This is about Shaq and wheels. Trust me.
So, there was no Big Wheel for me as a child. Still, my ride has always been of utmost importance. It started when I inherited a hand-me-down banana-seat bicycle, the very bike that my sister had run over me with when I was a toddler, although as a family, we accept that it was an accident each of the eight times it happened.
As a bigger kid, I got a little motorcycle—a dirt bike. I wore a helmet and buzzed through the desert behind neighbors' homes for hours and hours every afternoon, watching as house after house experienced unprecedented owner turnover. This speaks to the power of a good ride.
Now I drive a prudent, affordable, four-door sedan, but I do so strictly out of a sense of irony that is encouraged among media and allows us to view much of the real world with comfortable contempt.
But I'm slightly different from other reporters in that I am Shaquille O'Neal's soulmate. This allows me to be contemptuous for other reasons. Most people just know when they see me that I have umpteen things in common with Shaq. He's tall (7'1") and I'm tall (5' 8", 7' 1" in heels). He had a second career (rap); I had a second career (rap). He's known to be wildly charismatic; I'm known for a total silence that, correctly interpreted, implies interior charisma. Furthermore and most tellingly: Shaq likes purple and I like purple.
So the other day I put in a call to Shaq to see what he's riding now. But I've been busy and couldn't take his return call. Then, the kind of serendipity that just seems to guide my life happened, and I found out that Shaq rides Trikes, and that Trikes are made in Vegas, and so I had to go ride a Trike. Because Shaq and I are like this: (Picture two fingers crossed tightly, as if to say,
Shaq and I are tight.)
Let me skip ahead to the ride because this is getting way boring. I went to meet Phil Karnicki, who sells the aforementioned motor vehicles. Trikes are half-motorcycle, half-dragster: big, muscley, tricked-out, three-wheeled choppers. So, I meet Phil—who happens to be a counselor by day, Trike salesman/rider by other parts of the day—at his counseling office. And I think,
Wow, this too, would be serendipitous were I the kind of person who might need a counselor.
The Trike is in the parking lot. It's long as a Cadillac, orange, has neon lights and plentiful chrome. I ask about "specs" because that's what my editor keeps saying, "Get the specs." So Phil, the counselor/Trike salesman, tells me it has 500 horses, and that my car has 115, and a Trike weighs half as much as my car, and that this goes from 0 to 100 in five seconds. All said, it's a fierce, fast work of art. Phil's friend Mike Kloehn saw something similar in Daytona and now makes these in Vegas. Kloehn has one that has 900 horses.
After the specs, I ask about Shaq, and Phil tells me he's been to Shaq's house in California to show him a Trike, and that Tom Arnold was there, and that Tom rode one, too. Shaq bought two—they're about $50,000 each.
I hop on the back and Phil pulls out right in front of a Ford F-350. (Did I tell you we don't wear helmets? We don't wear helmets.) So, Phil pulls out right in front of a Ford F-350, and I drop my heart on the curb, and this machine we're on launches like a freaking rocket into the middle of Sahara, and I've got not a damn thing to hold onto except my pen and notebook. I'm just sitting in this car seat on top of a humongous, loud engine, no seat belt, no common sense whatsoever. Right about here is where I think,
F--k you, Shaquille O'Neal.
Soon enough, however, thanks to the tremendously thick traffic—Oh, how I love these piles of creeping cars everywhere—we slow down. At a stoplight, a woman in a car next to us asks, "Is that a Harley?" and I answer, "Help."
Right about then, the counselor/sadist stomps on it, my head snaps back, and we go flying under the underpass, up some hill, around the moon and land on the Strip where we purr through hordes of tourists who all pull out cameras and snap photos. Suddenly, I'm a tourist attraction. One camera-snapper asks, "Can you make a thumbs-up sign," and I do, but it's cool because I do it with contemptuous irony.
Then another tourist, standing under the Gilley's "Dirty Girls Cheap Beer" sign, asks, "Can it do wheelies?" and Phil goes, "Sure," and I just sit there grinning like a loon, ready for whatever piece of charming serendipity comes next.
Instead of a wheelie, though, we hit the Interstate, do 0 to 80 in a heartbeat, and I begin to pray that a pebble doesn't get spit up from a truck's tires and give me a frontal lobotomy. Phil, though, is having the time of his life: wind blowing through his hair, etc., all that actually living-instead-of-disdainfully tiptoeing-around-life stuff.
Somewhere around Spring Mountain on the I-15, I just break out laughing. Somewhat hysterically. It's a beautiful day, crisp and sunny. And I'm riding a giant Big Wheel, going about 70 down the freeway, only mildly aware that someone's litter, a straw wrapper it turns out, is stuck to my neck.
When we get back to the good counselor's office, Phil gives it a final rev or two, a roar, and hops off to go inside and help someone fix their head. I'm still laughing. Giggling inappropriately. With no sense of irony. Just embarrassingly giddy. I wish I had 50 grand; I'd buy a Trike and leave this gig behind.