bike goose chase

[topaz]

On Saturday, jacflash invited me to come hunt up used bikes with him. He'd found a guy on CraigsList offering 700 used bikes for sale at $9 a pop ("if you take more than 100 the price is $5 each", the ad said). Morgan has two bikes in good condition, but neither of them fit him quite right just yet, so I was game.

Our friend Zee's station wagon.

So off we went to meet jacflash in Leominster. The address we were given turned out to be a car dealership and/or repair shop, where we met Zee, who posted the ad. Zee quickly became a very good friend of ours. We know this because he kept telling us so, with great zeal and vigorous hand motions. He was very reassuring, and what he lacked in reassurance he made up for with enthusiasm.

One confusing detail was that the bicycles were not actually there. As our friend Zee explained, he (or perhaps his company) also own or invest in a storage facility, and when they acquired this storage facility a quantity of bicycles were included. jacflash and I nodded sagely, thinking of the many times we had found ourselves awash in unwanted bicycles after investing in storage facilities of our own. Zee was, of course, happy to take a few minutes to take us to the bicycles.

The mysterious gas station.

So we returned to our cars, jacflash and I and a third party who had come to see the bicycles. Our friend Zee, so eager to show us the bicycles, sped off without waiting, and we had to scramble to keep up with him. After swerving through downtown Leominster, Zee pulled unexpectedly into a gas station, leaped out of the car and ran inside. The three of us stood outside, looking uncertainly at each other.

Flying past intersections in Leominster.

It was at this point that I started taking pictures, figuring that they would come in handy either for the police report or a cracking good journal entry. After ten or fifteen minutes, Zee reappeared, happy and bubbling and this time accompanied by a colleague in mechanic's coveralls, who looked around nervously before ducking into Zee's car. The two of them pulled out into traffic without warning and we were off again. We followed them at a merry clip through the wrong side of Leominster for several minutes. I continued taking pictures frantically from the car, vaguely convinced that it was important to capture every landmark and intersection we passed (perhaps imagining that, after my body was recovered, only the pictures on my phonecam would provide the detectives with the crucial hints they needed to track the villains).

Our friend Zee's storage facility.

Finally our friend Zee swerved across the road and pulled in front of a decrepit garage. There was dust on the bricks and most of the windows were broken. The padlock on the chain-link fence was rusted open. We followed Zee and his compatriot around to the rear of the building, which was -- predictably by this time -- a junkyard.

In the rear of the building there was an enormous pile of bicycles. I would not be at all surprised if there were 700 of them, as the ad claimed. There surely were enough parts for 900, at least. Nor did I doubt our friend Zee's claim that "many of them" were "like new," though words like "many" and "new" are subject to such pesky subjective interpretation. jacflash's mechanic's eye served him well here, as he immediately began surveying the pile and without hesitation started pulling out the only bikes that were worth looking at even twice.

700 used bikes! Many like new!

I tried to find something useful in the pile, but the pickings were slim and the kids' bikes even more so. When Morgan made it clear that he found the entire trip boring and a waste of time, and after Quinn's third attempt to climb one of the rusting hulks in the junkyard behind the garage, I bid jacflash farewell (our friend Zee having retired to some unknown corner of the property for a business discussion with his partner) and took my boys home.

At least the boys got donuts out of the trip.

Comments

[aroraborealis.livejournal.com]

No picture of Zee?? Dude, where's my Zee?!

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Had he actually gotten a picture of Zee, and had the murder we were anticipating subsequently ensued, the photo would have made it so easy to find the culprit that you couldn't even get a short story out of the incident, let alone a full 300-500 page thriller. It is only through leaving confusing and incomplete clues that a good plot arc can be achieved.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

Oh, Zee will probably end up meeting colinhowe at some point, but likely not in a situation that has anything to do with bikes...