The Bicycle Thief
Two Women, A Second Language, A Couple of Ways to Feel at Home
In Mexico City, the equivalent to NYC’s CitiBike is the EcoBici program. Like CitiBike, it’s bank-sponsored and ubiquitous: racks of bikes in every neighborhood. You download an app, pay a little money, look for a bike seat that seems the least likely to give you an STI, scan a QR code, and you’re off.
At some point, if we remain in exile long enough, I’ll have to learn Mexican traffic law. As an observing pedestrian and Uber passenger, it’s a mystery. Most intersections have neither traffic lights nor stop signs, and right-of-way seems to be negotiated in real-time by all participants. There’s honking sometimes, but I don’t think I’ve seen an accident since we moved here.
That’s a big difference from LA, where stop signs, traffic lights, and red light cameras didn’t prevent me from seeing so many gruesome-to-fatal accidents that I lost count and became desensitized to a JG Ballard landscape of crumpled-paper-ball cars, fire trucks circled to hide bodies, and the occasional view of a corpse’s feet sticking out from beneath a blanket.
While the stakes of Mexico City traffic are lower than LA, the traffic is every bit as intense. After motorcycles, EcoBicis are the fastest way to make short trips in most parts of the day. When we moved here from Puerto Vallarta, Krista quickly adopted EcoBici as her primary mode of transportation. She’s a bike person. One of her best friends from her Austin years runs a bike co-op. She got around Oakland by bike. She’s unintimidated by her lack of familiarity with the city and the traffic laws and bops around on Ecobicis like a local.
When we ride together, I trail her nervously, always ready to get nailed by a bus, cab, or motorcycle. My bike boldness peaked in middle school. Since then, muscle memories of road rash, big jumps with bad landings, and speed wobbles portending doom have left me timid. When my brother and I went to Peru, he booked us a mountain bike ride down a volcano in Arequipa. He flew down the trail, catching air on every rock and obstacle and quickly disappearing in the distance. I squeezed the brakes the whole way down. When we reached the base of the volcano, I left only a thin veneer of brake pad over the metal caliper. My fingers were raw and bleeding from squeezing so hard.
Krista’s CDMX bike bliss was cut short when she returned her EcoBici at the end of an excursion. She slid her bike into the rack, saw the lights flash and the chime sound, and walked away. Only, this time the bike didn’t lock. She got a notification on her phone that the bike hadn’t locked. She returned to lock it, and the EcoBici was gone.
For emphasis: this was a pointless theft. EcoBicis are community bikes. The hand grips are grimy from being shared with a massive city and parked outside. The gears and chains are thrashed. The bikes are covered with HSBC advertising. They aren’t resellable. Owning an EcoBici is objectively worse than renting one. But still, someone had snatched it.
This started a long, intense saga with EcoBici and the Mexico City police, mainly in Spanish. It was a brutal reminder of how far we both have to go with the language. She spent more than an hour on hold waiting to speak to EcoBici’s one English-speaking customer support rep. When she got through, the rep told her that she’d need to file a police report or she’d be fined $500 for the bike.
This sent Krista on a scavenger hunt that started at the police station closest to our AirBNB. She tried in Spanish to explain that her EcoBici had been stolen. The person at the desk listened intently and then repeated back to Krista what she understood, “So, you need to report a missing passport?”
A helpful cop witnessed the misunderstanding and directed Krista to the office of the Tourist Police (“They speak English there!”). Off she went. Upon arriving, she discovered that the Tourist Police did not, in fact, speak English. Another helpful cop came to the rescue, offering to help get her to the right destination.
At this point, I received a video from Krista, wordless, in the back of a cop car and panicked with fantasies that a moment of frustration or miscommunication had lead to her arrest.
She was safe. The helpful cop had given Krista a ride to the “right” police station to file her report. It was, of course, not the right police station. Nor was the next one. Each station took Krista further and further from home.
That night, Krista and I had drinks scheduled with a person we’d met on Lex, a sapphic personals app. Mexico has been beautiful, but lonely, so I posted an ad looking for a friend. Krista, carrying a near-dead iPhone, exhausted and near tears from her tour of Mexico police stations, tested the idea of skipping the drinks. I pressured her to attend.
We beat our friend date to the bar, ordered drinks and Krista caught me up on her extremely frustrating day in time for us to be kind-of-sort-of charming in our new friend audition.
A few days later, Krista enlisted our Spanish teacher, a young Venezuelan woman living in Ecuador, to call the police with her. They were transferred from department to department until finally, the report was filed. Now, all Krista had to do was pick up a hard copy to send to EcoBici.
The day Krista went to collect the paper copy of the police report was also the day we’d scheduled an appointment to see our second-favorite apartment on Mexico City real estate sites.
A few weeks earlier, we’d seen our third-favorite, a three-story house in Roma Sur that had been used as the office of a travel agent. The travel agent was retiring and using the house for income. It was full of art and artistan details: paintings, prints, hand-made tiles. It was a weird old-person place, my favorite genre of home. But it was owned by an old person who wanted a Mexico-City-based guarantor to vouch for us two sketchy runaway lesbians on tourist visas.
Our first favorite was in Roma Norte and was fully furnished. Like the former travel agency, it was packed with art. But this one seemed more like an artist’s home than a collector’s. It looked like our former home in LA. We reached out to the realtor, and she warned us that the layout was “strange.” The apartment had three bathrooms, but one of them was in a shared hallway with a dispensary. Would we be okay with an arrangement like that?
I imagined becoming friends with our neighbors, getting high with them after work. Maybe I could buy some nice scented candles for the shared bathroom? We’d have friends!
