Sports in Hell (22 page)

“Never heard of it,” he said. He seemed to be hanging on to the bike a little longer than I thought he should. Made me feel better, though. At least my bike seat had probably never been in this thing before.

I wondered exactly how a naked bike race would work. Where, for instance, would you pin your number? Where would you put your fiver for emergencies? Would you really want to draft too closely behind another man?

For her part, TLC began to regard the whole affair as a fat-cell convention. She wanted no part of it, a fact that disappointed the organizer to no end once we got to Archibald Fountain. “You sure you don't want to come along?” said Marte Kinder, a tall hippie in a tie-dyed T-shirt and a hat with a plastic sunflower. He had scraggly dreds, a full foodcatcher, and sandals. In other words, exactly the sort of person you'd think would organize the Sydney portion of World Naked Bike Race. “I think you'd
really, really
like it!”

She looked at him like he was Willard Scott offering sexy time. No chance. She'd meet me later.

More troubling, it was beginning to look like Marte and I were the only two going.

“People are staying away because they think we're going to be arrested,” Marte confided.

Arrested?

“That's irony, eh? People arrested for being naked right next to statues of naked people!”

“Arrested?” I said, this time out loud. That's about when I noticed the two cops waiting in a squad car about a hundred feet away.

“Well, yeah,” Marte hemmed. “They say they're going to arrest us if we do it naked. But they can't arrest us! The law says that indecent exposure must be willful and obscene. So let's say a hurricane comes and whips your pants off; that's neither willful nor obscene. But let's say it rips your pants off and at the time you were
masturbating. That's obscene but not willful. But let's say you—yourself—rip them off to masturbate, that's both.”

This was starting to be a very bad idea.

Furthermore, Marte pointed out, even if we do get arrested, the T-shirts and the DVDs they sell go toward a fund to defend bicyclists in court. I saw no T-shirt stands or DVD sellers. Instead, I saw myself rotting in a Sydney jail, having monthly meetings with Marte's idiot brother-in-law lawyer, eating vegemite sandwiches three times a day, and fending off the advances of a former roadie from Men At Work.

Besides, Marte says we won't get arrested because the cops don't know where we're going. “While the people will be exposed,” Marte said, “the routes will not.”

And where ARE we going? I asked.

“We will leave here and reconvene at the University of Sydney,” he said. “That's where we'll undress and paint ourselves.”

Paint? Reconvene? What the?

It was becoming clear that this was not a race at all. “I wouldn't call it a race,” Marte hedged. “I'd call it more gentle exercise.” In fact, he said, it wasn't called World Naked Bike Race, it was called World Naked Bike
Ride
.

What was next?
Oh, yeah, and it's not “Naked,” it's “Nuked.”

“How far is it to the university?” I asked.

“No idea,” Marte said. “I was hoping some other people would show up and lead us.”

Wonderful.

But as we waited, people began showing up. Odd, unwashed, sleeping-in-fridge-boxes people. An old, dirty man rode up—his entire life needing a shave—wearing pants that clearly were not originally his. The waist was so big on him that he had to double them over and cinch them with a belt. The fly was permanently down, as was the brim of his bucket hat. He had shoes with no laces in them, and a very stained white shirt. He was either homeless or a flasher. He did not seem like an ardent bicycle-rights activist, if you asked me.

Three guys from Newcastle showed up on bikes, although they were all smoking and looked like they wouldn't make it past the first hill, much less the first cop chase. But at least they had experience with it, unlike Marte or me. They'd done it the year before in Newcastle. “After the race, they had a big party and everybody stood around naked cooking sausage,” said one of the three, a bristly man with one eye.

Among the things I'd be willing to do naked, grilling sausages over open flames is not one of them.

Finally, an actually recently-bathed person showed up: a young guy named Luigi, who arrived with a killer body, a painted-on fake handlebar moustache, big black-rimmed spectacles with no glass in them, and, scrawled on his back, cryptically, “Don't Vote for Silvio!”

