I once walked into Bikes Not Bombs “World Headquarters” in Roxbury, Massachusetts and saw Jeff Bayard, the shop manager there, working on a green Raleigh M30. The bike had no seat post, so he dug around through piles of old bicycle junk for one that would fit. Seat posts come in about 20 sizes, in increments of .2mm (25.4mm, 25.6mm, 25.8mm…). Bayard didn’t measure. The first one he grabbed was too small. The next one fit perfectly. “You try eyeballing it,” he said.

Jeff Bayard has been working on bikes in one capacity or another for almost 20 years, and to say he’s experienced with bikes and bike parts is an understatement. At Bikes Not Bombs (BNB), a grassroots non-profit that recycles and redistributes used bicycles worldwide, Bayard trains local teens to be mechanics, and because many are starting from scratch, he often does (or at least thinks about) three mechanics’ work in any given day. On Thursdays, Bayard works with kids expelled from high school “for behavioral reasons,” so in addition to fixing bikes and training mechanics, he supervises a group of kids known for being troublemakers.

Bikes Not Bombs is a chaotic jumble of all-things-bike-related crammed into a decrepit warehouse in a seedy part of town between a used-tire garage and an abandoned lot. The first time I stopped by, I took the T, and noticed that the rider beside me was carrying a gun. The fourth time I dropped in, a kid outside waved a knife in front of me. Latino kids speed down the street in lowriders. The store has been robbed more than a few times. When I asked Bayard if he felt safe there, he said, “Yeah, sometimes. I don’t walk home alone at 11 p.m.” Otherwise, Jeff refuses to be anxious or scared.

Inside, the shop exudes a casual energy. Most days, Jeff and half a dozen other employees wander around sorting, organizing, and assembling bikes and parts. Most people in the shop wear their pant legs stuffed into their socks, as they ride to and from work. Once or twice a year, they load 500 bikes into a crate and ship it to Ghana or El Salvador or Nicaragua, and then the shop seems marvelously spacious and clean and organized. But not for long. Somehow, mysteriously almost, rooms fill up with piles of tires, and floors fill up with buckets of chainrings, boxes of handlebars. Work benches overflow with layers of abandoned or forgotten projects. The place reeks of bikes.

At first glance, a bike can be described in elegant geometry: two triangles and two circles. Upon closer inspection, one will see that every bike has four swivel points (the headset – where the handlebars rotate; the bottom bracket – where the pedals rotate; and the hub of each wheel – where the wheels rotate). Within each swivel point are two races – or cups – of steel ball bearings, and connected to the frame there are cogs and brakes and cables and levers and a chain connecting everything. All told, most bikes have upward of 1000 individual parts making them go, and most of them are not standardized. So running a shop like the shop at BNB — which accepts 1800 used bicycles each year, in all shapes and sizes and conditions — is like running an auto garage that fixes Hondas, Fords, Chevies, a few Rolls Royces, and a whole bunch of beater Datsuns and old VWs. That’s why BNB is such a bike madhouse.

During a typical day at BNB, Bayard has difficulty finding a chunk of time (or space) to focus on one thing. He’s always being interrupted, resulting in as many side projects as projects, and also resulting in the regular loss of parts he had just located. In a typical day, Bayard is also bombarded with all varieties of questions:

- “Are these bolts too long?”
- “Are you looking for a 21 or a 22 over there?”
- “What’s wrong with the rear tire?”
- “Who’s junk is this?”
- “You want these cones?”
- “Can I have some money?”
- “You don’t have coarse sandpaper, do you?”
- “Where are the waterbottles?”

Bayard takes kids aside at every possible teaching moment. Today, he’s working with Carlos, a 19 year-old who’s been at BNB for five years, and Jon, a 20 year-old who’s been here for one year. Jon has “Thug Life” tattooed in Asiatic cursive down right forearm, and spent six months in jail for dealing drugs. While tuning up a bike, Bayard notices that the quick-release lever on the front wheel doesn’t tighten fully, because the axle is too long. So he gets a washer, then shows Jon the problem. These valves are bad for mountain biking, he says. “They slip sometimes.”

A few minutes later, Bayard brings Carlos a tacoed rear wheel, hoping to recover the freewheel and hub, which are still intact. Bayard admits he knows nothing about BMX bikes, which is convenient, because they are Carlos’ forte’. Carlos takes one look, sees that the freewheel is an odd variety, and shows Jeff that the usual tool won’t work in this case. It’s neat to see the teacher being taught by his own student.

