and only come back to visit my parents. When I do I find I still remember it. I also find, having lost the weight, I no longer have the will I once did. I rode that route — a version of it, anyway — this morning. I left early in the morning to avoid the heat. Onceago, as a fat young man pointed at fitness, there was something self-flagellating about riding through hot afternoons; there was a weird way in which I got off on the sunburn, the exhaustion, the near-delirium I experienced. Today, riding through the morning, with temperatures twenty degrees lower, I suffered, and I did not like it. Next time I get on my bike I won’t be going nearly as far. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw an osprey in a nest high upon a telephone pole. I did not see the body of a steer. I saw myself, ten years older, and I mourned the passing of the years.

2. Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

I haven’t watched the Federer match yet, so nobody say anything!

I don’t have much in particular to say about the tennis — Serena won, Andy won, despite having a bit of a scare thrown into him by a seven-foot-tall scarecrow with a 135-mph serve. I will say that I don’t like watching tennis with people who obviously don’t care about it, who would like their television back so they can watch something — anything — else. I was watching the Murray-Karlovic match at my parents’ house and I could feel my mother’s boredom, to the point that it started to infect me. She would leave the room and come back and say, “What’s happening?” After a while, I couldn’t say. They were trading games. Karlovic was massive and awkward and just skilled enough to keep up. Andy was fast and dazzling and volatile and frustrating and frustrated and all the things that make him my favorite player and everybody else’s least favorite. (I have a sneaking suspicion that he and I have similar personalities. This is why I like him.) In the end, Andy’s brilliance proved too much for Karlovic’s plodding power-serve-and-volley game. One wonders, however, how a player reaches #3 in the world with such a terrible second serve. What the hell, Andy?

Throughout the proceedings I kept going out to the back yard to visit my father, who has developed another quixotic hobby. For years, he walked the streets of Bend and made it his mission to pick up as many empty bottles and cans as he could. These he would throw away or take back to his recycling bin; then he would mark them down in a notebook. Ask him and he’ll tell you how many he’s collected. It is many thousands.

Anyhoozy, now they’ve moved out to the country and there isn’t nearly so much litter available. Instead, he hunts animals that are called, locally, “scrub rats” — actually, two kinds of varmint, one of which is a vole and the other one of which is not a vole.*** They’re tearing up the yard out there, digging holes and leaving mounds all over, so that the place looks, to use my dad’s colorful comparison, “like Verdun”. So he spends his afternoons out on his back deck with a book and a high-powered pellet gun, waiting. The things are brazen, all right — I’ve seen him get within two or three yards before pulling the trigger, and they don't seem to care.

***This second animal looks exactly like a vole.

He is as yet to hit one. My mom is blaming the sights on the gun. This is possible, I suppose, but I suspect mostly it’s a lack of experience that impedes his aim. We were city mice, my family. It’s funny to go out to the middle of nowhere and find them doing country things. It seems to me that his bad aim is for the best. What happens the first time some tiny animal’s brains are spattered all over the lawn? I mean, who knows, maybe it’ll be fine — this is a man whose grandmother used to wring the heads off chickens’ necks and set their golem-bodies shivering around the backyard. But that was a long time ago. Mostly I’m glad I won’t be there to see it.