A very tan, very gay man showed up, without a bike. Said he'd run alongside us. He was followed by a fat man in orange sweats with a ponytail down his back. We still didn't have a single woman.

“Maybe this isn't going to work out?” I asked Marte.

“Sure! Sure it will. We expect more than a hundred people!”

Finally, a Chinese girl arrived with a tie-dyed T-shirt that just barely covered her crotch. It appeared she was wearing no pants. Her face was smothered in half-applied sunblock. She wore shiny patent-leather half-boots. And yet she wasn't as bizarre as the next woman, who rode up on a miniature girl's bike with little colorful plastic spoke riders in the wheels, purple tassels, a banana seat, and wearing a dress that Goodwill would've rejected. “I found it on the dump!” she crowed.

We assumed she meant the bike.

That's when one of the cops climbed sheepishly out of his squad car. He put on his hat and ambled over to us at about one block per hour. He looked like he'd rather be sawing off his own hand than coming over to talk to us. He looked down as he walked, perhaps hoping not to see anything ugly—and it was almost all ugly. When he finally got to us, he said to the one-eyed guy, “Are you organizing this?”

“Organizing what?” the one-eyed guy said, coyly. But then ruined it by rolling over on Marte. “He is,” he said, pointing to Our Peerless Leader.

The cop turned to Marte's feet and said to them: “You'll follow all the road rules—”

“Yes, absolutely!” Marte said.

“Stay in single file—”

“Of course!”

And then, almost as an afterthought, he kicked the ground and said, “And no full nudity. You'll get a warning and then you'll be arrested.”

Groans and complaints from the group.

“No, no. Absolutely no, uh, genitalia,” he said, now staring at his own feet.

The gay guy called out, “Is it against the law?”

“No full nudity,” the cop repeated, starting to sneak away.

“But if a woman is riding a bike and she's on the seat, then not everything is showing, is it?” Marte said, putting a very fine point on things.

“No full nudity,” the cop kept saying. And he was still saying it as he walked away.

“What about wearing a sock?” Marte hollered.

“What if we're painted?” said the ponytailed guy. “Paint is a cover-up!”

You can imagine the shock on people's faces as we rode through the streets of Sydney, what with a woman on a five-year-old's bike and an old lecherous man who could barely pedal and a gay guy running alongside and Mario from Donkey Kong and a pantsless white-faced Chinese woman. It looked like the Tour de Glands.

After about forty-five minutes and six wrong turns, we eventually got to the university. We pulled over to a grassy spot near a cricket field, at which point Marte started handing out a three-page
paper upon which were written suggestions of what people could write on their bodies. Such as:

Less gas, more ass!

Ride a bike! Take a bus! Sell your car!

Indecent exposure to cars!

Then all of them broke out all kinds of body paint, stripped down to complete starkers, and started painting themselves and each other.

“Nice wicket,” some guy hollered from the cricket field.

So this was my moment of truth. Was I really going to do this? I took a look around at the group. In the age of cell phone cameras, was I really going to add my nakedness to the Sydney touring company of
Hair?

Still, a chapter is a chapter. I took off my shirt. Took off my shorts. And I was just about to take off my boxers when I heard, “Police. Can I see some ID?”

My heart became a block of ice. End of the road. I could see the headlines, “Yank in Crank Prank.” I turned around to face my executioner and it was just the one-eyed guy. “Ahh, I'm only tuggin' your chain, mate!”

Oh, no you're not, pal. Not now. Not ever.

That's when I decided I'd just ride in my underwear. Does that count? No? Tough.

There seemed to be only one fairly sane man there—one of the three Newscastles, a chiropractor named Michael, who seemed perfectly normal except he wanted me to paint “God Is Love!” on his back. He worked in Idaho for fifteen years and just decided he needed a change in life, so he and his wife and four kids moved across the world to Australia.

