Motorcycles I've Loved (10 page)

•   •   •

B
EFORE
I
BEGAN
my summer studies in Oxford, I spent a few days in London visiting an old friend from Ireland, then I went to Cambridge for a bit. When I finally boarded a bus to Oxford, I had already begun to think of my own stories of Ireland, and also of my mother's, stories I hadn't thought of in years. I thought of her riding through the misty heath with her arms tucked around that faceless motorcycle boyfriend, and suddenly Stonehenge coming into view, and feeling the breath knocked out of her when she saw those towering stones. I went there and I looked at them, too, one weekend when a group of other American students were going. It was raining, but that seemed right somehow, to be wet and uncomfortable and shivering as I looked up at those rocks and wondered who put them there. Occupying that same space my mother had, it occurred to me that while there might be many miles between us, we were only one dimension away from each other.

That summer I spent a lot of time alone, happiest when left to my own devices. I walked around the city in circles, drinking to-go cups of hot tea and looking at architecture. In my dorm room on the Trinity College campus I perched cross-legged on top of the desk to look out the window and into the gardens, where at night they would put on Shakespeare plays, though never the ones I was studying. I spent hours in the library, where there were long wooden tables with three partitions on each side and little desk lamps for each work space. There was a certain seat that I liked, where I left a pile of books and a note so that the librarian would know they weren't abandoned, and where a handsome Dutch grad student pored over mathematics texts across from me. Day after day, we would return to the same seats, whisper hello, and open our books.

There was an enormous window at the end of the table, so big there was a pulley system to open it, and in the afternoon the sun would slowly fall into alignment with the window until the book in my hands would burst into light, unreadable, each page glowing, and I would sit for a moment, enjoying that warmth with my eyes closed, then go to the window, draw the blind down, and continue with my work. I curled my bare feet around the wooden legs of the long table as I read, my toes twisting around the smooth grain like pink roots struggling for purchase.

At the end of the seminar I said good-bye to my classmates, turned in my keys, and went back to London. In London, I walked and I walked, and on the night before my flight home I went over to the house of my old friend from Ireland and he made a pasta dish that glowed pleasantly in my stomach after I ate it, like swallowing a hot water bottle. Eventually, I made my way back to the other side of the city and into bed, where I took out my contact lenses, looked up at the dark, smudged ceiling, with the long, blurry shadows from headlights in the street, and knew it was time to go home.

Power

W
hen I returned from Oxford, I continued to struggle with the expense of new tires for the Rebel. My last year as an undergraduate had gotten its hooks into me by the time the leaves began to change, and finally the riding season had all but passed. As the snow fell, graduation came into view, and the relief to see it shimmering there, just a few months away, was palpable, but it was my mounting excitement for motorcycles, the drive to learn as much as I could about them and then get back on the road, that propelled me forward most of all.

By the time the snow had settled and the rumbles had disappeared from the icy roads, motorcycles were all I could think about. Being a student again had introduced me to so many things—Japanese, physics, books I'd never read, theories I'd never understood—but the most valuable thing I learned was how to work. How to set aside distractions and absorb knowledge; how to be unquenchably curious. This same kind of intrepid thirst had led me to Ireland, manifested as wanderlust, but as I threw myself into learning, both for school and for myself, I realized that I didn't need to wander to discover; I didn't need to be lost to find what I was looking for. The desire for geographic exploration was still with me, but it was tempered with the knowledge that I was learning to explore in different ways. I didn't have to leave the state or even the county to discover something new. Traveling overseas made me open my eyes a little wider, look a little closer, but I began to understand that it wasn't the distance or the novelty that made things feel so compelling, it was my own heightened capacity for observation—and that's a tool I can access anywhere, from my desk, from the seat of a motorcycle or while exploring a city I've never been to before, a country I've never visited.

My affair with motorcycles began as a fling, a way to rebound from Australia, but what I came to realize was that motorcycles were offering me more than just movement, a way from A to B. Like all great romances, these machines made me see myself and my surroundings with fresh eyes; they made me want to know more and to be better. Motorcycles were waking me up—just a nudge at first, hearing an alarm clock going off in the middle of a dream, then a full-body jolt, a bucket of ice water on my head. I realized that I had barely grazed the surface, that this flirtation could become my next great love if I let it.

I began to read everything about motorcycles that I could get my hands on. I read Clymer manuals and memoirs and histories of the industry; I read about engines and engineering, carburetors and countersteering; racing, cruising, dynamics, classical mechanics, I read it all. And the old motorcycle movies—I watched those, too, for good measure.
The Wild One
,
Easy Rider
,
On Any Sunday
,
La Motocyclette
with Marianne Faithfull and her skintight leather suit, with nothing, absolutely nothing, underneath.