But, it wasn’t to be. Someone signed a lease on the place sight-unseen while we waited for the current occupant’s lease to expire.
We looked at “ex-pat” places, all kinds of soulless with short-term-rental vibes and elevated prices. We looked at houses and multi-unit compounds in the suburbs, imagining a refuge for trans and queer community as I heard about more and more friends-of-friends leaving the states.
The only place we sparked to was a 1950’s unit with banged-up parquet floors and rows of floor-to-ceiling windows. It would need to be fully furnished, but we’d already purchased four kitchen chairs at a flea market, so we were undaunted.
Before the viewing, though, Krista needed to collect the hard copy of her police report so she could scan and send it to EcoBici. She started at the station that the person who’d taken down the report recommended. They sent her to a second, administrative station. There, after some conversation, they directed her to the Tourist Police, because she needed someone English-speaking. She let them know that the Tourist Police don’t speak English.
At some point in these conversations, as Krista’s frustration with the police station runaround and her limits in communication peaked, another helpful cop emerged, promising to take her to the right station. If she’d wait five minutes, he’d give her a ride there, in the back of a cop car.
Krista refused the help - she wasn’t going to get in the back of another cop car. No problem, the cop would take the bus with her to the right station. He let his co-workers know he’d be out of the office for a little while, taking care of this wayward gringa.
While they waited for the bus, the cop offered to call EcoBici on Krista’s behalf. She accepted. He didn’t have to hold as long as she had because, of course, he spoke Spanish. He got through just before the bus pulled up, chatted with the customer service rep, and told her:
“Ah! So they already charged you $500 for the bike. The police report is only to clear your name in case someone uses the bike to commit a crime.”
Having put dozens of hours into the effort, Krista was crestfallen. She’d been texting me updates and as soon as I got the last one I rushed to meet her, chasing after her location on Apple.
When I caught up to her, Krista was hungry, angry, and extremely frustrated. I’d made things more frustrating by forcing her to wait for me when all she wanted to do was eat. We went to lunch together at a Oaxacan spot around the corner from our AirBNB. The service was slow, as always. We were both tense. Despite the good food it was a bad lunch.
Back at the AirBNB, Krista was still frustrated. I’d gotten my feelings hurt. I race-walked to Chapultapec park, holding back tears, with Angel Olsen screaming and wailing into my AirPods. I found an isolated bench in the park, sat down, and had a good cry. None of this was mature, but it wasn’t the first or last time I’d fall short of maturity.
Krista texted to see if I still wanted to come to the apartment viewing. I responded that I wasn’t sure. She sent me the address. It started to rain. I rushed from the park down Avenida de la Reforma seeking shelter from the weather under awnings. Eventually, I found the address on a block full of restaurants, bars, and hotels.
The realtor, a stylish woman around our age, welcomed us. Krista and I kissed and made up in front of her. We rode a small elevator up to the 5th floor and found our new home.
Like every effort to do normal things in Mexico, arranging to rent the place was harder and scarier than the US version of the same task. The owner of our second-favorite place was just as sketched out by us as the owner of our first-favorite place and asked for a year’s rent in advance to offset the risk of our tourist status and lack of roots in Mexico. Given my history with scammers, I’ve never felt dumber than when I wired that money. After all, we couldn’t manage to report a bike stolen. If this was a scam, how could we possibly report fraud?
The fear was mixed, equal parts, with relief. I hadn’t stopped listening to my “Fugitive Mix” on iTunes. My most played song in March was Led Zeppelin’s cover of When the Levee Breaks, and my most played verse in that song was:
“Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good.
When the levee breaks, Mama, you’ve gotta move.”
It had been my mantra for two months. I’d thought about getting gothic letter tattoos of “Cryin’ Won’t Help” / “Prayin’ Won’t Do No Good” on my knees. It would be an amulet against hesitation, against self-pity. A way to keep the beat of John Bonham’s drum in my steps as I walked through unfamiliar territory. The cavalry isn’t coming? Fine, fuck the cavalry, I’ve got this.
But, to have a home for a year? Or more? With space for family and friends? Enough space for other trans people to escape to if I keep being right about America?
Thank God, it wasn’t a scam. I signed the lease and got the keys. Was Mexico City was starting to feel a little like home?
It was. Maybe. Just a little. But, before we could move in, my kids arrived for spring break. I took a week off from work. We moved to a bigger AirBNB. We took them to Lucha Libre and a soccer match. We took them to Chapultapec Park, the Museum of Anthropology. I asked them to imagine a little version of me walking around those places. They said, “ok, Mom, sure.” We ate a lot of tacos. We dragged them to the Frida Kahlo house and tried to communicate our sense of awe. We watched The Minecraft Movie (against my high school son’s protestations). We binged Last Week Tonight with John Oliver*. We laughed and hugged, and caught up on our far- away lives.
And for a week, we were a little family again, making our way through Mexico City with broken Spanish, no bike, and love. And it felt a lot like home.
The kids are back on the East Coast. Krista and I are in our new place. As we thrift and order furniture and appliances and internet service, we keep screwing up, but hopefully a little less each time. We fall asleep to bands (Mariachi and otherwise) playing. We wake up to garbage trucks, gas trucks, water trucks. The levy isn’t breaking. And for a little while at least, we don’t need to move.
*If you haven’t seen the Trans Women in Sport episode, it’s brilliant and does a beautiful job debunking the current truth-y sounding narrative dominating American culture.
Congratulations! And Roma, nice.
I haven't been to Mexico City for over forty years, but what I remember about the traffic makes the idea of riding a bike there really, really, scary.