How Do I Meet These People?, Part 1

Monday night, I talked on the phone with my co-best friend, Viktor Zeitgeist,* and later thought about something that he and I have discussed a number of times over the years.

Viktor, who is a lifelong friend of Deadspot (I met Deadspot through Viktor-- Deadspot has related some of his own adventures with Viktor) and I have long resigned ourselves to the fact that we are "weirdo magnets." Individually, we attract weird people and situations. There is apparently some as-yet-unmeasured physical force in the universe that draws weirdoes to us individually. When we are within physical proximity of one another, this effect is magnified exponentially. More on that in another post.

In October of 1994, Adam was six months old, and I was living with his mother. Viktor was living in Frankfurt, Germany. He was there trying to reconcile with his wife, who'd grown up there, the child of Spanish immigrants. The fact that Viktor was living in Frankfurt with his girlfriend was not helping the reconciliation along. You'd have to know Viktor. But I digress...

He asked me to come visit him there, and sent me the money for a ticket. I took him up on his offer to visit.

We had a great time. I was having huge problems in my relationship with my son's mother, and Viktor and I had lots of time to hang out and discuss things. One day, he and I were walking around Frankfurt, talking about things, when he related the tale of the kamikaze bicyclist.

We were strolling through a plaza, when he pointed to a bench and told me he'd been sitting there, innocently eating his lunch, when he witnessed one of the most bizarre incidents of his life. As he sat there, he noticed a dreadlocked, hippie-looking guy on a bicycle, circling around the plaza. Suddenly, the guy on the bicycle started pedalling furiously, speeding up. He broke from his circling, heading for the large front window of a nearby bank. Then, shouting, in German, "Down with parlimentary democracy!" he rode through the plate glass, shattering it, ending up inside of the bank.

He was, of course, attended to by paramedics and taken away by the police.

Over the years, bizarre things have happened to he and I individually, and particularly when we hang out together, including witnessing a particularly bizarre-- and gruesome-- Fourth of July incident. In my new series, "How Do I Meet These People," I'll be relating bizarre things that have happened to my friends with and without me.

*His name has been changed to protect the guilty.