Bike riding is fun! Isn't it?

I used to live in L.A. I went from living with my father in Spain to living with my mother in Los Angeles at 17 years old. Hollywood to be exact. You wanna talk about culture shock? We went to Venice Beach the first weekend I was there. Holy shit. That chick was almost naked! It was the first time I'd ever seen a chick wearing a teeny-tiny bikini in person. Normally, you only saw that kind of shit on late-night "Skin-emax" soft porn movies. Don't act like you didn't watch those as a teen, we all did. Chicks included. Ahhh, memories!
I found out pretty quick that I was gonna enjoy life in L.A. It was February of 1988, and had to be the best time to be there.
I started to get acquainted with the a lot of the things the city had to offer. I'd walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard, go check out tapings of TV shows, and tried to bang every chick I laid eyes on. I had a cousin out there, and we hung out a lot. It was cool because she had a shit-load of hot friends! She lived all the way out in Inglewood, though, and like I said, I was living in Hollywood. For those of you that don't know, that's 10 miles one way. I used to ride a bike out there a lot, and when I look back on it, it's hard to believe that I was riding 20 miles a day 2 and 3 days in a row. Riding a bike in L.A. is fuckin' dangerous! Once, I was riding across Freemont Place at Wilshire Boulevard, and some asshole hit me. Now, I didn't end up on my back with a mangled bike laying next to me, but the idiot didn't wanna wait for me to ride by, so he cut me off. Hit my front tire. And kept going. I decided not to take that way home. Too many side streets to take, anyway. I told my cousin, "ThePrincess" about it after I got to her house, and she told me that I should've gotten the guy's license plate. We hung out for a while, but she couldn't get any of her friends to come over, and it was getting late, so I started pedaling home. LaBrea is pretty much a straight shot, so that's what I took home. Now, at some point, just past Slauson, LaBrea starts going through the western border of Baldwin Hills, so I had to work a little bit to get up the hill. I was getting a little pissed at the traffic, and the RTD bus that seemed to be stopping every 10 feet in front of me. Finally, the bus had no more stops, and made it's way up the hill. A little while after that, I crested the hill, as well. Now, it was all downhill! Coasting down a long hill on a bike is one of life's great pleasures. I love speed. The wind in your hair, things rushing by, it's great. Then, I saw that fuckin' bus again. Damnit! No problem. I'll just cruise around it. I looked behind me, and saw that there were too many cars coming to make that possible. I hit the brakes. Right. I may as well not have had any fuckin' brakes at the speed I was going, and the bus was stopped in front of me. Then I noticed that the guardrail on the side of the road curved in for the bus stop. Sweet. I pulled into the bus stop area with a sense of relief. That's when I noticed that the guardrail curved back out at the end of the bust stop. Shit. And what was worse, the bus had started moving again. I had slowed down a bit, but still not enough to completely stop. I ended up pulling out in front of the moving bus. The bus driver slammed on his brakes, honked his horn, and flipped me off while he was cussing at me. What the fuck did he want me to do? I couldn't stop. 30 feet beyond the bus stop, the sidewalk started again, so I thought that I'd ride on it for a while to regain my composure after almost getting run over by a fuckin' RTD. I cut loose with some nervous laughter as I pedaled on. It was dark, and I wasn't paying attention to my drifting to the wall on one side of the sidewalk. What I didn't realize was the 5 inch deep rut in between the sidewalk and the wall. My front tire rolled into it. Since I didn't know how deep it was, I tried to turn out of it. Big mistake. Over the handlebars I went, with the bike following me. I ended up on my back with a bike on top of me. The whole thing happened in slow motion. I saw the ground, the hill behind me, and the sky as I executed an Olympic level front flip. If only I could stick the landing! As my back made contact with the ground, I slid a good 4-6 feet. Then I saw the bike, tumbling through the air. It was coming right for me. "Fuck." I thought, "This is gonna hurt.". As I lay there in pain, locked in an embarrassing embrace with a Huffy 12 speed, I heard the laughter. People were stopping their cars to laugh at me. What heartless assholes......