How to Step Back from a Potential Mistake

The first one I saw flattens down from the top.

But there’s also one that sort of twists and scrunches from the side.

I had a nice bicycle back in my early 20s. I put over a thousand miles on it. And yes, I wore a helmet. A couple of people asked if I wasn’t worried it would mess up my hair. I told them I was more worried about crashing without one and messing up my head.

My friend I mentioned a few weeks back, who got his bike stolen from a boarding house he was living in, later moved to a different boarding house. It was just as much of a dump as the previous place, but it was a roomier dump, which felt like a step up. (Though, it could be argued it was a step up into a larger mess.) A few months after he moved in, a guy who made his living driving a little motorized tricycle ice cream cart moved in.

One of the other tenants moaned, “Here we go. Once the ice cream guys find a place, they all swarm in and take it over.”

My friend and I laughed.

I swear to you, a few weeks later, four or five ice cream men lived in the boarding house, and there was a partially dismantled ice cream cart in the front yard.

Anyway, the ringleader of the ice cream guys had a motorcycle, and wore this old-school white open-face helmet. One day my friend and I are in the shared kitchen, puttering around before going out somewhere, and the ice cream alpha comes in carrying his helmet, which has a big crazy dent in it.

You need to understand, my friend had mastered the art of the innocent question that is actually an insult.

My friend pointed at the dent and asked, “What happened?”

The ice cream guy said, “I was doing a wheelie. It got away from me and I rode into a light pole.”

“Why were you doing a wheelie?”

“I saw some cute girls.”

My friend asked, “Did they think you were pretty cool?”

To this day, I can’t explain why, but it was the “pretty” he added to the word cool that really got me.

When the ice cream guy answered, “No.” I had to leave the room.