The passion of the bike

The player

This musician knows better than to bike with all his clarinets in one basket.

Photo: Ben Reed

Classical musician Alejandro Acierto wears a bracelet made of bike-chain links. A clever and stylish adornment, it also signals his big bike love. He and his artist roommate have transformed a corner of their apartment into a bike garage so they can easily tinker with their numerous bikes (both own several, in various states of repair). Sometimes, if he’s out in public wearing grease–stained pants, “People look at me, like, ‘What the hell is going on with him?’ ” says Acierto, 22. “Usually if I extend my hand to shake theirs, they immediately see my bracelet and realize, ‘Oh, he’s a biker.’ ”

A native Chicagoan, Acierto rides his bike daily from his Humboldt Park pad—sometimes to school at DePaul in Lincoln Park, sometimes to visit friends in Pilsen or to rehearsal in Evanston. In his earlier college days, he and a couple of friends cofounded a DePaul bike club with the sly name SUV, or Students for Unfueled Vehicles. Still, as a semiprofessional musician who owns three clarinets, he sometimes resorts to the CTA. “If I have a rehearsal in Evanston and if I’m only taking one [clarinet], then I’ll ride my bike.” But if he needs all three for a gig, public transit wins, Acierto says. “That’s thousands of dollars of expensive wood on my back.”

Because he seems to be constantly swapping or selling bikes, it’s hard for him to count how many he owns; he settles on six. He’s moving to crowded New York in the fall for grad school, and “I’m trying to figure out, considering the amount of space I’m going to have, how many bikes can I take.”

Like any diehard, Acierto rides in all kinds of weather, “even when it’s being really stupid outside. There’s actually something really beautiful about riding in a storm,” he says. “I consider [bicycling] a lifestyle, but I can see how people would consider it an obsession. I would own that,” he says with a laugh. “I’m at the point of no return.”

—Web Beherns

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