Between the magazines, blogs, and online discussion forums, I was avidly tuned to anything to do with motorcycles. I bookmarked each Web page, bought every book, filed each fact away carefully until I thought that maybe I knew something—at which point, of course, I inevitably realized that I knew nothing, and I began again, from the beginning. It was a curriculum of my own making, a headlong rush to learn everything I could about motorcycles. It was work I didn't need to be doing, work outside the realm of assignment, of making a living, of meeting someone else's expectations. It was work born not of obligation but of fascination. The best kind.

•   •   •

M
ARCH ARRIVED
; the snow shrank somewhat but still lay thick on my driveway, waist-high drifts on either side. My parents gifted me with a plane ticket to visit them in Florida for spring break, conveniently coinciding with Daytona's Bike Week, so I gratefully packed some artifacts of warmer days— my bathing suit, some shorts, a pair of flip-flops—and took time off from the restaurant. Before I left, I ordered new tires for the Rebel so that they would be waiting for me when I got back, then I headed for the tropics.

My flight to Daytona was full of bikers. The man I sat next to was from Pittsburgh, and he was having his motorcycle shipped down; he told me he made this trip every year, that the only vacations he ever took were to Bike Week. As he spoke, a stout woman with a shaved head, dressed all in leathers, walked down the aisle toward the bathroom. I grinned at my seatmate and started to feel good, like I was part of this strange club. Scoping the other passengers as they slept or knocked back Wild Turkey in plastic cups, I spotted no less than a dozen Harley sweatshirts, at least five leather jackets, a couple vests, and countless bandannas knotted around necks or across foreheads. I knew I was headed for a motorcyclist's paradise. I knew I was in good company.

Leaving the airport, I saw my father waiting for me in front of some palms. As I walked toward him, his eyes slid right past me. I gave him a wave and for a moment he looked surprised to see me, as if he was here waiting for his ten-year-old daughter instead of a twenty-three-year-old.

“Hey, Pop,” I said, giving him a hug, and he murmured something into my shoulder about how grown-up I looked.

It's been said that I bear a strong resemblance to my father. We both have the same pink skin and blue eyes, the same thick, messy hair, the same round-cheeked smile. By then his hair was a little thinner, had gone a silvery gray, and his beard was snowy white. His glasses were smaller than they used to be, wire frames now, and his beard was cropped close against his neck. He wore his predictable uniform of khaki shorts and a pale blue button-down with a frayed collar and rolled-up sleeves, his socks pulled halfway up his spindly pink shins, shirt tucked in, a plain gray baseball cap tipped back on his head. He had a fresh, peeling sunburn across the bridge of his nose, and I could smell the ocean on him. He'd been out in his boat, he told me, fishing all morning. I asked if he had caught anything, but he hadn't. He didn't seem troubled by the fact. It was a beautiful day out on the water, he said, just beautiful.

On the ride home, three military jets shot by overhead in perfect formation, swooping and banking like a flock of sparrows. “They have a lot of air shows down here,” my dad said, and told me about one he had gone to recently. He had been looking around in one of the merchandise tents when he found some hats he thought were pretty suave. They were black baseball caps with a little white Marines logo on the front, so he asked how much. The sales guy said they weren't for sale, and he pointed to a chin-up bar in the corner. Do ten of those, he said, and you get one free. I can imagine the skepticism with which the guy must have said this. My father is not a large man and not a young man; he's skinny as hell, not very tall, but he's worked hard his whole life and he's stronger than he looks. My dad cracked up. “You wanna see the hat?”

He didn't gravitate toward those Marines caps out of whimsy. My father served as a Marine during the Vietnam War, though he doesn't often mention it now. He has no veteran bumper stickers, he doesn't go to reunions, and he doesn't have any Marine buddies. When he returned from his tour of duty, people spat at him in the street in San Francisco, where he landed: a lone, scrawny military man, crew cut still freshly chopped, human residue of an unpopular war. He grew out his hair and his beard as fast as he could after his discharge. He started doing yoga. He learned to meditate.

It's about a half-hour drive to my parents' house from the airport. I had been there only once before. At first I was hesitant to visit them in their new home; I was still feeling sulky about the sale of their house in Vermont, I thought Florida was weird, I couldn't afford it, et cetera; but then I went, and of course loved it, have been visiting whenever I can since.

When we pulled into the driveway, I admired the periwinkle color they had painted the stucco, and the cobalt trim. I could see the fruit on my mother's citrus trees swelling in the front yard, blue glass bottles dangling from the branches of a live oak, and the bamboo she had planted along the back fence, which had erupted since I'd been here last. My dad couldn't wait to show me all the other improvements. He'd built an outdoor shower, a new fence, some shelves for his tools, a little patio. When he'd shown me all there was to see, we went for a ride on his motorcycle, a Suzuki V-Strom that he bought not long after I told him about my Rebel, and ended up at the beach. It was his idea to go and admire the ocean before my mom got home—admiring the outdoors has always been one of his favorite pastimes. We walked along the packed sand and dipped our feet in the surf, and even over the white noise of the waves I could hear the Harleys rumbling down Interstate 1. He told me he had been hearing the engines roaring late into the night, even though Bike Week had only just begun.

