Scoot Scoot

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• May 11, 2024

One evening, I went for a run and got brutally murdered. In fact, we are all dead and living in a purgatory like the predictable ending of “Lost.” Just kidding. I’m pretty sure, anyway. Not about the running at night part though. Which I maybe shouldn’t do. I especially shouldn’t run at night with my running shirt that says, “MURDER ME,” in big letters on the front. Though the small print says, “be aware, murderer, several people are prepared to avenge my death in ways worse than you can possibly imagine.”

As I was running, listening to music, making it easy for my murderer to sneak up on me, I happened upon a scooter. Not a razor scooter like I had when I was a kid, and not an electric one, but an adult sized push one. Looking around for an owner, it appeared it was abandoned. It was a bit rusty and beaten up, but functional. It would be easy enough to clean it up with some WD40, cover it with a bunch of stickers, and it would be super cool if I was a 15 year old boy!

The scooter was probably stolen by some kid or a drunk and ditched. With my recent string of bad luck, I was happy with this borderline piece of trash transportation. It’s a win! I scooted home on it.

The razor scooter boom hit when I was in middle school. My brother and I both had razor scooters, and we’d ride around with the neighborhood kids, jumping a mere 1.5 inches in the air, but in our minds we were flying. As we got older, we rotated from bikes to scooters, back to bikes, to skateboards, to a gas motorized Go-Ped and ultimately back to the bikes. Almost everyone’s garage on Long Island had multiple razor scooters. Once we were in high school and “subtly” boozing (there was almost nothing subtle about our teenaged drunk antics), we would often “borrow” someone’s razor scooter to drunkenly get home. When you were hammered and faced with a 20-30 minute walk home and there was a razor scooter around to chop that commute in half, you thanked the Gods of Wine. So the razor scooter’s rotated around. I think at some point there were five razor scooters in our garage and my dad, who was perpetually annoyed that his kids failed to keep the garage organized, lamented our garage wasn’t a storage facility for our friends bikes or scooters.

Scooters, I think, are actually great transportation for a city. Because you can fold it and bring it on the subway or a cab! Electric scooters are now pretty popular in cities both in the U.S. and in Europe. Years ago, when I first moved to Queens, before it was “cool” (well, maybe not cool), I lamented to my then black boyfriend that the black guys have to start scootering around the city to make it cool, because white people just look like nerds on scooters. He agreed saying there was no possible way I wouldn’t look like a complete dork (and possibly a child) on a scooter.

I cleaned my new/old garbage scooter and covered it with stickers, including some of my merch stickers that say, “Live Well, Laugh Often, Fuck Off.” I won’t take it to the city. I really only ride it around Astoria, mostly to my friend Greg’s where I show up like a 90s sitcom character and drink all his club soda and eat whatever food (usually cheese and berries) in his refrigerator.

I find, though, that I quite enjoy scoot scooting around. I know I likely look like a dweeb, but my apathy towards the thoughts of others is written on a sticker that’s all over my scooter (live well, laugh often, fuck off). With the wind blowing in my hair, I feel young. It’s fun. Like when you’re moving through time and space on two wheels, you channel some sort of present living energy from days of yesterday.

Hopefully these moments of puritan bliss are never interrupted by getting impaled by a car. I may need a shirt for when I scooter that says, “HIT ME,” and then in the small print, “but if you do, my hit and run will be avenged in worse ways than you can possibly imagine.”