The Legend of Granny Grunt

We stood astride our bikes at the edge of the trail, hiding behind a hedge. We were waiting to make our move. Me, Markie and The Snitch. We were 12, 11 and 10, respectively, and it was summer vacation. School was out, and the summer stretched before us like a highway into the desert.

“I seen it, no kiddin,” Markie said. “I was sneaking through yesterday and I seen it.”

“You did not,” I replied. “It was prolly her cane, you dork.”

“No, it wasn’t no cane. I’m tellin’ ya it was a shotgun. And she pointed it at me. Right at me, you guys. I thought I was done for, but I pedaled really fast and made the woods before she could draw a bead on me. I wasn’t gettin' shot, no way. You buttheads don’t know what rock salt feels like when you get hit with it.”

“Yeah, like you do,” the Snitch scoffed.

“Well, no…but Marty Jackson told me,” Markie replied. “It hurts like, well, ....it hurts a lot. And if it’s close enough, it can kill you.”

We were starting to buy his story. After all, everyone knew that Granny Grunt had shot that kid with rock salt a few years back. Everyone knew it, and everyone knew someone who had a cousin or brother that had been friends with the sister of the kid who got shot. Granny Grunt had also killed her husband and dog, and buried them in the back yard and then planted flowers on them. You could still see the spot. Just because our parents didn’t believe she was a double murderer and a witch to boot didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

“Well, she’s not outside now. I think it’s safe,” I said. “You guys ready?”

Markie eased his bike out a little farther on the path, and gave the house the once over with his critical eye. He shared his professional opinion. “I think we can make it,” he said. “I don’t think she’s home. Either that or her car’s in the garage.”

“OK. We go on three,” I said, my voice tight. “One….two….three……GO!”

We pedaled as if our lives depended on it -- because in our hearts, we knew they did. We were only out in the open for maybe twenty seconds, cutting across her yard, following the faint trail that ran along her fence, but it seemed an eternity. We were completely vulnerable, and we knew it. On the one hand, you wanted to zig-zag to throw off her aim, but on the other hand, making a beeline for the woods seemed most prudent from a pure speed standpoint.

“The front door’s opening! I think she sees us! FASTER!” Markie screamed.

“I SEE IT! I SEE THE GUN!” The Snitch yelled back, looking over his shoulder and almost steering his bike into mine. He had apparently opted for zig-zag, unconsciously or not.

“Watch where you’re going, moron!” I yelled, barely avoiding him and redoubling my pedaling efforts. “You’re gonna get us all killed!”

We were flying in a pyramid formation, Markie in the lead with his brand new Schwinn Orange Crate bicycle. This thing was tricked out -- shock absorbers, 5 speed stick shift, banana seat, monkey-hanger handlebars, fat back tire and small chopper-like front wheel with flared fenders. The Snitch and I followed, me on my junkyard special and he on his no-name gold single-speed ‘unisex’ bike with the optional bolt-on bar that turned it into a boy’s bike.

Then it was over, and we were back in the trees, heading down the trail at top speed. We kept going until we were out of Grunt's woods, and safe in our own. Our hearts still in our throats, the adrenaline pumping through our veins, we coasted to a stop. We dropped our bikes and sat down on the side of the trail, our legs shaking from equal measures of exertion and exhiliration. We had made it. Alive. We felt like heroes.

We were on our way to "The Jump."

Granny Grunt’s house sat between Mayhall street and the woods where the jump was. “The Jump,” as we all called it, was a permanent dirt ramp at the bottom of a huge, ski jump-like hill. I think it was created by the older kids who owned minibikes and dirt bikes, but they stopped using it because Granny Grunt kept calling the cops on them. Since we were younger, and our regular old pedal bikes didn’t make any objectionable noise, Granny Grunt opted to take care of us herself rather than get the cops involved.

That particular day, we were heading over to the jump for a competition. We would be going for distance, and I was going to win. There was no actual prize, other than bragging rights and the well-earned respect of your peers, but that was enough. I didn't know it then, but it was going to be the last time, at least for me.

We weren’t wealthy growing up, but we weren't dirt poor. My father worked hard to put a roof over our heads, and we didn’t have a lot of fancy things, but we had all of the basics. New clothes and shoes for school and enough money so we didn't have to do without much in the way of necessities. My father was a big believer in saving for a rainy day, and in this case, that rainy day was our collective college educations. As a result of his aggressive saving behavior, he was also extremely frugal. (OK, let’s be honest. He was cheap.) He knew the value of a dollar and he always knew when we could “make do” with something, and so we often did. Case in point: I had a bike, but I also knew that there was no “Orange Crate” in my future – not unless I was going to buy it myself.

