“El Indio told me that there would be a Mexican customs agent waiting for me at the border inspection, and that this man knew everything. He would make sure that there weren’t any problems,” Jimmy said. “Of course, I was nervous. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, or if what I was told was true or not.”
The end of the I-5 freeway at the border funnels the traffic into tight lanes divided by concrete medians. Once in, there was nowhere to go but forward. Any number of cameras captured the entrants. It felt like running a gauntlet. Jimmy understood what it meant to cross that line—he would be subject to the Mexican judicial system, and he’d be deemed guilty before he ever glimpsed the flashing blue lights in the rearview. But before he knew it, Jimmy heard the click-clack of tire grates as he drove over the boundary. A Mexican official immediately waved him over to an inspection area where another armed agent directed him to park in a stall. He waited there, and watched as a panel van loaded with mattresses was rifled through. Drivers paced uneasily outside their vehicles. Eyes darted in the presence of agents. The officials began to pull each of the mattresses out of the van, turn them over, and tear the fabric. An agent of obvious rank appeared at Jimmy’s driver-side window.
“Documents,” the man said.
Jimmy handed the sheaf of papers to the agent.
“Please step out and open the rear door.”
He did as he was told and rolled the aluminum slider up. The men beheld a nest of wheels, spokes, cables, reflectors, and frames.
“Okay,” the agent said slowly. “Everything seems in order. Are you nervous? You look nervous.”
“No, I’m not nervous,” Jimmy said. “I’m just trying to donate some bicycles.”
“That’s a lot of bicycles to donate.”
“We have big hearts for the children of Mexico.”
“Big hearts? Ha! I’m just messing with you, Jimmy.” Then the agent pointed toward the exit. “Those police cars over there are waiting for you.”
“I don’t understand,” Jimmy said.
“Those are your policemen.”
“Mine?”
“Look, get in the truck and pass out of the inspection area. Those policemen are here to provide security and escort you to your destination. It’s the only way possible.”
Jimmy felt he had no choice. He stepped into the truck, sparked the engine, backed out, and crept toward the exit. He didn’t slow but looked over as he came to the police cars. An officer made sharp and direct eye contact. And as he passed, their vehicles pulled into line behind him. One flashed its lights, sped forward in an adjacent lane, and then merged in front. Jimmy followed this vehicle along the International Road as it paralleled the rusty fence, and then up an incline where they took a turnoff to Russian Hill and the neighborhood of El Soler. The lead car drew the caravan through a middle-class neighborhood and stopped before an unassuming single-story ranch house. There were no neighbors in the streets or in the yards. Only the last shuffles of hastily closed curtains signaled anything other than a vacant suburban street. The front door of the destination house opened, and the cholo from the ramshackle room in the Zona Norte walked out.
Jimmy learned that he was not the first to make a trip, that he was a replacement for a driver who’d broken his foot playing soccer. So he felt fortunate to be doing the work. He was paid $1,000 a week, which allowed him to keep up with his mother’s treatments. And because he made only about two trips a month, he had a lot of downtime. But soon Jimmy was directed to destinations farther and farther afield: Phoenix, Albuquerque, Denver, El Paso, San Antonio, and Houston.
“Whenever I’d arrive, there would be two or three people waiting for me with the truck already loaded. I’d be given the paperwork, and we’d look it over. My job was to drive.”
It wasn’t until 2007, when Jimmy was assigned to pick up an empty truck in San Diego and drive it to some isolated stretch of highway in the Mojave Desert, that he learned he wasn’t alone. At a solitary turnoff boasting an all-night 76 station, Jimmy met a second driver whose truck full of bicycles had broken down. They shook hands and began transferring the load. They joked about how nice it was to be able to roll the product rather than carry it and they marveled at some of the bikes among the mess of them. On the road, underneath the black desert sky, this driver mentioned to Jimmy that there were others, like El Junior and Yony. They’d talk sometimes, on meeting like this, but not much: How was the last trip? Oh I got a flat at such and such. Broke down in Gila Bend. And Jimmy’s mind gathered a picture of quiet, unnoticed ghost trucks traversing the great western night, as smooth and silky as drips from a leaky faucet, draining America’s bicycles south.
