Sports in Hell (23 page)

As we finally left for our historic and world-changing ride, I noted that every guy was nude except yours truly. Only one of the three women was nude—Tiny-Bike Girl. Nervously, we rode into Newtown, the college town that goes with the University of Sydney. And there—and there!—we were welcomed like returning astronauts!

Everybody LOVED us! We were riding very near the Imperial Hotel, where the infamous drag-show scene was filmed in the movie
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
. From every bar and café and head shop we got hoots of approvals, thumbs up, whoops, clapping, whistling, honking, “Way to go!”s. We were a large enough group now that we had our own lane of traffic. Do you know how wonderful that is? Not to have to dodge in and out of cars, not to have to pull precariously close to the parked cars so the moving cars can pass? It was heavenly! I wondered how it felt doing all that naked.

“Does it hurt?” I asked Marte, who was finally smiling.

“Nah, it feels great!”

I couldn't help noticing that Marte was rather well endowed. I'm surprised the thing didn't catch in his chain. He should've been forced to tie it to his calf for safety purposes.

The one-eyed guy came riding up to me, wearing only his sneakers and a hat, and said, “I see now why your Lance Armstrong does so well in the races. He has only one testicle! Much more comfortable!”

“And aerodynamic!” I added.

Conversations You Never Thought You'd Have.

Michael, the chiropractor with the disapproving wife, was hollering all kinds of stuff, none of it having to do with bicycling. “There is no shame in the human body! God loves the human body! Only man brings shame to the human body! The human body is beautiful!” Uh, dude? I think that's a whole different parade.

Most of the attention was paid to Tiny-Bike Girl, naturally, including photographs that would run on the
Sydney Morning Herald
online site, as well as all over the blogosphere.

Me, I was having so much fun, all I could think to holler was: “Don't vote for Silvio!”

I make no judgment whether what we did was right or wrong. I came to realize how invisible I really do feel on a bicycle compared to that day, how small and vulnerable. It was empowering to finally be noticed. On the other hand, I'm not sure we needed to be nude to do it. For instance, we passed by a church just as a family came out of it, all dressed up, a mother, father, a nine-year-old-ish girl and twelve-year-old-ish boy. The parents saw us and their mouths fell open in horror. The little girl looked stunned. But the little boy raised his hands in a touchdown salute. His mom was yelling at him, but he wasn't listening. He was whooping and hollering. I have a picture of that moment and I guess it sums up the whole damn experience—horrifying and hilarious, pointless and important—all at once.

Eventually, we were through Newtown and out in the suburbs and—like a date with Courtney Love—the whole thing just sort
of lost its charm. Essentially, we were just twenty-two nudes getting our butts sunburned for the entertainment of Pizza Hut employees and bus benches. Plus with all our evading cops before we could get the thing going, we were already four hours into it and I was already late to meet TLC in Paddington.

So I put my shorts and shirt back on, said my thanks and goodbyes, and peeled off the other way, riding as fast as I could, through the left-hand streets of Sydney, nearly getting killed two or three times. At one point a bread truck turned right in front of me while I was going full speed, causing me to hit my brakes so hard that I nearly flipped over.

“What, you didn't see me, pal?” I hollered.

It took me about ten seconds to see the irony.

Afterwards, I couldn't help checking the success of World Naked Bike Rides around the globe, and every single one of them made Sydney look like an agoraphobics meeting. According to news reports, there were 1,000 in London in the summer of that year, 2,600 in Portland, and over 1,000 in Chicago. I fully expect to see pictures of The Ancient Brit on a Schwinn, naked, in front of Big Ben soon.

Also, just FYI, I am buck freaking starkers as I write this chapter.

And no, Mr. Editor, I don't want to hear it's a little short.

I
n this business, I've had to mingle with thugs, con men, and murderers. Had to sink into the underworld of filth and lawlessness. Had to go undercover to write about everything from drug dealers to serial rapists.

But nothing prepared me for the criminal element you're about to meet.

Jarts players.

Now banned in America, a Jart (sometimes known as a lawn dart) was basically a weighted spear for children to play with. They were about a foot of metal, with a pointed steel tip on one end and three plastic fins on the other to increase flight speed and direction. Even the box said,
Outdoor Missile Game!
It's not often you get “missile” and “game” stuck together. Sort of like
Indoor Cat Disposal!

You'd have to list them at the very top of your Most Hideously Dangerous Toys Ever list, kicking ass over panty-waist dangers like lead paint and asbestos. (Also in my personal top five: 5. Socker Boppers—which were just big—and not very protective—boxing gloves for kids.
Mommy, is my ear still on?;
4. Fun with Chemistry set; 3. Superballs; and 2. The Hot Wheels Melt Your Own Car set, which enabled youngsters to finally heave hot molten wax at each other!)

The box warned to keep away from the business end of a Jart and to use them only as directed, which meant to throw them, underhanded, ten paces toward a little unmanned plastic hula hoop sitting on the lawn. A Jart inside the hoop was worth two points, a Jart within a Jart's length of the hoop was worth one point, the game to be played and scored like horseshoes. Except only an estimated seven people ever actually played the game of Jarts according to the rules on the box. Everybody else—including me and my nine-year-old friends—thought it was much more fun to heave them as high as possible into the sky and then run like amphetamined rodents in every direction hoping to avoid them coming down on our still-soft skulls. Jarts were also great fun for trying to stick in plywood siding at 70 mph, playing Cannibal and Tourist, and hunting the much-hated squirrel. Sometimes we'd play Russian Soldier, in which one kid would fling the Jart at another, and a third kid—wearing all three sweatshirts—would jump in front of the Jart, hollering, “I'll save you, comrade!” Then again, we went to school only to eat lunch.

