A Philly Bike Story by Nic Esposito

So it finally happened to me. After a week’s worth of premonition in my mind as I navigated the pedestrian filled streets, the labyrinth of trolley tracks and the cars constantly unloading in the bike lanes of West Philly, the moment came in a way I could have never imagined. The car door flew open too quickly for me to even react, let alone question why I chose to take Spruce when I always take Chestnut. The only time it did allot for was a quick reaction, one my gratitude will never fully grasp. For in that wonderful world of sub consciousness, I employed the training I must have received through my years of action film appreciation. After Mrs. Fantuzzo swung her door open, there was only three seconds between me being ejected from my seat, barrel rolling like a stuntman past the side of the door just clipping my leg and finding myself sitting in the street, screaming, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

By the time they were both out of the car, I was already trying to get on my feet, only being stopped by the two road workers who witnessed the entire scene.

“Man, sit down,” the worker yelled.

“Call an ambulance,” Mrs. Fantuzzo screamed.

In a fit of disoriented exhaustion, all I could say was, “No, I don’t have insurance.”

“But we do,” Mrs. Fantuzzo countered.

And they certainly did. But I wasn’t looking for health insurance. I knew after sitting on the ground for two minutes that there were no breaks, and I’d have to wait to see about internal bleeding anyway. What I did need was ease, compassion, and understanding. For the week before, for some reason I was visualizing this happening, almost waiting for it, knowing that my time as an unscathed biker was running out. But when my turn came, unlike my friends who’ve been abandoned or dropped off at their home and given the runaround with the law to get some help, these two people helped me.

Mr. and Mrs. Fantuzzo took me into their home, cleaned my wounds, put my bike in the car and took it to the shop, where it was deemed too damaged to fix for the price. The wheels that looked like they were warped in a magnetic field pointed to the obvious, but it was settling to know for sure.

Part of me still can’t believe that it finally happened. I can still feel the metallic, mechanical surge through my body as I felt the bike connect with the door, and then the rush of my skin as I slid across the ground. It was such a mix of the organic and industrial, the moment where the body experiences something completely outside of its realm of sensory, processes it, and catalogues it in the mental department of a feeling never felt before. I imagine it’s like the first time I smashed a car, or what it would be like to be shot; a physically jarring experience that is enacted by forces so completely outside of yourself.

Some people have advised me to get a substantially nicer bike out of the deal, some keep putting false ailments in my head.

‘Are you dizzy? I woke up one day after hurting my ankle and found it broke. Are you sure there’s no internal bleeding?'

I know they mean well, and as the pain in my leg fades, I get a new bike, and the whole morning is retired to the frontal lobes, which are thankfully still intact, I hesitate to see my premonition as fate and my accident as a karma that will reward me with a new bike for almost being killed. This could have happened to anyone, and it can happen again when I get back on a bike. All I can do is let this experience wash my sensibility of moving too fast and dry my adrenaline that I just escaped a terrible injury and possibly death. And hopefully, it leaves at least two more people with the awareness that bikers exist in this city. I even find myself as I've driven around for the past day looking much longer in my blindspot and in the bike lane before I open the door. But in the end it’s just another of life’s experiences, but one that has me enjoying the day that much more. Nowhere to run, no worries to subscribe, just thankfulness.

Excerpts from "Growing Your Hood"

From these anecdeotes, the question remains, what would have happened if the colonists learned from the indigenous how to plant the three sisters rather than showing them how to write treaties? What would have happened if the slaves would have remained on the land to show white city folks how to farm rather than joining those white people in the segregated factory conditions? And what if at 13, I would have suggested, “Hey, let’s go climb some trees or fish rather than trying that first joint?”

I realize questions like that can be futile, for the past still rests somewhere in the grand scheme, but those questions are still not asked in vain, for they raise the point, how does any culture, country or person form a character. For me, all I can do is realize it is my story and hopefully from tonight, other stories can help answer these questions, because they aren’t pointless. Their meaning is found in each country person who comes to the city to start a farm, and each city person who comes to a farmer’s market or installs a farm technique in their house to save energy and help the environment. In a strange way, we are reconciling those past mistakes that have hurt societies so much. In a way, each time you plant anything in the city, you are vindicating those oppressed indigenous people, those disenfranchised blacks, and those confused thirteen year olds.

