Motorcycles I've Loved (4 page)

I could barely sit still the whole way back to Northampton. When we finally arrived and unloaded the Rebel from the van, it was dark. We parked it in the driveway and shared a can of beer as we admired the glow of chrome from the porch steps. Rigdhen went home after the beer was gone, but I stayed outside, turning the Rebel on now and then to hear the roar, then reluctantly turning it off again, counting the hours until the Registry of Motor Vehicles office would open and I could get it on the road.

•   •   •

M
OTORCYCLES ARE
usually referred to by the size of their engines, and the unit of measurement is most often the cc, or cubic centimeter, although on American motorcycles you'll see this number expressed in cubic inches. The measurement refers to the capacity of the engine, or, in mechanical terms, the engine's displacement: the amount of air and fuel that is swept into an engine during one complete cycle. Once the chamber is full and the piston has been pushed from the top down to the bottom by the intake, the piston compresses the mixture until it is ignited, the explosion of which forces the piston back to its original place as the chamber fills once again and the process is repeated. The size of the chamber correlates with the size of the combustion, which is at the root of an engine's force output.

Whether there is one cylinder or six, an internal combustion engine will work in essentially the same way, but the more cylinders you have, the more volume your engine can handle, and therefore the more force it can generate. Between a 125cc dirt bike with a single cylinder and a 6,000cc Boss Hoss cruiser packing eight, there's quite a scope of power to consider. The size of an engine is, of course, relative to how much force it outputs, but that's not the whole story. An engine needs to be tuned in order to produce maximum power. The idle speed, fuel/air mixture, carburetor balance, and ignition timing each play a part in how the engine performs, and while knowing an engine's displacement might give an idea as to what kind of power is available, in the end cc's are a measurement of volume—not force.

With regard to vehicles, horsepower is the unit of measurement used most often to describe an engine's force output, but the relationship between horsepower and cc's is indefinite. A 125cc engine tuned for maximum power can generate as much as 50 horsepower, whereas the same engine, tuned differently, might get only 20 hp. Racing vehicles are where the strongest ratio between engine displacement and horsepower can be found, because speed is the one and only goal, but some of the weakest ratios can be found in the largest engines, where endurance and stability are most desired. A ship's engine with fourteen cylinders, weighing roughly 2,300 tons, has a displacement of 25,498,000 cubic centimeters but generates only 108,920 horsepower. It seems like a big number, but proportional to its displacement, it's not all that impressive. Then consider a tiny 3.5cc model car engine, and get this: it can generate up to 3.45 hp. Now, that
is
impressive, whether the kid holding the remote control knows it or not. Size and force are relative, but there is so much more to it.

•   •   •

O
N
M
ONDAY
I
DISCOVERED
, after waiting on a bench at the RMV for an hour and a half, that the registration fees for the Rebel would be more than a hundred bucks and only personal checks or cash were acceptable forms of payment. I squeezed seventy-six dollars out of my wallet and a little pile of change from my pockets before I admitted defeat and left the teller's window in dejection. I made my way out to the parking lot and circled the block, fuming with frustration, looking for an ATM so that I could withdraw the very last of the money I had managed to save from waiting tables all year and had set aside for acquiring a motorcycle.

When I got back to the RMV, cashed up and calmed down, I slipped past the waiting masses to the woman I had been speaking to earlier, ignoring the dirty looks shot my way. She took my money and my forms, then handed me a full-sized set of license plates in a wax-paper bag and waved me off, shooing me away like a fly. I laughed nervously, and she gave me a look. We stared at each other for a second.

“Um,” I said, and then paused, trying to be diplomatic, not wanting to point out her mistake. She waited, obviously irritated. “These are for a motorcycle?”

She checked the forms and a flood of apologies emerged; she became almost sweet.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, “I wasn't even paying attention. These wouldn't fit, huh?”

“Ha. No, I guess they wouldn't.”

“Let me get you the right kind.” She disappeared for a moment and returned with a single plate, about the size of my hand. “Does this look a little better?”

“It does.” I nodded.

She smiled, but there was something sad about it. “I used to ride on the back of my husband's Harley,” she told me, as if the husband and the bike were both distant memories. “I loved it.” She had beautiful cheekbones magnified by enormous glasses frames. I imagined her in leathers, a decade or two younger, her arms wrapped around the waist of the faceless husband, roaring through some quiet rural town. She looked past me, and I wondered if we were imagining the same thing. I thanked her, and before I walked away I leaned across the counter for a second, palms flat on the cool plastic surface.

“You should get your own,” I said, “sans husband.”

