First published in The Record on Sept. 27, 2019

The secret bike subculture of danger and fun

Two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon on a boulevard of fresh asphalt. Bikes. Bikes everywhere. Dozens of bikes, turquoise and green and yellow bikes, a blur of bikes, a whole bicycle army giddy in rampage, rolling south beneath the pale gray New Jersey sun. The road is five lanes wide. The boys on bikes gobble it up. This road is theirs, and no one can stop them. The police don’t even try. Pedaling, gaining speed, the cyclists yank their handlebars. Fat front tires lift off the pavement. Now the boys pull truly massive wheelies, wheelies that stretch out, block after block, wheelies that carry them into oncoming traffic, wheelies that spill onto sidewalks. These are wheelies to make a person Instagram famous.

And it’s working. The fame, the money, the love. It’s happening. In Newark, in Paterson, up to Boston, down through the Bronx to Philadelphia and tucked into certain side channels of the internet, these boys are rolling, pulling wheelies, inventing a whole new culture as they go.

They call it Bikelife.

Sometimes, Bikelife means two friends practicing wheelies on a quiet street. On a warm afternoon two Sundays ago, it meant converging on New York City, where hundreds of Bikelife kids shut down traffic in Times Square.

A few top riders make Bikelife their career. They earn salaries from bike companies. They are Instragram stars, winning free trips to California to market their self-made sport.

“The Bikelife movement is not slowing down. Our sales are growing like crazy,” said Todd Lyons, brand manager for the SE Bikes company. Its big-wheeled bicycles are synonymous with Bikelife. “For a lot of these kids, this is the most important thing in their lives.”

Let’s get to that in a minute. Because here now ride these dozens of New Jersey boys, sweating in the sun and consuming all five lanes of Broad Street in downtown Elizabeth. They roll, giggling, pulling wheelies, confident in the forever delusion of all boys everywhere that no one in the history of this world has ever been so cool, so powerful, so free.

This moment is perfect, until it becomes more so.

A twig-skinny kid named David Lewis is first to notice. Up ahead, in the oncoming lane, drives a squat red car that resembles a spaceship. Snap! Instant recognition. That, Lewis knows, is a Lamborghini Huracán convertible, a rare Italian supercar that costs $250,000 new. It’s a car these city kids on bikes know mostly from Youtube, when the rapper Cousin Stizz leases one for his 2018 music video “Lambo.”

And now comes this car, driving toward the boys on bikes.

“Yo, yo, yo!” yells Lewis, who is 21 but looks 15.

Watch this.

Lewis gives his pedals seven hard spins. He crosses the double yellow line. His wheel lifts. He wheelies toward the approaching Lamborghini. The Lamborghini driver wears sunglasses and crew-cut hair. Normally his car renders him all-powerful, able to pass anyone at any time. His car’s left headlight costs more than Lewis’s entire bike.

None of that matters now. Lewis pedals forward. Soon his front wheel fills the car’s windshield. It towers a foot above the driver’s carefully barbered head. Closer. Closer. At the last possible instant, Lewis leans to the right. He swerves, missing the supercar by inches. Dozens of kids follow, some on one wheel, others on two. The driver, this king of the streets, he sits with his head exposed, powerless. He revs his engine, filling the street with ornate Italian bellows of displeasure.

The kids on bicycles shout in unison.

“OOOOHHHHHH!”

This is the cry of total victory. The Lamborghini driver just got dunked on. Embarrassed. Played. This is the ecstatic joy that rises when young men escape the poverty and violence they see whenever they’re at home.

Their homes — not their bikes —are the most dangerous things in their lives.

“Most kids have older brothers out selling drugs, moms are out working all the time,” said Rich Isaacs, 22, who organized the summer ride and took his turn swerving the Lamborghini. “You can’t ride your bike and deal drugs at the same time.”

It’s like a bicycle mob, but fun

If you’re above age 25, and if you don’t live in a poor city like Paterson, you’ve probably don’t know Bikelife.

“I have not heard of bikelife before, but it seems like a wonderful form of urban self-organizing,” said Jeff Hou, chair of the landscape architecture department at the University of Washington, who researches guerrilla tactics used by citizens around the world to win control of public spaces.

