He’s the guy that zips around the city in a suit and tie, elegantly dodging pedestrians and racing the odd streetcar on a self-imposed mission to save the city one smile at a time.

The Unicycle Guy.

Only, it’s the one wheel that saved him.

Last summer was a dark time for Paul Abraham.

The 21-year-old was living in Oshawa, working the graveyard shift at Tim Hortons and living in a party house where disagreements were escalating.

Then his bike — a Super Cycle Classic passed down from his grandfather and painstakingly restored to peak condition — was stolen.

“I stopped and screamed at the sky,” he says. He returned to the Impala bike shop in Whitby, where his bike had been fixed, and told them he didn’t want another bike. “Someone will just steal it again.”

Instead, he bought a unicycle, “out of spite.”

Two weeks later he went back: “This one is defective,” he declared. “I can’t ride it.”

But he couldn’t return it, or sell it, so he kept trying — teaching himself in empty Oshawa parking lots in the dead of night and performing the Scorpion (when you fall face-first and your legs come up behind you).

Finally — as a bystander ridiculed him — he grabbed hold of a no-parking sign, steadied himself and then rode almost half a block for the first time.

“It was the most free feeling. I feel it all the time that I ride now — it’s unmistakable. Freedom. I’m doing me.”

That feeling got him back on track. Abraham, who almost always wears a tie because he’s loved the look since he was 14, moved downtown.

He got a job washing dishes and line helping at two Swiss Chalets. In his spare time, he is perhaps the only beatboxing rapper to also travel by unicycle.

Life on one wheel has made him more introspective.

“I can kind of lose myself in the one wheel,” he muses. “I can think of a million things at once — the wonderful things to come (he’s thinking of taking up a trade like heating and air conditioning repair), things that have happened that are awesome and not so awesome.”

Abraham was born in Scarborough, his dad out of the picture and his mom — who passed away on Dec. 31 — battling mental issues that made it hard for her to raise her children. He was raised by his “wonderful” foster parents in Whitby, who have also died.

“They were my rock. They wanted me to push and be this creative person that I always have been,” says Abraham. “I’m doing this for myself, and for the world to see, but also for them.”

Last month, he got some additional motivation. On a visit to the Hospital for Sick Children he met a 9-year-old boy with cancer.

“It opened my eyes. He’d been told time and time again how malicious it was and what they can’t do, and he was so content. It gave me shivers. I couldn’t believe how happy this kid was.”

It inspired him to a goal beyond making kids laugh as he zooms by. He plans to raise money for the Sick Kids Foundation by riding his unicycle from Montreal to Toronto with two friends (one on a bike, the other also on a unicycle).

They are looking for sponsors for the five- or six-day trip in May.

He’s saving up for a new 36-inch Bedford unicycle to use.

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He is in training now — riding out to Mississauga’s Square One, Pickering Town Centre, and last week tackling hills to Pacific Mall (going downhill is much harder than going up).

Every day he gets better — and gets one heck of a workout.

“I have … I’m not gonna say … the best six-pack in the city,” he grins. “But it’s getting there.”