Motorcycles I've Loved (5 page)

I grew up and went on my own journey, disappeared in my own way. Eventually, I let go of the boy I remembered so vividly. The fixation of my teenage years gave way to a ferocious grudge I sustained for more than half a decade. Long after Phineas had extended the olive branch, I stayed silent. I finally went to visit him out west and met the man he had become when I was twenty-one and he was thirty, seven years after I'd watched him drive away. His face was a little fuller, his beard and his waistline a little thicker. My mother always used to refer to him as a string bean when he was a teenager, but he had lost his gangly scrawniness and become a solid-looking man, handsome, with broad shoulders and wire-rimmed glasses. He told me he was a line cook and worked the graveyard shift in a fast-food kitchen, which he liked because he had the whole line to himself, and that he studied the Bible in his free time. He said he didn't have many friends; that he didn't want many. We talked about our parents. There were so many memories of my childhood that I had never fully understood, and here was my chance. “I'll tell you when you're older” was the line I had been used to hearing, and here I was, finally: older. It was the first time we had spoken as adults, and there was so much I wanted to know.

We went for a walk, using fallen branches to switch away the mosquitoes from our bare legs, taking pictures here and there because my mother had demanded it with an intensity I don't often see in her. It was the first time in seven years that her two children had been in the same state, and she wouldn't let it go undocumented.

He pointed out the chemtrails in the sky, wispy puffs of chemicals sprayed by clandestine government airplanes. I nodded, but my heart was sinking as he became animated, explaining about the Them that seemed to dominate his entire life; I didn't press for details. Thom and I stayed for a few more days, in a motel not far from Phin's house, where he rented a room and slept on the floor in a sleeping bag. Phin and I did our best to tiptoe around the land mines, each of us thinking the other was crazy, silently agreeing not to mention it. “Let me know when you're ready to wake up from your illusions,” he whispered to me sometime before I left, and although I knew he meant it kindly, I was furious. Furious at him for being recognizable but indelibly different, for not understanding what he had done to me, and to our family, to my parents; furious at him for his staunch conviction that I was the one who needed waking up.

I drove away that day not knowing when I would see him again but needing to feel the wind lashing around the open windows of the car, the highway slipping away beneath my feet, never mind the destination. I needed to move. Phineas and I travel at different velocities, but I understand his impulse for motion, because I feel it, too.

•   •   •

I
FELT THAT SAME IMPULSE
about a year later, when a man I was interested in started sleeping with someone else. I had ridden up to the northwestern border of Massachusetts to work at a youth camp, just weeks after buying the Rebel, and I learned about the affair from some gossipy campers, who recounted their after-hours discovery with delight, not knowing I would care—but I did care. The stress of working with teenagers twenty-four hours a day, of living in a mildewed tent, of feeling that unexpected stab of rejection, suddenly overwhelmed me.

It seems trivial now, but in that moment the elusive promise of perspective in a week, a day, even an hour, was utterly useless. I felt exhausted, angry, spurned, and something came loose inside of me—what was that, I wondered, logic? Calm? But it was too late, I was moving, and I didn't care what had come loose, would have shaken my entire fucking head like a piggy bank if I could have, until it all fell out, every last thought, every last emotion. The pressure that built inside my chest propelled me toward my helmet in the staff room, then down to the parking lot, slamming doors, stomping my feet, kicking rocks the whole way. I felt hurt, and with that came a slow simmer of unhinged, senseless rage in the pit of my stomach. Some sliver of my consciousness panicked, grasped for logic, for perspective, but there was none.

Rage is an emotion that I rarely display in the company of others, and that has always frightened me in other people; I've seen it redden the faces of the men in my family far too often, contorting their familiar features into warped versions of themselves, suddenly and inexplicably transforming a father or a brother into a monster. I remember the terror a raised voice would instill in me, how I would cover my head with my arms as if the volume would physically hurt me. My memories of their wrath rarely make sense to me, even now: my father losing his shit because I didn't line up my shoes, my brother shaking me so hard my teeth rattled because I borrowed one of his comic books. My own rage is buried deep—as a child, I would go to my room, shut the door, and throw pillows when I felt angry, never able to lose myself enough to forget the consequences of destruction. Phineas, on the other hand, never even seemed aware of the consequences. I inflicted the rage I felt on myself, quietly and brutally, but Phin projected his onto the whole world, without provocation or mercy.

