Motorcycles I've Loved (2 page)

Accel
eration

W
hen I was a kid, my mother used to joke that she'd skin me alive if she ever caught me on the back of a motorcycle. Then, when I was seventeen, she told me she used to ride one. There was an Indian two-stroke, she said, with dusty black saddlebags and oily leather tassels that she rode from San Francisco to Missoula with a man she'd just met. They ran out of money in Washington and cleaned gas station bathrooms in exchange for the fuel to keep going. There was another bike she had, in Philadelphia, a Honda 305 that got stolen, boosted onto a truck in the middle of the night, and another in Vermont, an old Yamaha dirt bike she rode to her job as a public-school art teacher. She strapped a milk crate to the back and filled it with lesson plans and her lunch; it was 1981, and all the kids thought she was something else. I listened to my mother in awe as she counted off the motorcycles she'd owned and the motorcycles she'd ridden. She had me the same year she turned forty; I'd never known her young. She still taught art, but by then she was driving to school in a Toyota hatchback. There was a lot I didn't know.

I leaned forward and put my elbows on the countertop, and she told me how an old boyfriend taught her to ride his Triumph in an Illinois cornfield sometime during the mid-1960s, just before she dropped out of college. She'd ridden whiny little dirt bikes on the Jersey Shore as a teenager, but never a full-blooded motorcycle, and never with an engine like that—double-cylinder, four-stroke,
run home crying or ride straight to Las Vegas
polarity shimmering on the chrome finish.

I pictured it: pale green husks against indigo mountains that lay close to the earth, and the two of them, out there in a clearing by some ramshackle, whitewashed barn where the harvest was already cut and stacked. He taught her how to go, but before he could tell her how to stop she'd gone. The bike rumbled and she gunned it, showing off, thinking she had motorcycles down pat.

The front tire leapt into the air, the bike bucked her like a startled horse, and together they galloped forward: my mother, just barely hanging on to the throttle, inadvertently opening it up as far as it would go. She roared toward some hay bales, and when she couldn't swerve fast enough they caught her neatly, like rough pillows, plumped and piled high. I can see it: her boyfriend running to catch up to where she lay sprawled in the hay, overcome, laughing and sobbing and holding her arm like it had come apart at the elbow.

I love picturing my mother this way: with long dark hair and a leather jacket that's too big for her. I love thinking of her whipping down the highway, somewhere green and warm, a red handkerchief across her mouth to block the dust, and a big pair of mirrored aviators, pinned to her face by the wind. I wish she had been the one to show me how to ride, but there wasn't a chance in hell—I don't know how she taught me to drive a car without having a heart attack, but she's been telling me to slow down ever since.

•   •   •

T
HE MAN WHO
did teach me to ride chewed the side of his oily thumb and looked me over: an overexcited twenty-one-year-old running my hands along the sleek lines of a cruiser, impatiently waiting for instructions. A clean V-neck T-shirt glowed white against the permanent grease smudges on his hands and the deep nut-brown of his arms, his black hair smoothed back into a ponytail. Back then he wasn't quite a friend yet—a friend of a friend—but he was a motorcycle man, and the only one I knew at the time. I had been running into him a lot lately, and pestering him about wanting to learn, until he'd finally succumbed and picked me up at the curb outside my house one afternoon. It was the first time I'd been on a motorcycle since I was a little kid clinging to the handlebars of my dad's dirt bike, but it felt familiar. We found a dirt road next to a sprawling farm in western Massachusetts to practice on.

The bike was borrowed, loaned by the motorcycle man's brother—a Yamaha Virago 750, I think. The engine was too much and the frame was too heavy for me at that point, but my feet could touch the ground and that was enough for me. I thought of my mother: sitting among the hay bales, four decades and a thousand miles away, but also somehow right next to me. On either side of the road, cornstalks were chopped low to the ground, and clouds were rolling in from across the river. A few drops of rain flecked my jacket. It was cold and getting late as I pressed the toes of my sneakers into the dirt, trying to master a machine that weighed four times as much as me. When it comes down to it, there are two ways to keep a motorcycle upright—by supporting its weight or by accelerating.