She laughed and shooed me away. “You're cute,” she said and sighed. “If I was a young thing like you, maybe I would.” Before I could respond, the number over her station clicked forward and a mother carrying her toddler under one arm squeezed past me. I wanted to tell her what I had only begun to learn for myself: That she had a choice. That there's no such thing as too old or too young, no such thing as too small, or too weak. We tell children that they can be whoever they want to be when they grow up, but then forget we can make that choice as adults, too. A motorcycle is a vehicle of change, after all. It puts the wheels beneath a midlife crisis, or a coming-of-age saga, or even just the discovery of something new, something you didn't realize was there. It provides the means to cross over, to transition, or to revitalize; motorcycles are self-discovery's favorite vehicle.

When I got home I attached the license plate to the Rebel's fender with a few zip ties and took her out for our first ride together. I went around the block a few times to smooth out my shifting, and then we leapt out onto Route 9, amid the humming traffic. I weaved around potholes and frost heaves, and when I rolled up to a stoplight I revved the engine joyfully while waiting for it to turn green. I could almost see that archetypal motorcyclist up ahead, hair lashing out behind her like a banner, her spurs sharpened to razor points and her hand heavy on the throttle. She took her turns low to the ground and flew between passing cars, tires eating up the dotted line, a speeding smudge of silver and black.

About an hour later, I pulled into my garage and cut the engine. I got off and stepped back to admire the fiery blue glow of my gas tank in the dim light. A friend of a friend glided up the driveway on his bicycle and stopped to admire the Rebel with me for a moment. “It's so cute,” he said, and I frowned, dissatisfied for a moment, in his reaction and in my purchase, but then I stopped myself short. After years of letting that word diminish me, I reminded myself that it was only a word: a house-trained, second-rate adjective that had about as much potency behind it as
fine
or
cool
. Maybe it was true, and so what if it was? It wasn't his reaction that mattered, it was mine.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She is.” Suddenly, I didn't care if the force I felt showed on my face; I knew it was there. It would have to be enough.

Velocity

V
elocity
is a word that's often used interchangeably with speed, but it's more specific than that. It's not only the rate of speed but also the direction that it travels in. It's a vector property, which is to say that its definition includes both a magnitude and a direction. On the other hand, speed is a scalar because it defines only a quantity. Sixty miles per hour is a speed. Sixty miles per hour, heading south, is a velocity.

My older brother, Phineas, used to play this computer game called
Escape Velocity
, and as I was hardly a worthy gaming adversary, I would often just sit and watch him play. This was in the mid-nineties, so the graphics weren't complex; you, the little spaceship in the middle of the screen, were traveling through outer space very, very fast. There was debris in your way, and sometimes other spaceships shot sluggish laser beams at you. You could land on planets and develop trade relationships with their governments, and you could flip on your hyperdrive to travel instantaneously between stars. I remember rolling the name around in my mouth,
Escape Velocity
,
thinking maybe it had something to do with going faster than the speed of light, never really being sure.

Later I learned that
escape velocity
is a scientific term—but it's a misnomer, as it quantifies a speed independent of direction. It should probably be called
escape speed
, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it. Escape velocity refers to the minimum speed required to break free, or to escape
,
from gravity, and it can be in any direction. I guess that's where the name of the computer game comes from: jumping from planet to planet, breaking free from gravity over and over again. It's an inspiring idea: you, that little spaceship, overcoming powers as great as a planet's gravitational pull, mission after mission, defying the sway of the universe and sallying forth into empty, unexplored space; blasting through the barrier. When I think of it that way, I understand my brother a little better—he was always searching for a way to escape gravity, never mind the direction of the trajectory.

When he was twenty-three he found it. All it took was a broken heart and a solo cross-country drive. I didn't see him for more than seven years. He went to Utah first, and found God, then to Washington, and found conspiracies. He signed over his bank account, his soul, and his station wagon to fundamental Christians and then either alienated or ignored everyone he had ever known.

Phin left right around my fourteenth birthday, and after a few months of silence, I began to receive letters from him at boarding school. They were hard to follow, full of half-finished thoughts and scribbles crammed onto both sides of tattered sheets of college-ruled paper. He called me a sinner and an ignorant fool and told me I was going to end up in hell. He told me my parents were criminals, that we were sleepwalkers, and that my only hope of salvation was to throw myself upon the mercy of God. Confused and devastated, I read and reread each one, looking for some glimmer of logic, of familiarity. I didn't find any. His slingshot away from the early years sent him off on a trajectory so drastic he seemed like another person. He still does, but the shock and the nostalgia has worn away to the meager thread of our shared childhood. These days, I try to rein our interactions in to the mundane and keep the connection alive, but the neutral ground left to us is scant. Another way to think of velocity is as the rate of displacement—how quickly and in what way an object moves away from its original place.