The dichotomy of my dad lies somewhere between the military and mysticism. On the one hand, he is harmless; a space cadet, as my mother says; a new-age goof. On the other, he is a Marine—nothing harmless about that. He's mellowed over the years, has buried that hard edge that I could always sense just beneath the skin when I was a child, but it's hard to forget. I remember a fierce argument my parents had when I was maybe six. I don't recall what the argument was about, and I doubt they do, either, but my father became so incensed he threw one of my mother's antique wooden chairs, hand-painted and inherited from her great-grandmother, down the stairs. It exploded on the landing below in a shower of wood splinters, and he stormed out of the house. The sound that it made as it shattered was like bones breaking. The next day my dad shut himself in his woodshop with all those jagged pieces and glued my mother's favorite chair back together. It took him all day, and when he was finished, it was stronger than it had been before, the hairline cracks barely visible, even if you were looking for them. This is how he was: first the rage, then the tender repair.

I used to imagine my father as a power switch: Dad On, Dad Off. In the On position, he was my favorite playmate; he would do anything to make me laugh, but then something would happen to flip the switch, and my father would disappear. Rage would bloom in his face, a deep, simmering, poinsettia red. The veins in his neck would bulge. His jaw muscles would dance in his cheeks as he ground his teeth together, his features distorted. He would become someone else, someone who looked like my father but was in fact a stranger. What frightened me more than this rage was the fact that I didn't know what would flip the switch, or how to flip it back.

This balance of power that I grew up with, the journey between the bookends of my father's repertoire, the destructive and the restorative, taught me to tread lightly. In physics,
power
is defined as the rate at which work occurs. It is a concept that hinges on the duration of work, and how much of it is accomplished in a finite set of time. On its own, work has no temporal implications. It takes however long it takes—but power hinges on time. The faster work is done, or energy transferred, the more power is being used. I think of emotions like rage and joy and despair, and the amount of energy these feelings exhaust, how abruptly they come, and how brightly they burn. I think of my father going from silly to wrathful in a matter of seconds, and the surprise of it, the utter shock. The faster the transition, the more powerful the reaction. As I grew older, the warning signs began to be more obvious, words became imbued with meaning, I started to see patterns. I quickly learned how to see the train coming, knew when to step out of the way, and his rage lost some of its power over me.

I don't like remembering my father in this light, because he's changed over the years, has fought to overcome the kind of trauma I can't even imagine. He's consciously and painstakingly evolved. He's a student of meditation, Pranic Healing, yoga asanas, good intentions; but the rage is hard to forget because it moves so quickly and is so all-encompassing, spreading across his face like wildfire. These days the On/Off switch is still there, but it's no longer the same seismic shift it used to be. I understand him better now and am grateful to have him, yet the scraps of my childhood fear will always cling to me: not fear of the dark or of serial killers, but of the people I love turning on me without warning and becoming unrecognizable.

•   •   •

M
Y DAD AND
I
EXPLORED
the fringes of Bike Week over the course of the next few days. Simply by nature of living in New Smyrna Beach we were in the thick of it, but we skipped the nightlife, which, by the sound of it, was raucous and inexhaustible. We did other things. We rode out to an event on the lawns of the Daytona Speedway; I was hoping for a race or a show, but it was mainly just a gathering of vendors and show-offs. The merchandise was nothing new, but the motorcycles I saw there took my breath away. There were the motorcycles being displayed, and those were cool, but then there were the thousands of bikes parked in rows ringing the event: bikes people had ridden there. I could've walked up and down those rows all day.

There were sidecars and three-wheelers and license plates from Maine and California and Texas; there were Harleys, so many Harleys, and seriously sleek sport bikes from Asia and Europe with lime-green racing stripes and exhaust pipes that were tricked out to spit flames. Vintage, brand-new, custom, stock, every make was represented, every model. I even saw a little Rebel 250, around the same year as mine, with Kentucky plates and 60,000 miles on the odometer.

When I couldn't look at the motorcycles any longer, I looked at the people. Bikers in chaps, in performance padded jackets, with Mohawks and ponytails and crew cuts and scalp tattoos; bull dykes with tits out to here; women dressed all in pink leather; a never-ending parade of middle-aged white men in black Harley T-shirts with varying degrees of hair loss. I saw a woman with no pants, just chaps and a G-string, then I saw another, without pants or chaps, just a hot-pink leotard and a pair of cowboy boots.