The Hero's Body (21 page)

All his life force got poured into racing. He refused to sleep with his fiancée the night before his Sunday ride because his fluids had to be reserved for the red-and-white mistress. Racing brought him alive, yes, but it also brought him nearer the grave. There were
crashes in that Sunday cult, lots of them, and there were injuries and funerals—lots of those too. But part of the prevailing attitude riders possessed was this:
It's never going to happen to me. He's dead and I'm clear
. Until you're not.

The young father of my youth, in his twenties, committed and abstaining, famous for his competence, his reliable level-headedness, most alive when providing for his kids, versus the early-forties father, heedless and harebrained, a high-stakes gambler. I want to say that his death was unavoidable, decreed by watchful gods. Nobody or nothing could have saved my father. His family history, his bloodline, was a Siren he was powerless to ignore. The Yamaha R1 was the howl, the homecoming he needed, his death the ultimate articulation of that need. But in my most rational, regretful moments, I consider that perhaps his fatality was not inevitable, that I or others might have saved him had we only tried. It's just that the trying would have seemed such a transgression against the familial code, and such a betrayal of his joy.

II

On May 7, 2000,
an hour after I got the call, Anna and I were the first to arrive at my grandparents' house in Manville, and we waited on the red-brick steps of the front porch. This quadrant of town had long ago been dubbed Lost Valley, pinched between the railroad tracks and the Raritan River, accessible only by a tunnel at the west end and a bridge at the east. Lost Valley would soon become more literally lost as the river, that unmanageable artery of mud, kept breaching its banks and wrecking homes. The government, repeatedly galled by spending billions in disaster relief, would swoop in, purchase the homes, and then bulldoze them away. My father's boyhood home would be among those lost, just a patch of sick-looking grass where his memories once lived.

As we waited, there was nothing to do but look, and to feel the weather—eighty degrees, sun-filled, no humidity, incongruous with disaster. My aunt's house sat to the left of us, my uncle's to the right, those concrete sidewalks exploded in spots by stretching roots. In my grandparents' long concrete driveway, the basketball hoop still hung from the garage. On those front and back lawns we neighborhood kids had held riotous wrestling matches in summer and autumn, a band of ruffians who strove for much bruising and the minor blood of others. When I think of my childhood, that barely observable
cosmos rushing farther away from me each second, I think of that house, that street, that driveway, those sidewalks and lawns.

Roil the mind with news of this death and it will attempt some form of focus, a stay against the new anarchy booming through it. The focus is diversion. I studied the shifting, devolving light of day as five o'clock came, as late spring slid into early summer. I studied the cracks in the pebbled concrete walkway beneath my sneakers, multiple cracks veining off into the grass. Pop had poured that walkway when he built the house, by himself, fifty years earlier, in 1950, not long before he left to fight in Korea.

My father was born two years later, while Pop was still there fighting, a forward observer directing mortar fire at an incomprehensible foe. There's a sepia photo of the day he returned from the war, dressed in a khaki uniform, unrecognizably good-looking and fit, a photo shot right there where I now sat. This photo was his first time meeting my father, already a year old. It was this photo I remembered now while waiting for the certainty of his death. And it was this very spot, on Easter Sunday, just two weeks earlier, where I'd last seen him alive. He'd handed me fifty bucks that afternoon and we'd given one another the clownish hug Parma loved to see.

Soon my grandparents' sedan turned the corner onto Huff Avenue. Anna and I stood, stepped away from the porch, reached for one another's hand. I tried to peer inside the car as they pulled into the driveway, tried to gauge their faces through the reflected foliage. They came slowly from the car, Parma's face a picture of hurt, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth.

Pop looked stoic still but walked somewhat unevenly, as if testing the earth before letting his full weight down, and when he reached me there on the walkway, he said four words: “You lost your dad.” My father was forty-seven years old. I was twenty-five. Pop was sixty-seven, recovering from a double-knee replacement or else he'd have been on the ride that day. He embraced me in that tense,
back-clapping mode familiar to men everywhere, and I brought my right hand to my eyes as if to shield them from a punishing sun, but the sun had begun its drop behind roofs an hour ago. And I noticed again the cracks in the concrete beneath my sneakers.

I cannot say if I'd thought of my brother or sister since getting my godfather's phone call two hours earlier, and I cannot say if I thought of them then, after learning for sure that our father was dead. It seems right that I should have thought of them: my brother, Mike, four years younger than me, eighteen hundred miles away in Boulder, Colorado, and my sister, Alisyn, two years younger, in Manville still. It seems right, but I cannot recall the thoughts, nor the probably lawless emotions to which they were attached, nor when I first saw my sister that day, or if I'd even seen her at all. We three have never been overly involved in each other's life; after childhood, our trajectories were too disparate, our interests too incompatible. But I must have thought of my siblings then in our grandparents' driveway. I want to believe that I thought of them.

There's much I can't recall. It's been sixteen years and the memory has its own wayward agency, its own mysterious volition, citadels in one spot, lacunas in another. When something momentous hits you, you are not always conscious of needing or wanting to seal certain details inside the vault of your mind. You are not predicting that sixteen years hence, you will wish to resurrect those details. You have faith—it
feels
like faith—that the memory will clasp onto what is vital, what is necessary to remember. But that faith, like all faith, is too often a letdown.

When I embraced Parma in the driveway that evening, she had four words of her own to say: “This is so bad.” Her understated potency has stayed with me all these years. I could not tell her Tennyson's line,
Though much is taken, much abides
, because that line did not appear to me just then, and if it had, I would not have bought it. Nor would she have. This was the woman who, every
afternoon for years, in every kind of weather, would carry a lawn chair to the cemetery and sit at her son's grave, in reverie and private requiem, as if she could make him remember her, as if he could know she was there.

