The Wheelie God
I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like
Pink Floyd - "Bike" - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn - 1967
Reagan was The Wheelie God. It was extremely impressive.
I rode bikes with Neila and Reagan perhaps 10 times as a child. It was always with both, never with one.
Reagan could pop a wheelie, hold it, and steer on his 27" old school brown Schwinn 10-speed, effectively rendering it an overwrought unicycle. I never could come close to that feat, wheelie-proficient only on BMX bikes.
One day we were riding in the nicest part of very nice Lakewood. Reagan popped a monster wheelie and rode it a good ways uphill to a smooth landing. Neila blew her top:
NEILA (furious): REAGAN! GOD DAMN IT! STOP THAT!
He, laughing, asked her why and she screamed something along the lines of "Because I told ya to!" I never found that a valid explanation. Neither did Reagan, it would seem.
We continued. He circled us a couple times, then we reached another uphill and he circled again. I heard a faint grunt of great effort and Reagan came around our right side, still circling us, but this time in epic near-vertical wheelie form. The effort he was pumping into that machine was amazing. Had there been a propeller, he'd have flown away to faraway parts unknown:
NEILA (furiouser): GOD DAMN IT, REAGAN!!! WHAT DID I JUST TELL YOU?!?!?
It was utterly hilarious. Neila went haywire. People were actually coming out of their houses to see who was shrieking and cursing on their quiet, very fancy street.
Reagan just laughed it off. She was pissed all the way home.
The next time bicycling raised its head was a trip the rough part of town to buy a tandem bicycle from a crazy old bastard who sang "On a Bicycle Built For Two," all three verses, three times while we were there. Neila was delighted by it. I wanted to strangle him with the garden hose built for one.
Neila had hamstrung The Wheelie God. Never would I see him pop another.
Ironically, for a list of obvious reasons, that behemoth two-wheeler was quite less safe than the old paradigm. But hey, at least we were wheelie-free.
And, it looked goofy as all fuck. We were a spectacle everywhere. But hey, at least we were wheelie-free.
After one outing in which the number of people exceeded the number of bikes, I quit riding with them. It was supposed to be fun, but the total bleed of Neila's Siamese Twin Togetherness Stranglehold Policy into the bike world plus her volcanic anger at Reagan being a hoot de-fun'ded the affair more than enough to point me in other directions.