My return to full-time urban trucklife couldn’t have been less smooth.

Thanks to a bike thief attempting to steal my locked-up ride earlier this summer, I’ve grown reluctant parking the thing outside overnight.

The problem is that, save for Dawn’s garage in Calabasas, I no longer have a storage unit. Being that I really want the exercise, convenience, and youthful joy of taking my road bike to the streets, I have little option but to lock it up outside overnight… or sleep alongside it. Inside my camper. At risk of admitting my own absurd level of commitment to an idea, I’ll post a photo of the tight squeeze below.

Cozy quarters.

Some might think this is a little ridiculous. And that’s not wholly inaccurate. But let me provide a little background. First, I’m accustomed to sleeping in small spaces, and not just in the truck itself, but in single-man backpacking tents. These are the rough equivalent of cocoons, with little “wiggle room”, as if one could spread out in the mummy-esque sleeping bag anyway. So there’s that. Additionally, the low-level PTSD of waking up to a thief stealing property–your property–within feet of your sleepspace leaves plenty of room for bumps in the night to turn into alarm bells. Having tried unsuccessfully to sleep soundly with my bike locked to a sign post directly outside my truck, with any odd clink or clank rising me to attention, led this odd bedfellow to seem preferable to no sleep at all.

Indeed, for the first two nights of this underbike arrangement, I slept like a baby. Clearly this wasn’t a sustainable situation, but I was busy, packing in some extra work shifts this week, so on night three I decided to load my bike into the back and sleep cozily with my aluminum two-wheeled lover. Clinks and clanks completely ignored. It was the soundest sleep I’d had since leaving Calabasas.

So sound, in fact, that I drifted into a deep REM-cycle dreamland, kicking through clouds of calm.

Kicking.

Kicking!

Actually fucking kicking. 

I woke up to a searing pain flashing across my lower leg. I reached for a flashlight, only to look down and see that I was bleeding. A gash sliced through my shin. I had been sleeping so well, I twitch-kicked the gears of my handlebars. Ouch.

The next fifteen minutes were spent cleaning up the wound. The very solution to my sleep had become the reason my slumber was interrupted.

Camo duct tape helps sooth my ailing wound.

The irony was not lost on me. At least I could appreciate that.

Within that two-week period, I was also attacked by mosquitoes (which at first I thought were bedbugs–thankfully I was wrong), nearly overslept work (which I never do) due to a failed alarm, and kept up late night by two men sharing not-so-discreet pleasures IN THE STREET. Dead serious. For all the smack vehicular dwellers get for their behavior, it is the general population that I’ve seen committing the most disturbing of acts on the public streets in/around their cars. Why these men chose this street to engage in public sodomy I have zero clue. But I can tell you it was one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen on the streets of Los Angeles.

Disturbing enough to drive me to the Craigslist classifieds and consider the rental market. As discussed in a recent post, having a stable space to write 24 hours a day is a serious pull. And with my writing partner having secured the funds to shoot a promotional trailer for our feature film next month, I’ll need the stability. As much as I enjoy the home-free lifestyle, the mosquito attacks, dreamland trauma, and amorous exhibitionists have tested my resolve. But is it all as bad as the specter of egregious rent payments?

The saga continues…

-TOH