My first bicycle came home in an old cardboard box, as a collection of bike parts. I’m not entirely sure they were all parts of the same bike. It was, literally, a basket case. I remember my father coming home from work, and telling me “Hey! I got you a bike today."

Imagine my dismay when I ran outside to see it, and then watched as he took a bunch of rusty bike parts out of the back of the station wagon. I didn’t have high hopes for this bike, but I’d seen my father work miracles before, so I withheld my immediate judgement. My father lived by a few simple rules: Nothing couldn’t be fixed, and epoxy and rustoleum paint were intregral ingredients of any repair. If something was broken, you could glue it, and if it was rusty, you could paint it.

The first thing he did was sand and repaint the frame a bright blue. Then he replaced the tubes in the tires, put some black electrical tape over the torn seat, and oiled up the chain. It had no chain guard, so I had to ride with a rubber band around my right pant leg. I learned this lesson after getting yanked off my bike by my own pants and catching hell for ripping up a perfectly good pair of Toughskins. My father told me to tuck my pant leg into my sock, but I thought that looked ridiculous, so I opted for the rubber band, which was much more stylish.

So let me tell you a little more about Mighty Blue.

My bike had no fenders, so one not-so-enjoyable side-effect of this was that if the ground was the least bit wet, I would get a brown stripe of mud that started at my butt and went all the way up my back. When it was wet out, I used to wear a backwards baseball cap just so the mud and water didn’t get on the back of my neck and in my hair. The rubber part of the pedals had long ago fallen off, and all that remained was the center steel sleeve rotating on a stationary peg. As a result, your sneaker could easily slip off the pedal if you weren’t paying attention. This problem reared its ugly head quite frequently, since the bike had rear coaster brakes.

I don’t even know if they make bikes with this sort of braking mechanism anymore, but the way they worked is that if you wanted to stop, you would jam the pedals in the opposite direction, and that would engage some sort of brake in the rear hub. A favorite pastime was to find a dusty, gravelly patch on the side of the road, get going as fast as you could, then slam the brakes on just as you hit the gravel patch and see how long of a skid you could produce. Yes, our tires were bald. The problem in my case however, always came back to the damn pedals. I would slip off them about one time out of twenty, and end up in a heap on the side of the road, with my bicycle either lying 20 feet in front of me, tires spinning, or directly on top of me, with my pant leg jammed so far into the chain that it would take the jaws of life to extract it. Normally, on any other bike, this also would have resulted in a brutally painful bashing of the family jewels on the center bar.

Not in this case.

In this case, it didn’t happen because…

…it was a girl’s bike.

Yes. I admit this bit of humiliation to you. I rode a girl’s bike for much of my childhood. I didn’t know this at first, but as everyone who has ever been a kid can attest, kids can be cruel, and it didn’t take long for them to start giving me crap about it.

But I didn’t care. It rolled. It got me where I was going, and I could leave it anywhere. This lesson has stayed with me to this day, and if you saw my current canoe you would understand. Sometimes, it's good to own a functional piece of junk that nobody wants to steal, because you can leave it anywhere, drag it across anything, and you don’t even think twice about it. My bike was like that. I’m not saying it didn’t get to me sometimes, and I did do a fair amount of whining to my father, especially after The Snitch got a new and better bike – one with a bolt-on bar. Bolt on or not, at least it was there.

After a while, just to avoid the ridicule, I started telling the other kids that I had borrowed my sister’s bike because mine had a flat tire. Nobody but Markie and The Snitch knew I was lying.

There was only one benefit to owning this rolling turd, and it made up for all the abuse I was forced to take.

This bike made me King of The Jump.

Since my bike consisted of nothing but a thin, girl’s bike frame, two tires, a seat and handlebars, it weighed next to nothing. I was a scrawny kid, so I also weighed next to nothing. These two things combined to give me the hang time of a giant Frisbee.

