My friend used to work in a bike shop and last night she brought over a 5 gallon bucket full of old inner tubes. Then she left.
I counted 67 tubes and each one had at least one puncture. So I made a gallon of green tea and started drinking it. Then I lined up all the tubes and started patching them. Patching each and every one like any good kid at BikeWorks would do. Like any bike mechanic in Cuba would do. Like a poor legal messenger that gave away all his spare tubes to his coworkers would do.
I drank so much green tea and huffed so much rubber cement that I could no longer bend my fingers. I had plenty of glue and could have vulcanized all night but when I got to the 43rd tube I ran out of patches and had to phone a friend to bring more. It was hard to dial the phone without bending my fingers but I did it.
When my friend arrived he said maybe I should open a window and he asked me if I knew what time it was. And I said no because I’d been listening to the same Edie Brickell cassette since I started patching tubes and I couldn’t remember how many times it had played through.
Then my friend went to work and I patched 12 more tubes. Some of the tubes had broken valve stems and could not be repaired. And there were a couple big fat 24 inch tubes that I had no use for, so I put those back in the bucket and took the bucket outside and left it on the sidewalk.
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