So much for the whole “we bicyclists are tired of being invisible”
raison d'être
.

His one-eyed buddy had no such moral reasons. He just liked the idea of being nude in public. He painted his front to look like a tree. His chest seemed to be the leaves and they worked their way down to his, well, trunk, which he'd painted lavishly in brown. I mean, he worked that trunk over and over, stretching and pulling it this way and that, the way a barber strops a razor. The thing had more coats of paint than a new Lexus.

One guy had painted a peace symbol on his chest in blue, but he messed it up.

“What's that?” somebody asked.

“That's the peace sign,” he said incredulously.

“No, I think that's the Mercedes sign.”

Perhaps he was protesting not owning a luxury car.

And that's when the real cops showed up.

“Everybody, get your clothes on,” the pudgy one growled. “Right now! You're on private property.”

“Private property?” Marte said. “This is a university!”

“Yes,” the cop said. “Private property.”

A tall, dark, bikinied woman who had joined us at the school said, “But I'm a student here!”

Big mistake.

“You are, huh?” said the cop. She shrank back.

“So we could do this on
public
property?” I tried.

“Well, no. Public OR private property. You can't do it. Indecent exposure, mate!”

This outraged Michael, the chiropractor, so much so that he put an athletic sock over his member and stood brazenly in front of the cop, hands on hips in front of him.

“No socks!” the cop insisted. (Surely it was the first time any police officer had uttered the command.) “Put on your underwear.”

I was starting to warm to the discussion. I figured this may be as close to a war as I ever got to cover.

“So you're making a distinction between underwear and socks?” I asked.

“Uh, well, yes.”

“But why? Don't they both cover the offending part? A sock has more material than, say, a thong, doesn't it?”

The cop looked like he wished he'd gone on to college and not picked this particular line of work.

“No!” he finally said. “Because a sock doesn't cover everything. His bum cheeks are just out there, and nobody wants to see that.”

“But if he's riding the bike,” I reasoned, “then you're not seeing his bum cheeks, right? Then nothing's exposed!”

The cop started fingering his billy club. His face got red. I took half a step back.

“Look, everybody put your underwear on. Everybody put their underwear on and go right now! Everybody! (Then, pointing at the bikini girl) Except you. You stay.”

Uh-oh.

She pretended not to hear and mounted her bike. “Hey!” the cop yelled, but she peeled off. He tried to give chase, but his pudginess kicked in. The closest he got was five feet and then she was off and gone. Victory to the Unclear-of-Purpose Semi-Nude Protesters! It was thrilling! Like
The Great Escape
, only with spokes.

There were twenty-two of us by the time we all were chased off campus and settled in nearby Victoria Park, which was so huge no cops were going to come by no how no way. More stripping, only now there were two newspaper photographers there. I thanked the Lord for my boxers. More painting, too, most noticeably by the tiny-bike girl, who had been very busy. She'd stripped naked and was painting her breasts stoplight red. But this was not the disconcerting part. The disconcerting part was that she seemed to have
Don King trapped under each arm. You don't even want to ask about her shaving skills in the most sensitive portions of her body, which she'd also painted red. Her butt she'd painted black, and on her back Luigi had painted—as asked—“Ride for Pride”!

She turned to Sunscreen Girl and said, “You know, you're wearing rainbow colors. You're gay, right?”

Sunscreen girl: (broken English) “No, no, I just like the rainbow colors. That's OK, yes?”

Tiny-Bike Girl hesitated, then pronounced that it was OK.

Mostly, this seemed like it would be Perverts on Wheels. One guy fashioned his shorts so that they were split down the outside of each leg and split along the crotch, so he could lift them up and flash. His schlong was painted blue. I was guessing he wasn't really that big into biketevism, either.

Creepy Bucket Hat Guy had taken off his pants and nothing else. Was there nobody who was here to protest cars not sharing the road? (Or writing a chapter about it?)