keyword: and, title: bike and video in misc. flash fiction

Most places can’t say they have a pornography-and-bicycle-repair shop, then again, I’m not from most places. I’m from a very specific place on a razor’s edge between the relative civilization of the upper Midwestern rustbelt and vast redneck nowhere of the untamed Adirondacks. As far as my research has shown, it’s not just that pornography-and-bicycle-repair shops are rare, the store is singular. Near as I can tell Wright Bike and Video is the only pornography-and-bicycle-repair shop in the entire world. Wright also fixes screen doors, to be fair, but you get what I’m saying. It doesn’t exist anywhere else and couldn’t exist anywhere else. Just here, in the place where I was born, that I keep coming back to hat in hand again and again.

On a lonely stretch between Little Falls and Dolgeville, across from a “farm stand” that may not be a farm stand at all, may have its stuff shipped from down South the same way you can catch the Amish buying “homemade pies” off the day-old shelf at the local Price Chopper, it’s there. The world’s only pornography-and-bicycle-repair shop.

I’ve lived all over the country, traveled the world and never seen anything like it, even though it has long accepted as a curiosity at worst, a local institution at best. More so, its constituent parts no longer really exist, there are few physical smut shops left in the world these days, the internet being the internet put most of them out of business. Another local just-porn store between Little Falls and Herkimer just went, if you’ll excuse the pun, tits up a few months ago. I can’t think of a bike shop anywhere nearby either, to be honest, unless you’re really devoted to cycling, no one gets bikes repaired anymore, just go to Wal-Mart and get a new one, everything’s cheaper if you don’t give a damn about longevity, our national creed no longer “e pluribus unum” now merely “planned obsolescence”. Place the phrase “planned obsolescence” below a yellow smiley and we would have our new American flag. Despite all that, two mismatched things that no longer work on their own somehow still work here as our chimera of weirdness, as a glorious beautiful freak.

No one anywhere else believes me when I tell them about Wright’s Bike and Video. Nor do they believe my graduating class had a Nazi who blew off his arm building a pipe bomb but escaped with “boys will be boys” and a lengthy hospital stay. They say “you writers make everything up” as if my tales of Little Falls are an experiment in a post-modernist’s take on Lake Wobegon for the end of the final American epoch. But I know that it’s all true, every word of it.

Just to the north of where I was born stands the world’s only pornography-and-bicycle-repair shop, underlining what a magical horrible miraculous place from which I sprang and where I remain. Oh, and they also repair screen doors, which probably helps business too.