The Bicycle Thief

There’s a Bloor Street regular who spends his days hawking Black History Month pamphlets. He has a kind of appealing 1950’s look to him, and a dash of fast-talking charm, but those qualities are always pushed to the side by a ready anger that’s never far from the surface.

After being rejected by two guys and then seeing me approaching, he said in a voice that was both inviting and reproachful, “Hey man, don’t be like those guys, why dontcha buy one?” I shook my head, and this brought out his bitterness, “ You’re not in a hurry, man, you’re not doing anything, I can see that!”

He was right, but it still felt like an insult, like it was intended to be an insult, and as I sat down to have a tea on front of the Common, I was now acutely aware that I was no different than any of the other drifters who composed the street at this hour.

A young homeless man with a big, spacey grin on his face and a huge backpack slung over his shoulders came down the sidewalk. Everything made him happy, and when he saw my tea he beamed as if he had just seen a mystical object. I thought he might reach down and take it, but a display bicycle in front of Curbside Cycle caught his eye. Fashionable, with a big, wooden delivery container at the front, it was just sitting there, one of those art objects that got people in off the street to talk to the engaging staff.

The homeless guy just got on this bike, and silently, practically invisibly, turned into traffic and vanished into the city. It was astonishing, this, like something imagined rather than seen. Curious to see how the world would unfold without intervention, I did nothing. Nobody did anything, until one of the employees happened out of the store, noticed the missing bike and had events explained to him by a preoccupied deliveryman, who pointed down the street.

As if created for just such an occasion, two young men rocketed out onto the street from the store and sprinted off after the missing bike. They were built for this. Not for violence or displays of virility, but because their native disposition was to act, to confidently not be a bystander. A pretty girl came out from the store and watched after them, standing on a concrete city planter as if a pedestal and staring off into the horizon after her knights. And there was something beautiful and heartbreaking in this, and in their return five minutes later with the purloined bike, and once again the winners having won, the loser having lost.