"The Kinda Bike Jesus Woulda Rode In On"
An encomium to humility, the King of Kings, and vintage mopeds.
Gringolet right after I bought him in Summer 2015.
Happy Palm Sunday. Once upon a time I lived in a Holiday Inn on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., just southwest of Observatory Circle, where the Vice President lives. I’d inadvertently built a whirlwind of a life that included a live-in staff position in a makeshift residence hall for international students housed at the hotel, a wee-morning-hours grind as a Starbucks Shift Supervisor, and the M.A. in Literature at American University. My average day included a 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Starbucks shift, breakfast on the two-block walk back to the hotel, a quick shower, a 10:30 a.m. shuttle ride to campus, classes from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., a shuttle ride back, a snack, a nap, dinner, studying and hanging with residents, and bedtime.
One morning I clocked out a few minutes late at Starbucks and my manager said, “Better hurry or Dick Cheney’s going to screw up your day.” Just to be sociable, I half-laughed at what felt like some inside-the-Beltway joke about something I didn’t understand, then headed off at a trot and, since the crosswalk was going my way, crossed to the other side of the street, the hotel side, earlier than usual. Suddenly there were lights and sirens and Wisconsin Ave. was officially shut down. And then came the motorcade. Apparently, what I’d taken for a joke and an oblique reference was a legitimate warning of something we don’t deal with in my native Des Moines, nor here in Kansas City (unless the Chiefs win a Superbowl): a city shutdown due to VIP traffic. Being caught on the wrong side of the street when the motorcade came through would have screwed up my day.
Today, as I contemplated the Triumphal Entry amidst a store run, cooking for the week, buying blinds because we’ve lived here a year and still have black crinkle-paper shades painter’s-taped to our bedroom windows, and celebrating my in-laws’ fortieth anniversary, I was reminded of a line from The Parking Lot Movie, which I wrote about last fall. It’s a documentary about a group of extremely creative, intelligent people who run (now, “ran”) the Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville, Virginia, behind the bars frequented by undergraduates likely to become some of society’s most influential people. If you’ve not had the pleasure, I highly recommend it as a study in misanthropy. But whose? I leave that to you to decide. (Note: There’s some language you wouldn’t want your kids to overhear.)
In my previous post there’s a photo of the booth where the attendants sat to collect fees, especially when it was raining—a nine-square-foot hut (TOPS) made of OSB and cardboard. In a turn of phrase that has long stuck with me, one of the lot attendants interviewed in The Parking Lot Movie referred to it as “the kinda building that Jesus woulda collected parking fees from.” And the contrast between the humility of this booth, with so much traffic flowing past it in cars and on foot, and the motorcade in D.C. that day, an ostentatious traffic pattern that made sure everyone saw it and yielded the right of way, has stuck with me for years.
I can’t remember for sure whose sermon it was (I think
was preaching), but once upon a past Palm Sunday I heard someone explain that New Testament scholars think Jesus’s Triumphal Entry, greeted with waving palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna!,” occurred on the same day and on the opposite side of Jerusalem from another triumphal entry, Pilate’s return from afar, Rome maybe. The Roman custom—and Pilate, you’ll note, was the Roman governor of Judaea at the time—was a cavalcade, the ancient world’s equivalent of the motorcade, a parade of important people on horseback followed by a retinue on foot.Assuming for a minute that these two processions happened on the same day, or even at the same time, Jesus’s choice of ride speaks volumes: he rode in on a donkey. And at this point, all I can think of is Eddie Murphy in Shrek: “Y’hear that?! She think I’m a steeeeed!” Donkeys—or, if you prefer, jackasses—are the perennial choice for comedies, after all. At our house, we’ve rewatched the Godfather trilogy this month, which is for us a Lenten reflection on the power that sin has to corrupt even the best aspects of our lives when we give it full reign. (But you’ll have to wait until next year, maybe, to read what I have to say about that.) In the third film, one of the assassins who brings the trilogy to its tragic close tinges the death he intends to deal with chaotic humor by entertaining his don with a donkey impression he’s apparently been doing since he was a kid. Donkeys are hilarious even in tragedies. In one of the best donkey-featuring comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare gives us a half-assed actor who is turned into a donkey from the shoulders up; his name, you’ll recall (and I’m already tearing up with laughter as I type), is Bottom.1
Sure, all of this came after Jesus’s cavalcade. (Though the story of Balaam [and] the ass came earlier.) But if there’s a God who’s genius enough to have spoken a cosmos into existence and then written into it a story in which He Himself must die in our place and rise again to conquer death, wouldn’t you think He’d have chosen a donkey for his last ride at least partly knowing and loving how hilarious the trope would become? Proud as we are, some of us might at times say to the proudest of us, “[Curse] you and the horse you rode in on!” But how can we sustain such animus toward anyone riding in on a donkey? The curse goes unpronounced amid the hilarious, possibly humiliating spectacle of a grown man riding on a steed whose ambling gait and obnoxious braying are curse enough. There is no high horse to get off here, only a humble King of Kings so gentle that he can calm a ripsnorting jackass long enough to hitch a ride into town.