16
The scene is grainy, black-and-white. The crumbling tenements, piazzas, and arches of postwar Rome form the backdrop. A sudden downpour blankets the Porta Portese market as Antonio Ricci and his young son Bruno reach the square. The boy pulls a woolen jacket over his head. Water streams from the brim of Ricci’s hat. Wheeled carts laden with bicycle tires and frames for sale are packed and rolling away with vendors. Bent over handlebars, casual shoppers begin to cycle away, too—the whole market a school of fish darting for cover. Ricci’s head pivots right then left; he is seemingly the only man with two feet on solid ground. His attempt to examine each of the fleeing bicycles signals his misfortune. The Fides single-speed on which his young family depends has been stolen. There is no money for a replacement. There is no job, no rent money, without the Fides. A fortune-teller advises Ricci, “You’ll find the bike quickly, or not at all.” Everyone in Rome knows exactly where stolen bikes end up—in parts at the market. But on Ricci’s arrival, bicycles scatter like possibility in the wake of his own personal torrent.
Since its release in 1949, The Bicycle Thief has commanded a top-ten position on any serious list of cinema greats. Director Vittorio De Sica chose nonactors for the leading roles. The man who played Ricci was a factory worker named Lamberto Maggiorani. The son Bruno was played by Enzo Staiola, a little man-like child the director found selling flowers on the street. There is one incidental scene in which Bruno, trying to cross the road on foot, is nearly run over by cars, twice. This was a real clip of Staiola caught by an astute cameraman. These players weren’t acting. At poignant moments Maggiorani levels a gaze of utter exposure, evoking a silent survivor of Europe’s grinding postwar recession. It feels real because it is. Maggiorani struggled to find work long after the filming wrapped.
Watching the film again in the 2010s, it seemed a little too familiar—the universals of hope and personal isolation in economic conditions wrought by a mad, wheeling world too big to understand. I pressed pause frequently. I stood. I paced. I saw myself in Ricci. And I returned to the narrative of The Bicycle Thief specifically, and only, because right there on its surface was another universal experience, one repeated every two and a half minutes in America alone: missing bicycles.
In England’s Selby train station, a man wearing a high-visibility vest like those of other rail staff stepped up to a crowded rack of bikes. He disabled the lock on one, threw a leg over its saddle, and casually pedaled off. Neither the man nor his actions were noticed until police reviewed their security footage. The man in the fluorescent orange vest with bold reflective stripes happened to be the British Transport Police’s most-wanted suspect in bicycle thefts across Northern England.
In July of 2012, looking to stanch a rise in cycle thefts, San Francisco police took the extra-normal step of responding to suspicious online ads. They followed leads through layers of informal sales—which eventually brought them knocking on the door of eighteen-year-old Irving Morales-Sanchez. “Officers said they found eight bikes in his kitchen,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “A search of two storage lockers he was renting in Oakland turned up 106 more bicycles, 80 tires, and a frame.” Morales-Sanchez’s public defender claimed it was the family business—the restoring and reselling of bikes, that is. Family members said they didn’t know the bikes were h
ot. Reporters following the case seemed to enjoy pointing out that San Francisco bike thefts dropped precipitously after Morales-Sanchez’s arrest.
In 2006, a North Vancouver man established Bike Rescue, a not-for-profit organization with a mission “to locate and return lost or stolen bicycles.” Founder Gordon Blackwell purchased bikes in shady parts of town at rock-bottom prices. If no legitimate owner claimed the bikes in thirty days, he sold them at near market value “to fund the operation.” In 2009, Canadian Mounties raided the Bike Rescue facilities and seized 153 cycles. Blackwell himself was arrested in January of 2010, after which he pleaded guilty to fencing stolen property. He was out on parole in 2012 when Mounties, operating on tips, again discovered twenty grand worth of high-end bikes and parts in his new residence. Blackwell told media reporting on the case, “You know, you guys are going to undo all the good I do.”