For me, I just feel extreme ease as I sit here, on my back porch, writing this story, looking at my garden, thinking about the potluck I’m going to later, and knowing that a whole city buzzes around me. I feel ease in knowing that these words I write down were not born out of my own self importance, or will only be available to those qualified enough to read it. But that they are going right back into that great Philadelphia story telling tradition from which they were born. And even as I sit here, retelling story after story of my childhood, or my experiences in the city, I still can’t really determine how each chapter connects, how I got from the conventional confines of suburbia to the experiment in insanity that is sustainable city living. And as insane as it may seem at times, as hard it is to get land from the RDA or hide from L&I my compost pile in the backyard, I’m happy to be a little crazy. For in this craziness is where I find my garden, and in this garden is where I find the peace of mind that everything I need is not waiting for me in some far off ideal of adventure and desire, but that it’s growing right here.

-Nic Esposito

See,

My father is this South Philly mystery,

And in order to understand me

You must know him.

He wears Fila sweat pants everywhere he goes

He knows everyone everywhere that we go

Talks with his hands

And lives six blocks from where he grew up.

But, there is a difference between him

And his comrades

He has enough.

It is suffice to say this detail

Makes for a spirit

That is alive.

As a child I sensed a longing in his heart

One that affectionately remembers

The days of stick ball in the yard

I learned after awhile:

Every park has a story to Dad:

Every storefront a name, every block an old friend

Everywhere in South Philly holds a place in his heart

For family, for the past, for what is now gone.

He lovingly allows me to enter his South Philly;

a place from our past.

III

Then,

Somewhere along the line

Through the years,

His stories became mine.

His past

Entangled me.

The stories of my great-grandpa

Passed down to me

The stories of my dad are

Me.

My story goes back to the neighbors on my block

Who have there for over

Sixty, seventy, eighty years now.

They’re are

Sweethearts still together

96-year-old mothers

and 63-year-old daughters

living across the street from one another.

Hell, I live across the street from my mother!

Nothing has changed.

Last week I read in the South Philly Review (you know what the Review is, right?)

Called The Gentle Deception

A short, opinion piece.

I’m ebarressed I actually read the Review

But, sometimes it does have good news,

And for laugh I skim the social scence and classic Italian recipes.

The article went on to describe a time from my dad’s era when:

“In South Philadelphia, the world was all about neighborhoods.

You found a house you liked in a neighborhood that was safe

And you settled there for the next 40 or 50 years.

All of life was contained in those communities.

The merchants knew you by name,

So did the local pastor.

The policeman directing traffic in front of the nearby school was your friend

Friends were friends for life

Love was gained and sometimes lost

Within just a few blocks of your home.”

Still,

I wanted to escape South Philly so many times

I’d run around the world

But return to find myself still here

I’d run towards the edges on all sides

But blocked by a bubble

I’d always seem to bounce back inside.

Some days I’d wait

Sit,

In a state of a of alienate

Outside the bubble

Still chocked by the air within.

Some search for a way out

Thank god I found a drafty back door.

-Jaime Hunter

Grow Your Hood on July 30!

And Now, A Word from Nic Esposito

An excerpt from a story as told by Nic, Corner Stories' Creative Director:

And then there are the stories of Philadelphia. The ones we can tell, the ones we can listen to, the ones passed down for generations to us, and the ones we can hopefully pass down as well. As I’ve come to realize from all of the stories I’ve told here tonight, and all of the lives I’ve lived, there were no set good old days. Each generation is full of stories of the good, of pain, of humor and of justice.

Before I finish, I’d like to tell one more story. Some years ago, while I was in high school, my English class in New Jersey took us on a research trip to the Walt Whitman House in Camden. It was raining that day, that damp cold March mid Atlantic rain. We were all impatient teenagers miserably wishing to just be warm and not doing a ten-page research paper. After standing outside for ten minutes, an old black man in an unassuming flannel shirt and blue jeans approached us. As he got closer I leaned into my friend Brent and said, “Look at this mulie (which is racist Italian slang for “black person”). He’s probably going to ask us for money.”

Not a second after I said that, the man walked right up to us, smiled, walked past us and opened the door to the center. I hope some of you just felt the apprehensive hollowing of your stomachs as I felt in mine. Needless to say, I’ve never referred to black people in such a context since then. In an instance, all of the xenophobia, ethnocentrism, ignorance and hate I was in some ways brought up with by the certain elements in my neighborhood had been dismantled. As I recall the old black man giving our class one of the most impassioned presentations of Walt Whitman’s amazing contribution to the human condition, I realize something about the world and literature, and my place in both. The art of story can connect an older black man from the city with a group of suburban white students through the words of a nineteenth century gay liberal man.

And that’s the sort of connection we are trying to make. To connect our community to the history of local story telling created around those first cave fires and still present even with the advance of global media. We hope you will join us in finding the worth of every story told in this great city.