•   •   •

I
GOT TO THE PARKING LOT,
just beyond the boundaries of the camp, where I was keeping my motorcycle underneath a tarp, the corners tucked through the spokes of the tires to hold it down, a big rock pinning it to the seat. I ripped the tarp off and flung it into the scrubby grass, and the rock rolled underneath a car. I took the tiny key from my pocket, opened the choke, and pressed the starter button.

As soon as the engine coughed to life, the tightly coiled tendons in my neck loosened a little; my shoulders began to sink. Just hearing the thump of the combustion, the wheeze of the exhaust, my body knew what was coming, and it responded. I strapped on my helmet but kept my visor open, and backed up out of my spot; then I knocked it into first and blew out of the parking lot so fast I almost didn't make it around the corner. Wind filled my lungs like the bellows of a concertina, and I roared past a stop sign, onto the main road.

Rowe is a beautiful place to ride; it's way out there, and the roads are well paved and sparsely populated. The incline rolls up and down all the way to Shelburne Falls, and the curves are sumptuous. The view I didn't appreciate just then, but the curves I hugged as tightly as if we were dancing. I was going fast enough to feel the breeze pushing me back and forth across the road, but I went faster. I glanced down at the speedometer, idly wondering where courage ends and carelessness begins.

I knew I should turn around, should slow down, dig up some rational thoughts and a couple of brain cells, but in that moment, with that kind of ferocious exuberance fluttering underneath my right palm, I couldn't bring myself to let up and straighten my wrist. It was like playing chicken with someone I couldn't see. I got down to Charlemont, riding recklessly the whole way, and I pulled into the gas station to fill up. I hadn't decided yet how far I was going, or in which direction, but I knew I was going to go fast. I put down the kickstand and took my helmet off, hooking the open visor onto the end of the handlebar as I climbed off. On the other side of the pump, a potbellied golfer filled his gold SUV and gave me a long, curious look. For a split second I saw myself in the reflection of his car window: flaming hair wired with static electricity, dark smudges of mascara under both eyes, practically quivering with rage.

“That's a nice bike,” he said after a minute.

“Thanks.”

“Used to have one just like it,” he said. “What year is that? 'Eighty-something?”

“'Eighty-six.”

“Brings me back.”

I nodded and went into the gas station, bought five dollars' of premium, and filled up my tank. He was still there when I finished, and his pump was still going. He kept trying to catch my eye, but I wasn't having any of it. I put on my helmet.

“Hey,” he said as I started the bike, “ride safe.”

I snapped my visor down, and, looking at him through the tinted plastic, I saw an expression on his face that I recognized. The puckered eyebrows and earnest eyes, an uncertain slant to his mouth, a face that conveyed both worry and helplessness. It was my mother's face, after a disturbing phone call from Phin, or when I announced I was dropping out of high school. The man lifted a hand as I rode away from the pump, and I saw him turn to watch me pull out of the parking lot.

I rode a little farther, but it was getting dark fast. I felt the pull of gravity and followed it, sinking back into the atmosphere, into reality. I headed back to the camp. On the way, it rained a little, just enough to slick the roads, and I slowed down. I remembered that
Escape Velocity
was never my game, that I had nothing to prove. I remembered that I had a choice. Maybe Phineas didn't have that, maybe the twists and turns of his brain dictated his actions, his beliefs, but I sensed a decision waiting to be made, and so I reached down deep and I made it. I recognized it—a decision I'd made before, one I'll make again. The decision to pause, to pull back. I let my thoughts settle, my blood cool; I flexed my fingers. Speed and direction aligned. I leaned back into the wind and felt the throb of the engine buzzing through the soles of my boots and into the pads of my feet. Vibrations crept up my legs and down my arms. I listened to the whistle of air past my helmet and the hiss of my tires on the wet asphalt, the taste of soggy summer night air and gasoline on my tongue. The road straightened out, and for a long moment my velocity was constant—perfectly fluid, as if I were gliding.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK
, the parking lot was quiet and the tarp was tangled in the tall grass where I had left it. I switched off the engine and the silence seemed to expand, to take up room around my mouth and eyes and ears like a physical presence, shushing me with some kind of invisible pressure. I unlaced the chin strap of my helmet and set it on my lap. Air rushed against my face, sound found its way to my ears: crickets in the scrub, frogs at the edge of the pond, birds murmuring in the trees.