Apparently, we weren't the only lint-brained Jartists. Between 1978 and 1986, Jarts caused an estimated 6,100 injuries of every kind—from poked-out eyes to craniums with a sudden and unwanted eighth hole. Four kids died accidentally. One adult died not accidentally. Scott Currier of Huntington Beach, California, was killed when attackers “hog-tied and killed him by throwing lawn darts into his back,” according to news accounts.

Definitely not mentioned on the box.

The end for Jarts came in April 1987, when a seven-year-old girl
named Michelle Snow of Riverside, California, was playing dolls in the front yard while her nine-year-old brother, Paul, played in the back with his two buddies. One of the kids heaved a Jart that wound up flying across the fence and piercing Michelle's head, killing her three days later. Michelle's father, David, a Hughes Aircraft engineer, devoted himself to getting them banned, and he succeeded. The federal government permanently forbade their sale and manufacture the next year, in 1988.

And since that day, they have disappeared like Soupy Sales.

Except in one place—Piqua, Ohio.

Jeff Balta doesn't really look like an outlaw. I suppose he could be on America's 1,000 Most Wanted, except he'd be easy to catch at the post office, since he's a UPS deliveryman. Balta is a usually law-abiding single man. He does not usually defy congressional bans. It's just that one day, he and his buddy, Shane David, were eighteen and hanging around Shane's house, bored to the bejesus, when Shane's mom finally smiled through clenched teeth and huffed, “Why don't you get the Jarts out of the garage?”

And these guys have played them nonstop ever since. Hey, this is Piqua, which is a suburb of Dayton, which is the home of the Wright Brothers. Can they help it if they like to see things fly?

So Balta and Davis started an underground, secret, and entirely hush-hush yearly Jarts tournament, the de facto World Championship of Jarts.

The Jarts world is just slightly more shadowy than the black market for kidneys. Just getting hold of Balta was like trying to find Bobby Fischer. He didn't answer e-mails for about six months. Then, when TLC convinced him we weren't Elliot Ness, he made one phone call, then dodged us for another three months. Finally, she won his trust and wrangled an invitation for me to play in the 15th annual tournament, as long as we didn't print anybody's address or e-mails. The invitation included this warning:

“Only one person has ever really gotten hurt,” Balta insists. “One guy got hit on the knee. It just sorta stuck there. He kinda lost a lot of blood. We took him to the hospital and he ended up fine. We told the ER people he got punctured on a rusty chair.”

Really? Only one injury?

“Well, a poodle almost got skewered once. But it was blind. It just kind of wandered out in the middle of the playing field and a Jart just barely missed it. I mean, if you pay attention, you'll be fine. But it's not the kind of thing people bring their kids to.”

Really? One knee and almost a poodle? That's it?

“Well, there was a beer cooler once. A Jart went through a Styrofoam cooler and poked a hole in a Miller Lite … It helps to know the Flamingo.”

The Flamingo is a move a Jartist does when (a) a Jart is coming toward his foot and (b) he doesn't want to spill his beer. That's when you do the Flamingo, which is to simply lift your endangered foot out of the way while keeping everything else still, so you look like a big, pink tropical bird. Veteran move.

Jeff also told us to BYOB, and to hang around after the tournament because guys play money games at night, under a spotlight they clamp to the deck. “It's pretty strong, but it still doesn't cover much of the yard.”

OK, so in summation, we're going to be throwing mini-spears at each other, after drinking all day, at night, for money.

I'm
definitely
bringing my poodle.

•   •   •

On the drive in from Columbus, I wondered what the World Championship of Jarts would be like. Would all the hors d'oeuvres be served at Jart tip? Would it be conducted in a basement, away from prying NORAD cameras? Would it be like a floating crap game, where you have to know the secret phrase?

I noticed that in all the literature and on the T-shirts, there was no catchy slogan for the tournament. Balta said they keep trying to think of a name for it but … (warning: Jarts joke coming) … nothing's stuck.

May I be of assistance?

It was July 7, 2007—7/7/7—when we arrived in the suburban neighborhood of the preppy Shane Davis, thirty-four, Balta's partner in the art of Keeping Killer Toys Alive in America.

There were already about fifty people in Davis' spacious backyard, most of them in their late twenties, early thirties, upper middle class, many of them with no flak jackets. A lot of them have made all fifteen tournaments. One friend came every year until she began working for the FBI. Now she avoids it like al Qaeda meetings.

Davis was so into this whole thing, it was a little scary. “I bought this house just for the yard,” Davis beamed. “It's perfect for the
tournament!” Well, perfect may be a stretch. He spent about $10,000 bringing in ninety truckloads of dirt to fill in a swamp and taking out a bunch of trees in order to get the perfect lawn to poke holes in.

Upon noticing his wife was listening, he added, “The inside is nice, too.”

Everybody playing had to sign the same waiver that came on the invitation, and everybody got a T-shirt with last year's winners' names on it. Turns out a man named Geoff Sharp won it twice. Oh, irony!

Then the pregame festivities began. There was a twelve-foot flag hanging from the porch, and bunting, too. Then two men and two women—all of them in the choir—stood on the porch and sang the national anthem. Because there's nothing quite as patriotic as breaking federal law. At the end of the anthem, there were sounds of jet fighters strafing the place. Wow. Really? But it was just Jeff and his boom box.