Like every teenage subculture before it, Bikelife arises from new technology and old-fashioned teenage rebellion. Surfing went mainstream with the invention of short boards in the late 1960s; so did skateboarding after squishy polyurethane wheels emerged in the early 1970s. 

Bikelife is borne of bikes. In 2008 SE Bikes created the Big Ripper. With a steel frame made to resemble BMX race bikes from the 1980s, the Big Ripper was marketed to men in their 30s and 40s, Lyons said, men who spent their childhoods dreaming of becoming professional riders.

Because its target customers were grown men with old knees, the Big Ripper wore some of the widest wheels and tires ever fitted to a bicycle.

“We made the regular size, and then we said, ‘Well, let’s make a bigger version for these older guys,’” Lyons said.

Young guys noticed something else. The Big Ripper’s heavy frame, fat tires, and wide pedals and footpegs provide an excellent platform for tricks. In about 2013, a scattering of teenagers across the Northeast began to notice these special capabilities. From there SE Bikes and Bikelife grew, together and by accident. Kids invented crazy tricks, which attracted more kids. By this summer in New York City, Bikelife gatherings called rideouts regularly attracted 500 people.

Most were African-American or Latino. Most were younger than 18. Most live in poor neighborhoods. About 90 percent ride bikes made by SE.

"Our biggest hurdle now is having enough bikes in stock," Lyons said. Sales grew 60 percent last year, he said, so the company plans to open a new factory in Taiwan.

Here is what Bikelife looks like now. In a large pack, the majority of kids ride on two wheels. Only experienced riders pull tricks. They swerve oncoming busses. They weave through gridlocked traffic. They dance between the handlebars, seat, pedals and pegs, all while riding on a single tire.

And they travel. Bikelife riders post videos of their craziest tricks on Instagram, where they also invite kids from other cities to rideouts.   

“Bikelife is blowing up, yo!” said Abi Torres, 16, of Boston. One recent Saturday, Torres boarded a bus in Boston at midnight. He rode all night to join a rideout organized by Bombsquad, a Paterson-based group of riders.

“I’ve been to rideouts in Philly, New York, Paterson and New Haven, Connecticut. And those people all come to Boston, too,” Torres said.

Official reactions to all this chaos vary. Last summer in East Orange, Mayor Ted Green participated in a rideout. Asked whether he views Bikelife as a reasonable alternative to dealing drugs, Green said, “I agree with that.”

Others see Bikelife as simple hooliganism. In Ridgewood, Police Chief Jacqueline Luthcke recently sent a letter warning of a planned rideout.

“This is an unsanctioned and ill-advised gathering,” Luthcke wrote. “We are asking for your help, parents, in discouraging this behavior and in preventing your children from being involved in this type of activity.”

Of course, official warnings about ill-advised gatherings have been making subcultures cool ever since the word “teenager” was invented.

“That’s what makes it fun, right?” Dr. Hou said. “You’re violating the cultural norms that govern public space.”

Is it wise to wheelie for miles through traffic with no helmet? Obviously, no. Will a Bikelife participant get hurt or killed? Probably. Do these facts make Bikelife any different from surfing, skateboarding, mosh pits or hot-rod cars, subcultures in which (predominantly white) teenagers bonded in their physical power, camaraderie and opposition to authority?

Also no.

“From the outside people see them as troublemakers, but they’re not out there to get into trouble,” said Becky Beal, a professor of kinesiology at California State University, East Bay. She sees similarities between Bikelife and skateboard culture, which she’s studied for 30 years. "It’s like they have control over their own bodies and their communities,” Beal said. 

Inside a Bikelife pack, the mood isn’t angry. It’s boisterous. The constant violation of traffic laws fades into the subliminal undertow. Recently 50 cyclists left downtown Newark, rolling south. They traversed eight municipalities, trading jokes for five hours without a single argument.

"It may seem angry, but that's not the riders' intentions," said Anthony Rosa, 18, who lives in Paterson and rides with the Bombsquad crew. "We don’t ride to cause trouble. We ride to have fun."

A surfing, dancing wheelie battle

We ride. Up the hill of Main Street in Clifton, downhill on Main Street in Paterson, past the IHOPs and weedy lots of Newark, Cranford and Kenilworth, we ride.

