The Hero's Body (31 page)

I said to Myron, “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything,” he said.

“What's it
feel
like?”

“What's what feel like?” he said.

“That speed. The bike beneath you at such speed.”

“You never rode before?” he said.

“Never,” I said.

“Well, I can't really explain it,” he said. “It just feels like . . . like you're alive for the first time, like you're gonna live forever.”

Myron told me then that he was keeping my father's bike, buying it from the insurance company for a mere $1,500. Not bothered by a curse on that machine, undeterred by the blood he had to wipe from the gas tank and engine, he planned to modify it into a drag racer and run it at the track at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey.
I wasn't sure what to say to that, although I know I didn't like it—not the way it sounded, not the way it made my intestines clench. I wished this young man good luck. What else could I do? In the weeks after this phone call, I kept checking Englishtown newspapers for information on fatalities at Raceway Park. And to this day I wonder if he died on the machine that killed my father.

VIII

After my father's crash,
I sifted through his stacks of motorcycle books and magazines. One book was titled
The Soft Science of Road Racing Motorcycles
, and you can ask yourself if you'd ever choose to trust your life to
soft
science, because when you hit the guardrail, it will most assuredly be the opposite of soft. I also found a trove of DVDs about the aptly named Isle of Man and the annual race that happens there, called the TT, or Tourist Trophy. This was motorcycle porn for the velocity-addicted. My father watched these DVDs on Saturday nights to charge himself for the next day's ride, to fall asleep with the Doppler-effected scream of a 1,000 cc engine still in his ears, to let that speed infiltrate his dreams.

The Isle of Man is a green, cliff-rich arcadia in the Irish Sea, midway between Ireland and Britain, and the TT is the deadliest motor race ever devised. A thirty-eight-mile, time-trial motorcycle race on narrow island roads, roads of cambers and dips, bends, bumps, kinks, wet in some places, dry in others, uneven textures everywhere, gravel when you don't want it, ridges to the left of you, ditches to the right, average speeds of 130 miles per hour, the smudge of 200-plus on straightaways, mere inches from stone walls and hedgerows, street signs and spectators, cottages, lampposts, objects made of concrete. Road racers call it “the furniture.” A rock in the road and you're dead.

Since its inception in 1907, a staggering 246 racers have been killed at the TT. In 1970 alone, six racers died. This risk is inbuilt, and the coterie of riders not only accepts it, but thrills at it. Crash on a racetrack and you slide into a patch of grass. Crash at the TT and you hit a house. One you walk away from; the other makes sure you never walk again. Try to envision the stupendous violence a house inflicts upon a human body at 160 miles per hour. In little more than a gesture of safety, hay bales are strategically placed in some of the deadliest spots, but hay bales haven't kept men from killing themselves. The chances of calamitous injury or death at the TT are so high that a casual observer is left with a dislocated jaw, incredulously agape, speculating about the mental hygiene of these racers. Edgar Poe called it “the Imp of the Perverse,” that mischievous force within that prompts us toward our own demise.

Here's further testament to the lunacy or purity of the TT, depending on your view: the prize money for winning is a pittance. There's no large purse because sponsors are slim, and sponsors are slim because those roads are ruby-hued with blood. It's a mite bad for business when your product adorns a “death race,” which is what one disillusioned racer recently dubbed the TT—although “disillusioned” isn't literally right, since these men are not gripped by a single illusion. They know better than anyone what can happen, what
will
happen, on those island roads each summer.

No man is an island
proves demonstrably untrue on the Isle of Man. On those bikes, each man races and wins or dies alone, and each dead man is enisled in his grave. The
pas de deux
is between either the bike and the rider, the rider and the road, or the rider and his death. There's the incontrovertible skill and fearlessness of these riders, yes, but another reason my father admired the TT was this: they are overwhelmingly working-class family men who have to keep their day jobs. Coarse-palmed carpenters and plumbers, mechanics
and truck drivers with perpetually blackened fingernails and worried wives. You'd have trouble finding the pampered and the privileged among their number.

At the urging of my brother, I recently spent an hour and forty minutes with the film
TT: Closer to the Edge
, a docudrama about the 2010 TT. “If you want to understand Dad's mentality,” Mike told me, “then watch this film.” During the dramatic opening images you hear a mélange of riders in voiceover, their unmistakably British lilts, measured, contemplative, soothing in the slowness of their gravitas, a slowness that belies the speed within:

“There is nothing to compare it with.”

“It's the most exhilarating place in the world.”

“It's like being able to fly. Just like growing wings.”

“If it's in your blood you can't get it out. You just want more.”

“My mind goes completely blank. My mind just turns into madness.”

Just like growing wings
. It's a felicitous simile. The TT racers, like the MotoGP pros, are easily thought of as kin to fighter pilots: cool heads, quick vision, superior eye-hand coordination, and blood that welcomes the rush of it. Guy Martin, the charismatic, uncontainable star of the film, his hair styled by a storm, has this to say: “I can imagine, from the outside looking in, anyone who's racing the TT looks like the lights are on but no one's home.”

That's one way to put it, I suppose. Throughout the film Martin cranks up the wattage on those lights, an illumination of what it's like to be a conquering pale rider, to live in triumph bestride the white horse of death. And if he seems mad to you, if he and the others seem to have vacated their braincases, well, that's the cost of the glory they want. Here's Martin on the many perils of the TT: “You
do end up in that position where it looks like it's gonna be game over at any moment. But those positions—money cannot buy the buzz you get, that
thing
you get when you think,
That's it, game over
.”