I got off the bike and spread the tarp out over it, then I tucked it in, each corner laced through a wheel spoke and back again. I found the rock that had rolled under a car and repositioned it on the seat of the bike, a little extra weight just in case those clouds hanging over Vermont moved in and brought a storm with them, and then I tucked my helmet into the crook of my arm. The hollow between my heart and my stomach still ached, but my head felt clearer. The pounding need to move had abated, and the raw fury of rejection that had fueled me sputtered and went out. I felt spent, as if I'd been awake for days. As if I'd been riding for days. I looked back at the Rebel, bundled up in her blue tarp like a newborn, and I thought of that man at the gas station in Charlemont. His expression, so familiar it startled me, and my own, in the reflection of his car: jaw rigid, eyelids tight and narrow, nostrils flared, breath slow and heavy and ragged—unhinged. I recognized that one, too. I drew a line in the gravel with the heel of my boot as I fished a pack of cigarettes out of my breast pocket; then I turned away from the Rebel and started walking.

Entropy

E
ntropy
can be quantified as the amount of disorder in a closed system, or the measure of unavailable energy. It is a quantity that illustrates the simple but irrefutable fact that in nature, order tends toward disorder and never the opposite. Concentrated energy disperses, chemical bonds erode, heat cools, cold warms. Entropy must either increase or stay constant, which is why it is sometimes referred to as
time's arrow
—by discovering how much entropy, or disorder, is present, one can make inferences about the timeline of events. This isn't a scientific quirk, or a complex formula. This is fundamental, intrinsic to how we interpret what we see.

Imagine, for a moment: a motorcycle is on its side, debris everywhere, a car splayed sideways across the road and white steam curling from beneath the hood. There are sirens, and shouting, and the smell of spilt gasoline and burnt rubber.

Now look again: double yellow line, smooth pavement, and a motorcyclist whizzing down the road, her passenger's head turned to admire the view—a car in the distance, a deer poised in the brush.

And again: a motorcyclist and her passenger on an otherwise empty road, no one ahead, no one behind, just fresh black asphalt and warm afternoon light.

It doesn't take a scientist to know which snapshot comes when, and it doesn't take a scientist to know that the opposite sequence, the motorcycle spontaneously rising from its side, regaining its fallen passenger and rider, unbending its handlebars, and restarting its engine—is impossible. Entropy is a one-way street; this knowledge is innate. No one needs to explain why spilled milk stays spilled, or why milk tends to spill in the first place, it's only whether one cries about it or not that warrants an aphorism.

•   •   •

W
HEN
P
HINEAS HEADED WEST
I was about to begin my first year of high school. I had always been very concerned that I would somehow be trapped in the small suction cup of a town where I grew up, as if I might put down roots by accident, and so I became intent on the idea of boarding school. As I was always impatient to be moving forward, growing up and getting on with being an adult, it seemed like the thing to do. I was adamant about this, impatient to expand my horizons. My parents never had a hope of convincing me otherwise. I imagined finding kindred spirits at boarding school, learning amazing new things, becoming cool, attractive, edgy. I was terrified of venturing into the unknown, but also thrilled and so, so ready—this was it, I remember thinking, the beginning of growing up, the end of being a child, what a thrill. My mother gave me the enormous steamer trunk she had taken to college in the sixties, and I painted the inside of it a bright, robin's-egg blue. I was so pleased when I finished. Brush in hand, I stepped back to admire my handiwork in the flickering fluorescence of my father's woodshop, newspapers under the edges and painter's tape around the lip, imagining it in my dorm room. I still have the trunk, but I keep it mostly shut—the blue seems too bright, too obvious. It is an overly optimistic shade.

I had already begun to sense a little darkness in my thoughts, depths that hadn't been there before. Eighth grade fluttered by on gray wings, but that particular period of apathy was easy to dismiss as a symptom of my location. I'd begun to despise life in my small town and at my even smaller school. It wasn't so much the smallness itself that made me cringe, it was the small-mindedness, the insularity of the people around me. I was sure there had to be somewhere better, but I had yet to understand that the bleak and hopeless wasteland I was entering wasn't the landscape of my surroundings. It was within.

