Letters: My stolen bikes & this *#@! city

BACK IN 2008, as Philadelphians celebrated being No. 1 in baseball with a World Series win, Kryptonite, the bike-lock company that makes those U-bar locks that seem unbreakable and theft-proof, ranked us as the No. 1 city for getting your bike stolen. Six years later, the Phils have more losses than W's, and you can add two more bikes to Philly's stolen list.

My first bike theft, and hopefully my last bike theft, happened 30 years and four traffic lights apart.

For Christmas in 1983 I asked for a new bike, a dog and the miniature WWF Wrestling Ring with Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant figurines. Santa Claus, (a/k/a Big Pat and Carmella Kozlowski) decided that I would enjoy a Cabbage Patch Doll instead of the wrestling ring, and on Christmas morning under the tree was a boy Cabbage Patch Doll named Whitney Vincent. Whitney did not have a good life and DHS should have been called on my 8-year-old butt as I tattooed him with magic markers and made him wrestle the real WWF figurines that all my friends got that year.

However, a blue and yellow BMX bike also was under the tree (and it made me forget that we didn't get the dog, too), and that spring and summer of 1984 I rode that bike everywhere in the river-ward boundaries that I was allowed. I could go as far north as Bridesburg, as far south as Fishtown, but I wasn't allowed to cross Aramingo Avenue west into Kensington. The movie "E.T." was still hot, and riding BMX bikes was cool as hell as another movie called "Goonies" was just ready to be released.

In an effort to ruin my childhood, like she ruined my Christmas of 1983 with the Cabbage Patch Doll, my mom slapped 50 "Property of PAT" stickers all over my bike. On the handlebars, the seat, the pedals, the plastic yellow rims. This is cool if you race in NASCAR, but not when you're an overweight kid chugging along on your BMX bike with a pretzel in one hand and balancing a cherry water ice on your handle bars with your tires deflating from the weight.

One hot August night, the bike was stolen out of our backyard. I would chain it to the fence behind our BBQ grill but a pair of bolt cutters took care of that security. Who would come in our backyard and take my stuff? See? If they would've got me that damned dog for Christmas, the dog would've barked like hell to stop the thief.

The morning I saw the chain on the ground and the bike gone, I sat on my step (with a pretzel and water ice) and cried.

A few weeks later, at 1:30 in the morning our phone rang. It was the 24th Police District calling. They nabbed a guy stealing bikes in the neighborhood and in his backyard was a pile of bikes he had stolen. He had filed off the serial numbers and repainted most of them but the cops found a "Property of PAT" sticker underneath the seat that the scoundrel didn't catch and peel off. My mom drove to the police station in her pajamas to reclaim the bike. (Her Sicilian blood also prompted her to flip over the property receipt she had to sign at the police district and she found out who the guy was who took my bike. Let's just say he walks with a limp now.)

And now, almost exactly 30 years later, I find myself standing on my porch in Bridesburg early one August morning holding a cable lock and Kryptonite U-bar lock that has been broken and cut. The blue Raleigh mountain bike that I rode on the Wildwood Boardwalk, the Lehigh Valley Gorge, Kelly Drive, the new Port Richmond riverfront trail and Pennypack Park was stolen, as was my better half's beach cruiser, which I had nicknamed the Elmira Gulch 2000 ("Wizard of Oz" fans chuckle).

Charlie, the dog that howls, yaps, barks and tags it on Facebook, if God forbid, I break wind in my sleep, had been silent the night before as we slept to the rhythmic hum of the air conditioner in the window.

My neighbors have security video of two junkies from the drug house down the block coming onto my porch at 4:55 a.m. and then riding our bikes away at 5:02 a.m. The lock cutter had a tat on his forearm and the look-out nervously picked his face and scratched his beard. Ironically, he was wearing a Phillies 2008 champs T-shirt.

That morning, the cable lock was coiled on my bare porch, and it hits you that your bikes are gone, and a mouthful of four-letter words spills out as you prepare yourself for yet another quarrel on why we stay here and why can't we move to a cul-de-sac in Jersey. ("Because I work for the City, Sweetheart! And maybe I like pumping my own gas and paying more for that privilege, thank you.")

I call the police. They never come out. I call again and wait for them, knowing they will pull a Comcast-service no show on me. I flag down a police car later that week and finally get to file a report. Since then, I find myself driving in the car trolling the bike racks downtown.

But the bikes won't be found in downtown Philly. The junkies, who I have to look at every day, hocked them for quick cash and shot it in their arms or up their noses. Do they know that everyday I look at the baseball bat behind my front door (a/k/a Bridesburg burglar alarm) and want to swing at them like Matt Stairs did against the Dodgers back in '08?

I finally call my mom. She yells and asks if she should come up to my house and go after the bike thieves. She then asks if I put my name on my bike. And that is when I start to cry.