Blazing trails to urban freedom

“It’s better than a video game! It’s better than a movie!” Ben Guzman’s eyes widen. Sure they do. He stands a half-inch taller just thinking about Southern California’s most daring thrill ride -- propelling a spindly, stripped-down bicycle straight into the fury of big city traffic.

Guzman’s friend ponders the remark, and shakes his head.

“No,” says Jimmy Lizama, flashing a ferocious grin. “It is the movie.”

Traffic got you down? It’s no consolation but merely an inevitability that some among us have found exhilaration in the narrow blacktop spaces between the city’s torment and temper. Urban cyclists are the judo artists of the urban landscape; the sluggish weight of traffic is their launch pad.

Over the course of time, they’ll actually make friends out here on the roads, not just exchange glowers with strangers -- although, yes, they’ll get plenty of glowers too. They will ride in the “Tour de Tamal” to taste delights of hidden-away Mexican eateries. They will rally for an “Ice Cream Sunday” to sample the city’s dessert palaces, and work them off at the same time. They know the city by its seams and intersections, by the smells of its neighborhoods and by the school kids who wave along the way.

The strangest thing of all: They believe in their hearts that they are ascendant. They are pathfinders, utopians with a more livable city in their sights.

Takes all kinds

“It’s a cliche, I know. But it’s freedom,” says Lizama, a downtown Los Angeles bicycle messenger and bicycling activist who turned 30 this month. “My mom raised five kids in L.A. without a car. I’ve never had a car.”

People have sharply different ideas about engaging urban traffic on a bicycle.

A good many earnest, and accomplished, cyclists -- perhaps most of them -- go out of their way to avoid busy streets. In contrast, confrontational activists group together loosely under the banner of Critical Mass and periodically tie up the roads, protesting the tyranny of cars and infuriating everybody who drives one. Working bicycle messengers, small in numbers but oversized in cultural influence, are notorious for their outlandish bravado, grace and opportunistic disregard for traffic laws. Then too there are the traditionalists, the “vehicular cyclists,” as they call themselves -- commuters with mirrors bristling from their helmets, grocery-store shoppers with their grandpa handlebars, and Lycra-wearing weekend athletes, all of them adhering to the rules of the road and seeking peaceful coexistence with motorists.

“In between,” says Guzman, a 30-year-old film editor, “is everybody else, like us.”

Lizama and Guzman, along with throngs of their friends and others of like mind, approach the city with an ecumenical view: Borrow freely from every good strategy. Whatever makes sense, whatever keeps you safe, whatever gets you where you’re going, whatever keeps it fun.

Bombastic street protest? Sure. Pub crawl? Most definitely. Espresso run? Let’s go. Costume caravan? Once a month. A midnight ride whooping and whistling into the core of the city? Pick your theme. Monday morning commute? Every week. How about a night ride down some of Echo Park’s steep pedestrian stairways? Well, gulp, OK.

“We were out the other night, maybe 50 of us, and a guy in a car yelled, ‘What are you riding for?’ ” Guzman recounts. The motorist guessed that only a protest or a crusade could explain such a cavalcade of cyclists in the heart of the city. He smiled when Guzman shouted back: “For fun!”

It’s all personal

“Yeah, I’ve been accused of talking about nothing but bike, bike, bike.” Lizama is holding forth at a sidewalk cafe, consuming a large portion of his body weight in greasy carbs -- which is what devotion to bikes will allow you. “So, I get in an elevator and I hear, ‘Commute, commute, commute.’ I go into an office and I hear people talking about the mess getting to work .... I say, bike it.”

Two years ago, Lizama and Guzman -- with the support of a few pals -- opened a community workshop called the Bicycle Kitchen in an empty apartment off of Vermont Boulevard, not far from the 101 freeway. It sounded a bit grandiose when they proclaimed the Kitchen a “cultural space dedicated to propagating bicycles as a way of life.” Then, that’s what it became.

As a consequence, Lizama and Guzman and the Kitchen regulars have become notable in the city’s cycling scene. One cannot quite call them leaders, because the community of bicyclists is far too diffuse for leadership. In fact, cyclists tend to have such personal motives for riding and such specific relationships with their bicycles that they seldom regard themselves as part of a community that could be led anywhere.