•   •   •

W
E GREW UP IN RURAL
V
ERM
ONT,
and we both went to the local school, which educated kindergarten through eighth grade. There were about sixty or seventy students who went there. The older kids went to the high school in the next town over, and there was just one year that Phineas and I rode the bus to school together. Me, a tiny kindergartner clinging desperately to his huge eighth-grader hand. I remember him zipping up my coat for me during the winter and making me wear my hat even when I didn't want to, shepherding me into my classroom in the mornings. The year after, he was on a different bus, at a different school, but I remember waiting at the bottom of the hill together in the mornings, hands in our pockets as we leaned out into the road, trying to spot a bus coming around the bend. Sometimes we would leave a nickel on the guardrail post and check to see if it was still there when we got home.

There is a photo of us around this age that I've carried during all my travels and pinned to the wall in each of my homes. He's fourteen or so. I am five or six. He leans his head back against an Adirondack chair painted pale blue and looks at the camera. His Adam's apple is exposed, just beginning to swell with adolescence, and his childish black bowl cut is tousled. He smiles, mischievously. I am a golden blur on his right, the profile of my delighted features visible beside a curtain of moving hair. I am whispering a secret in his ear and he is surreptitiously tickling me just as the shutter clicks, making me shriek with laughter.

About the same time this was taken, my dad bought a hunter-green 125cc dirt bike for eighty dollars and taught my brother how to ride it. They would go to an abandoned gravel pit up the road to practice—popping wheelies among the sand dunes, taking jumps off the diminished gravel piles. I was so young—I can't tell which memories are real and which are built from secondhand stories, but I can remember impatiently waiting my turn to take a ride on my father's lap, zipping up and down the dirt road we lived on. He had this dark brown leather bomber jacket with a faux fur collar that he wore all throughout the nineties, and big horn-rimmed glasses that, in league with his beard, took over his entire face. I remember holding on to the handlebars with my tiny fists, the fur collar on his jacket tickling the back of my neck, sitting on his lap with my short little legs humming against the gas tank and watching the road flow by beneath us—or at least I think I do.

The bike didn't last long. Maybe a year or two, then my brother crashed it in the meadow behind our house. Phin would have been thirteen or fourteen, and totally incapable of following anything resembling direction. The grass was tall and slippery, and there was a rock he just couldn't see. It must have been a big one, because when he hit it he was launched high into the air. I think of him hovering for a moment before crashing down, long limbs flopping, back arched against the sky, and for a split second gravity couldn't touch him. He'd been told over and over not to ride on the grass—even I knew he wasn't supposed to—but he didn't care.

My father was furious. The membrane that seems to shield most people's emotions from their impulses is extraordinarily thin in my dad. He has always been an all-or-nothing kind of man—usually brimming with love, occasionally overflowing with rage. The incident with the motorcycle was only one of many conflicts between him and my brother. He hauled the bike into the shed and sold it the first chance he got. Game over. Phin ended up with some bruises and a burn on his calf from the muffler when he crashed. I remember admiring it: the flaking skin, the shiny mottled pucker around the edges. It was a beauty. I revered his recklessness, his loosely focused tenacity, but most of all his battle scar. I wanted one just like it.

•   •   •

I
HAD A SENSE
of never quite being able to catch up to my brother. I was forever stuck in this body that was too small for my aspirations—I wanted to be a sidekick, or a cohort, anything but his dumb kid sister. When Phin was in high school, the pedestal I set him on was so high I could barely see him up there. I thought everything he did was fantastic, even when it wasn't, and although he'd been my protector when I was very young, as a teenager he lost interest in me, then became my tormentor instead. I was annoying, and precocious, and an exact opposite of him in a hundred ways, a fact that seemed to grate on him the older we got, but that served only to fascinate me more and more. He was lanky and brooding, getting taller by the second, with black hair and a troubled soul, struggling through school, clashing with my father constantly. I was tiny and golden, always smiling, always hovering too closely at his elbow, breezing through my elementary years in a way that I see now must have been infuriating, charming my parents into taking my side whenever there was a gray area. I sensed a certain bitterness coming from him, as if I had no right to learn so easily or to smile so brightly, but this only made me more indebted to him, more resolved to earn his love, his respect.

