Okay, this happened a few weeks ago, but it’s been bugging me ever since.
April 29th, i’m participating in my first ever alley cat, a race by and for bike messengers and messenger-wannabes. There’s no set course, just a series of questions that you answer at various locations around the city, and you make your way as you see best. I know where the finish line is, but there’s a problem in that i have to cross two freeways to get there. So i’m wandering down Cesar Chavez St. in a not-so-nice part of town, make a turn to try to find a route, and end up going up this gigantic hill into the middle of the biggest housing projects in the city. Not a place you really wanna be on a bicycle, so needless to say i make an abrupt turnaround and hightail it outta there. On my way down the hill, who do i see but Jack Batty in a U-Haul van, honking and waving at me.
So, Jack, i gotta ask: what the hell were you doing there? Was that where the U-Haul pickup place was? Did you just happen to be driving down Chavez when you saw me and figured you’d say hi (in which case you probably thought “what the hell is zyzzyva doing in the projects??”)? Just what WAS going on?? 
An excellent question. And one with a pretty good answer actually, I’d just forgotten all about it. In fact now that I think about I can’t recall exactly what portion of the day this happened.
There I was with a van full of heroin, crack, speed and $165,000 dollars in cash …
Just kidding …
That was the day I was moving over here to the east bay. I had either just gotten back from the storage place in Burlingame with all my stuff, or I was just on my way to the storage place, or I had already moved everything and I was bringing the truck back. At any rate, the apartment where Alice moved to is on Protrero Hill, and I can’t remember exactly where we were headed, but we needed to get to Cesar Chavez to get there. The route from her place to Cesar takes you through the projects.
I saw you ride past, and I thought, “Hey, zyz said something about a futon I might borrow” and I think at that point I still owed you a little cabbage. So I tried to flag you down to see if we could sort things out.
When you took off like a bat out of hell, I thought you might have been either in some sort of race, or in the zone or something.
Mystery solved.
And by the way I did find a futon, frame and all, for $25 on Craigslist.
Ah… yes that makes sense then. And yes, not only was i in a race, i wanted to get the hell outta there!! The last time i found myself in a situation like that, i nearly got my bike stolen right out from under me!