Growing up in the suburbs, personal modes of transportation were very important, and I know I’m not the only person who can describe down to the detail each tricycle, big wheels, or bike they owned when they were in elementary school and junior high. The reason for this isn’t anything profound or even some great secret to reveal–they were ours and as we got older became how we got our first taste of independence.

And that was mostly true when it came to our bikes, which we all graduated to sometime around the first grade, leaving our big wheels in the garage, taking the first steps toward becoming a “big kid.” I’m not sure when BMX bikes specifically became the thing, although a quick look at the history of BMX says that they first started to appear in the 1970s. I imagine that by the 1980s they had become ubiquitous and that made them the standard for kids’ bikes. They certainly didn’t take up as much space as a ten-speed and were certainly not as unwieldy as a bike with one of those big banana seats (or the one with the baby seat on the back that my mom had — how were those even safe?). In my hometown of Sayville, you went to Friebergs, aka The Bike Works, which at the time was located next to the video store (it’s now a tire place, although Sayville Bike Works is still in business and now just down the road). I remember the place being full of bikes and smelling of new rubber whenever I went there to get tire tubes replaced or my chain repaired.

I got my first–and only–BMX bike for Christmas when I was about five; it was a black and yellow Columbia BMX, complete with a bell and a speedometer/odometer. It would take me a while to learn how to ride it without the training wheels (borne out of a constant sense of dread and a need to practice that haunts me to this day), but once I did I was off and used it more than anything I owned, joining my friends on trips to whwerever we were headed in the small radius within which we were allowed to travel.

Sadly, my bike was not cool. Then again, neither was I, but I didn’t know that when I was in the first grade and had fun skidding out using my coaster brakes; nor did I know that in order to be cool, you had to own a specific brand of bike. Shit, until I was probably in about the fifth grade, I didn’t know that different brands of bikes existed and which ones embued you with a particular amount of status. But there were and they did and said brands usuall had kickass names like Mongoose or Predator, which were definitely cooler sounding than Columbia. The premier brand, though? That was GT. Why this was the case, other than their being pretty expensive and made for the competitions you’d see in movies like Rad or much later on the X-Games, was beyond me. A look at the history of GT shows that they were revolutionary in their design and were what more or less put the idea of BMX on the map, so I guess that means they were kind of like the Morey Boogie Board of bikes or something.

BMX competition was never something I was going to do; plus, I loved my bike. It got me everywhere I needed to go and while I don’t like to wax nostalgic about some sort of “more innocent golden age” that never actualy existed, suburbia in the Eighties was a time when you could ride your bike anywhere and park it outside a store or lay it on someone’s front lawn without locking it up. In junior high, I’d have two bikes stolen from me, one of a number of times when kids in my town proved to be absolute dicks. Seriously–who just takes someone’s bike? And whate were they doing with them? Were there BMX chop shops? Was there a black market where they sold them for a cheap price? Did their parents ever notice that their kid just randomly had a new bike?

Anyway, people kitted out their GTs. Plastic spokes, various colored tires, and pegs on the back were all things that got you noticed and the kid down the street from me had all sorts of accessories on his; he also kind of did tricks, most of which were popping wheelies and bouncing the bike while standing on the pegs. That doesn’t sound like much, but fifth and sixth grade came with a lot of new insecurities and with that came the desire to impress people and show off, and I remember wanting to look cool like that.

My chance came in 1987 when scooters became a craze and I got the GT Zoot Scoot for Christmas. These had started to become a thing over the past several months and it seemed like a lot of people in my fifth grade class were “getting them for Christmas” (i.e., asking for them and just assuming their parents had already made the purchase). I decided to throw my hat in that particular ring and probably asked for a “GT Scooter” instead of just a scooter, although I don’t know if any other company made those scooters. At any rate, I came down the stairs on Christmas morning to a “Tacky Eighties Blue” (as my wife calls it) Zoot Scoot with white handlebars, white wheels, and pegs on the back.

I cannot express how Eighties–and I by Eighties I mean exactly what people think of when they hear the word Eighties–this was THe color was electric, the board was a skateboard deck mounted to the frame, and the logo was wirten in Eighties-era block lettering. It looked like it had been born in California, which was the center of all popular culture at the time. I mean, I knew so many people who were obsessed with the skater culture coming out of the L.A. area; the halls of my elementary school were filled with people wearing Vision Street Wear whom had shaved heads with long bangs hanging over their faes. So getting this scooter meant that I was in the cool crowd. Well, in my own mind and a few days over winter break, anyway. When I returned to school in January, my social status reasserted itself.

For the week between Christmas and New Years, I was all over that scooter. I would ride it up and down the blcok and try tricks–in cluding a rad move where I jumped back and forth over the board then got on and took off. Okay, it wasn’t rad and camcorder footage shows that at 10 I actually looked like a complete tool. But hey, I had a GT.

Too bad it didn’t last very long.

The biggest problem with the Zoot Scoot and other scooters that were part of this fad was that it wasn’t a bike. You could go really far on your bike without expending a ton of energy; riding the scooter anywhere beyond a block or two was exhausting. Sure, people rode their skateboards everywhere, but the bulk of the Zoot Scoot made it a bit unwieldy. And none of us gave up our bikes for it, so when we all got together that’s what we rode and the Zoot Scoot sat in the garage, where it would linger for years as the tires deflated until they eventually gave it away.

Scooters are something that seem to come and go every decade or two, although whomever created the Razor Scooter made it a lot more portable than what I had back in the day. That’s a pretty expensive fad when you think about it, but it’s also indicative of that time and the age I was when I started to become stuck between being a kid and feeling I had to be something more.