With blinding speed I blaze down an alley, graffiti and grime peeling off the bricks in my wake. Shadows run from me but even things composed of light cannot match my speed. I run the shadows down and, wham! I’m on the street again, overtaking police cruisers and photons. I breeze through the downtown like a laser beam, taking a zigging and zagging course rather than a linear one. I am the fastest thing in all of Lewiston and the most dazzling by far. I am an exotic particle on two wheels.

This week, I officially launched ICRRU. That’s the Inner City Rapid Response Unit to you mortals. It is a bicycle borne of a lightning bolt. Wait for the crack and flash of it and you will know that I am there. And then gone.

I would invite you to ride along with me, but your fragile body could not take it. At the speeds I attain, your organs would sail right out your backside like streamers. You people would have better luck contending with the forces of a black hole than trying to keep up with me.

I could be exaggerating. ICRRU is on the streets, but I may not have achieved the velocities described. Butterflies have landed on me as I ride. Dead people routinely rise up and blow past me on the street. A child taking his first baby steps moves faster and with more grace than I do.

The problem is this new gear schematic. Since when do we reach for higher or lower pedal power by twisting knobs? Whatever happened to those shifters that looked like rabbit ears? Furthermore, why do bikes these days not have ram’s head handlebars?

There is also the matter of the bicycle culture and the elitists who dominate it. You know the type. They wear anatomy-revealing spandex suits and helmets that look like they were designed by George Lucas. They do long, elaborate stretches before climbing aboard two-wheeled rides that cost more than their houses.

Why? Why is a simple bike so damned expensive? Are they made of bald eagle bones? Does the metal that makes up their frames come from one of Jupiter’s moons? What is it that makes a $5,000 price tag logical when you are talking about four metal tubes, two pedals and a chain?

My bike is made of recycled Pabst cans. I have the obligatory headlight. I have the police siren and no, I can’t tell you where it came from. I had a nice cushion for the seat until a couple of bicycle elitists pointed and laughed at me. They made L’s out of their thumbs and forefingers.

“Loser! You might as well have a pink basket and tassels,” said one of the bike snobs.

Which is really a bummer, because the pink basket would have been handy for carrying around all my important reporter stuff.

Moving by bicycle is a great way to interact with the downtown crowd. You look people in the eye when you are not surrounded by the shell of a car. You overhear conversations. Moving at butterfly/cadaver speeds, those conversations are fragmented, sentences breaking up as you pass.

“… told that no-good rat to stay away from my sister …”

“… thought it was just a cold sore but the doctor says it might be …”

“… buried the guy’s head in the sandpit behind the …”

“… really amazing book by that handsome reporter from the Sun Journ …”

I dig it. I’ll keep riding even though the population of bicyclists is evenly divided between the biking elite (super-lightweight pedals made in Milan) and bike grunts (pedals swiped from some other guy’s bike) like myself. The difference is as glaring as that between wealthy landowners and the serfs of feudal times.

We have bikes constructed of parts from other bikes and in some cases, toaster ovens. Ours are Frankenbicycles. We ride them shirtless with cigarettes dangling from our lips. We lock them up with duct tape. The only gadgets we need are headlights for short rides home from the bar and Band-Aids for the same reason.

The elite have bikes that weigh no more than pencils and they are built by fairies in the mountains of Tibet. They mount them after getting surgically placed inside their riding suits and only after downing proper amounts of yogurt and hummus (meat from a hummingbird?). They have gauges that measure speed, burned calories and armpit sweat.

A friend of mine is a member of the bike elite and was one of the first to scoff at my seat pad. I asked him about the difference between riders like him and riders like me.

“For you, it’s a mode of transportation,” he said. “For us, it’s recreation.”

In other words: We are awesome; you lowlifes suck.

Which is fine. I like riding a bicycle of the type that can be found at the bottom of the Lewiston canal. It doesn’t require insurance and it’s no big deal if you ram the sucker into a fire hydrant or cop car.

I like that bike grunts like me don’t care what they look like and they are not concerned with things like wind resistance or cholesterol.

I like that if I ever misplace my bike, I can just go back to the canal and get another one.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].