“Show me your gears,” he said, and I dutifully kicked it into first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, then back to neutral.

“Show me your brakes,” he said, and I squeezed the lever under my right hand.

“And your rear brakes?” I touched the pedal with my right foot.

“Good,” he said. “Show me your throttle.” I flicked my wrist and the engine came alive. “Now. Let's see what you got.”

I felt the hum of 750cc's against the inside of my thigh and hot metal searing through the thick skin of my jeans—savage energy below me, literally combusting, over and over. Within the engine casing the pistons were firing away, like two empty syringes spurting exhaust instead of vaccine, compressing gas instead of liquid, workhorses shuttling back and forth, filling the chamber, compressing it, and exploding back in the other direction. From pistons to crankshaft to rear wheel, energy flowed until it became the motion in my tires and together we lunged forward.

The first moment of acceleration, when my feet lifted away from the road, buoyed up by the air itself, felt like leaving the ground completely. The weight of the bike dissipated into motion and it felt like ascension. As I straddled it in stillness, with my toes on the ground, it was deadweight, but when I let out the clutch and laid on the throttle, it lightened, became effortlessly balanced; it flew.

I pulled in the clutch, let go of the throttle, and knocked it up to second gear, then I accidentally jammed the throttle on so hard I slid back a few inches in my seat. Up to third, fourth, and the wind stung my neck, my knuckles. Ahead I could see deep, muddy ruts crisscrossing the road and no way around them. I hurried to rein in the engine, to bring it down gear by gear, but I hit the mud too soon and my back tire skidded onto its edge; my connection with the surface of the road slipped away. Instinctively, I tightened my fist on the brakes and the tires locked, the heaviness of stasis returned, and I lost momentum. Without it, I felt a few hundred pounds of churning metal begin to go down and to take me with it; I stopped thinking about how to stay upright and started thinking about how to fall.

The engine died on impact, and even as I slithered out from underneath it I could feel the heat and the hum and the dull ache in my limbs that had begun to sharpen. I stood up and my ankle wobbled. My knee screamed, my palms were skinned raw, but I struggled to heave the bike back up. I took my helmet off and I tried again. The motorcycle man caught up to me, and together we pulled it up off the ground. He checked the bike over, decided it was okay; I checked myself over, couldn't decide.

•   •   •

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER STORY
my mother told me, about another crash. This one was a little after she'd wiped out while she was learning in Illinois, in 1968 or so. She had just abandoned her sophomore year at Monmouth College and gone back to her parents' house in New Jersey while she figured out what to do next. In the meantime, she got an office job designing pamphlets at an insurance company and a blue Honda 305 cruiser to make life more interesting.

She had an old high school friend who had gotten into dirt bike racing, and one weekend the two of them and three other guys made the trip out to western Pennsylvania so that he could compete. The four guys rode in the van with the dirt bike, but my mother decided to ride her motorcycle. It was a beautiful day when they started out, a stubby little caravan of motocross misfits. The race itself was warm and sunny, but on the way home the weather turned. Rain began to bounce against her helmet and the sky darkened. She slowed down, tried to be careful, but she was tense, terrified of how easily she could lose control. There is a delicate ridge one must ride between fear and reason on a motorcycle—lean too far in either direction and there will be consequences.

They were on a winding road in the Pennsylvania mountains, twisting and turning their way down from the misty peak. The van followed her, and as she rounded a corner on a downward slope she braked and lost her traction on the wet asphalt. The wheels locked and slid out from under her. It was over in an instant. She laid the bike down, and together they slid to the shoulder of the road. The scrub grass caught her by the jacket, but the bike kept going. She lay there, a quivering, shaking mess, as the boys stopped the van and ran to her, shouting over the thrum of the rain against the road. Her left side ached from the impact, and she began to cry as they fussed over her, through gritted teeth, trying to will away each tear. They managed to fit her boxy little 305 into the van alongside the losing dirt bike, and they stowed her in the seat of honor, battered and aching from her battle with the road, then proceeded to give her the frame-by-frame replay of her crash the whole way back to New Jersey. She returned to her cubicle at the insurance company after the weekend, and her entire left side was a rainbow of bruises beneath her corporate-casual shell.

