My Son and the Bicycle Wheel

In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. . . . It was around that time that the word “Readymade” came to mind to designate this form of manifestation. A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these “Readymades” was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference.

—Marcel Duchamp

He said, my son said, you just don’t get it, I’m not like you. What does it mean, I’m not like you. I think differently, act differently, move about differently, don’t like you, can’t stand you and what about the waver in both our voices when we come to this point in the conversation. A street sign: Go Left or None of Your Business. That could be it, I’m asking too many questions as usual and interfering in his life, of course.

You’d get on with them, he says, you’re like them, but I don’t. I couldn’t do it, work there I mean or anything. I can’t adopt the pose, manage the portfolio, stand at attention and besides they think I’m weird. You don’t see me, but they do and they know I don’t fit in. You’d fit in, he says it again, you would, because it’s where you went to school and everything, but not me and I don’t want to anyhow.

It’s a hot day and growing hotter and I hate talking on the telephone when I’m late and it seems I’m always late when he calls with something important to say.

He makes up stories. Sometimes when he’s talking I am back in time with his father but I never tell him this because he is, of course, a separate being, but then the only person who reminds me of him is his father telling stories and making me laugh as I never laughed when I was growing up where laughter was a mockery of whatever serious endeavor we were all supposed to be engaged in.

But the stories don’t help with I’m not like you. What can it mean exactly. It’s like an abrupt bend in the road which you don’t see and are out over the air in your mind, wheels spinning, heart pounding. Not that you think you are alike since even you can see that you’re not. But it’s the phrase and what it means beyond the fact that he likes one kind of food and you like another or that he grew up here and you grew up there or that you analyze everything and he thinks it’s weird. He’s a great cyclist, Cat 2, and has raced in several cities and then smaller ones I’ve never heard of and he comes in with the pack or wins or trains by riding to the top of Mt. Wilson which is about 65 miles round trip in a day and comes in and walks to the refrigerator, ravenous and bent over in insect clothes unable to utter a word much less tell a story.

When he was a kid I was a single mom. I thought of course that I could do everything because that’s really what one has to think, but as the years unfold, one realizes that one is a paltry number and also that as he reminds you, you live in one world and he in another. He saw a home movie once of me riding a bike decorated with crepe paper in a Fourth of July parade in the middle of Ohio. No wonder he says, and he shakes his head.

So what do we talk about. We talk about the movies which of course is what everyone talks about, although again, he likes movies in which things happen and I like those in which things don’t. Who wants anything to happen and I think this more and more; there is too much happening all over anyhow and what we need to do is slow things down.

He races bicycles. Brilliantly as it turns out. When he was five I took him to the nearby park to learn to ride which he didn’t want to. I won’t he said and he said it again. You will I said. I held the back of the seat and launched him forward until he fell and then launched him again until by the end of the afternoon he could do it. He didn’t want to but then he did and then he did every afternoon when I came home from work and before I could put my feet up or listen to my messages, we were at the park and he was riding and jumping over jumps and taking off.

My first memory of sheer joy is riding a bike. It was an adult bike much too big for me and so I had wooden blocks on the pedals which I could push only standing up. It was a year or two before I could ride the bike sitting on the seat but I could ride it much farther then because I could sit down once in a while. He had always been indifferent to my stories of riding, riding without hands, riding the neighborhood, getting away from everyone, riding to outride the boys on the block, riding into the sunset with my cowboy hat flapping against the back of my t-shirt. No wonder he said looking at me as if I were a foreign object he had just suddenly encountered in his living room. But one day he looked at me and said, I’ve inherited the bicycle gene, I’m just like you. Of course he wasn’t, he’d been right in the first place, he wasn’t just like me, but it was a good story.