A/N: The game is BMXXXX (PS2, by AKA Acclaim). You don't necessarily have to have played the game in order to be able to read this, though.
I knew I had sometimes felt worse in the past. I just couldn't recall an occasion in which.
In a narrow and filthy passageway between two high buildings, Bronx, NYC, I was throwing up what was left of my hot dog lunch. My white bike was lying on the ground, and I grabbed the wall with my left hand in order to keep standing. The world kept blurring and spinning around. I knew why they had told me not to ride when drunk.
Twelve hours earlier I had woken up in my apartment that's only furniture was a small and almost broken bed, and a BMX bike in the corner. I had glanced out through the filthy window, and seen the world all beneath me; the trains, the cars, the people. The hookers that always stood on the other side of the road, come rain and shine. I quickly got dressed.
I had cut off the hems of my gray jeans and thus created shorts. I wore them low enough to show a slice of my deep red boxers beneath them. My basketball tank top was completely black, as well as my leather boots with red steeltoe tip. I never took off the chain around my neck, and the "necklace" was sealed with a lock. I had lost the key.
My hair was short, and naturally blonde for a change, but completely covered by a greenish gray hat that I had stolen the last time I visited Moscow. I had gotten into some problems with the local police, and they hadn't been treating me very nicely. So, when I finally had left the police station, I had taken the hat with me. I could only imagine in what kind of problems the poor policeman had got into when the crime was discovered and I was sitting in a plane above the Atlantic and grinning like a complete madass.
I had woken up with an uncomfortable pain in my right leg. The day before I had widened my collection of tattoos. I already had one on both of my arms, and a tribal in my chest, and a tribal band around my right leg. I had taken a skull & bones - tattoo in my left leg. I was planning on a huge tattoo on my back aswell, but I didn't have enough money yet.
I proceeded to the bathroom, a small closetlike room with a toilet, a shower, a metal sink and a filthy mirror. I shaved, leaving only the small and ridiculously blonde sideburns that I was so proud of. I was ready to face a new day.
Mullally park, and its surroundings, was a place to see that day. There was an underground BMX competition to be held, and my friend Rave had done the arrangements. When I got there, I saw a sea of youngsters on bikes, the youngest kid couldn't be a day older than ten. Only Rave was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly I started to hear music - someone had brought two bigass speakers into the park.
"Yo wassup kids!" came a voice. I lifted my gaze and met the eyes of a black woman standing on the roof of a nearby warehouse. Her name was La'tey and she seemed to be the one to play the role of a DJ today. Great.
"Get ready to injure yourselves," she went on, "because this is no place for friggin' kids, ya know what I'm sayin'? This is where we measure your talent. So get ready, get set, ...WATCH THIS KIDS!"
A girl jumped off the roof with a white BMX. She landed softly on an alley-oop, accelerated, jumped from the top of the next oop, twisted herself to a 360 degrees spin with only one hand on the handlebars, landed again for a short while before jumping on the gate around the skate park and grinding it down. When she was out of sight the kids started shouting like fucking morons, and La'tey came along,
"Yeah, see that, noobs? That was elementary. Doing that ain't gonna get y'asses nowhere today. Anyone who got a sudden desire to go back home to ya mom better do it now, 'cause soon it's too late! Now let's listen to Saliva for three minutes fifteen secons to give y'all the time to go."
The song was called Click Click Boom. Only a couple of kids left the park, and I already felt sorry for the rest. Suddenly, I got a hell of a punch on my back. I nearly fell off my bike. Furious, I turned around to see Mika's grinning face. She was the girl who had impressed the kids just a while ago.
"Leon boy! What ya doing here, man?" she greeted me. "Think you wanna show these kids how to win a race?"
"Hell no," I sniffed. "Just watchin' that's all. Where's Rave?"
"Well you know him right? Last time I saw him he was with a blonde junkie hooker. That was last night, so no wonder where he is now."
"Yeah. I can't believe so many kids wish to get killed," I said, referring to the competitors.
"Tell me about it," Mika said, shaking her head. "They aren't all kids though. Some of the older ones ought have some talent."
"Yeah like who?" I wanted to know.
"Like her," she said, pointing to a blonde girl on a red bike.
The blonde's age was somewhere between 20 and 25, and she was wearing a black t-shirt and grayscale army colored pants. Her hair was on a quickly tied ponytail, and her skin was fairly tanned. She sure looked fuckable to me. I told that to Mika.
"Uh, right. I'm sure she's a dyke, though," she offered me a cold shower in mental form.
"And you'd know if she was," I grinned. "I've heard that gay people have the best gaydar."
"Suck off," Mika kindly told me. "Oh, I know that boy. He's a friend of my brother's."
She pointed at a kid with long blue mohawk and tight black panties that looked like swimming trunks. The boy's skin was gothic pale and covered with tattoos.
"What's his name?" I asked Mika.
"Rex. He's fifteen, and lives with a big fat sugar momma."
"So he's a whore?" I asked.
"No not really. He's just a homeless kid who don't care about school nor work. Still, he's gotta eat sometimes."
"Oh I see. I wonder how can he avoid getting tanned if he walks around wearing only those."
The kid noticed us and smiled to Mika. Then he took his bike over to us.
"Mika. Good to see you," he greeted.
His voice was gothic low, but I was surprised to hear that kind of voice from a skinny fifteen-year-old brat.
"Hi Rex. Here to show some skill for these motherfuckers?" Mika asked.
"Yeah sorta yes."
He seemed a bit embarrassed. At this distance I could see the white five o'clock shadow on his face. That albino beard made him look sympathetic.
"Hi there, Rex. M'name is Leon Alec," I introduced myself.
"Nice to meet ya, man," he said. A funny mixing of good manners and a street kid. "Mind if I just call ya Alec?"
"Not at all. Most of the others call me Leon, though."
"Hey Rex, mind if I call you Stallion?" Mika chuckled. "It's okay to call people by their first names."
"Stallion? That your surname?" I asked Rex.
"Yo kids let's start the action!" La'tey interrupted us through twosix-feet tall speakers. Beat that.
"Yeah that's me. Better get goin' now. See ya around!" Rex called out as he went.
"That really his last name?" I asked Mika as soon as Rex was gone.
"Ain't that hilarious?" she replied.
What happens when you let an army of kids on bikes to a skate park when they think they can and should impress someone? Yeah. A mess.
Mika hired me to transport the injured kids somewhere else and call an ambulance there. We sure didn't want the police to notice and interrupt our competition. I took nine bleeding brats one by one to some distance on my bike and nearly killed one of them. I passed a taxi a few inches too near and crashed down on the road. Luckily the taxi didn't run over me and the kid with a broken bone, but the kid screamed like hell. He was about the same age as Rex, but a lot more a naive rich boy. He wanted to see the 'rough' guys and live a 'rough' life, romanticizing it so much I thought I would drown in all that sugar. I quickly got him back up on my bike and trampled us away from the reach of the cars.
I happened to be in the park when the winner was selected. Mika and La'tey argued about that for a while, but then La'tey's voice came.
"A'ight boys 'n girls, we have a winner here. That's right, the only one of ya who showed some skills here today is...you, young lady," she said, pointing at the blonde Mika and I had talked about at the beginning of the competition. "Climb up here to say a few words for da brats, lady."
The girl took her bike up the alley-oop nearest to the roof, and spinned herself next to Mika and La'tey. Showing off, but effective.
"Well now young biker, what's ya name?" La'tey asked her.
The girl grabbed the mic La'tey handed her and replied,
"I'm Sandra."
Her accent told me she was from Eastern Europe. I decided I would talk to her later.