Another way to look at it is to say that majesty is relatively easy. Horses—I mean really majestic horses—are bred and then trained to be on their best behavior. A yearling donkey is decidedly not. So while Pilate’s easily-performed majesty played out on Jerusalem’s west side, Jesus performed a challengingly humble counter-entry from the east.
Bless him, and the donkey he rode in on.
It’s one thing to hear a sermon that so brilliantly exposits the meanings of animals in such a poignant juxtaposition of Jesus and Pilate. For me, the hearing was only the sowing of a seed. The seed grew, fertilized by echoes of The Parking Lot Movie—“…the kinda building that Jesus woulda collected parking fees from…”—as I rode around Lawrence, Kansas, on a vintage moped, a 1982 Yamaha Qt-50 “Yamahopper.” I’d bought it for a song from a gentleman in a small town south of Lawrence. The bike ran but only for a few minutes, then it killed when it got going too fast. Doc, my housemate, a Chemistry postdoc, had been an oil change mechanic in a previous life and reassured me that if I bought it, we could fix it. As it turned out, all the bike needed was a $30 charge coil.
Doc, me, and General at the apex of my mopedding life—a swarm ride through Lawrence with at least fifty other riders.
From there, and with Doc’s guidance, I dove into ever-more-intricate overhauls. A bigger-than-stock piston, which gave the bike more power. This required a carburetor adjustment and a wholesale overhaul of the air filter assembly. Then, Doc fabbed a high-volume tailpipe that helped the engine breathe better. That old pipe fell off in 50-degree weather on my morning commute one day. The bike—I named it “Gringolet,” which you’ll appreciate in the next few posts here—erupted in a hellacious howl that made me kill it and jump off out of fear for my manhood. And I had a loud return that evening. After that, I upgraded to the MLM People’s Sidebleed, a high-end pipe that coaxed what had been a stock 30MPH moped above 45MPH once, when I was going downhill, eastbound, with a Kansas prairie tailwind pushing us like a yacht. A buddy rode Gringolet after I installed the Sidebleed and breathlessly told me as he coasted to a stop, “Dude. This thing’s got star mode!” Yes, it does.
A moped is a humble mode of transport, in two senses that you Charlotte’s Web fans will recall: “not proud,” but also “close to the ground.” The University of Kansas is built on a hill called Mount Oread, and parking at the top of the hill is scarce if you have a car. But if you ride a moped, there are always spots open. Of course, hopping off your bike right next to your building means your department chair may spot you, a grown-ass man (though not a grown ass-man, like Bottom), riding on what looks like a toy, with the nickname “Jester” stenciled down the sides of your helmet. And this minor indignity crimps the aura of professionalism we hope Ph.D. candidates are developing.
If my chair had asked, I’d have said a moped is just another tool for research, just another way to know the world. For example, from a moped you become aware of the fiscal shape of your city’s Department of Public Works. For one thing, my feet were always four inches above the pavement, if that, which meant I could see every crack and pothole in the road. One year the craters were so bad that Bison, my riding partner after Doc and General moved away, blew out a tire on one. (It’s best to ride in formation on a moped because car drivers are blind, careless, and occasionally hostile.) When you see the postapocalyptic condition of the roads from that close, you realize what your tax dollars aren’t doing.
Also, mopeds are relatively slow. Forty-five miles per hour, Gringolet’s fastest speed, was still not fast enough to really blur the view. Bison’s little Suzuki Fa-50 wasn’t much of a scorcher, either; so we cruised instead of ripping, enjoying the view. When you move that slowly, you have time to care about what you see. Plus, you aren’t really looking down on the rest of humanity like you would be if you were driving, say, a pickup truck.
Gringolet and Bison’s Suzuki Fa-50, basking in the morning sun atop Mount Oread.
And so, it was from astraddle Gringolet that I came to the conclusion that a moped is the kinda bike that Jesus woulda rode in on, had Palm Sunday occurred in the age of the motorcade instead of the age of the cavalcade. No street-closing Dick Cheney limos, no blazing police lights on black SUVs. Just the lonesome sound of a Yamahopper humming “Hosanna!” as it four-cycled down hills, as its Rider looked down on nothing but the road, avoiding the little potholes before plunging into that grave-crater that lay up ahead.
Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.
Since I’ve heard some of you really enjoy the footnotes lately, here’s another one. Did you know that “horsing around” has a counterpart in English, “arsing around”? Me neither, until a chance discovery in the OED. Apparently “arsing around” is just goofing off, while “horsing around” is, uh, goofing off in a sexual way. Having been raised in an evangelical church, when I discovered this all I could think of was how asinine all of my youth leaders seemed after so many years of yelling at us, “Hey, no horsing around!” Not only did they not know what they were saying, their preference for the horse over the ass made fools of them as they routinely reminded us about sexual purity while intending to stop us from playing tag-no-tag-backs.