Her faith, I could see from the outset, would only be strengthened by this blight. Pop, on the other hand: he'd never had any use for the divine and its dictates, and now he'd have even less. His indifference would turn to muffled scorn. That's how it works: a personal storm of this sort rends you one way or rends you the other but seldom leaves you right where you were.

Neighbors and
family began appearing only moments after my grandparents returned from the Pennsylvania hospital. In a small town, news of death is fleet of foot, forever in a rush, much quicker than news of birth. Soon the driveway was alive with people in summer's colors, all those yellows and light blues, people I hadn't seen in months or years.

The phone would not stop; information trickled in with each call. The six other men with whom my father had been riding that day gave us what they thought were the basic facts. My father was thrown from his bike in a right turn on a remote country road, hitting a guardrail headfirst, though no one had seen the crash. He'd been at the rear of the pack, taking it easy that day; there was something wrong with his front brake, he'd said; it didn't feel right. He'd never been on that road before, didn't know the turn was there. The others found him beneath the guardrail, in a pond of blood leaking from his cracked helmet. I can't remember all of Pop's sentences from that day, but I remember this one: “It's hard to crack a helmet.”

My father's younger brother, Nicky, himself an expert rider, walked me around the block and attempted to explain how the
crash might have happened, how my father might have been calculating that turn as it ambushed him. Speed was the factor I'd return to again and again. What else but speed? Already I was accepting the rash of clichés as they came, the unexamined inklings as I maneuvered through the electricity of this new truth. Circling the block, I told Nicky that I anticipated being “haunted” by my father's crash. I might have congratulated myself for not resorting to the most common formulation of all:
This feels like a nightmare
. In truth, it never did. What was so regrettable for me—what I was beginning to digest, even during those initial jolts, in those early hours of knowing—was that my father's death didn't feel nightmarish at all. It felt outright expected. Of course he'd kill himself on that machine. Of course he would.

Both of my father's brothers had inherited the motorcycle lust from Pop. Both had decades of riding experience, up-close knowledge of racing those machines on meandrous back roads, but both had been sensible enough to stop. They had young children and nervous wives. But my father's three children were already grown, and so perhaps he felt a less pointed responsibility to keep alive. Perhaps the risk of speed, perhaps all risk and recklessness, comes more easily to those who have finished the hard work of raising their kids. If that's what he might have thought, that my siblings and I needed him much less now that we were grown—my brother just twenty-one, my sister twenty-three—he was very wrong. His likeliest thought, though? No thought at all. Because it's always the other guy who dies.
He's dead and I'm clear
.

He'd been only a few months away from a marriage that promised a middle-aged fulfillment his youthful twelve years with my mother could not deliver. He and his fiancée had been about to move from their closed-in condominium to a sizable home backed against acres of woodland. I'd recently gone with him to tour the house, to hear his plans for mild renovation, where his workshop would go, where his bike
would sleep, and I was gratified to see, to feel, his contentment—it felt forty-seven years in the making.

If I'd once thought of my body as a machine for living, the motorcycle is a living machine. Parma detested the bikes. Pop had always taken several trips a year, week-long trips to motorcycle races and rallies, to Laconia, New Hampshire, and to Daytona, Florida. Each time he prepared to leave, Parma's rancor would rise, and we'd all sidestep her conniptions over being abandoned again, over the non-paranoid possibility that the next time she saw Pop he'd have coins on his eyes. Emergency-room personnel have a special argot for motorcycles; they call them
donor
cycles. If you need an organ, bet on that hearty young ignoramus winging down the highway at 105, twenty years old and strong, in flawless health except for his newly destroyed neck and skull.

The best pro racers in the world, the MotoGP maestros who top two hundred miles per hour on the straightaway—Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo and their intrepid brethren—those men won't ride on the road. Combining a maximum of sense with a prudent dose of dread, they know that to ride on the road is to shorten their lives. On a racetrack, there's nothing to hit. There are gravel-trap runoffs at the turns you're likely to miscalculate—they know where you're going to crash: it's always in a turn—and even if you lose it at two hundred, you slide for a while before tumbling into the grassy infield. The armored suit, with its padded humps along the back, saves you from a snapped neck and spine. But on the road? Trees, guardrails, telephone poles, streetlamps, mailboxes, trucks and cars intent upon grinding a rider into tinfoil. There's no escaping them.

Statistics tell a story. Death by motorcycle is nearly thirty times higher than death by car. Helmets are only 37 percent effective in preventing death. In 2000, the year my father was killed, close to three thousand other American riders were also felled. Most motorcycle fatalities happen from May to August for the very reason you
suspect: the weather is pleasant. My father crashed on the seventh of May. The time of day when most crashes occur? Between the hours of 3
P.M
. and 6
P.M
. For those who began riding in the morning, the late-afternoon crashes are due to fatigue but also to overconfidence. The longer you go without crashing, the more actively you believe you won't. A simple but deceptive equation. My father hit the guardrail at 3:06
P.M
. More than 30 percent of all motorcycle fatalities result from speeding—of course they do. The species of my father's bike (known technically as a “super sports” bike or “superbike” or “sport bike,” rather less technically as a “crotch rocket” or “Jap bike”) is four times likelier to kill a man than a soberer species of bike, a cruiser or touring cycle. You've no doubt seen those jolly, hirsute fellas in helmet headsets, grinning wives at their backs, a youthful Billy Joel crooning from a cranked-up radio about an uptown girl. Pop called those riders “jackasses.”