Later that afternoon, three kids ring the doorbell (the shop is closed to the public today), and ask for help. The back wheel is wobbly. Jeff can’t refuse the opportunity to teach, even though he has a million other things to do. He runs back inside, grabs a wrench, then comes back out, and on the side of the street, removes the rear wheel of the tricked-out BMX. “You wanna use a 15mm wrench instead of an adjustable,” he tells the owner of the bike. “You see these stripped bolts? That’s why adjustables are bad.” After removing the wheel, Bayard finds the problem. “You need a washer there,” he says, pointing them to a hardware store.

Carlos says that Bayard has made mechanic work less mysterious for him. “I learned what to look for and what to expect. I never used to do adjustments right. I never used the right tools.”

Bayard is essentially a hands-on science teacher – perhaps closest to a Chemistry instructor. He urges his apprentices to be patient, to diagnose a single problem at a time, and to isolate problems in order to understand them. He uses the word isolate a lot. “Isolate the problem. If there’s a noise, does it happen when you glide, or when you pedal?” Bayard also tells his mechanics what’s cheap, what’s old, what’s inefficient, or what’s just plain dumb. Pretty, curvy, shiny — these don’t matter to Jeff unless the parts fit together, make sense, and run smoothly. He is very pragmatic.

On one occasion, Bayard saw Jon and Carlos ogling over a showy full-suspension mountain bike, with a high-tech-looking Carbon frame. He came over, asked them why they liked the bike so much, and then asked them how the suspension system worked, and if it made sense. They pushed down on the seat, watched a hydraulic pump compress, and now very excited, said, yeah sure, it works like this. Bayard then told them about a mountain biker’s desire for a soft, smooth ride while cruising down hills and over bumpy terrain, and told them that most mountain bikers stand in their pedals over such terrain. He then showed Jon and Carlos how this particular suspension system would not soften the ride of a standing rider. Examining the pivot points, he showed that the distance between the bottom bracket (and thus, the pedals) and the ground remained constant — meaning the rider would feel every bump. Sure, the seat is really soft, but who rides over rough terrain sitting down? Jon and Carlos were floored, and went back to their work, illusion destroyed.

This method of dissecting, Bayard believes, makes kids into very competent mechanics. It also makes them very rational thinkers. In this way, while Bayard teaches kids about bikes, he also teaches them about how systems work beneath the surface, and, more broadly, about how the world works. Bayard does this often when he starts to tell a story, then stops, adjusts his thoughts, and says, “You guys will like this story,” and shares his experiences with them. In these frequent stories, he breaks down history mechanically – isolating people and actions and results – to provide simple, illustrative lessons. While working on bikes, he talks to Carlos about relationships, talks to Jon about the legal system, and to both of them about religion and philosophy. I hear him pondering: “I always find it funny that both sides of a baseball game pray to god – like he’s deaf to one ear!” Though seemingly irrelevant, it is in this way tht he encourages his mechanics to believe in themselves more than in god. He is a good mentor.

Last year, Bayard took Carlos to a national bicycle convention in Las Vegas…Carlos rounded up $250 for airfare, and Bayard covered all of the other costs. Carlos is still enthralled about the trip, and reminisces about the lights and casinos and night life. “It was like paradise,” he says. “Everything was so fancy!” Bayard, with a smirk, puts it this way: “It was an educational experience.”

But still, in the shop, the questions remain:

“Can I put this here?”
“Where’s the nearest hardware store?”
“Where do these go?”
“Can I borrow a dollar?”
“What’s a bashguard?”
“Whose is that and what’s wrong with it?”
“Can I borrow a dollar too?”

Bayard, 32, has short, wispy, light brown hair, long sideburns, and fingers with fat, swollen knuckles. He wears thin, wire-rimmed glasses, and cargo pants and t-shirts. He’s five foot ten, and neither skinny nor heavy. He walks with a slight limp – most evident in the way he picks up and plants his right foot. At times his face is very serious, but most of the time he looks energetically curious and playful. Sometimes, while working, Bayard talks to himself while searching through drawers, shelves, buckets, piles:

-”Beth, Beth, Beth…Where is Beth?”
-”Justin wants a seat, huh? What kind of seat does Justin want?”
-”Wow, these are cool brake levers…”

