Bruce Cameron

Sep 25, 20140

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2009.

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I was raised on the rough-and-tumble streets of Shawnee Mission, Kansas.

The day we moved in, I was a fourth-grader, stomping my feet in puddles of water in the street because, well, I was a fourth-grader. Suddenly, three boys my age rode up on Sting-Ray bicycles, skidding to a stop in front of me with a triple shriek of rubber. They wore sunglasses, white jeans and white slip-on tennis shoes. That’s right: They were gangsters.

The gang leader folded his arms. “We’re the Stingrays,” he informed me with a sneer so pronounced it looked like he needed lip surgery. He nodded toward the moving van in our driveway. “You moving in or something?”

These Stingrays were sharp boys. “Yeah,” I replied in a voice tough as marshmallows.

“My name’s Ricky,” he spat, “but my fighting name’s Gearshift because I have a gearshift.”

Ricky did, indeed, have a gearshift, a 10-inch lever with a silver knob on it that was mounted just forward of his banana seat. It had no cables running into it and thus served no purpose whatsoever. “Groovy,” I said enviously.

“Groovy!” Ricky the Gearshift snorted. His friends snickered. “Nobody says ‘groovy’ anymore. What are you, the Mamas and the Pappas?”

“He’s a mama,” laughed one of the boys, intimidating me because he wore a real football jersey that, bereft of shoulder-pad equipment, hung on him like a deflated hot-air balloon.

“I meant ... mud,” I said, pulling out a word that as far as I knew was nothing like the word “groovy.”

“Mud?” Gearshift repeated uncertainly.

“Yeah, that’s what we say where I’m from. Something that’s cool is, you know, mud, or dirt or dust. If it’s really cool we say, uh, scum.”

“Huh,” Gearshift replied. He nodded toward the boy in the huge jersey. “His name is Chuck, but we call him Sprocket. It’s his fighting name ‘cause his bike has a sprocket.”

“That’s dirt,” I said admiringly, hating the ridiculous sound of it in my mouth. Couldn’t I have come up with anything better?

Ricky pointed toward the third boy. “And his name’s John, but we call him John ‘cause his mom won’t let him have a fighting name.”

“My mom couldn’t stop me from having a fighting name. All the fights I’ve been in,” I observed. I experimented a little with a sneer, deciding I liked it.

“You been in a lot of fights?” Gearshift wanted to know. “How many?”

“Oh, uh, 557,” I said.

The boys registered this as if they somehow found it implausible. Gearshift grabbed his gearshift and shifted into a higher gear with an impressive clicking sound. “Yeah? You ever kill anybody?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer this. I really wanted to join the gang and wear white pants and white shoes and be named after a bicycle part, but not if they were going to actually kill people. I decided on tough evasiveness. “Who wants to know?” I responded, though I was sneering so hard it sounded more like “Who wanfs the snow?” I had to repeat it a couple of times, and then Gearshift looked puzzled.

“Me,” he answered. “That’s why I asked.”

“Oh. No, not yet. But my dad has,” I advised the Stingrays, in case they decided I must be a softy due to my lack of any personal homicides.

I wondered if my father would be OK with me telling the neighborhood that he’d killed people. It might have some impact on his gynecology business.

“I’m going to do a wheelie,” Gearshift announced. He expertly turned his bike and began peddling, yanking the handlebars so that his front wheel rose off the ground for a fraction of a second. I was about to yell “scum!” in appreciation when Gearshift’s off-center landing turned him into the curb, stopping him so abruptly that he slid forward and hit his gearshift in such a fashion that the rest of us clutched our hands between our legs in instant sympathy.

The next time I saw the Stingrays, Ricky had removed the gearshift from his bike.

I never did find out what his new fighting name was.

(Bruce Cameron has a website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.)