That summer Alyssa Chrisman rode her Giant touring bike 4,179 miles from sea to shining sea—a North Carolina-to-California run. The Central Michigan University student had joined a group of cyclists on a fund-raising ride for an affordable housing organization. The journey was meant to culminate in the sunny beach city of Santa Cruz. But the cyclists stopped briefly in Davis, California, to celebrate the college town’s famous bike culture. There, Chrisman locked her bike with two others outside the Bicycling Hall of Fame and stepped in to learn a famous bicycling lesson. When she came out, her Giant was gone.
There is something cosmic about the completion of a bike chain’s cycle through gears and sprockets—the full rotation of the tire, the endless looping and traveling only to return to the point of departure—that makes the bike a fabulous vehicle for irony.
During World War II, the automobile assumed total dominance of American streets, and bicycles were increasingly considered toys. Since then, there have been two major moments in one’s trajectory via machine: when your training wheels are taken off, and when you dump your bike altogether in favor of a car. But there is also a rarely acknowledged third universal that occurs between losing the training wheels and gaining the car, and it is the loss of a well-loved bicycle. Death, taxes, and missing bikes.
In various ways, most of us are complicit.
At twenty-four, I attended a party thrown by a popular friend. It was loud and crowded and fun. The crew knew a lot of people from a lot of dodgy places and they were all there having a good time. Late the next day, almost as an afterthought, the host, Derek, called around asking if anybody had ridden his bike home. It was an average black beach cruiser distinguished only by the menacing character of its patina. The flat black spray job and rusted spokes and nicks and wear made the bike look like it belonged to the neighborhood creep. None of Derek’s acquaintances admitted to borrowing the bike, and as he was leaving town for a few weeks, he didn’t have time to go looking for it.
A couple of days later, I was driving my squeaky ’68 Mustang up a residential hill in another part of town when I ran out of gas. I parked the car, popped the trunk, found the familiar red gas can, and started walking. A block down the hill, my eyes happened to peer into a fenced yard, and I saw what looked like Derek’s beat-up cruiser—its nicks and wear. I set the gas can on the curb. I gazed right, then left, and jumped the fence. Snatching the unlocked bike by the frame, I hoisted it over. With a pop from the ankles, my feet lifted, following my hips, knees, and shins right on over and onto the sidewalk. The downhill getaway went as smoothly as the bike’s bent rims allowed.
While the cruiser sat in my kitchen waiting for Derek’s return, however, I really began to think about the act. In California, there’s nothing more common than an old beach cruiser. Was this the missing one? Or did I steal someone else’s wheels with belligerent ease? If so, the act came to me, well, like riding a bike. I considered returning the hot property to the fenced yard. But I knew that returning to the scene was as dumb as committing a crime. My pretensions of righteous revenge on Derek’s behalf were really beginning to deflate.
So when I heard that he was back in town, I gave Derek a call and asked him to come over. Once he was in the living room, I asked Derek—who wore, weirdly, a shimmering blue 1950s-style sharkskin suit—to have a look in the kitchen.
“Oh, you fucker,” he said. “You stole my bike.”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved that he recognized the cruiser. “The second time.”
I quickly told the story using my hands and elbows and arms and legs. Yet Derek seemed vaguely, amiably indifferent to the feat—even as he wheeled his cruiser out the front door. “Cool,” he said with a wave. “Thanks.”
It is a nothing story, really. But when I think of the somersaults of identity I’d have endured had Derek not accepted ownership, I pause. I scheme on how I would have returned the bike to its owner. Maybe this would be an even more noble gesture than liberating it. At night. Over the fence. Through the gate. Would it be more honorable to knock on the door and explain the situation? No, I’ve pictured the owner’s face. It’s not pleased. I would not knock. In fact, I likely wouldn’t have returned the black cruiser at all. Too ashamed to admit guilt and too chicken to ride the bike about town, I’d have let it rust in the side yard.
More painful than imagination, however, is that my friend Derek died unexpectedly within the year. And in thinking about him, and retelling stories about him within our peer group, I’ve realized that as electric a friend as he was, the energy one felt in his presence came down to the fact that he was also an insanely inventive and chronic liar—a quality I don’t begrudge in the slightest. But in memory, I do examine the look Derek shot me before walking out of my apartment with his beach cruiser. The weak smile tells me something different on each recall. I revise this story often—for myself, for others. But in the bedrock of the deed, I think I stole somebody’s bike.
