My first serious wreck was on a trike, towing a Radio Flyer wagon. One of my best friends (and next door neighbor), Clifford Bossie, and I had been playing some intense game with our trikes for hours. All I remember was that it involved going really fast and stopping suddenly. It grew dark as we played. For the thousandth time I stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk but this time Clifford ran into me. I ate the bars on the way down, and broke all my front teeth, seriously repositioning them all along the way. The dental surgeon who pulled them left fragments. It took two more visits to get all the pieces out. The permanent teeth grew in the same screwball way the baby teeth had come out. It took several years of braces in Jr. High & High school to mostly straighten the mess out. I think my parents blamed Clifford, but it was just one of those things; we were always running into each other. We were boys.
My first bike was a bright red, used Murray with a luggage rack on the back sporting a skull and crossbones sticker courtesy of the previous owner. I rode the wheels off it until it was stolen. For some reason I always had problems with bicycles and thieves.
I then got an honest-to-goodness Schwinn, a big hunka steel with 20" wheels and a front basket. When this one got stolen from school my dad and I rode around the neighborhood until we saw a kid on it. We followed him home. Dad confronted his disbelieving parents and we got the bike back. The same kid stole the bike twice more; the last time my Dad made it clear the police would knock on their door the next time. The thefts stopped.
All my first real 2-wheeled wrecks were on this bike, including my first head dive from showing off, and my first run-in with a car.
I remember riding this thing to school in all kinds of weather. In the 6th grade I even did this carrying a trombone by its case's handle looped over one handlebar.
Head dive
One day in the 3rd or 4th grade, Clifford and I were riding our bikes home from school, engaged in typical 9 year old boy type bike-riding activities - showing off, playing combat aircraft, playing cops & robbers, playing cowboys & Indians, trying new things.
After a particularly brutal chase of some sort, during which I'm pretty sure we killed each other at least a dozen times, he started weaving. I wove wilder. He wove insanely. I switched to a high-speed, fast wobble, which got out of control and I ended up doing a headstand at 5 or 10 MPH. Screaming, I jumped back on the bike, raced home, with Clifford trying to keep up with this madman, ran in and denied I had done anything. In fact, Clifford must have cut me off!
I wasn't a habitual liar. But somewhere between panic (blood gushing from my head!), pain, shock, and embarrassment I'd lost it. Mom put me on restriction from playing with "that kid" for life. It was several years before I admitted it had been my fault. Clifford forgave me, figured I had been out of it. I don't think my Mom ever really believed that, and last I knew, she still thought it was Clifford's fault. She did let us play together the last year I was in El Paso. We'd had to play together as outlaws til then. I lost a couple of years of excellent friendship because I couldn't accept responsibility for my own mistakes, and it would have served me right to have lost his friendship forever.
Meet the Truck
One summer when I was 8 or so, I was riding back home from a nearby 7-11 on my shiny, red Schwinn. Once I got away from traffic and onto the quiet street I lived on, I couldn't stand waiting, and started reading the comic I had just bought.
While riding the bike.
People almost never parked their cars on the street; everyone had ample driveways and carports. Unfortunately someone was washing a car and had moved their pickup into the street. Keeping the curb in my peripheral vision, I knew I was doing fine, and just as some new kid in Sgt. Rock's platoon, whom everyone had been ragging on, spotted an enemy in a tree, I ran Smack Dab into a bumper. Blam! Stop. Splat. The guy washing his car almost wet himself laughing.
I jumped on the bike and tore out for home, my face the color of my nice, red bicycle, to read my comic in the privacy of my bedroom.