Only top riders surf. Rosa jumps from his pedals, placing his left foot on the saddle and his right on the handlebars. This is bicycle surfing. In Instagram videos, Rosa surfs some of New Jersey’s steepest hills. He reaches 40 miles an hour on public roads with no helmet, no kneepads, and often no shirt.

Today Rosa does the opposite. He dodges cars in the Corrado’s grocery store parking lot in Clifton, rolling at a slow jogging pace. He is surrounded by 60 members and friends of Bombsquad, who drop their wheelies to watch.

Fast or slow, no one here surfs like Rosa.

“Whoo!” somebody calls. “Surf’s up, baby!”

Rosa smiles back. He stands up tall, flexing his biceps. He is strong. His ride is smooth. It took him a year, practicing in basements and parking garages during snowstorms, to get this good.

Every hour on his bike was an hour away from his apartment in Paterson, Rosa says, on a block dominated by drug dealers. 

“I have problems at home. After my mom passed last year, I went into a deep depression,” Rosa, 18, says in a quiet moment. His mother died of cancer. “I didn’t know what to do. And I just hopped on a bike. This is an escape from reality. If it weren’t for Bikelife, I’d be doing some negative things.”

Other riders dance. Cresting a hill, a rider called Ballout leaps into the air. He lands with his left shin flat on his seat and drags his right sneaker on the pavement. He jumps again, performing a salsa dance on his seat. He spots a man with a GoPro camera gliding up on his left. Pantomiming, Ballout pretends to cock a pump-action shotgun, aim for the camera, and fire.

He performs all these tricks during a single wheelie. Tricks like these recently won Ballout an SE Bikes sponsorship.

“Whoa, dog! Don’t shoot the cameraman!” one boy shouts. “That is crazy!”

As we ride, traffic stops.

“It’s scary!” says Carmela Josef, 77, who beeps her horn after finding her Chevrolet surrounded by bikes. “I get a bad feeling. It’s scary seeing so many young people.”

A police officer in Kenilworth zooms toward the pack in his blacked-out cruiser, flashing his lights and mashing his sirens.

“What the hell is this?” the officer yells out his open window. “It’s stupid!”

Bikelife riders – even the crazy ones – understand this power dynamic perfectly. For them, it’s part of the fun. Nico Brun is among a handful of white kids in the group, and among the craziest riders here. Brun can’t dance or surf. Instead, he launches himself down stairs and over loading docks.

“They don’t like the unity of all of us riding together,” said Brun, 19, from Roselle.

Some people like it intensely. Pedestrians lift their phones and shoot quick videos. A few raise their hands and cheer.

“God bless you! God bless you! God bless you!” shouts a street preacher in Paterson as the Bombsquad crew rolls by.

“God bless YOU!” one kid shouts back.

At 22, Richard Isaacs is a Bikelife elder statesman. He’s also the reigning wheelie champion, a title that gets challenged constantly. Round one went to David Lewis, who beat Isaacs to swerve the red Lamborghini first.

Now Lewis is talking trash.  

“I got you, old man. I got you!” Lewis says to Isaacs. “You wanna go? Let’s go right now. Let’s do this.” 

“Hold up. Hold up,” Isaacs says. “If you want to battle, we’re gonna do it right.”

Isaacs and Lewis regard each other. They sweat under the hot New Jersey sun. Their words sound aggressive, but their smiles are friendly. Isaac picks the location: a quiet two-lane stretch of First Avenue in Elizabeth. There is no countdown. Both men simply lift their wheels. Isaacs’ front tire seems suspended by invisible wire. It barely moves. Lewis, the challenger, wobbles and bobbles. Occasionally his left leg shoots sideways for emergency balance. They roll slowly, two skinny men on two fat tires, handlebars occasionally touching. They roll past Nu Style Hair Salon, past Community Bank and Banco Popular, past Amigo Fish Restaurant and Good Friends Chinese Restaurant and Tuta Power Tools.

The wheelie battle rolls through Unity Square. Cars stop. After 12 blocks, Lewis loses his balance and drops his wheel. He groans. Isaacs smiles. Neither says a word. Each reaches for the other. Together they roll toward oncoming traffic, holding hands.