My friend Bobby hands me a ring of Allen wrenches and a greasy rag. We are in my backyard, tightening bolts, putting my new bike together. The bike is blue, with red handlebars. We tug on the brake cables, winch them into place, flip the gears, hear them snap to attention, true the wheels, pump the tires. Tools in hand, it is easy to acquiesce to the feeling that we have made this machine, that we alone are responsible for its simple, Euclidean beauty: two tangential triangles resting on two perfect circles.
Speaking of perfect, it is a perfect June day in the Adirondacks, the kind that could be an advertisement for summer, if that were necessary, where you know already, at 8:35 in the morning, that it will end with swimming, ice cream, watermelon, frogs. It' s as if this day, too, had a geometry, and swimming, ice cream, melon, and frogs were the measure of its angles.
It has taken forty minutes, maybe an hour, to sort the pieces that came yesterday in the FedEx package, to lay them out skeletally on the grass, to assemble them in principle, and then for real. "I don't know what's in the box," the FedEx driver, Claude, said to me when he handed it over, "but if it was up to me I'd have sent it second day. Would have cost less." He shows me the shipping bill: it's for more than one hundred dollars. What he doesn't understand, what I don't say, is that there are some things whose urgency is not a matter of timeliness. Think of a passage from a book, or a poem, just read, that must be shared immediately with someone else. That must be what happened to the man who really made my bicycle, Steve Bilenky. Having finally seen the whole bike for the first time, after months in the making (the first call, in mid-March, "We've got your tubes. They're in the jig."), he had to have me have it. "Here is the villanelle I was telling you about," he seemed to be saying. "What's a hundred bucks for a good poem?"
In the brochure describing his bikes, Steve Bilenky uses words like "sculptural" and "aesthetic," words that strike you as accurate once you have seen a man fashion a length of steel into something that feels, underfoot, to be a precise extension of the body. It is practical, utilitarian sculpture, form enabling function. Think of it this way: if someone were to describe a bike as moving, you'd probably assume they were talking about motion. But Bilenky's bikes are tempered with emotion, and that is what makes them art as well as craft. He loves what he does and what he can do, though it is a love tried by the difficulties of running a business that is always strapped for cash.
Bilenky's cramped, noisy metal shop sits across from a junkyard at the tail end of Second Street in northeast Philadelphia's Olney district. There are bars across the windows, a gate across the door, and graffiti ribboning its brick face. Olney is a "transitional" neighborhood, which is to say that there are other neighborhoods nearby that are marginally more rundown. Push through the gate, step inside, and duck your head: hanging from the ceiling are dozens of bike frames in various stages of construction: brass-tacked, silver-brazed, rack-ready, fully painted. Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly: they are more unlikely, more lovely, than what you would have imagined.
It is raining the first time I visit Steve Bilenky on Second Street, raining so hard that the gutters overflow, flooding the streets and sidewalks. Bilenky, caped in a plastic poncho over green work pants and a torn flannel shirt, has ridden his bike to work, as he does every morning. (Not aesthetic, habit.) Before he can get his second wheel over the transom, his crew is lobbing questions: "How many racks on the bike going to Singapore?" "Should we update the Web site?" "Twenty-six-inch or 700C wheels on the travel bike?" "What time is sundown today?" The last because Bilenky, his wife, and their four children are orthodox Jews, and tonight is the Sabbath. For twenty-four hours the shop will be dark, and Bilenky, who usually can be found bending metal at ten o'clock, at midnight, will be at shul, doing something that may, at times, be harder.
But right now the lights are blazing, and each member of Bilenky's three-man crew is working on a different frame, one at the grinder, one at the jig, the third at the torch. Each frame will take months to complete. In a good year they make one hundred frames, tops. Two of the crew, David and Andy, used to own their own frame-making business but found the economies of scale impossible to master. The third, John, has been messing with hubs and headsets since he was a teenager, just like Steve Bilenky.
Bilenky, who does all the final welding (welding being to bike making what voice is to writing), has slipped on a protective helmet and is joining one piece of steel to another when a customer rattles on the gate and steps into the shop. "My car is blocking your driveway," he announces cheerfully, "and I'm not moving it until you finish my bike." He leaves twenty minutes later, no bike. The phone is ringing. Bilenky's blowtorch hisses, exhaling a green flame. The grinder barks dentally. The phone is ringing. Andy is cutting tubes. John polishes a frame. An older man pushing a junker bike he's found at the dump and repainted with brilliant orange sunrays and black-and-white yin-yang symbols, arrives to ask if anyone wants Chinese food for lunch, collects money, disappears back into the rain. Excess metal hits the floor. The phone rings. An order of Tru-temper tubing is delivered. The other phone rings. The Chinese food comes. The grinder stops. The jig stops. The blowtorch continues, solo. A box of tire rims comes via UPS. A middle-aged man who used to work for Steve stops by to tell him about the job-retraining program he's signed up for at the community college, something to do with computers. Both phones. The pitbull-rottweiler mutt, Bambi, who guards the shop tugs on her five-inch chain, growling at the UPS deliveryman waiting for a signature. The grinder again.
Steve Bilenky clears a space on his desk and sits down to design a bicycle, a bicycle that has never been made before: my bicycle. He asks me some questions--where I plan to ride, how often, how much--then measures my arms, my feet, my inseam, my back. He drops these numbers into his computer, and in a few seconds an image of a bicycle appears. Bilenky studies it, trims the downtube, lengthens the top tube, studies it some more, says "Oh, yeah," scales back the wheels, studies it some more, adds new values, takes away others, says "Oh, no," shortens the seatpost, slopes the top tube, sits back, folds his arms, slopes it further, stares at the screen. "How do you like it?" he asks after a while, and when I say that I don't know, that it's only a picture, Steve pulls on his beard and studies the screen. "I guess you have to take it on faith," he says at last.
My blue Bilenky--bolts tightened, seat attached--is propped against the clothesline so Bobby and I can step back and admire it. The top tube angles up and the handlebars curl down and the effect is aesthetic, sculptural. I ask Bobby if he'd like first ride and in an instant he's three revolutions, ten revolutions down the driveway, and then he's out of sight. When he comes back sometime later, my husband is in the garden, pulling up weeds. "I understand the part about not coveting your neighbor's wife," I hear Bobby say to him before spinning toward me, "but what about her bicycle?"