You have to understand the prestige that came with this title. When I was growing up, Evel Knievel was HUGE. He had just tried to jump the Grand Canyon on a rocket bike for chrissake, and he was the hero of every kid under 12. We had all breathlessly watched him jump cars, busses, tractor trailers, bodies of water and buildings, both flaming and not, and we were among his most ardent fans, especially when he failed with a spectacular wipe-out. We would talk about it for weeks, armchair quarterbacks to the last, like we knew exactly what went wrong. “He almost made it,” we would say. “If only he pulled up just a half-second earlier when he hit the lip of the ramp, he would have made it.”

Every kid wanted to be him. And every kid that wanted to be him wanted to jump over things on their bikes.

We all had the playing cards in our spokes, held on by clothes pins – sometimes 5 or ten of them at a time. When we pedaled down the street, it sounded like a full-auto firefight. The only time we tilted them out of the way was when we were making a break for it through Granny Grunt’s place and we wanted to be quiet, or when we needed to minimize the drag on a particularly daring jump. A few of the kids tried the under-inflated balloon procedure to get more of a “lub dub” sound, but the balloons never lasted long, and it was always back to the playing cards.

Here's the way it worked: You would walk your bike to the top of the hill, picking any debris off the trail on the way up, while all the other kids waited at the bottom. You got one practice jump, and then you jumped three more times. The best jump was the one that counted, assuming you didn’t wreck.

When you got to the top, you would hang on the lip for a moment, gathering your nerve. When you were ready, you would pedal as fast as you could to get your momentum up, and then you would tuck low, for less wind resistance, and barrel down the hill at top speed toward the ramp. When you hit the ramp, you needed to pull up hard, just as your front tire left the ground, and raise up off your seat a bit to turn your legs into shock absorbers in order to stick the landing.

You needed to be absolutely, positively sure you landed on your rear tire, or you were completely screwed. We had all seen it happen. Some poor bastard would land on his front tire, collapse the spokes and end up bloody, if not broken, and wouldn’t even be able to walk his bike home because the front wheel was so bent that it wouldn’t turn. Too many kids ended up this way, which is why we were strictly forbidden by our parents from even going near this place. Needless to say, I had to keep my celebrity status a secret. If my father even suspected we were doing this, he would have taken away our bikes until we were 35.

The final jump of my life happened like this. I was trying to beat Paul Dorr for distance. He had just made a spectacularly perfect 3-and-a-half-board jump, and had stuck the landing like a pro. (I say “3-and-a-half-board” because that was how we measured distance. We had found a six-foot hunk of 1x4 in the woods, and we used it as a giant ruler.) He thought his second jump was unbeatable, and he was feeling pretty cocky.

I was up next, and I walked my bike to the top of the hill, inspecting the trail for any and all debris. It looked good. I ran through my pre-jump status check. Pant leg rubberbanded: check. Seat tight: check. Tire bolts tight: check. Shoe laces tied: check. I let a bit of air out of my rear tire because it had seemed a bit overinflated, and Mighty Blue and I were ready.

I took a deep breath, tipped over the lip and started pedaling hard, tucking down low at the same time. About a quarter of the way down, I was already going too fast for my pedaling to keep up, so I balanced my feet and kept my eyes on the ramp. I was a blue bullet. All I could hear was my tires on gravel and the wind, which was pulling tears from the corner of both my eyes. I hit the ramp perfectly, and as I launched off the end, I simultaneously came out of my tuck and pulled the front of the bike upwards. A picture perfect launch. Evel Knievel would have been proud. As I was sailing through the air, congratulating myself on a great jump, I looked down and realized something.

I could no longer see my front tire.

No, scratch that – it wasn’t just the tire that was gone – it was the entire front end of the bike.

I was still holding the handle bars, but they were no longer connected to anything but my hands. I could feel the bike drifting sideways out from under me, both of us in freefall. The front fork -- tire and all -- had separated from the frame when I had pulled up, and it was somewhere under and slightly behind me. I was flying through the air connected to absolutely nothing.

I hit hard, somehow almost managing to land feet first. I still had the bike partially under me, however, and the frame and I crashed down together, the handlebars bouncing off my shoulder right before my face hit dirt. I am pretty sure I passed out for a minute or two, because I don’t remember much about that part. I remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe, and it was hard to see, and my shoulder felt like it was on fire. I had never had the wind knocked out of me before, and I felt sure I was dying. All I could think about, when I was finally able to think at all, was that if I didn’t die, my father was going to kill me.

At that point, I think I would have walked home on a compound fracture of the tibia in order to avoid having my parents find out what had happened. In retrospect, I am very glad my bike had no bar.