Yet these young cyclists represent an idea that seems to be catching on, here and elsewhere: If cycling is good for city dwellers and good for cities, the case cannot be postponed. Today in L.A. County, 20,670 miles of riding opportunities begin at the doorstep, down the sidewalk, onto the neighborhood street, across the alley, through the parking lot, up to the arterial -- right into the busy, rumbling gullet of the beast.

Theirs is not an argument to eat your peas and bicycle for the sake of saving the world. More, it’s about finding exhilaration in the city and seeing if it won’t catch on. In a meditative how-to manual published this year called “The Art of Urban Cycling,” writer Robert Hurst concluded: “We could argue for years about whether the post-modern, motorized metropolis is good or bad for our souls. Better we should tackle a question that we can really sink our teeth into: How is it for cycling? The question is complex, and the answer, it turns out, has much to do with attitude ....As cyclists, we are in prime position to make the best of what we cannot change.”

A lesson in diversity

It’s midmorning, Sunday. Eight cyclists congregate outside the Bicycle Kitchen for a ride to lunch.

There’s a woman with a nose ring and bleached white hair. Another wears a T-shirt and the torn-off sleeves of a man’s dress shirt pulled up her arms to guard against the chill. There are a few tattoos in this circle and the usual assortment of ratty street clothes, sweat-ringed fingerless gloves and rolled-up pant legs to keep cuffs off the chain. Not everyone is wearing a helmet. You know the type.

Or do you?

A couple of bicycle messengers in the group surely fit the stereotype of the urban insurgent. But there is a pediatrician here (the one with the nose ring), a language translator, an agent and two people whose business is television commercials, plus a tag-along reporter.

Likewise diverse are their bicycles. Unlike either mountain bikers or “roadies,” urban free riders face only modest group pressure to conform to equipment trends -- except for the fact that nearly all serious urban bikes, including the fanciest, are plastered with stickers or tape or otherwise “uglified” to reduce their appeal to thieves. Most bikes on hand today have their gears stripped off. Three of them are sleek, lightweight “fixed-gear” machines, bicycles that require uncommon skill to master and therefore represent the boldest expression of city cycling. On a fixed-gear, the rider cannot coast.

Lizama -- tall, gangly, strong and graceful in the way a long-legged bird is graceful -- is so at one with his bike that he rides his fixed-gear without brakes, relying on the muscles of his legs to stop. Actually, stopping isn’t the point of fixed-gear riding. Rather, it’s being able to waltz, samba, hip-hop, swing and salsa through traffic, in traffic, across traffic -- anticipating everything that’s going to happen ahead, behind and beside, in order to avoid having to stop at all.

His bicycle is built up from a castoff frame. He doesn’t know the brand. It is the best bicycle in the world because of the way it feels under him.

Guzman -- compact, big-boned and quick like a college wrestler -- also rides a fixed-gear. His track-style bike is a KHS, a proven urban workhorse with its precision components camouflaged under a patina of hard use.

There is quick discussion of route and destination. Koreatown will lead to Echo Park and Sunset Boulevard, and then ...

“Let’s go,” Guzman says, stabbing the pedals. Two clicks tell him the metal cleats on his shoes are locked into matching spring-loaded clips underfoot. He rises off the saddle and leans forward. His 19-pound bicycle springs ahead as if it were alive and hungry and dancing on tiptoes.

Edge of disaster

“It’s kind of like love. It wouldn’t be exciting if there wasn’t a possibility of extreme disaster.” Lizama, with a 6-pound boron manganese locking chain slung around his waist, sprints to the front of the pack, down a backstreet grade and into one of the city’s old, calm, tucked-away, freeway-adjacent neighborhoods. Others follow in a loose file of twos.

The city energizes senses in the cyclist. The eyes search for cracks in pavement and grates that will grab the slender road-bike tires, and for glass and sand and oil and waxed-paper wrappers. The ears scan for threats amid the noise -- like the sound of an aggressive driver approaching from behind.

The neighborhood street leads to a feeder road, where the traffic intensifies, speeds increase and margins of error diminish. This is where it kicks up -- adventure riding.

What cannot be seen or heard must be accounted for: doors of parked cars that are about to fling open in the riders’ faces. Side streets that are ready to launch hidden cars into their path. Oncoming drivers on the verge of turning in front of them. Kids, dogs, a cloud of debris shot into the air by a leaf blower.

When Lizama wants the attention of a motorist, he howls in a perfect imitation of the “whoop, whoop” of a police siren. Then he smiles. The smile is important.