I would never have guessed Bayard’s a neat-freak until I saw his section of the “office,” which is a haven of cleanliness and sparseness. Because BNB is a bare-bones non-profit, almost everyone there saves everything, because everything they use is donated. The photocopier, the computers, the cash register — all are donated, and old and bulky and easily obsolete, and also yellowing nicely. But Bayard seems to have rebelled against this hoarding. Though his space is surrounded by milk crates overflowing with papers and manuals and binders and improv wooden shelves nestled wherever they’ll fit, there are no stacks of stuff on Jeff’s desk. His desk – a paint-spattered sheet of plywood – is bereft not only of disorganized items, but any decorative touches. There’s a helmet, a backpack, and an old Macintosh. There’s one photo of him (tuning a bike) thumbtacked to a two by four beside his computer – but he didn’t put it there, and doesn’t know who did. There’s no picture of his fiance’ There’s nothing, really, to indicate that he has a life of his own. Not even a photo of the six bikes he owns.

Bayard grew up in Swampscott, the son of an upper-middle class Jewish family that lived well within is means. His father, a Psychiatrist, still drives a 15 year old car because he’d rather not waste his time searching for a new car. His mother, a former high school teacher and professor at Salem State College, now works as a college administrator.

By age 14 Bayard was convinced he didn’t like learning. He went to U Mass, Amherst, and began studying business, but decided against it for English. Since he graduated Bayard has consistently worked in the bike industry. First, he managed a bike shop in Stoneham, then worked as an intern for Cycling Magazine in Boulder, CO, and then he came back East and worked for a new bike shop before it went out of business. After that, he began working as sales rep for Mongoose, working primarily on their $290 million account with Wal-Mart. “It wasn’t the type of job where I could bike to work,” he says. He spent two months in Long Island, nine months in Wisconsin, two months in Chicago, and 10 months in Arkansas. And then, on August 26, 1999, he was hit by a car while riding his bike.

He remembers the events clearly: a car made a left turn in front of him, and he slammed into the rear door, then flew over the roof, and landed on the ground smack on his right hip. According to his doctors, his femur had acted like a hammer, shattering the right side of his pelvis. According to the policeman who arrived on the scene, it looked like a deer had run into the car. The driver was cited. Bayard was out of work, and all of a sudden in hospitals and rehab centers. The recuperation brought him back to Boston, and left him, four years later with a 10cm screw in his hip and an off-white plastic brace that extends from his ankle up to mid-calf.

Bayard couldn’t walk for a year. He spent another year using a walker, becaue he couldn’t use his right leg muscles. The pain was awful, Bayard says. “I thought about killing myself for a while. Most people like me are on narcotics. It feels like my foot is burning and being crushed all the time.”

Bayard didn’t start working again until the spring of 2001. As usual, he gravitated towards bikes, so he came to BNB as a volunteer. Weeks later, when a position opened up, he grabbed it. He says the transition from the corprate world, where he sold 1.2 million bikes a year, to the non-profit world, “Where you’re lucky if you sell 12 bikes in two months,” still astonishes him. But now, however, he works face to face with people, and is psyched about environmental and social issues, and about teaching. Amazingly, biking is the one sport that agrees most readily with his recovering body.

The accident has changed Bayard’s life in another way. He drives a silver dodge caravan for two reasons: 1)seat position (he can’t bend more than 90 degrees at his hip) and 2) the big car holds bikes easily.

In that regard and others, Bayard is more grounded than many of the idealists at BNB. He’s not bombastically radical about ideologies, which is tough in a place overflowing with radicalism (one poster in the shop reads: “resistance to corporate colonialism,” while a common bumper sticker says: “friends don’t let friends drive junk”). Bayard is progressive, but realistic. Since his accident, he’s only become more so. “I have a real problem with people who think everything happens for a reason,” he says. “I think that’s a dangerous way to think.” The contrast between Bayard and rest of the staff is evident. Bayard explains, “I’m the most traditional, conservative, white guy here.”

Bayard defends teaching kids mechanics soleley because it gives them an awareness of what they are doing, pointing out that he has no particular aspirations for them. “I could be setting them up for anything. I’m not trying to shape their lives. I’d like them to think about their impact, about marketing, about cars. I want them to think about things in methodical ways. It’s as much mechanics as it is social and personal developement.”

He’s the kind of inspired but also grounded teacher and mentor who is not yet jaded, complacent, or ready to give up. “It’s impossible to get it all organized – there’s too much going on,” he says. In other words, he’s not willing to slow down. “Someday, I may teach at a public school, but I wonder, how the heck do you do it? You can’t try out what you’ve done.” Working at BNB, he admits, is at times confusing, at others, overwhelming. “It’s the most varied job I’ve ever had. You do what you can with what you have. It’s simple analysis.”