The sober and sensible adult person strives, I think, never to be in that position. The “buzz” to which Martin refers is, for most of us, a gut-clapping fear. Whenever I've come close to being killed, in a car or on a bicycle, it didn't feel to me like the buzz of being alive. It felt like being
almost dead
. That's one of the danger-seeker's bromides, the first clause in the credo of every skydiver, cliff diver, bungee jumper, road racer: in order to be fully alive, you must come to the very lip of death. You see the logic. Only Martin and his brethren of extremity are really living. The rest of us are effectively dead, zombies in bondage to the mediocre. Yeats:
The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind / In balance with this life, this death
.

Near the end of the 2010 TT, Guy Martin must have had more buzz than he knew how to feel. He came within an inch of dying in a filmic fireball when he went down in a lethal corner called Ballagarey. In the prologue of his memoir,
Guy Martin: My Autobiography
, he writes this of Ballagarey:

This is the kind of corner that keeps me racing on the roads. It's a proper man's corner. You go through the right-hander at 170 mph or more, leant right over, eyes fixed as far down the road as it's possible to see, which isn't very far. Like so many corners at the Isle of Man . . . it's blind. I can't see the exit of the corner when I commit fully to the entry
.

And then Martin describes the crash that resulted in his bike tumbling across the asphalt in an inferno, igniting the hay and hedgerows along the road. The model of Honda he was riding is aptly called a Fireblade, a 210-horsepower missile on wheels. The front end tucked,
the tires lost grip, the bike began to slide. He thinks,
I've got it, I've got it, I've got it, I've got it . .
. But he doesn't have it. And the bike is “steadily skating, increasingly out of control toward the Manx stone wall that lines the outside of this corner.” And then what happens?

Then the thought “Game over” entered my head. At those speeds, on a corner like that, you're not jumping off the bike, just letting it go. I was leant over as far as a Honda CBR1000RR will lean, and a little bit more. I released my grip on the bars and slid down the road. I didn't think, “This is going to hurt,”—just, “Whatever will be, will be.”

Or, perhaps a bit more accurately: whatever will be will be
what I made happen
. You can't choose to enter a famously fatal turn at 170 miles per hour and then throw up your hands to providence, appeal to predestination, blame the caprice of fate. Providence has a hard time caring about you when you're standing still, never mind when you're a nearly airborne blur in the Ballagarey turn. Barring blindsides, the lightning strikes of God and man, our living or dying is the outcome of the decisions we make.

In
TT: Closer to the Edge
, the wife of a rider remarks that if you love the men who do this, you support their wishes, apparently even if those wishes are death wishes. Two riders died in the 2010 TT: the New Zealander Paul Dobbs and the Austrian Martin Loicht (the film spotlights only Dobbs's death; he was forty years old). “Climbing without a safety net” is how another rider describes the road race. No margin for error. One minute miscalculation toward glory and you are no more. A white-haired reveler and speed fan, referring to “the bravest men in the world,” imparts this wisdom about the TT: “If it doesn't excite you, you're not alive, and that's a fact.” But, sir, here's Larkin:
Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood
.

The film gives you the unassailable integrity and strength of Dobbs's widow, Brigid, even as the torment is stamped onto her face and her voice begins to break from the grief of it. If you're looking for genuine bravery, you can look no further. Her dignified resilience, the umbilical to joy she maintains for her two fatherless girls (she speaks of their nightly dancing in the kitchen), and her steadfastness at the hardest task there is, the successful rearing of children. Her class of courage is more capacious, and more important, than the suicidal brand of bravery of men doing 180 miles per hour through antique villages lined with stone walls, a bravery indistinguishable from imprudence. You can't watch Brigid Dobbs in the lush scape of her New Zealand home, and those tiny beauties riding tiny motorbikes in homage to their dead father, and not feel whole segments inside you collapse.

Another rider remarks, with ample sadness, that Dobbs died in his pursuit of love. That might be true enough, but the syntactical inverse is also true: he loved the pursuit of dying. Here's what Brigid Dobbs herself says: “You can't love the death, you can't love the loss, but you can't love the excitement and the thrill without knowing that that's part of it. It wouldn't be so exciting if it didn't have the risk. That's why they want to do it.”

And that's what I'll never understand: how his lust for the thrill conquered his love for the two blond beauties he and Brigid invented together. Because they needed him more than he needed that blast, that bang in his blood, and now their kids will grow up without the ballast of a father. They were four and now they are three, and that minus-one, that gap, never heals. What is our responsibility to our passion when measured against the responsibility to our children? Watching Dobbs's kids—and feeling a stab of that late-night mawkishness when the house is still and the ale bottles empty, that supernatural deal-making with imaginary magistrates—I knew I'd
swap my own father for theirs. The Reaper could keep mine if only he'd bring theirs back.

There's a shot near the center of the film that lives in me still. The camera, fixed to one side of the road, aims intently across at the bucolic calm, at the silence and stillness on the other side, only the slightest sighing of the hornbeams, a flutter from a kingfisher, the whistle of a skylark, a gray-stone church, its steeple arrowed at clouds, a megalithic crucifix watching the day. And then you begin to hear them in the distance, coming from the right, coming to kill this pastoral pause. You've heard the sound of the approaching high-pitch gasoline scream, how it ripples on air, an exhaling to a needled crescendo. And when the crescendo comes, directly in front of the stationary lens, you can
hear
it, yes, it's right there in front of you, but you can't
see
it. There's only a green, then a blue, then a red blear: blink and they're gone.

On the Isle of Man or on Slifer Valley Road, that's what two hundred miles per hour looks like. Chromatic ghosts caught on film. But barely.