“Don’t let them get to you,” he says. “I swear, wearing a smile makes better commuters out of more than just yourself.”

Confidence is important too. Hesitation arouses the predator instinct in a motorist.

With a fast glance over their shoulders, the riders calculate the velocities of two lanes of traffic moving behind them, locate a plausible opening between cars and merge across both lanes for the upcoming left-turn pocket.

At the corner, the group stops.

“Espresso?” Guzman asks. All heads nod yes. Why not a little caffeine to crank things up?

The rush of traffic

On Sunset Boulevard, traffic roars -- all the louder for being only a foot or two away. Hugging the right-hand side of the slow lane, the group is split by a bus. The driver swoops in and brakes to an angled stop. Riders at the rear have no escape except to merge into the stream of fast traffic to the left.

Two blocks later, the bus returns and again muscles into these easy pickings.

For the most part, bicycling in a group is a powerful sensation. Motorists who might grow impatient or aggressive in encountering a lone cyclist are calmed in the presence of many. The bus driver is an exception.

At the next intersection, Guzman glides to the front of the bus and raps hard on the driver’s window.

“It’s your responsibility to drive safely, you know!” There is edge to his voice. He has a large and expressive face, and his expression is reproachful.

The driver is taken aback. He is not receiving an everyday, so-what, finger salute from a motorist cocooned in distant armor. Guzman is only inches away, a human, not a motorist. The driver nods sheepishly and mouths, “I know, I know.”

Past Echo Lake, the group veers right. Traffic eases. Into downtown, the riders soar onto open Sunday streets, occupying one lane and then two, exhilarated as the city flashes by in glass and marble and tall shadows.

It’s not always this smooth.

Lizama earlier recounted the night he made an instantaneous turn in an alley-cat race, plunging through the 2nd Street tunnel rather than huffing over Bunker Hill. Rush hour was ending, streams of stragglers were hot-footing it home. With no lights, no helmet and no chance to merge over to the tunnel’s sidewalk, Lizama rode the windstorm down the double-yellow line, threading the furious, honking traffic.

“The energy was amazing,” he says. “I’ve never felt so powerful.”

A sweeping right-hand turn leads from the city core toward MacArthur Park, into the inviting pepper-and-smoke smells of Latin kitchens, and to lunch.

‘I am in control’

Want to stir up an argument? Raise the question of traffic laws and road etiquette with cyclists. Include motorists in the conversation if you dare.

The fact is, savvy urban cyclists disagree among themselves, often strongly, about the need to stop at all red lights, about the efficacy of threading traffic, about riding on sidewalks, about when to share lanes with cars and when to “take” lanes, about helmets. These same riders also inevitably recognize that the city is home to legions of unthinking, oblivious, inexperienced and barely competent cyclists. No wonder motorists are bewildered and sometimes angry. Cyclists are apt to do anything -- because they do.

In the end, there is little doubt that the illusion of danger is greater than the actual danger in urban cycling. Otherwise, bicycles would have been expunged from the roads long ago. But there also is no question that the danger is quite real indeed. There’s no such thing as a fender bender on a bicycle.

Four friends of the Bicycle Kitchen have gone down in recent days.

On a sidewalk table at Mama’s Hot Tamales, the group recharges on caffeine and calories. A conversation ensues:

“You can’t think about that, really. You have to act like you’re on top of the world. You have to always be on top of your game,” Guzman says. “Every car is a weapon of mass destruction.”

In the creed of urban cyclists, there is a keen sense of self-responsibility that accompanies the freedom of moment. It’s the key to survival. Lizama puts it this way: “As a rider, there are two things I keep in mind. I never, ever assume that a car sees me. I assume they’re after me. Two, I am in control. I assume that it’s my duty to tell them what to do and where to go.”

Wait, there’s a third point. Seasoned riders of all types talk about it. “It’s instinct,” Lizama says. “You listen to your guts.”

When to dodge. When to hold your space. When to go left. When to hammer down and when to stop. Those who master it never tune to drive-time traffic reports; they move to the music of the streets.

“Out here, it’s as much fun as when you were 8 years old,” says Aaron Salinger, an English-Spanish translator. “Think how bad it would be to spend your life on a couch.”

“What I like about it is thats it’s always improvisational,” says Kelly Martin, a visual image researcher.

“It is,” says bicycle messenger Orlando Godoy, “a feeling of anywhere-ness.”