Riding Outside the Lines International Incidents and Other Misadventures With the Metal Cowboy

ON YERE BIKE I took a place in one of the booths near the door, intent on ordering something warm. A traditional pub: darts, fireplace, and a long bar already crowded with Irishmen pouring that dark mother's milk down their throats. It might have been about ten in the morning. The joint was rowdy enough by anyone's standards, on a weekday no less, that I wanted to hang around and see how it ended. But this was only meant as a brief pit stop before pedaling back into the breach. The rain hadn't really stopped lashing since before breakfast, and the wind, like the higher math I so loathed back in school, was a constant. Seeing as I'd volunteered to bicycle around my ancestral homeland, I felt duty-bound to offer casual disregard in the face of the harshest weather. Given my pitiful state after less than a week of sloshing about country roads, my relatives, were they still aboveground, would certainly have shunned me. Or, at the very least, they would have called me cruel names, like plonker and wank, before letting me buy them a pint. I was too cold to shed my blue Gore-Tex shell and pants. When I glanced in the mirror behind the bar the image staring back resembled a bulky blueberry as painted by Keith Haringpractically glowing. Had my rain suit always been so loud, or did the sea of muted jackets surrounding me raise its reflective properties to clownlike proportions? One of the patrons, about my age, noticed me noticing myself and leaned over. "What do ya call an Irishman in one of them spiffy rain suits?" I shrugged. "You call him a tourist. We wouldn't be caught dead wearing that shite." He smiled, a good-natured grin. The rest of the pub must have been listening, because the place broke into hearty laughter. I joined in. What the hellit was a good joke even if I happened to be the punch line. Clearly, my reaction suited them, because an open stool quickly appeared and handshakes were exchanged. The comedian's name turned out to be Brian, and his friends were damn near everyone in the place. When the second round arrived I realized a sip too late that I was participating in my first genuine "session." To leave at this point would have been beyond rude. Having heard that these things could last indefinitely, I ordered myself a substantial amount of grub, hoping it might absorb some of that potent beer as we went. "Ease up, lad," Brian said as I inhaled a thick bowl of soup and tore at something called a doorstep sandwich. "The potato famine ended years ago." This brought on another round of laughter and more drinks. At least I'd peeled off my blue rain gear by then. If I passed out and hit the deck, I'd seem less like rotting fruit without the blueberry suit. At some point, between stowing my bike and losing much of the feeling in my cheeks, I reviewed the blind spots in my life, as a young man verging on the edge of drunkenness is apt to do. Everyone has such spotsnot obvious shortcomings, but the hidden flaws and conspiring circumstances that duck under the radar, usually until it's too late. Growing up in suburbia, the land of Wonder bread, Campbell's soup, and cul-de-sacs, I harbored a nagging suspicion that my blind spot was somehow tied to a vague feeling of rootlessness. Can anyone really claim a genuine sense of place when the landmarks of their youth are a series of strip malls, golf courses, and 7-Elevens? A childhood of summer evenings spent floating weightless and womblike in a backyard pool regulated to the temperature of blood . . . for a time I cherished my little monocultural world, taking stock and feeling something close to pleasure in its sameness. The way the automatic sprinklers popped up from hidden turf-bKurmaskie, Joe is the author of 'Riding Outside the Lines International Incidents and Other Misadventures With the Metal Cowboy', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400047987 and ISBN 1400047986.