•   •   •

“L
OOKIN
'
GOOD
,” the motorcycle man said after he saw I was just shaken up. I rubbed my knee and brushed mud from my pants. My hands were shaking and my heart was pumping like it might combust. He flicked the starter button and the engine turned over a few times before it caught. He revved it. “It's now or never,” he said, and I knew what he meant. I hesitated, but I got on, and this time I found fifth gear out there among the shorn crops and the dry farm roads, the dust leaping up behind me like a banner.

•   •   •

D
URING MY MOTORCYCLE
safety course a month or so later, we practiced on a big square of asphalt in the middle of a field, way out by a tiny airport. There was a jumble of students: two teenage boys with crotch rockets who couldn't wait to get the hell out of there; two middle-aged women with long nails and dents on their ring fingers; an older, soft-voiced gentleman who used to ride as a young man and wanted to refresh his skills; and me. At twenty-one, I was done thinking about Australia, but I didn't know what to think about next. For months I had been in a state of shock, wondering what I had done, how I had managed to destroy everything that felt safe about my life with one well-aimed blow, and what I was supposed to do now. Thom was back in Melbourne, I'd found a place to live in Massachusetts, and time was creeping forward. I needed something to catch me up and catapult me out of the apathy that I was slowly settling into, but something more than an unfamiliar destination—I needed a new route, a different mode of travel. Returning to New England and leaving Thom had been intuitive. It gave me the foundation and the energy to expand as an individual, but the next part, doing that work and embracing that challenge, required effort and attention.

“Imagine there's a car in front of ya,” our instructor, Joe, said. “And ya gotta stop real fast.” He was a wiry little guy from the North Shore, with a sprout of black-and-gray hair and stubble that had been getting thicker all afternoon. I've never seen anyone more passionate about their job. He was crazy about motorcycles, and totally committed to the safety manual—those corny videos, even the pop quizzes at the end of every chapter. He wore an armored jacket and shiny, indestructible-looking pants, and he told us anyone who didn't wear a helmet was an asshole, no matter what state they lived in. He took a shine to me when I got a 100 on my written test, and when I started zipping around the practice tarmac on the little Kawasaki bike, he called me over, slapped me on the back, and laughed as he told me not to go too fast.

“Now the car in front of ya,” Joe shouted, “is twenty yards away from ya—here.” He scrubbed his toe against a white line painted on the asphalt. We were in a row, a ways off from him. “And they've stopped real sudden. Now ya gotta get up to a good speed, then stop on the line.” We nodded. We were ready. “Start your engines,” he shouted. “Okay, Becky, c'mon down.”

Becky's nails were hot pink and square tipped. She had on black leather knuckle gloves trimmed with tassels. She worked as a nurse, down at Hancock Regional, I think, and her ward was starting an all-women biker crew. She went, and it looked pretty good. Pretty simple. The teenagers went, too, and I admired their tire scorches. “Lily,” Joe called to me, “all good to go.” So I went.

In physics, the word
acceleration
means the rate of change in velocity—not necessarily an increase. A decrease in velocity is acceleration, too. The movement involved in stopping is the same kind of motion as getting up to speed. Consider an object moving in a straight line at a constant speed, then the same object at rest. The acceleration in both cases is zero, because it's the fluctuation of speed that is being measured, not the speed itself.

I jammed on my brakes. The sudden change jolted me forward and locked my back tire, but I kept the wheel straight and the front and rear brakes on evenly. I put my heels down, my front tire an inch or two shy of the line. On two wheels it's hard to remember to stomp down on the rear brake pedal and squeeze hard on the front with even
,
measured pressure, all the while committing to the change in velocity and, maybe more important, being ready to support the weight of the machine once it stops moving.

Joe strolled over and motioned for me to flip my visor up. “You know how fast you were goin'?” he asked, looking impressed. I shook my head, feeling pleased with myself, trying not to let it show. “Really freaking fast,” he said. “But you stopped clean. You know why you ride just as good, prolly better than those boys over there?” he asked, and he jerked a thumb over at the hot-shit teenagers popping mini-wheelies near the shade tent.