The Adventures of Bicycle Man

I haven’t seen my cohort from The Paper, Mean Dene the photo queen, in quite a while. We haven’t had a concert to cover in weeks, but I did think of her last week.

I don’t know if the reason she likes to hang out with me is because she loves nothing more than shooting pictures or if it’s because she likes to see what’s going to happen to me next. For some reason or other, strange things happen around me anywhere I venture. She thinks it’s funny but I think it’s scary. I recall one time, my memory of which article we were doing isn’t really clear right now, but something weird happened.

Dena told me that something weird always happens to me and it doesn’t matter one iota where I am at the time. She looked at me laughingly and told me I was never to go to New Mexico. I asked her why in the world she would say something like that. She smiled and said that if I ever went anywhere near Area 51 that I would probably vaporize or something and that if that happened she would kind of miss me, … a little bit.

To this day, I still have no idea what she meant, but I’ll always remember that she said it, for whatever reason she had.

I spent the greater part of last week in Atlanta, Georgia. In my regular job I work for two of the finest men I have ever known. They’re really fine people, but for some reason they came up with the idea that I am actually “trainable”.

The truth is that I may be, but I need to work on it. After two days of training and another two of flying, I don’t know if any of the other salesmen I work with are trainable either. I mean we are able to be trained because we are all fairly intelligent people, but we really need to laugh while we’re doing it or the retention level drops off of the table. We all knew that going in, so we took the ball into our own hands and ran with it. I’ll spare you the details but I think the other twenty people in the course wondered which asylum we had escaped from and whether or not Georgia has an extradition treaty with Texas which would facilitate our expeditious eviction.

We were staying at a very nice hotel, smack dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta. It’s still a nice hotel because we may be marginally untrainable, but we clean up pretty good and can fake good behavior in public, if it’s absolutely necessary. We have all proven it, with one exception. Four of the five of us have all completed phase one of good behavior and have rid ourselves of our starter wives. Since we have had starter wives in the past, we therefore have proven that, although difficult, we are trainable to some extent.

I have a good friend, Surfer Girl, who was in between residences and needed a place to stay for a brief time. She’s a really great person who has been a little down on her luck recently. I told her that she had a place to stay until she was able to get back on her feet if she wanted. The only catch was that she would need to figure out if she could handle the c’est la vie manner in which I live. I then told her that I would be out of town for four days and nights and that she would have a vacation and a place of her own. She really liked that idea, so with my bag packed I told her to have fun and enjoy herself while I worked my Shirley Temple little brain to its roots.

But I’ve veered off course again. As I mentioned earlier, the hotel in which we were housed was a first class place. Kind of a waste perhaps but it wasn’t my call. If you’ve never been in one of those types of places, you aren’t allowed to smoke in the building. I could normally handle something like that, but I’m here to tell you that when they have a bar on the bottom floor which serves several local micro brewery selections, good taste dictates that only the truly rudest of tourist would insult their host by refusing to abide by the local traditions and refuse to soak up at least a little of the culture. The one minor problem both I and one of my co-workers had to endure is that when we drink beer the need for a good smoke from time to time during the cultural process is magnified. So we would step outside and have a smoke before returning to the bar to finish our beers.

That was the first time I met Bicycle Man. Bicycle Man is a homeless black gentleman who stays at the Salvation Army Shelter, which is located right up the street from the hotel and hence the bar attached to it. I think he got a better rate than we did but I have to tell you, he may be unemployed and homeless but he works his tail off getting spare change and free smokes from me and everyone else. Bicycle Man is working against some pretty stiff competition, which is plentiful in Atlanta these days. One of the competition is Vendor Guy. Vendor Guy is another homeless black gentleman who as far as we know resides in the same shelter as Bicycle Man. Vendor Guy is just as pleasant and polite a person as Bicycle Man is. We all got to know each other pretty well over the four day period of my ongoing education thing. Vendor guy is a class act. He would panhandle for spare change and cigarettes as well, but he would always have something to give you in return, whether it be a local paper or a flower. That struck me as a wonderful thing. So my roommate and I would give them both smokes, because although we aren’t wealthy, we feel like we’re pretty blessed in comparison to their current positions.

My roomie and I are both early risers and had a few hours to kill every morning before the van came to pick us up for training. We both like drinking coffee and having a smoke or two to start our day off. The hotel had a really nice window ledge on the street which was a perfect spot to sit with your coffee and welcome the day. So we would head out to the ledge with our vices and talk about some really interesting stuff. Bicycle Man is an early riser as well, and would come wheeling down the street with a wave and a smile. It was six in the morning and he was out looking for work at that time every day we were there. He would always stop for a brief time to say hello and wish us luck today. We’d give him a smoke and he’d be on his way because if he didn’t leave the security guy would run him off. Vendor Guy would inevitably wander down the street shortly thereafter and the routine would repeat itself. After Vendor Guy wandered away, we knew the van would be there shortly, so we would head back in to the hotel to meet everyone.

It’s sure good to be back home in Houston in my own bed, but when I got back to my apartment, Surfer Girl was gone and my place was spotless. She left me a note to say thanks for the hospitality and goodbye.

In retrospect I suppose we should have left a note on the side of the hotel for Bicycle Man and Vendor Guy. God Bless’em all.