So maybe you’ve heard cause I won’t stop yapping about it, but I tore my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my knee and am pretty sad about it. Before fucking up my knee and getting surgery that will ensure I have arthritis sometime in the future, I rode my bike everywhere: work, friend’s houses, bars, softball games, group rides, you name it. Since my current apartment is in that weird semi-industrial part of the Kerns neighborhood, getting to work near the Lloyd Center via public transit doesn’t make sense. I’ve had to drive a lot more, which coupled with all the time cooped up on the couch, hasn’t been great for my mental health.
Within the last few weeks I’ve gotten the okay to get back on the saddle, making my first reappearance with the homies at the Ladd’s 500. I go more in depth both on my commute and the role cycling has played in my recovery so far in a story I did for Bike Portland1 last week—“Bikes, the Miracle Cure.”2 In it there’s a short anecdote about the other cyclist in my quadplex that was cut short for space. All it was meant to illustrate was, despite the dream of an auto-oriented hellscape being alive in Portland, and some motorists wanting to dance on the graves of the transit cucked, everybody bikes!
Now that I’m writing this my bike received the inanimate object equivalent of an ACL tear on my commute home from work. This past weekend I could hear and feel a funny sound coming from what I thought was my pedal, only for the chain to snap about five minutes from home. This setback feels more like years of wear and tear through not properly taking care of my trusty travel vessel, rather than a sudden impact and pop. Then again, maybe that’s exactly how my busted knee views its treatment… Well luckily this fix costs less. Plus the recovery time for hard metal is nonexistent—compared to flesh and soft tissue that really REALLY do not like when a surgeon shoves stuff inside it so they can tear off a piece and re-attach it to another. Really it’s a miracle I’m able to bike at all.
My neighbor is not the imagined Portland Cyclist: Middle aged affluent white man, wearing a spandex sausage suit,3 $2000+ bike with another easy $2k in accessories, drives for most trips so he will say “as a cyclist X policy to protect cyclists is bad.” Yes, Benjamin,4 may be a middle aged white dad, but he’s far from rolling in it and can’t drive because of a dewey. Benjamin is simply nice. A sweet stoner type that’s always got eyes on the block. He’s either having a cold one and a smoke on the porch or is being a gentle father with his super hyper daughter that wants to ride around, jump on the trampoline, or “see how your apartment is different than ours.”
On the first sunny faux-spring day of the year I couldn’t really even leave the house without help. Benjamin rolled up on his old rusted beach cruiser, new purple highlights in his hair with a can of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in hand.
“Woah man, is your leg broken?” he said.
“No, I tore my ACL and had to get surgery.”
“That’s brutal man,” he replied before taking a pull. “Don’t sit on that man, it’s a piece of shit. I need to throw it out.”
I was sitting on his rotting wicker chair, my ass sinking through. Benjamin went inside and quickly came out with two dining room chairs that we’d put in the backyard for a party a few weeks before. He helped me on, propping up my leg before sitting down himself.
“I bet they got you on some hardcore meds man” he said.
“Yeah, Oxycodone.”
“When I broke mine they were handing out Oxy like I was a little kid on Halloween. And that’s a nasty habit to kick, I’ll tell you that much.”
He seemed nervous. I wasn’t sure if he was giving me advice or just wanted to tell me a story. I don’t think he did either.
“I mean you really have to take it for the pain, I know, just be careful,” he said. “That was years of my life.”
I thanked him before he biked off to run an errand. Bopping and weaving between bread trucks and seltzer forklifts, having seemingly forgotten why he even came home in the first place. The next day I stopped taking my oxycodone, resolved to power through with Ibuprofen, ice, and my physical therapy appointments. It sort of worked. I mean it did, I’m biking again and hardly feel pain. Mostly just frustration that I can’t straighten my leg—it’s still a swollen looking monstrosity people look at like should you really be moving on that?—and fear when my left quad muscles seize up and I wonder if I’ll fall down again starting everything over once more.
“Feel better man.”
I think I will. Thanks again for all the help.
Thanks Taylor (<3) for the edits and Jonathan for publishing it.
Well… I mean aside from “surgery”...
Those spandex bike gear with a bike shop or microbrewery logo on it that are so tight it shows the outline of their dick.
Not his real name.