Hunter Biden shared his Logan Circle, D.C., apartment with a crackhead named “Bicycles” for five months, where “the two of us interacted with a deranged, crack-addled version of the Odd Couple,” the president’s son wrote in his memoir.
Bicycles had seven children, “one on death row, another in prison for life. She didn’t know the whereabouts of the five others,” the book said.
“Almost anyone who lives or works in DC has at one time or another seen Bicycles–also known as Rhea, a homeless, middleaged Black woman–weaving in and out of traffic or swerving around sidewalk pedestrians” with a “piercing voice that can be heard a block away as she shouts for everybody to get the hell out of her way, which she does almost continuously,” Biden wrote.
Biden had a decades-long relationship with Bicycles, buying crack from her in a park near the White House when he was a Georgetown University student in the 1990s.
Decades later, Biden would throw change out of his apartment window to her and she would go to the store to buy him cigarettes.
In 2016, Biden relapsed on cocaine while in Monte Carlo for a meeting of the board of Burisma, the Ukranian gas company that paid him five figures a month after getting angry that Europeans discussing Brexit did not heed his warnings about the “rise of far-right populism.” When he returned to the U.S., he admitted the cocaine use to a drug counselor but refused to take a drug test, instead returning to the park and buying crack from Bicycles, which he smoked outside a downtown coffee shop.
Bicycles eventually moved into his apartment, with Biden giving her keys. “She commandeered the TV and only watched those true-crime shows, with the volume turned way up,” he wrote, at one point believing a serial killer was hiding inside the walls.
But Bicycles had her act together more than Biden in some ways and “got mad when I left dirty clothes on the coffee table or spilled vodka on the rug,” he wrote.
Later while living in Los Angeles, Biden was repeatedly shooed from hotels for the disruptive behavior of himself and his guests, which he blamed on racism by hotel staff. He wrote:
An ant-trail of dealers and their sidekicks rolled in and out, day and night. They pulled up in late-series Mercedes-Benzes, decked out in oversized Raiders or Lakers jerseys and flashing fake Rolexes. Their stripper girlfriends invited their girlfriends, who invited their boyfriends. They’d drink up the entire minibar, call room service for filet mignon and a bottle of Dom Pérignon. One of the women even ordered an additional filet for her purse-sized dog. When they finished, two or three days later, they’d walk out with the hotel’s monogrammed towels and throw pillows and comforters and ashtrays.
But when the “front desk informed me that guests were complaining about the parade of ne’er-do-wells traipsing in and out of my room and asked me to leave[,] I saw it as blatant racism and let them know it.”
Biden’s book “Beautiful Things” was released Tuesday.