by John B. Allen

At sixteen, I wanted a bicycle. Both my brothers had Schwinn ten-speed racers. My best friend Glenn had a twelve-speed, metallic yellow model. Every morning Glenn rode past my house as I started my four-block trek to the bus stop, brown lunch bag in hand, the apple always weighing it down. “See you at school,” he’d say, standing up off the seat, posing briefly, hands-free, before whirring out of sight.

Mom explained that we didn’t have the money, adding hopefully, “I thought you liked the bus?” Then, after seeing my bratty frown, she said, “I’m sure one of your brothers will let you borrow theirs.”

Yeah, sure, Mom, you understand testosterone and sibling cruelty. Mike, two years older, rode all day long, and whenever I asked him he’d say he was just about to take another turn. Terry, four years older and a foot taller, owned the largest bike, the pedals well out of reach. He treated it like a car – hands off, off limits, you’re too young.

“But I want my own bike,” I said.

Bike, for me, meant one step closer to Me, to Adult, to Man, but I didn’t know how to explain this to her. I looked pleadingly over at Ray, my Mom’s perennial boyfriend, and he simply nodded, continuing to polish a silver spoon from an antique set he’d recently salvaged. His stony hands bore whitened calluses.  Purplish-black burn marks, some as large as dimes, marked his lower arms and upper chest, the result of sparks flying off blow-torched steel. Since he worked in demolition, he had access to abandoned things. I remember the half dozen crystal, faceted teardrops he’d salvaged off an old Park Avenue hotel chandelier, each as big as my hand and heavier than a brick. He’d sometimes bring us small, funny-shaped tables, hard-seated chairs with spindled backs, marble bathroom tiles, rattling tins full of nails and screws and brackets in all sizes, which he deposited onto the crowded workbench in our basement for some unknown future use.

This weekend Ray stayed over, as he often did. He also spent part of each holiday with us, and the other with his actual children somewhere on New York City’s Upper West Side, or maybe it was Brooklyn. I never paid much attention to these details. I mostly treated him like a neighbor or family friend, a Backstage Man. I became Ray’s assistant when he cooked, declogged the lawnmower, fiddled with the car, painted book shelves, or rewired an old lamp. My brothers seemed indifferent to his whereabouts or activities, maybe because they were older and busy managing complicated social calendars. Sure.

Ray parked Mom’s car at the curb and worked in the garage all Sunday morning, the roll-down door and basement door firmly closed. I heard the drill, metal tools clattering on cement, sounds echoing in the bay.

Mom asked me to refill her glass of Pepsi. She often complained that she was “too tired to budge.” She worked two jobs, as a leasing agent for the Ford dealership, and as a real estate agent. On weekends, she watched television, mostly game shows at night and black and white movies in the day. Sometimes she’d watch Abbott and Costello movies with me, but not this morning.

After I fetched her drink, she told me to check on Ray, see if he wanted help. I knocked on the basement door. “Thirsty? I can get you some seltzer.”

“Busy.” That’s all he said.

Not curious enough to plot an intrusion yet, I grabbed my glove and went outside to pitch a tennis ball endlessly against the neighbor’s curb, inventing nine inning games, out by out. When it became too dark, line drives hitting me on the wrist instead of landing safely in the glove, I went inside the house, the garage forgotten until Ray shouted my name.

I rushed down, taking the steps two at a time, shouldering into the wall. I pushed open the door and slid a little on a grainy oil stain.

He kicked out the kickstand. “Not bad, eh?”

A white frame. Black handlebars wrapped in duct tape. Purplish seat. White-walled tires that seemed too short, too thick. Gear shifts in strange places, down by the chain. No logos or stripes or “Schwinn” painted anywhere. A clumsy generator headlight crouched on handlebars that were pocked-marked with rust; all the chrome was rusty.

“I wanted yellow,” I said.

Ray lost his smile. He pushed passed me on his way inside, wiping his hands on a shop towel. “Hey, it works.”

I crossed the garage away from Ray’s bike and rolled oldest brother Terry’s Schwinn out of the corner, lifted myself awkwardly onto the crossbar, unable to sit on the high seat. I kept imagining Glenn and company’s cruel laughter and resolved never to ride the Frankenstein bike. I put Terry’s bike away, then moved the white bike to an opposite corner and left it untested for about a week. Eventually I rode it around the neighborhood, on streets where my friends, the few I had, did not live.

Mom chided me to thank Ray, and I may have given him a half-hearted hug after dessert. I may have even liked the bike once I started riding it with some regularity. But that night, I went to bed brooding, perhaps angry, perhaps depressed, thinking about this creation of his, constructed in the same way he had built and rebuilt our household, in dinners and lamps, gadgets and furniture — as if Ray, the stand-in for an absent dad, knew he could fashion a better bike, knew all along what I didn’t: how to piece together a better family, a better boy, a better man, because he understood how scrap transforms into sculpture.

Photo by Alexandre Juca on Unsplash