“I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike…”

I’m sure Queens was not referring to the mountain-type bike or the old-BMX type of bicycle in their song. But this song might as well be the background music when my neighborhood friends and I were on our bike+sidecar escapades back in the late 80s.

The shiny red sidecar was a gift from Santa Claus one Christmas (I forget when). Well, at least we thought it was Santa and my sibs and I don’t really care who gave it to us. As far as we’re concerned, it was going to bring us to places.

And it did. We took it for a test run and found the brakes almost non-existent. That was terrible especially in our village with all its hilly portions. It was bound to break one of our necks. Not to be deterred by this one setback, the eldest in our group, Mark and his brother Allan, came up with something ingenious! They took an old Spartan slipper --- the original Havaianas flip flops and hooked it up to one of the bars near the wheel of the sidecar. Voila! Our very own emergency break! And I tell you, that old slipper saved our lives from a lot of catastrophes that year! I can still hear one of my friends yelling from the top of her lungs, “Emergency breaaaaaaaaaaaak!!!” while we wildly careen over the steep streets in our village. Mark would be the one driving the bike with 7 or 8 kids crammed into the sidecar. And usually, it’ll be Allan who’d be pressing the makeshift emergency break over the tire. He’d get burns from the friction but hey, we were young and wild and it was all fun!

I remember one time when it was just us 4 girls roaming around with the bike. Katrina, the eldest girl would be the designated driver while Jerlyn and Mia would be seated up front and I at the back cushioned with a huge throw pillow we got from Mommy’s living room. Since it was always Mark who’d drive us around, we girls, weren’t as adept with the idiosyncrasies of driving a sidecar. The 3rd wheel has this quirk of rolling off to a different direction from the main bike. So that spelled trouble for us. Our fear was founded when we were riding through our steep street and both the regular and emergency brakes didn’t work. Katrina didn’t know what to do and hit the gutter, causing us to fly off the bike into different directions. I hit the ground the hardest since the bike flipped over and I was at the back. My left hand took the full weight of my fall and needless to say, I couldn’t write with my hand (yup am a leftie) for 2 weeks. So there I was lying flat on my back taking a quick inventory of my working body parts. Luckily, nothing was broken. I didn’t know what happened to the other girls. We all scampered into different directions. I went home, got the scolding from my Nanay that was sure to stop me from biking ever again as long as I lived in our house before putting bandages around my fingers and my knees.

The next day, we were at it again. In spite of the scrapes, burns, and wounds we wasted no time after school or the summer getting on the now worn, bruised, red bike. It was our red Ferrari.

Until, one summer afternoon, I stepped out of our front door and found our gate wide open with the bike missing. And that ended biking season.