I Teach at Harvard. Store Managers See Me as a Threat.

Opinion|I Teach at Harvard. Store Managers See Me as a Threat.

In November, two days before my 44th birthday, behind a local bike shop that I frequent, a manager from inside the shop approached me and mentioned something about the police. If I were still on probation, which I was for about three years ending in 2008, running my name might have triggered an arrest.

I’d come to buy a bike, as a birthday gift to myself. During the decade I’ve lived in New Haven, Conn., I’ve escorted the elderly home, given lectures at public schools and been a commencement speaker at Quinnipiac University, Yale Law School and a local high school. I coached rec basketball for children for eight consecutive years. By the time an officer arrived and asked me for my license, I was nonetheless shaking with rage and near tears.

In the last 18 months, I’ve become wildly emotional. I went from being the guy who has a birthday party and receives 15 bottles of bourbon to barely having a drink a week. I had been drowning time in bourbon. Then I stopped and the emotions liquor had let me bury cascaded me into long waves of weeping. The solitude of a bicycle let me grapple with all my sorrow.

Almost two decades after my release from prison, which I entered at 16 after confessing to a carjacking, I’d begun cycling as an effort to be free. I’ve learned every hill and turn around New Haven this way. I ride down Ridge Road to the old cemetery. I’ve memorized the sound of my wheels crossing the train tracks leading to State Street. Cycling became the only time since solitary confinement that I’d be alone with myself, and I savored it. I rediscovered curiosity and fear and the stillness that comes with listening to your own heart while going out for rides at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. or 3 a.m.

When I first began riding, I wore jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. When it got colder, I wore thicker jeans, a hoodie and some gloves. One Saturday morning I biked 27 miles in a fierce downpour, watching the rain go from sheets to a sprinkle from 3 a.m. until 7 a.m. I was sopping, as if I had fallen off my bike and into a lake.

Eager to learn how people biked in the rain, I visited this Connecticut bike shop months before the incident. A tall brother with a low haircut explained the science of clipping shoes to pedals, layering the thinnest of fabrics and wearing warming gloves named after lobsters. The more I learned about biking, the more enamored I became. In the mid-1890s, there were about four million bikes in the U.S. Cars? Across the country you could barely find 300.