Free An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood by Tom Purcell

polished it every day. I rode it slowly and carefully. The last thing I wanted to do with it, initially, was jump it off a rickety wooden ramp.
     
    I sat by idly while watching a dozen or more other kids attempt to jump their bikes on the ramp we’d built on Janet Drive. Kids came from all over to try out our ramp — they came on every kind of bike.
     
    The kids whose parents had more money over in Georgetown mostly rode Schwinns and other expensive bikes and I marveled at how the shock absorber on the front of Mike Landy’s Orange Krate absorbed the energy as his bike landed on the hard pavement.
     
    Most kids showed up riding the lower-cost Huffy and Murray brands, most of them of the single-speed variety. They pedaled as hard as they could but never could attain a speed great enough to give them a high liftoff. Rather than floating through the air after they hit the ramp, gravity pulled down their front tires as soon as they passed the edge of the ramp, causing their front tires to hit the pavement hard — and their rear tires to hit it even harder.
     
    Many a kid was thrown headfirst into the pavement that way, always painful to watch.
     
    Another class of kids was those whose parents couldn’t, or wouldn’t, buy them a new spider bike. Some kids would show up on their sister’s bike — its frame had a low, curved center bar that was originally designed to allow a girl with a dress to pedal without her dress getting caught on the bar, which could do a real number on a boy’s private area.
     
    When I was 8 I was riding a “girl’s bike” when my foot slipped off the pedal. My crotch roared downward, just shy of the speed of light, to be stopped by the low curved bar, which caused a black-and-blue bruise in an area where no boy ever wants to be black and blue.
     
    Other kids who lacked new bikes showed up riding every kind of contraption — bikes pieced together from parts of other bikes people had dragged to the curb on garbage pickup day.
     
    The typical homemade bike would have a 2- inch frame, a 26-inch rear wheel, a 20-inch front wheel — giving the thing a drag-racing look — and handlebars and a seat that were off-center and clearly sourced from another bike.
     
    We took guilty pleasure in watching such kids race toward the ramp because their bikes were likely to explode back into their individual parts — often in mid air — and bike parts and kid parts would rain onto the hard pavement, making a spectacular symphonic sound as grunts and groans were accentuated by metal clanking .
     
    In any event, I rode my five-speed Murray up to Janet Drive to watch the others jump, not to jump myself. And I would have been content with that had not one of the kids — he’d just had a tremendous wipeout and was sore — told me I was a sissy who was afraid to even try.
     
    Finally, after much ribbing, I saw little choice but to jump myself — something I’d done a million times on my prior two bikes . But this time, as I raced down Marilynn and cut onto Janet in fifth gear, I was shocked at the distance I was able to fly — some 25 feet or more — and was hooked instantly on the adrenalin rush.
     
    I soon had the neighborhood record easily in hand and held it, barely even trying, for several weeks — until a stranger from another neighborhood arrived. He was older than I — probably 14 or so and nearly the size of a grown man, much bigger and stronger than I.
     
    Worse, he arrived on a brand new 26-inch 10-speed spider bike. He broke my record by 5 feet with his first jump. His second extended his record another 2 feet — he flew some 32 feet through the air!
     
    I was determined to get my record back.
     
    ***
     
    A dozen kids stood on either side of the ramp on Janet Drive as I sat atop Marilynn Drive, ready to begin my descent.
     
    I started off in first and pedaled as hard as I could, banging through the gears until I locked into fifth. I was still pedaling as hard as I could when I