Discovering this inexplicable sadness was like flipping over a mossy rock in the woods and seeing the fat grubs and centipedes unearthed, writhing as the light touches them, or discovering a false bottom in my soul, a dark and foreboding extension of who I had believed myself to be. I was instantly ashamed, as if this was wrong, was somehow my own fault, and so I pretended it wasn't there. This was easy at first—there was no one to tell the difference. Phineas was in the wind by then—lost, but not yet found. My parents were home, in their empty nest, a little more than an hour south from me. My mother, keeping busy at her school, teaching art to kindergarten through twelfth grade, organizing the yearbook and the art fair and the half a dozen other extracurricular activities she always seemed to be in charge of; my father, listening to audiobooks in his woodshop as he made jewelry boxes and tables and stools, sanding them smooth, then varnishing them until the wood grain glistened like living golden veins.

I had chosen between two boarding schools, one large, preppy, and prestigious, one small and alternative, with a working farm on its campus. I don't fully remember my reasoning behind choosing the smaller school, but the idea that Phineas would approve certainly crossed my mind, as his approval had yet to lose its currency with me. When I toured it I saw kids with neon hair and piercings, in frayed jeans and muck boots, playing Ultimate Frisbee, dreading one another's hair, sketching on big pads with sticks of charcoal. The tour guide showed us the barn, with its rows of cows and a few students shaking containers full of feed, and the pond, where kids swam in their underwear. It was familiar, and at the same time it was a whole new universe. I could see myself there. At the other school they showed us the massive, silent library and a Vespers rehearsal, brick dorms, and pristine soccer fields. It was a beautiful campus, and utterly predictable. The first school drew me in with its strangeness. It magnetized me.

From the moment orientation began, there was so much to do, so little time to think, that I was carried through the first few months of my freshman year simply by the momentum of everyone around me. Yet this in and of itself began to eat away at me. Yes, my peers were interesting and unique, artists and farmers and activists and nerds, but I couldn't escape them, even for a moment. I had grown up with hours and hours to myself, whole days for sitting in the tall grass outside or reading in my room, and suddenly it wasn't possible to be alone. Suddenly, I needed to be in class, or at an activity, or at my work-study job, or doing homework, or socializing. I was almost immediately exhausted.

There was no time to address the sadness that was overtaking me, no way to release it. I upped the wattage of my smile to compensate, but it only made my energy fade faster. It only made me feel like a liar. Pretty soon I started acting like one, too. I lied about skipping classes, about smoking pot in the woods; I lied about the bottles of booze that I grew skilled at stealing; I lied about hallucinating with psilocybin mushrooms and unadvised amounts of cough-and-cold medication, watching the ceiling bubble and the walls breathe. All this was a way of searching for a release valve, some way to let just a breath of despair escape my body, because if I couldn't find relief I was sure I would burst.

Of the blur that was my freshman year, I remember most vividly the crowded crush of Milk Lunch, a mid-morning snack that the school served in the foyer of the dining hall. There was watery hot cocoa and cider and coffee and warm, gooey muffins laid out on a barricade of folding tables, plus a few hundred kids packed into the cramped space, waiting and pushing and squawking like a flock of gulls, crumbs falling from their mouths, muffin wrappers scattered across the floor. I remember entering the throng and feeling as though my head would explode, wishing fervently to disappear, to find myself somewhere, anywhere, else. Come to think of it, I felt like my head was about to explode for almost the entire year. I had always been a relatively easygoing kid—I didn't know what to make of the anxious, icy sweat trickling down my neck and behind my knees, didn't have the vocabulary or the knowledge or the perspective to understand what was happening to me.

Navigating boarding school as a naïve fourteen-year-old with depression and anxiety nipping at my heels was overwhelming, but when Phineas resurfaced at the end of that first semester, it became torture. All I wanted was to be liked, to make some friends, to not be ridiculed or flunk French, but even those modest goals felt insurmountable. I was sinking on my own, but then losing my brother took me straight to the bottom. First he sent me a box, full of his favorite things: T-shirts, CDs, books—no note, just things. Things I had always coveted—suddenly, I didn't want them anymore. We hadn't heard from him in months and I had no idea what this gift meant, but I went ahead and thought the worst. My parents reported a disturbing and irrational phone call from him, and then, after I sent a pleading letter to an address I had for him in Utah, begging him to come home, his sermons began to arrive. I kept them because they were so cruel. I knew I would second-guess myself later, that I would have to go back and reaffirm that he had indeed written that in bold, black ink. Seeing someone else's beliefs, someone else's words, in my brother's handwriting shook me, unsettled me like I had never been unsettled before. Someone else's words, but undoubtedly his own voice, his own twisted humor and slang and biting logic that I had always trusted implicitly as a child, even when he told me things like my new toy shark would expand and come alive if used in water; or watching
The Wizard of Oz
too many times would make me go blind; or cigarettes tasted like chocolate.

