Whose Streets? Their Streets!

When trying to make sense of a culture, it’s usually wise to start with the aficionados, the crazies, the obsessives—and work outward. Unfortunately, the freakiest freaks in the Minneapolis bike culture are currently unavailable. They’re the self-described “last bicycle outlaws,” a mangy gang of twentysomethings who flop together in a house somewhere in Seward and have christened themselves The Black Label Bike Club, evidently after the cheap Canadian beer to which they’re partial. They’re visible—perched six feet off the street in their postapocalyptic steel Frankenstein contraptions—they’re just not available. Their primary hangout, the Hard Times Café, a notorious gutter-punk nexus in Cedar-Riverside, is mysteriously closed for renovations during the summer. The next best thing seems to be a local punk band on MySpace: Fixed Gears Are For Jerks and Lesbians. I immediately arrange an interview.

For many Minneapolis riders, the fixed-gear bicycle has become a fashion statement. A fixed-gear, or “fixie,” is a bicycle with the sprocket (the toothy cylinder that bites the chain) attached directly to the hub (the center of the back wheel) so the pedals travel at the same rate and in the same direction as the rear wheel. A couple of strains of the most dedicated riders—messengers and track racers—swear by the feeling of grounded control. Everybody else—anybody who actually knows what a “fixie” is—believes the bikes are both too trendy and unsafe. You can’t coast, and some fixies don’t have brakes, so the only way you can stop is by stomping down with your feet, using your leg strength to stop the back wheel.

I meet the band in front of their practice space—curiously, in an on-the-market Kenwood duplex. “Oh, the drummer’s mom is a Realtor,” rasps the lead singer, who calls himself Jay Awesome. “We’re just practicing here until she sells it.” Drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, the stocky, baby-faced twenty-two-year-old runs his hand over his unwashed Mohawk and explains how the band’s name came to him when a dude on a fixie beat him in an impromptu race to the corner. “Then I remembered one of Homer’s lines from The Simpsons: ‘Public transportation is for jerks and lesbians.’ ” The band doesn’t really believe fixed-gear bicycles are for jerks and lesbians because (or although) two of the band’s members ride fixies. The guitarist, Eric Frame, started riding one when he delivered sandwiches for Jimmy John’s. (He now drives to work at the family industrial plasma torch business in St. Louis Park, and the band uses his car to tote their gear to gigs.) Drummer Kate McNulty rides a fixie for her downtown messenger job. In fact, McNulty earned a reputation in the messenger community after coming in first during last winter’s Stupor Bowl, a sort of orienteering-on-a-bike contest held on Super Bowl Sunday that involves slamming a beer or doing a shot at every checkpoint. Some messengers—there are only about twenty-five of them remaining citywide—are hired based on their performance at these events, known in the community as “Alley Cat” races.

Earlier in the summer, the band organized Ride Against Patriotism. Fifteen dollars bought all the beer you could drink. “The reason I ride,” Awesome explains, “is so I don’t have to buy gas and support a stupid war.” The band does write the occasional radical-bike-culture lyric, but for the most part, they stick to more general antiPope, anticop, anti-everything material. Marc Cohen, the bassist, points out one of the more compelling reasons for a punk band to ride bicycles. “It’s just easier to avoid being called a hypocrite,” he says. “Instead of riding around in the Volkswagen that Daddy bought you.”

McNulty has been silently judging me from across the patio during the interview. “What’s the point of your story anyway?” she asks. She suspects I’m out to write a hatchet job about how the hard cores are constantly trying to out-hard-core each other. In fact, she wrote a college ethnography essay on the subject. “I mean, in New York, only 10 percent of bikers are actually living the lifestyle.” She refuses to let me read her paper.