I actually beat Paul Dorr. Distance counts, even if you don’t stick the landing, and most of my bike and body went farther than he did. My front fork came in a little short, but that didn't matter. We had a judge's ruling on it, and Paul graciously allowed me the victory, since I was bleeding from a dozen places and he thought my crash was the most awesome one he'd ever seen. (He was a good guy, even though we drifted apart when we got to high school. In junior high, he started running with a rough crowd and doing drugs, but we still hung out sometimes. He once stole a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull from the bookstore and gave it to me as a birthday gift. To this day, I am not sure why.)

When I had recovered enough to stand up, if not walk, I inspected the carnage that had been Mighty Blue. It was definitely not repairable. When I got it home, I snuck it into the garage and was able to stick the fork back into the bottom of the frame. Even though the handlebars and the fork were no longer linked tightly, it looked fine as long as you didn't pick it up.

I had a plan, you see. In preparation, I didn’t ride my bike for a few days, and I hid the scrapes and bruises from my parents.

That weekend, while my father was outside doing yardwork, I staged an accident. I popped a wheelie in front of him, careful to do it on the grass, and then fell sideways when the fork came undone. He came over and looked at it, and said, “Well, that bike didn’t owe us anything, did it? We’ll have to shop for a new one.” For a microsecond, I felt bad about not telling him what really happened, but I was getting a new bike, and so that feeling of guilt didn’t last long. I had visions of an Orange Crate of my very own. A guy can dream, can't he?

Yeah, you know what happened. What I got was a generic gold unisex one-speed with a bolt on bar, just like the one The Snitch had. Oh well. A new bike was a new bike.

My jumping days were over, however. I had learned my lesson, and besides, I knew from The Snitch's attempts that the new bike was heavy as hell and it didn’t jump worth a damn.

At least I retired undefeated.

A few years later, when I was about 13, which is miles from ten or 11, I got a 10 speed with 26” wheels that I bought for myself with money I had saved from my paper route. One day when I went to the driveway to get my paper bundle, a funny thing happened.

Whenever you got a new customer that is in your covered territory, the home office would stick a little index card on top of your delivery pile with the name and address of that customer on it. You were supposed to go introduce yourself and tell them that you were their paper carrier, and that you’d be collecting on Fridays. I looked down at the index card and when I saw the address, I couldn’t believe it.

It was a subscription request for Granny Grunt.

I rode over to her place on my new ten-speed, thinking about how I hadn’t been down to the old jump in years. I pulled into her driveway, and got off my bike and walked up to the house. I rang the doorbell, and a few moments later, Granny Grunt opened the door. I explained that I was her new paper carrier, and we had a nice chat. She told me where she wanted the paper, and I told her when I would most likely be coming around to be paid. She asked me where I went to school, and how I liked it.

It was funny, standing there in the presence of someone who had evoked so much fear in me just a few years earlier, conversing with her as if she were my grandmother. It also occurred to me that I had never actually seen her before. She was smaller than my old memories conjured her up to be, and she certainly wasn’t holding a shotgun. Turns out she was a widow, and she was the nicest lady you’d ever want to meet. She used to tip me well, and even gave me a homemade cookie once.

A couple of years later, when I was close to passing down my paper route to The Snitch and getting a real job, I got a cancellation notice for her on top of my pile. I showed it to my mother, and she told me that Granny (or Mrs. Hannover, as I knew her by then) had suffered a fatal stroke.

A little while later, her house went up for sale. An older couple bought it, and I got the subscription notice on my pile of papers shortly thereafter. I missed Granny, and it never felt the same walking up to that house. The new people were rarely home, so sometimes it would be weeks before I could collect. For the most part they weren’t very friendly, and they tipped for shit. There were certainly never any cookies.

Sometimes I would still see the younger kids cutting through the side yard on their bikes, mortal fear telegraphed in their every movement, pedaling for all they were worth. They glanced over their shoulders at the house, and didn’t stop pedaling until they were out of sight.

I smiled. It was good to see that the legend of Granny Grunt was alive and well.

Thinking back on it now, I can’t help but think she would have been pleased, and more than a little tickled. She always did have fun pointing that cane of hers at the kids.

Wherever she is now, I hope she’s still doing it, and still laughing her ass off every single time.

Thanks for the memories, Granny. There's a great many kids of all ages who will never forget you.