In earlier years, my brother was my ally whenever our parents fought. He would stay with me in my room, the covers tented over our heads, while they shouted on the other side of the wall. He would tell silly jokes and make faces until the shouting died down and the apologies had been made. Then, as a teenager, he became the adept instigator of these explosions. His “bad attitude” was the constant culprit, and I would seek refuge alone, from all three of them. He got a car when he was sixteen, and from then on he was rarely home. His absences were easier in a lot of ways, but I never stopped missing him.

I don't mean to be stingy, I have beautiful memories, too: my brother and my father playing catch with a Frisbee, and me running between them, hopelessly trying to intercept it, utterly thrilled to be a part of their game. The pair of rabbits we bought at a farmer's market one year, that we thought were both boys but turned out to be one of each, and the dozens of accidental bunnies that followed, too many for the hutch we kept them in. And the cats, of course, a constant rotation that were always disappearing into the woods and reappearing weeks later. The cats would stalk the birds, I would stalk the cats, and my brother would stalk me. No one could make me laugh quite so hard, or scream quite so loud, as Phineas could. I remember once he startled me so badly I burst into tears, and he spent an entire afternoon trying to make it up to me.

As family lore tells it, I was an easy baby. In contrast, Phin's reign of terror is legendary. There is one story in particular that always comes to mind, in which he and my mother are in a grocery store—Phin is four, maybe five—and he reaches for a sugary cereal. She says no. In protest, he lies down on the dirty tile floor, screaming his heart out, until my mother is forced to throw him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, gather up her purse, and abandon the cart amid stares and raised eyebrows, carrying him out to the parking lot.

Phineas was undoubtedly difficult, but I loved that about him. His complexity, his epic disdain for stupidity and pop culture and redneck politics, the pendulum effect of his moods—all of this seemed unbelievably exciting. More than that, though, was his ability to react without thinking. I was a child consumed with hesitation, but he was all action. No analysis, no false starts, just the plunge: headfirst. I couldn't understand how he did it, but I knew I wanted to learn how. There were so many bold adventures in his repertoire—riding dirt bikes, going spelunking in West Virginian caves with my father, being fantastic in productions like
The Odd Couple
and
The Real Inspector Hound
and
Guys and Dolls
. In one play, he was cast as an old, wild-eyed, fire-and-brimstone-style preacher. I remember finding that particular transformation—the white paint in his hair, the fury of his declarations, the zeal on his face—remarkable.

I couldn't wait to arrive at that age of privilege and independence, to stop being the spectator and start learning the game, but when I eventually got there, Phineas might as well have been on a different planet. He went to college in northern Vermont for a year, then dropped out and moved to Boston—I would have been ten or eleven. Suddenly, he was no longer in my orbit. I went to visit him in Boston a few glorious times, but it was like visiting the moon. I knew I didn't get to stay.

When I was nine, before he moved, I remember driving around in his car, a two-door piece of junk he called the Rusty Justy, listening to mix tapes. It was a rare moment in those years that he was paying attention to me, and I was alert to everything about it: the fast-food wrappers at my feet, the smell of his cigarette and the overflowing ashtray, the grumble of the engine, the grayness of the light coming through the windshield. An early White Stripes song came on, consisting of two lines and some
whoa-oh-oh-ohs
thrown in:

When I hear my name, I want to disappear . . .

When I see my face, I want to disappear

Phineas let the song finish and then he turned off the tape.

“Do you ever feel that way?” he asked me.

“What way?” I said.

“Like you wanna disappear.”

“Oh.” I thought for a minute, immediately wondering what he wanted to hear, even before I'd fully digested the question. “Yeah. I do,” I said, then began worrying I'd given him the wrong answer. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” he said and nodded. “All the time.” Then he turned on the tape again and we didn't talk anymore. We didn't need to. I felt slightly less alone, and I like to think he did, too.

•   •   •

W
HEN HE ACTUALLY
did disappear,
I felt more alone than ever. He left to go on his cross-country road trip a few weeks before the beginning of my freshman year, and after several months of silence I began to receive his letters. Phin's displacement became an obsession I had no room for, but which I clung to anyway. He had been my idol for so long, I couldn't give him up. It was like a nightmare in which I was holding something inanimate and cuddly, a doll or a stuffed animal, and suddenly it became a snapping, shrieking monster with sharp teeth and huge jaws. For a few years I couldn't manage to reconcile myself to this new reality. I kept trying to say something, anything, that would make him snap out of it and become himself again. I started thinking of myself as an only child because I didn't know how else to understand where my co-conspirator had gone, never mind how to articulate it. I just knew I had to let him go, that while I was waiting for the monster in my hands to change back into a teddy bear, it was ripping me apart.