The Trek Antelope mountain bike I brought to New York never got a name. I didn’t love it like my later bikes. I neglected and abused it. I took it for granted. Yet when it was stolen I was pissed. Silver with blue lettering, it was a decent, rather generic 18-speed mountain bike. I bought it from a friend of a friend to bring to college, and the bike endured four years of outdoor storage with zero maintenance. I brought it to New York and rode it until it failed. When I took it to the bike shop to get a new chain, I was certain the guys were screwing me because they insisted I replace the whole rear cassette. They weren’t screwing me; the whole drive train was beat to shit. Feeling naive in a bike shop was worse than the financial outlay, which was significant in those days. A month after I replaced everything and was riding smoothly for the first time in years, I came out from my job on 57th & Lex in the middle of the afternoon to find my bike gone without a trace. It’s a particular sting, having a bike stolen. May it never happen to you.
Late that night I went to Craigslist, one of the internet’s greatest accomplishments - especially in those days. Though my search to find the thief selling it was in vain, I came across a fresh posting from a guy selling a red and white “Cannondale racer bike” for $125 that had been sitting in his basement unused for a decade. I wrote him immediately and arranged to meet him the next morning. It was all about getting there first.
What a beautiful bike. The 1989 Cannondale Criterium with the fat downtube and compact stance was the company’s first generation aluminum road bike and one of the coolest-looking frames ever made. The ride home was intense. I had never ridden on skinny wheels before nor held drop down handlebars in a city, and the clip-in pedals with sneakers combination was the icing on the cake. I was hooked. I called the bike Henry, in honor of the Arsenal legend Thierry Henry. With Henry I became an everyday rider and experienced the City in a whole new way.
One day years later I was blasting down Seventh Ave from 43rd to 30th and got jammed. I had a pocket of space ahead of me in the left lane and went hands free to open a cliff-bar lunch. Suddenly a parked tourist car from the left tried to merge into traffic. They got in the lane enough but immediately braked hard due to a truck changing lanes from the right into that same pocket of space. I found myself desperately in need of a brake lever with no hands to pull it. I reached for my handlebars and barely hit the brakes when I rear-ended the Camry and flopped on the trunk. A child’s shocked face stared back at me through the window. More annoyed than hurt, I ushered them away, got back in the saddle and rode on. My knee hurt like hell but there was no catastrophic damage to Henry. Later on the way home the ride felt weird but I couldn’t put my finger on it. When I finally got a good look, I saw my front fork bent backward about an inch but perfectly square. I hit that car flush. Even though the fork was toast I couldn’t find any further damage to Henry. But it’s an aluminum frame, and any crack or hairline fracture is a ticking time bomb. You can’t investigate something like that without stripping all the paint off. So I retired him. Henry’s frame hangs in storage and I hold onto a faraway dream of a someday rebuild.