By: Samuel Letchworth

I saw Groucho Marx the other day.

I was on campus getting my bicycle permit just before it happened.

Actually, that’s a lie. I was on campus with my bicycle talking to the people who were handing out the bicycle permits and explaining to them why campus bicycle registration was not only unnecessary but a dubiously surreptitious ploy to make money off student cyclists in the future. Give a mouse a cookie and he’ll want to start charging for bicycle permits, as the saying goes.

I hopped on my bike and rode across campus to Oakland Street, past the sorority houses, crossing Douglas Street and straight on ‘til morning. It was a route I had taken a hundred times before. 

Now I want it to be known, for the record, that I wasn’t riding my Specialized Hardrock down that break-neck hill like a bat out of hell. More like a squirrel out of purgatory. And then this squirrel hit a raised patch of freshly dried concrete in the middle of the road that had spilled out of a construction truck from the close-by parking deck site and flew over his bicycle handlebars, clanging his unprotected head on the ground.

And that’s when I saw him.

Old Groucho. He was in the sky, reclined on a cloud, his caterpillar eyebrows curled around his black frame glasses. He had a cigar between his bared teeth and he was laughing at me in his patented “Meh-meh-meh-meh” cachinnation. We exchanged a gaze and then he disappeared in a wisp of cumulus smoke.

I stood up, grabbed my bike, and walked it straight up the road to where my friend Alex Cogbill lives. He was on his front deck playing the guitar.

“Holy crap, what happened to you?” he said. He must have seen the blood on my face.

“I think I suffered a concussion,” I informed him. “I saw Groucho Marx in the clouds. We might need to play 20 questions for the next few hours.”

And that we did as I attempted to re-orient myself with the world. This proved to be a tall and confounding chore, because all the while the only thing I could hear was the beep-beep-beep THRASH-BANG-THRASH from the parking deck construction site two streets over.

“They do that crap at 4:30 in the morning sometimes,” my friend Alex said.

“Those blackguards made me wreck my bike. They should be more careful where they spill their cement,” I said.

“Why don’t they just build more bike racks instead of spending $26 million on a new parking deck when we already have two?”

“Why do you think?” I said.

“David Byrne from the Talking Heads has been designing bike racks all across New York City. There’s one on Wall Street shaped like a dollar sign. I’m a welder and an artist. I’ll design a damn Razorback bike rack and put it on campus. Hell, I’ll do the labor for free.”

And he will. Alex Cogbill, welder extraordinaire and art student, will design and build bike racks for solely the cost of materials for any business, including and especially the University of Arkansas. You can reach him at [email protected]

So what’s the point, aside from shamelessly plugging my friend’s practically artistic endeavors? I guess it’s this: The superfluous and annoying new parking deck construction, which we are paying $26 million to build, is a categorical misallocation of serious monetary and resources. It is causing unnecessary unrest for the Garland neighborhood at large and, lest we forget, they made me wreck my bicycle.

But, like Groucho Marx said, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”