GlitchSlapTko

When I was about 12 years old, and living in Sasser, Georgia (Pop. 378, near Albany the first city in the South to actually arrest Martin Luther King Jr, also known as the "Good Life City") I signed up for a bike-a-thon with my best friend Ronnie Coxwell. His folks were farmers and his big brother was a trucker. He had a really big nose and listened to Krokus and shit like that. His mother was a total bitch, but that's another story. Oh, people made fun of his nose, and that caused him to develop a complex about it. He had a black electric guitar. By the time he was 17, he had saved up enough money to buy a green 66 Mustang. I didn't think it was going to make him any more popular, but it actually did. As fast as that car was, it wasn't fast enough for him to be able to escape from his life there. I don't know where he is now.

When we were 12, and we didn't know what being popular was so we rode bicycles instead. We rode them everywhere. On the highway, competing with tractors and 18-wheelers (we'd always make this chain pulling motion in the air and get them to honk blast their horns) and speeding teenagers listening to Bon Jovi in pick-up trucks with crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon cans in the back.

Old people in Sasser drove so slow it was like they would get there faster in reverse. They also stopped right in the middle of the rode if they happened to pass someone they knew, and strike up a conversation. Imagine, two people in head-to-toe denium sitting in trucks idling in both lanes of the highway, talking about things like...the weather. The guys in the 18-wheelers knew about this and always took circuitous routs in order to avoid that town.

If you don't know what a bike-a-thon is, don't worry, we didn't either at the time. All I can say now is that this was probably the bright idea of someone church mother. Basically, a bunch of lower/middle-class kids (upper-class kids don't have to bike usually since their parents donate money directly) go around and get 'pledges' of a fixed rate per mile (not kilometer, it was America, remember?) from their friends, family, and total strangers, and then see how long they can ride their bikes in the name of some good cause, and then go around and collect the cash afterwards, donating it to the NPO for some 'big' prize. Now that I think about it, I recall we were biking for Muscular Dystrophy...it would have been better to bike for some other cause like Widespread Illiteracy or something, but that would have taken some real vision

Anyway, I went around for a few weeks before the race and got a bunch of pledges. Most people pledged like, 50cents per mile or something like that. The biggest one was from my grandmother, named Annie Ophelia Browder, who was working at a convenience store in Mobile, Alabama called Starvin' Marvin' (so she MUST have been loaded) and with it, I knew that I was going to be the pledge winner, entitling me to the grand prize of a 10 Schwinn 10 speed bike...so that I could ride in future bike-a-thons? At the time, this thought didn't occur to me. Later, I would be haunted by it. Oh, my grandmother used to let me eat all the Moon Pies I could eat when I visited her in Alabama. That was pretty cool.

Well the big day came. My mom (god bless her) drove me, fueled on a Moon Pies from a binge made possible by a recent care backage from Mobile, out to the closed-down industrial complex (I'm sure the employment rate was terrible) that we'd be using as our track. I saw my friend Ronnie there with his BMX bike and his rat-tail. His blue jeans shorts were so short he looked like nothing but legs. We quickly checked out each other's 'donation sheets' to see what the moneymaking potential of our 'competiton' was. I think we both really wanted that Schwinn. Anyway, it looked like he and I weren't doing all THAT great in the pledge department, (in Sasser, the primary agricultural products were soybeans and homophobia), but we DID manage to trick a few of our closest family into pledging pretty high sums. Of course, a few of the dozen or so kids there were from upper-class families, with larger per-pledge sums, but we knew that we could bike circles around them. We were planning to beat them with the sweat of our brows...how very proletarian of us!

To make a long story short, my friend Ronnie Coxwell and I did indeed ride the FUCK out of our bikes that day. We had made inspirational mix tapes the night before together, so we were ready to win! Side A was my favorite picks, side B was his. The race, that began at sunrise. At sunset, we were still riding...the only two kids left on the track in fact. The presiding officials actually wound up making us quit. We had ridden 120 miles. We with our perpetual sugar highs, were naturally ready for more. We had guzzled tons of the free Dr. Pepper and Mountian Dew they were giving away. Oh, we had taken off our shirts to ride for some reason. My mom coated me with Coppertone sunscreen. Ronnie's mom didn't come to the race. After we finished the race, that poor boy's upper body looked like something you'd order at Red Lobster. That was the only time I saw him without a farmer's tan, actually.

The reason I didn't go home the winner that day proudly riding that Schwinn, is that my grandmother (god bless her) stiffed me on her pledge. That right, she refused to pay the original sum that she had promised. Now that I think about it, I can't really blame her, 10 dollars per miles X 120 miles would have set my granny back more than a grand! I think the rate we settled on was 5 bucks per mile, but that put me in second place behind Ronnie. MAN I really wanted to ride home on that Schwinn.
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Well of course, if you sacrifice your body the way I did that day and still come in second, I guess you qualify for some kind of conciliation prize. I was allowed to pick ONE (1) album from a pile of records donated from local record shops (I think cassette was the dominant media form in those days) from around town. Of course there were two things I didn't think about: first, I didn't have a record player, and second, if these were donated, they must either really suck or be so unpopular that no one wanted to buy them. Thank goodness I didn't know any better! I just picked the one with the coolest cover, which turned out to be Steel Pulse's 'Earth Crisis'.

No, of COURSE I didn't have any idea what I was picking...I didn't even know there were any musical genre outside of contry music and heavy metal. I DID sense that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to show this album's cover to my father, who, last time I checked, still had little ceramic front yard 'nigger statues' with fishing poles and watermellons sitting on the dock near the lake. (What I was later to do in my rage to one of them is a story I'll save for another day.)

Anyway, I wrote this post a few days ago, but didn't get a chance to post it up until today. In the meantime, my pal Chris calls me up out of the blue ysterday and he and I go biking and hit some reggae/dub record stores in Nishi-Shinjuku. His bike (see picture) MAY very well be the coolest bike in Tokyo. Of course my bike is the second coolest! Anyway, of course they had some Steel Pulse there. What a blast from the past. Thanks for a good time, Chris!

STEPPIN OUT


CHORUS
Stepping out, stepping out
Stepping out, stepping out

Open says a me
Here comes Rasta Man
Abracadabra me seh
Catch me if you can

I know
You'll find it hard to believe that
I am
The genie of your lamp
I can
Do anything you wish but
Right now
I am commanding you to dance

CHORUS
Stepping out, stepping out
Stepping out, stepping out

Invisible music
Beam me up to the cradle of sound
(Riddle me this)
You cannot see it
Nowhere on earth
Can this reggae be found

I know
You'll find it hard to believe that
I am
The genie of your lamp
I can
Do anything you wish but
Right now
I am commanding you to dance

Rain Dub Rain Dub Rain Dub
BRIMSTONE HURRICANE CYCLONE

Ask me this I tell you why

I know
You'll find it hard to believe that
I am
The genie of your lamp
I can
Do anything you wish but
Right now
I am commanding you to dance

CHORUS
Stepping out stepping out
Stepping out stepping out

Journey through the tunnel of loce
Wisdom is respected hatred is rejected
On the planet Dread it rains dub
Climb Alladin's ladder hotter reggae hot

Open says a me
Here comes Rasta Man
Open says a me
Here comes Rasta Man
Catch me if you can, hey!

Steppin out, say's I'm steppin out

I know I am I can right now I'm steppin
Highest heights and hottest hot
Rasta this and Dreadlocks that
On the move I just can't stop
I'm in the groove and I just can't stop
Cause I'm in love with JAH music

Invisible music