Heroes, Ghosts, Grand Delusions, and Bad Ideas

Storage lockers hold a desolate kind of allure for me. The tang of young concrete and cheap steel prefabrication mingling with the waft of decomposing cardboard, discarded clothing and furniture trying to be forgotten, it all carries a smell of bittersweet sentimentality. Part of me wishes I wasn’t so familiar with storage units that I can smell the damn things before I see them, but another part of me hopes to someday find treasure and redemption behind those loud, flimsy roll-up doors.

I was breathing in deep that aroma again a couple days ago. It was hailing gently – something I had never imagined being able to contemplate until I discovered Colorado in the springtime – and I had volunteered my morning and my big orange truck to help a friend try to empty one of the storage units that have been hanging like so many $100 a month albatrosses around his neck ever since he shut the doors of his bike shop a little over a year ago. The task for the day was to load up all the bicycles hidden in one of the units, shuttle them over to a vacant corner across the road from where I live, and then bequeath them in “as is” condition to whoever wanted them, no offer refused.

And there it was. Buried all the way in the back; behind the sweet old Louison Bobet touring bike, a late 80s Redline bmx bike that might actually be worth some money, a genuine KOS cruiser, a gaggle of well used Rockhoppers of roughly “mid-Exage” vintage, a Klein Mantra, and a fully intact (but for the melted elastomers) Pro-Flex Beast. The Shitbike. Sigh. The hail clattering (gently) on the tin roof muffled my groan of “Oh dear god, not again.” This must be how Sisyphus felt.

The Shitbike, conceptually, was the twisted progeny of Lou Mazzante. It was a beautiful idea that he brought to life when he stepped up to take the helm of BIKE magazine following my grumpy departure. Physically, The Shitbike was a Softride beam bike. People who were not riding mountain bikes in the early to mid-1990s are forgiven for not ever knowing they existed. But, since we are all here, now, let’s recap: The Softride beam had been developed by a company called Allsop, and consisted of a pair of couple-foot-long laminated fiberglass leaves with a thin shear layer of something rubbery sandwiched between them. The marketing ideology that Allsop employed at the time was “suspend the rider, not the bike.” No dampers (aside from that rubbery sandwich layer), held in a rough seating position by rider weight, those beams were wonderfully responsive and adept at filtering out high frequency, low amplitude kind of stuff, but the deeper they got flexed, the more enthusiastically they would respond, and since the rider was usually sagged around three inches out of a possible many more inches of travel, things could get more than a little frisky when rebounding.

It wasn’t really any dumber than some of the other ideas people were throwing at the wall with regard to bike suspension at the time, but there were some interesting characteristics that made it problematic for mountain biking in any terrain steeper or rougher than a washboard fireroad. Beam bikes got named all kinds of uncharitable things by riders who had been catapulted over their bars after one too many G-outs. Diving board. Moose tongue. Insert whatever springloaded phallic metaphor you want here – they have all been used.

As fate would have it, the Softride beam bike was Lou’s introduction to mountain biking. His first ever mountain bike rides were aboard a hand-me-down beam bike that he had scavenged together. That he continued mountain biking is something of a miracle. That he survived his initial self-hazing and went on to become editor of BIKE and then pursue a lengthy career of editorial excellence at Bicycling - while also developing some legitimate chops as a rider – speaks volumes about either the resilience of the human spirit or Lou’s dogged stubbornness. Not sure which. Maybe both.

So, with the editorial reins firmly in hand and a valuable page at the back of the book in need of some solid, fuck-all-y’all editorial panache, the idea was hatched to trot out a hammered old Softride and send it off to try and survive some modern mountain biking. Time to make a statement, leave a mark. There had to be an element of catharsis at work inside Lou, some exorcism of old ghosts. But I never asked. I had left the building, and with a quiet sigh of relief, felt like I had dodged a bullet. I wanted no part of that particular trip down memory lane.

The Shitbike turned out to be a stroke of genius. At a time when the magazine needed some good old-fashioned humor as well as a guiding esprit de corps, The Shitbike stepped up and delivered. The entire staff bonded over it. Lou debuted it by racing it at the Keyesville Classic. Dain poached the Sea Otter Classic XC race. Squirrel rode 250 miles of the Baja Epic aboard it. The Butcher raced it at SSWC in 2008, while pregnant. Joe Parkin’s first ever assignment for BIKE was racing The Shitbike in the Downieville Classic. Along the way, Wade Simmons wall rode it to recreate an iconic BIKE cover, Cam McCaul backflipped it. The Shitbike got decked out as a scraper bike, set on fire, launched from a trebuchet, and Stevil rode it into the Santa Cruz harbor at Joe and Elayna’s wedding. Turns out that beams are surprisingly buoyant, and the damn thing floated, necessitating rescue, and resurrection. Again.

All in all, during a five or so year run, The Shitbike made 34 back page appearances before being “officially” laid to rest in 2011. With each new assignment, the bike would take on a new part here, a sticker there. Just enough work would be done to keep it running, nothing more. No attempts were made to turn The Shitbike into something “better.” But along the way, passing from absurd situation to legendary talent and back repeatedly, The Shitbike gained more patina and aura than I suspect anyone envisioned at the outset. The Shitbike became a celebrity in its own right. A topic of conversation among the readership that transcended its origins by far, until it crafted its own arc of legend, rising like some scabby, eternally ugly phoenix from the forgotten swamp of doomed ideas where it had been stewing for so long.

And there it was again, looking as beat-up and forlorn as it ever had. The hail gently pelted my head, and we solemnly went about stuffing the bikes into the back of our trucks. Most of them had been brought into the shop at some point by owners who then disappeared. Some were beautiful old period pieces, every component correct for the time. Others were slapped together wrecks that had been hacked away at every day of their lives before they ended up at the shop. Every one of them had a story.

The sun came out, then it hailed again for a bit, then the sun came out again. This is, apparently, par for the course in the banana belt of the Colorado Rockies at 8000’ above sea level, along the banks of the Arkansas river. We set the bikes up against a chain link fence, and watched as people came and squeezed brake levers, kicked tires. A kid about 12 jumped out of the passenger side of a 4Runner, tape measure in hand, made a straight line for one of the BMX bikes, ignoring the Dave Mirra edition Haro next to it. His dad handed over a couple 20s and they were gone as fast as they had appeared. A few bar staff from the Viking came by looking for townies, left happy. A greybeard in a battered Tacoma with a pristine Pivot Mach 6 on the roof came early, and hung around trading mountain bike war stories all afternoon. He left with the Klein Mantra (wanted it for the XTR rear derailleur), the Pro-Flex (elastomer fondue and all) and a very sweet Klein road bike with full Campy Record that fit him perfectly. One by one, the bikes all found new homes.

Across town, there’s a storage unit that smells of young concrete and cheap steel prefab, decomposing carboard, forgotten furniture. It’s almost empty, aside from the bullet I thought I had dodged. Maybe it’s time.