Perhaps I should burn my white dancing shoes. Doing so would’ve saved me from a self-inflicted nightmare of steel and sharp objects.
The trouble began when my friends and I arrived at a bash, located in a Williamsburg loft with cigarette-scarred wood floors. Partygoers in frayed jeans shorts and tight tank tops writhed to reggaeton, indiscriminately flinging appendages toward the crumbling ceiling. It was that rarest of creatures: a New York City party where people actually danced.
“Oh, yeah!” I shouted gleefully. I humped the air, which equals dancing in my book. Soon, I was moist. “Help me take it off!” I shouted to my girlfriend, unbuttoning my long-sleeve oxford. She pulled off one sleeve, then the other, revealing my gray wifebeater.
“Whooooo!” I shouted, swinging my shirt like a helicopter blade.
Several booming songs passed before panic crept in. My bike key was in my shirt pocket. The key opening the steel chain locking my 10-speed to an iron fence.
“Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit!” I dropped to the bottle-cap-littered floor. I searched as feverish as a 6 a.m. cokehead looking for misplaced blow, but the key, like my dignity after three tequila shots, was gone.
The next morning, I called a locksmith named Raoul. He worked for a company named Champion. Who doesn’t like a winner, especially one with rock-bottom rates?
“Only $35 to come out,” Raoul said on the phone, a departure from the $55 others charged. “And it’ll be another $30 to unlock the bike.”
Raoul arrived in a white van, the kind used to whisk teenagers to sex dungeons. He parked near a fire hydrant.
“You sure this is your bike?” asked Raoul. He possessed a globe belly, walrus mustache and cop sunglasses.
“Yes.”
“OK then,” he said.
If I ever want to steal a bike, I know whom to call.
Raoul examined my chain. “This is steel,” Raoul said. “This ain’t gonna be easy. We can’t just drill the lock. We gotta saw it off. It’ll be $100. OK?”
It was far more than $65, but I had zero bargaining power. “OK.”
“Plus tax.” He smiled. “Lemme get my blade.”
It was one of the few times in my adult life I’ve been elated to hear that phrase. I expected Raoul to return with a Sawzall, a tool making quick work of metal. Instead, he escorted a handsaw outfitted with thin carbon wire. It looked like a device doctors used to saw off gangrenous limbs during the Civil War.
“Where’s your electric saw?” I asked.
“I don’t use ’em. They send shards toward your eyes. And I like my eyes.”
“Why not wear safety goggles?”
Raoul ignored me and started sawing. “You gotta be in good shape to do this,” he explained.
I refrained from mentioning his rotund tummy and neck wattle. It’s probably best not to mock a man with a blade so near your jugular.
After several furious minutes, Raoul examined his progress. Only an infinitesimal channel was ground away. “That’s hard steel,” he said solemnly, his brow beaded with perspiration. “Ten more minutes passed and Raoul again paused.
Only about half a link was cut. “Oh, boy, that’s beautiful steel.”
I agreed that, aesthetically speaking, the steel was beautiful.
“Beautiful steel,” he repeated. Ten minutes later, the link was severed. “Oh, yeah!” Raoul said. “Oh. Yeah.”
I touched the link, hot as a frying pan thanks to friction. “Now let’s pry this off with my money maker,” Raoul said. He grabbed his crowbar and slid it into the cut link, trying to pry it wide so the lock could slide off. It was as stubborn as our president.
“I need leverage,” the locksmith said, his armpits soaked with sweat. “Where’s some goddamn leverage?”
In my overachieving scholastic career, I received C’s exactly twice: for physics and chemistry. “Just push harder,” I suggested, a notion jibing with the American school of repair: If it’s broken, kick it until it works.
“Looks like I’m gonna have to cut another one,” Raoul said, giving up and grabbing his saw. He attacked it with an intensity peculiar to men determined to do it their way, damnit.
Raoul’s frenetic sawing devoured half the link—until the carbon wire snapped, flopping on the ground like a dying snake.
“If this doesn’t work,” the locksmith said, grabbing his crowbar, “then you’re screwed.”
“Will I still owe you $100?” I asked. But more than losing money, I was worried my bike would forever be captive, a casualty of my unquenchable thirst to dance badly.
“Yes,” Raoul said, yanking his crowbar with all the might an overweight Puerto Rican man could muster.
“Ughhhhhhh!” he shouted. “Ugghhhhhhhhhhh!” Millimeter by millimeter, the chain bent backward like an arm wrestler losing strength, until the lock clanked to the ground. Freedom! Sweet, sweet freedom!
“That,” Raoul said, wiping sweat from his brow, “was hard steel. Now don’t lose the key again.”
For once, I was inclined to agree with someone’s suggestion.
