BIKE RACKS FOR BIKES

Once upon a time, many moons ago, back in the day, somewhere over the rainbow, way up north where the cottonfields grow, our narrator sold an ounce of hashish, gram by gram, to some of his fellow students at the effete liberal Eastern urban University where he attended classes. Or perhaps it was Play-doh colored with tobacco juice that he sold---no matter---the buyers seemed happy, no one asked for his (they were all male) money back. The hashish/PlayDoh had been fronted to him by his friend Dave, a gungho engineering major who had channeled his talents into making elaborate waterpipes, and who all-too-soon (to the chagrin of his blue-collar parents, no doubt) dropped out of school and headed back, or slunk back, to New Jersey. Somehow, all the monetary proceeds from the sale of the hashish/Play Doh ended up with Dave, and now Dave found himself owing our narrator his share, when, low and behold, out-of-the-blue, surprise no end, who coulda thunk it, the money was gone. Nevertheless,our narrator never really feared that Dave would welsh on the debt, and, soon enough, Dave proposed a solution. He didn't have any folding cash, all the cabbage had been cooked, consumed, and excreted, but he had this other item of value, this Italian worldbeater, this exotic Ducati motorcycle. This exotic Ducati motorcycle was worth at least as much as the amount owed, and in lieu of the green, our narrator could be the proud owner of this splendid specimen. Being mucho verde himself, not-overly-worldly-wise, a tad soapy behind the ears, our narrator took the bike.
How the bike actually came into our narrator's possession he doesn't remember. Where and when he discovered that the bike didn't actually run he doesn't recollect. In fact, our narrator never actually got the bike running, our narrator didn't, but he did manage to get it out to the house of his great friend, mentor, father-figure-extraordinaire, Mr. Merrill, and Mr. Merrill the great tinkerer (he once took his Alfa Romeo apart and had it lying out in his front yard, piece by piece) Mr. Merrill got the bike running. This would have been on some weekend, when our narrator had taken the train out to the suburbs, where Mr. Merrill and his lovely wife Stuartie (she had been born in Virginia, and her parents, perhaps disappointed that she wasn't a boy, had nevertheless named her after the local hero, Jeb Stuart) had a house with those hot water heat pipes that creak wonderously as they're coming on. When the exotic Ducati motorcycle was up and running (sputtering, wheezing, fiffully alive after an ether transfusion, if memory serves) Mr. Merrill took it for a spin in the neighborhood, and when he came back to the house, he pronounced it worthy (most probably) and said, (most probably), "Why don't you try it." And so it was, not half-a-mile away, that our narrator found himself over-running a stop sign and landing in a ditch, uninjured, but certainly not ego-fortified.
To make a long story less-long than it otherwise would be, soon enough our narrator found himself dropped out of school and slinking, himself, down to North Carolina, where he helped himself to the hospitality, and discomfort, of his relatives. Somehow, he managed to take the again non-functioning (its odomoter now had an added ten, maybe twenty, at most fifty miles) Ducati with him. And really, by any lights, that should be the end of our story. Our narrator moved about from place to place, Uncle's house to Aunt's house to apartment complex to apartment complex, and everywhere he went, the Ducati with its damaged aluminum cylinder block (it ran on one huge cylinder) seemed to go. When he picked up from Charlotte and lit out for Greensboro (now with college degree in hand), there went the Ducati with him, first to a tree-shrouded older apartment complex where our narrator shot the rat with the 22, and then on to an apartment in a house on Tate Street, not far from the campus of UNC-G, the house from which the well-stoned crew set-out for their skinny-dipping excursion to the city reservoir, where the lightening bugs flashed in the trees on the far shore, not thousands, or tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lightening bugs, flashing on at the base of the trees on the far shore, and then, like bulbs on a theatre marquee, flashing up the string, thousands of strings of lightening bugs, up and up and up, until they peaked at the top of the trees and started over again at the bottom. A more wondorous sight there never was, unless it was Julie, lithesome naked Julie, climbing the ladder of the brick tower where the water ran out on its journey to the filtration plant, where the water was purified, as if it needed to be purified, after lithesome naked Julie had swum in it.
There was an empty spot down in the basement of that house on Tate Street, not far from the furnace, and there the Ducati sat. And by any lights, that really, honest and truly, shoul

fast lightweight aluminum 21-speed with sweet shifters and low low miles

I need to sell this bike. I rode it for under two months before I faced up to the reality that it doesn't fit me. Been stored in the basement not getting used at all on my trainer ever since. Your choice of either San Marcos or Serfas Rx gel racing seat. Priced for fast sale at $325 out the door. $450 gets it with my Kurt Kinetic trainer.