Sure I bike with the Midnight Ridazzz - all of them - Taco Tuesday, Ride with No Name, Mom's Ride, WIF (What the Fuck Ride). And, Yo Dog, we have done it - done it HARD. Drink, smoke, tag - in your face stuff that I'd only do in the dead of night riding with crazy kids miles into the dawn light of a Raymond Chandler LA whose mean streets no one knows but us midnight ridazzz. Sure, I'm what you can call 'hardcore' BUT this one group I hooked up with showed me up for the pussy I really am. The Fugitives, whose motto is, "We've escaped and you won't take us alive."Right, I scoffed when I read their twitter account. Bunch of lousy nerds I meet with couple of weeks back that did this vanilla ride over Barham Road in the Valley from NoHo into Hollywood for some beers. Pansy stuff compared to what other groups do. I didn't think twice 2 weeks later when I see an ad on the midnight ridazz.com website for a quote, 'adventure' ride'. ( Although, when they said, 'bring a change of shoes' it shoulda been a big ominous tip off.)So off we bike from Union Station at about 9pm down Alameda till the leader, Nerd A, says, 'Hey, we went too far' and we backtrack from Vernon to Exposition and head West. We hit Culver City around Duquesne Ave and head onto LA River Bike path. Kool, I'm thinking, I've done this a million times - out to Mustache Bridge in the Marina. Have a beer on the bridge, I figure, eat the rest of my Subway Sandwich and call it a night - right? Wrong as can be. We back track again from West back East on the Baloona Creek bike path and then it gets fucking weird. We duck under the cable wire barrier, carry our bikes down to the creek and start heading back in the Creek itself. It's low water level an even though everyone else has knobby tires and mountain bikes, my ghetto bike with South Central red balloon 700 tires can handle a couple of inches of water. So, I go with the crowd of 5 and ride the river - till we miss our turn again.Next thing is a back track to a secret tributary that's headed North off Balboa Creek. (Our group leader made us swear a blood oath to keep exact location secret.) And before you know it, I'm in a dark smelly tunnel that kinda felt like I was biking thru a vagina. And all the nerds are just fine with it all. Dark, smelly tunnel filled with untreated sewage, late at night in LA. And I'm thinking, it’s OK, be a short ride and all's fine, be out in the fresh air laughing again headed for a beer in no time. But noooooooo, we're biking and biking and one mile turns to 3 and 3 seems like an eternity because we’re totally encased in cement with water up about 2 inches deep and now it's slimy. We're headed North from Culver City to Bev Hills in a fucking tunnel and there's no exit, or fresh air, till we're there.Our bike lights were plenty to see with and my headset blasted enough music to overcome my sense of smell so it was like a '60s acid trip for awhile. Lots of cell phone photos with goofy poses at various points made me think that Ken Kesey Merry Pranksters had kidnapped me for a ride on the bus and it was all cool until, the guy in front of me goes down.He slid on the slim and banged up his knee on the upturn in the tunnel. I go down kinda partial on my elbow and knee but hop right up so as to not get real wet or full of too much sewage. (The sealed soda cup in my cup holder was even OK.) But my fellow nerd is hurting and need first aid - which a ride member came prepared for. Me, my chain got fucked 'cause of the Frankenstein nature of my bike - parts from 40 bikes put together so nothing quite fits. But we teamed it and got the chain on again and now we're rolling again, just a little more cautiously. We end up walking the slime for about the last mile.After about 15 minutes, somewhere north of Sunset in Bev Hills, we jump up a tunnel ledge, semi-crawl out to a closed Iron Gate and bang on it till we get sprung in the middle of wooded parkland off of a road that must forever remain nameless in BH. Free, we escape into the cool night and everyone rushes to catch the last train to North Hollywood just like nothing much went down. And in a funny way, nothing much did. Just another escape brought to you complements of ’the Fugitives'. But it does makes you wonder 'What if'' we had gotten stuck in that God forsaken tunnel of sewage. We might not have made it out alive, indeed. It also makes you want to get a Tetanus shot.
