The first time I saw one of those motorized bicycles, I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I was being chased by some oversized, supersonic bat and I was prepared to take evasive action. Evasive action consisting mainly of wetting myself and crying a lot.
It was the middle of the night and I was walking on Webster Street in the dark. The faraway buzz of what sounded like a bus-sized mosquito grew from faint to loud to louder and then to oh-my-God-I’m-going-to-die, Mommy! I turned to behold the blood-gleaming proboscis of the demon creature and readied myself for impalement. What I saw instead was some rather mousy fellow with thick eyeglasses, a knit cap over his undersized dome and a cigarette pointing from his lips like a flaming conductor’s wand.
The dude had grocery bags flapping from each wrist as he cruised along at roughly the speed of a Frisbee in flight. To my eye, it made no sense. Here was a fellow on what looked like a garden variety Schwinn, yet he was booking along fast enough to create a wind.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZ went the mutant bat/mosquito/bike thing while I stood in the street swearing off cheap beer forever.
A motorized bicycle? Why, it’s madness. Madness, I say!
When we were kids, we dreamed of such marvels. “Imagine,” one of us would say, huffing and puffing with burning muscles and strained lungs as we pedaled up Abbott Street hill (you don’t know where that is; stop thinking about it), “if you could put a motor on a bike?”
“A motor! That’s just stupid. Let’s clothespin baseball cards to our forks! It’ll be just as good!”
So we clothes-pinned baseball cards to our spokes and it wasn’t just as good, Randy. What the heck is the matter with you?
Now motorized bikes are everywhere, to the point where I only wet myself half the time upon hearing them. This is no feat of space-age engineering. From what I can gather, viewing a motorized bike from the safety of bushes, somebody simply attached a lawnmower engine to a bicycle and then proceeded to slap himself on the forehead for not thinking of it many decades earlier.
We’re talking 48ccs of raw Huffy power here, an engine that’s tiny enough to get 100 miles to the gallon, but powerful enough so that when you whiz up downtown streets, the majority of people are going to think you’re some kind of magical flying wizard being pulled by a team of invisible stallions. Because while the motorized bikes have been around a few years now, people still don’t get it. They don’t get it because when we were kids, we didn’t have motorized bicycles. That was the stuff of fantasy, like flying cars or the power of invisibility.
Imagine if you had the power of invisibility AND a motorized bike? You could really blow some minds with that action.
The advantage of the motorized bike, I imagine, is that you have something very similar to a moped without all the stigmas, and without at least one hilarious joke that comes with riding a moped. You’ve heard that joke. Admit that you’ve heard it and let’s move on.
The fact is, somebody should have invented and popularized the motorized bicycle somewhere around 1902, but no. We were into the two thousands before some practical genius — as far as I can tell, it was a guy in Lewiston — decided to do what every American boy dreams of as he pedals his butt up Goff Hill with his girlfriend sitting on the handlebars. The result is all those people buzzing up and down the Lewiston streets because, A: They lost their driver’s licenses and needed alternative means of transportation — take that, BMV! — B: They don’t want to pay government extortionists in the form of vehicle registration, inspection, tax and title and blah blah blah, or C: They’ve always dreamed of buzzing through the night like a dragonfly, scaring reporters and causing others to believe the inevitable insect takeover has begun.
The motorized bike craze doesn’t seem to be diminishing. I envision a day when the majority of locals are using these things, including crack dealers and prostitutes, who absolutely, positively have to get their wares to the customer at Frisbee speed.
Police chases won’t end so violently when everybody tops out at 35 mph and a garden-variety thumbtack would serve as a spike mat. Get motorized bikes for the roving ice cream people and replace the terrifying hell music — finally! — with the somnolent bicycle buzz.
These are all brilliant ideas for which I’ll take full credit whilst I go about working on my invisibility cloak, which I should have completed by the end of the week. How hard can it be? And once I have that capability in hand, well … Wait until you see me then.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer who will take a BMX over the BMV any day. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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