This time I was older, he was meaner, and I'd already been fooled one too many times. So when he wrote,
“You are a wretched excuse for a human, but you can have forgiveness from God. That is, if you so choose, or should I say, if God so chooses you,”
I had enough of a spine not to get down on my face and repent for my selfish little soul, as he suggested on page 11, but not enough to discard the claim that I was a wretched excuse for a human being. I was already so miserable it fit right in with the rest of my convictions. I internalized the brimstone, declined the salvation.

I don't recall many details from that year, though, oddly, I do remember seeking out old prom and bridesmaid dresses at secondhand stores and wearing them with black combat boots, underneath raggedy sweatshirts. I mention the dresses because I can picture them more clearly than the faces of most of my classmates. Something about the colors made me feel better—there was a lavender off-the-shoulder dress, mid-length, with a ribbed corset; a strapless iridescent blue ball gown, layer upon layer of shimmering fabric for a skirt, like shiny flower petals, and a purple silk lining; a spring-green frock with yellow roses embroidered on the collar. I changed my hair a lot—dying it one color, then another; cutting it short, letting it grow, cutting it even shorter, but I could never seem to look in the mirror without wanting to disappear. I kissed a boy for the first time, then a girl, or maybe the other way around, I can't remember for sure which came first. My mind was expanding so quickly, changing so rapidly, that the moment I thought I knew who I was everything would shift and I would lose track.

Summer arrived, and that helped. School let out, and gradually I could breathe again. I went back to my childhood home in southern Vermont, where the closest neighbor was a dairy farm a mile away and there were acres and acres of meadow or forest to wander in. The press of scheduled time and crowded assemblies ceased while my imagination took over, led me away from the harsh realities that had been bringing me low. But when my sophomore year rolled around it was like being dropped back into a barrel of ice water—constricting, cold, dark, and familiar in the worst way. The correspondence from my brother had lost its temporary, what-the-fuck-is-happening quality and become an old, stale pain that I still didn't understand. I started to realize that I never would, and that's probably around the time that the self-destruction I found myself experimenting with—binge drinking, popping pills, snorting them, putting cigarettes out on my arm, cutting myself with a razor blade—became difficult to conceal. All the rage I felt at being abandoned by Phineas, at the horrible hopelessness I couldn't help but attribute to him, was pointed inward.

In the end, everything I had been trying so desperately to hide became illuminated by an inquisitive spotlight. The dean found out and called my parents, who came and got me. I felt disgusted with myself and simultaneously not sorry at all. I had short-circuited, and there was the burnt-out fuse for everyone to see. There was pain in this shift, but also a strange, smoldering nugget of pleasure—a downward spiral was what came next in the blueprints Phineas had left me, a black hole, and in that respect, at least, I was on the right track. I dropped out around Thanksgiving, then enrolled in community college the next semester, acquiring credits that went toward appeasing my understandably freaked-out parents and also counted toward my high school requirements. From having two reasonably well-adjusted children, they had gone to one, and then to none. I didn't know what to tell them, how to explain something I didn't understand, either.

At this point, I can tell you how boarding school felt, but not how it was; can recall the colors I wore, but little about the roommates I lived with. The years after are a bit clearer. Post–boarding school, the psychology of mental illness became a fixation. I began to look for it in myself, in my own behavior and thought patterns. The chronic-depression diagnosis I received didn't interest me—hopelessness wasn't an answer, just another word for my day-to-day. Instead, I was captivated by delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and breaks with reality, and I did all sorts of research in my spare time. I wished for this sort of disconnect in some small way—for the ability to do what Phin had apparently done, to disappear from the world entirely. To manufacture my own reality, then live there, forever. It was a precipice I played at the edge of a little too often and a little too eagerly.

Over the course of the next year my best friends were drugs and alcohol. I discovered sex, first with girls my own age, then with an assortment of men too old for me. At sixteen I got a car—a revelation. A game-changer. I could go where I liked when I liked, and the intoxication of this freedom thrilled me so deeply I came to crave speed and uncertainty whenever I stood still. The knowledge that I could take my keys and go, anywhere, and no one would be able to find me was exhilarating. When it came time to begin thinking about what to do next, all I knew was I would follow that exhilaration anywhere. My associate's degree quickly arrived on the horizon—I took classes during both the summer and winter breaks in order to finish sooner—and I began planning my disappearing act.