Many of the Tijuana River Valley residents I spoke with concerning the bicycles came to the obvious conclusion that the bikes were stolen from someplace, maybe by the individual migrants themselves. David Gomez noticed a sticker on several bikes that indicated they’d originally been sold by a shop in nearby Coronado, a wealthy enclave just to the north. The fact that these bikes had been crossed into Mexico and sent back to the United States with a migrant on top suggested to him that the Coronado bikes, at least, had been pinched for that specific purpose. Cars, trucks, and vans stolen along the border end up in Mexico with such regularity it’s taken almost as a migratory pattern. Why would these bikes, or anything on wheels in the Southwest, be any different?
State parks ecologist Greg Abbott was convinced that the bicycles were caught in an eddy of some sort, circling through border defenses and then back again through the commercial lanes into Tijuana—riding in trucks packed with used couches, refrigerators, mattresses, and plush animal toys—in an unbroken cycle. Abbott was an old hand in Mexico, and knew it well enough to feel certain that the bikes were not from there. Tijuanenses liked to bike about as much as they liked to swim, which wasn’t very much, by the former lifeguard’s estimate. In direct observation, however, he saw only the northbound tracks of the migrant bikes’ movement. Where they’d originated from, empirically speaking, he couldn’t say.
Terry Tynan claimed that if he came upon a bike that exhibited a licensing sticker of some sort, he’d just “leave the bike in the dirt.” He didn’t want to end up with obviously stolen merchandise on the ranch. I think what he meant was, he didn’t want to harbor stolen merchandise that was easily traceable. But, even as I listened to him say this—my feet in the dirt and the sun on my face—good sense told me that the statement slipped past his cracked lips as one of those obfuscating gushes interview subjects emit in an almost nervous twitch, like a squid escaping behind its ink cloud. It is human nature to talk; eventually everybody does. Terry loved to talk about his bikes but having done so, it seemed, he wanted some portion of the story back. After searching for bikes with Terry and later talking to his neighbors, I knew it was not in his nature to let a bike lie, any bike.
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The sense I got from this obsession struck me as the same as when an unknown dog appears and takes up residence on your property. You’ve got good food and a nice spot to rest, so the dog stays. She’s streetwise and knows a good thing. Months go by, and hey, you didn’t steal the dog. It’s the animal’s own choice. You like her; maybe the old family didn’t treat her so well. The fact that you never advertised finding the dog, or even asked around—the fact that you’re covetous of the dog and have renamed her—is beside the point.
Yet, in Terry’s growing collection, in his increasing abilities to track and scavenge and sniff out bikes, the scenario of the dog was repeated over and over. And of course, after she had hung around long enough, he didn’t have a problem selling the dog either.
“To me, it didn’t seem like it was that organized,” said Union-Tribune reporter Janine Zúñiga. In conversation, she indicated that the Border Patrol didn’t appear to feel that way either. In her piece, Zúñiga quoted Border Patrol spokesman Jerry Conlin as saying, “For [migrants], it’s a quicker means of getting from point A to point B on that type of terrain.”
But the sheer numbers suggested something more than convenience. In colloquial shorthand, the Border Patrol calls a group crossing here or there a “onesie” or a “twosie.” No big deal. But if you multiply a group of fifteen, which many observers have seen, times 365 days in the year, you get 5,475 migrants crossing undetected in one five-mile stretch of the border. Multiply this by the two and a half years it had been going before I ever caught wind of it, and you get 13,687. These are outside numbers, of course. But even at half that rate, the volume of bicycles alone presented one hell of a sourcing problem. Were dozens of migrants from southern Mexico and Central America gathering in Tijuana daily and randomly deciding to cross this craggy landscape by bike? And if so, did they then scour the city for reasonably priced wheels? After two-plus years of cycle crossings, could there possibly be any unwanted bikes left in Tijuana? How was it possible, then, that reliable bicycles were made available to the migrants on a daily basis? Could it possibly be true that a central organizing figure, or group, was stealing bikes from the United States and importing them to Tijuana for that specific purpose?
The Coyote's Bicycle Page 18
