The Hero's Body (34 page)

On page three, Officer Branch concludes his narration with “Scene was photographed by police.” For several hours after first reading the report, I'd thought that what the police had photographed was my father under the guardrail, on the stretcher, his body and his blood, and I went about preparing myself, preparing my own blood, to behold those shots, because of course I'd have to see them eventually, the photographic work of an anonymous police artist for whom my father was the model. Until I realized that the photographs Branch refers to are the standard shots of any accident scene: the skid marks, the bike, lipstick-like smears on the guardrail, gouges in the asphalt. By the time the police began taking photos, my father would already have been in the ambulance, en route to the ER, having his racer's suit sheared from him, being tended to by hands incapable of reversing the hurt.

From the middle of page three to the end on page twelve, another
narrator takes up the thread: Robert L. Bell, the police chief himself. (Daniel Branch and Robert Bell: wholesome American names. You can picture them: sandy-haired and sideburned, slightly freckled, a pinch overweight, highly Protestant in that Pennsylvania vein.) Chief Bell's narrative of my father's crash is taken up mostly with “witness testimony”: to say what you saw, and in saying it, to make it true. Remember the irate old farmer in the pickup truck, the one with the crippled hand? He was “startled to discover one of the motorcycles was traveling 5 feet behind him”—tailgating, he means, and he got the word right. If ever you've turned to find on your bumper what looks like a Crayola cosmonaut astride a two-wheeled rocket, startled is exactly what you feel. The farmer was then startled some more when the bikes began roaring past him, that distinct silver roar, the sexed-up scream that sounds like nothing else on earth.

The farmer is sure to mention “an oncoming white van that came very close to colliding with one of the cycles, head on.” A white van: he remembered the color. Then he pulled to the shoulder and waved on the other bikes, watching them “across a valley as they accelerated quickly away from him.” For some reason he doesn't mention what the married couple told me when I visited the crash site weeks earlier: that he unzipped my father's suit in an effort to give him more air. He doesn't mention the blood that must have been on his fingers after he did so. How could he have forgotten? This farmer who remembered the detail of the white van doesn't remember my father's blood on his own crippled hand. Or else he considered it too indecent and upsetting to say so.

Another witness was at a stop sign on Hickory Lane—what a pleasant-sounding American street: nothing awful ever happens on Hickory Lane—waiting to turn onto Slifer Valley Road, and that's when he saw the bikes go by “well above the speed limit.” He himself was about to pull onto Slifer behind the pack, but that's when he saw my father coming, “traveling faster than the previous group
of motorcycles, apparently trying to catch up with the group . . . He believes Unit #1 was traveling approximately 80 MPH.” (That's a good guess, eighty—I wish it were true. At eighty, an R1 is just getting warmed up. The faster it goes, the better it works. Unless there's that turn you don't know is there, in which case both it and you cease working altogether.) When this witness found my father on the road, “he felt for a pulse, but did not feel one.” It's uncertain just what he would have done if he
had
felt a pulse—in my father's neck or wrist, which did he touch? What does a bystander do then except ogle and be relieved, by turns fear-lashed and inwardly glad, grateful to his god that today is the day of another man's death and not his own?
He's dead and I'm clear
.

After that, Chief Bell has what looks like an irritating time in conversation with the riders who were with my father that Sunday, every one of whom retches up the same lie: their average speed was forty-five miles per hour. One guy says he “believes Unit # 1 was doing around 35 MPH,” a comedy any way you cut it. Another guy says that “they traveled no more than 50 MPH,” as if he could appear consummately truthful with an admission that they were indeed speeding, but only by five miles per hour above the limit on those roads. What's the harm of a measly five miles per hour over the limit? Everybody does it.

And after hearing the same bullshit line from the last rider he interviewed, Bell had had enough: “I confronted him on that statement and explained to him that numerous witnesses and the total of over 100 feet of braking skids by Unit #1 contradict that stated speed. Nevertheless, he maintained they were not going over 50 MPH at any time.”

Each rider tells Chief Bell the same sequence of events: the pack stopped at a Mobil gas station for a breather. My father was complaining of his front brakes; they didn't sound or look right. He said he had a headache, “didn't feel well . . . was going to take it easy
and head home.” When they saw that my father wasn't with them anymore, they waited at a stop sign (some say the pack waited three minutes, some say it waited thirty seconds; that's a two-minute-and-thirty-second discrepancy in the conception of time). After waiting, two riders went back to look for him. About two minutes later, one of the riders returned to the pack to inform them that “Unit #1 had been involved in an accident.”

Involved in an accident:
the word choice of the rider who returned to tell the others what had happened. Not
crashed into a guardrail
. Not
killed himself in that right turn
. The linguistic sleight of hand is telling for how it strives to absolve my father of blame, how it strives to absolve them all of blame.
Involved in an accident
sounds rather like
involved in a lightning strike
.

This same rider confesses that he “did not know if Unit #1 was familiar with the road.” To him, for his willingness to indulge the obvious, I'd like to put two questions. After what happened, how can you still not know if he was or was not familiar with the road? And if
you
were familiar with that turn, and if you doubted that he was, then why didn't you warn him of it?
Think of the other guy
. Why wasn't anybody thinking of him?

My father's riding pals are all ashine with admiration for him—“was an excellent rider . . . the best rider in the group . . . more than 20 years of riding experience . . . a highly skilled rider”—which is the reason they have to lie to Bell about his speed, about how fast every one of them rode every weekend of every summer. To tell the truth would be not to risk a summons for themselves, but to betray my father, to snitch on a fellow Sunday soldier, to transgress against the code and camaraderie. They are, in that way, identical to the cops they badmouthed, outmaneuvered, outran each week: the brotherhood and the bond, clan-thinking, tribal solidarity—it always and everywhere trumps the truth. A tribe of warriors protects its own, even when, especially when, he has fallen in battle.

I can guess Bell's sensible query as he listened to the laudations for my father:
How does such “a highly skilled rider,” an “excellent rider,” end up dead beneath a guardrail?
Because it would seem to him, as it no doubt seems to you, that the inverse of skill and excellence are required to find yourself smashed and bleeding to death on a Pennsylvania roadway.

A detail I can't explain: halfway into Chief Bell's narrative, he begins referring to my father by name: “GIRALDI stated he was going to take it easy . . . GIRALDI was lagging behind . . . Two riders went back looking for GIRALDI.” But on the final page of the report, under “OPINION and CONCLUSION,” Bell reverts to form, as if invoking my father's name here, in this most pertinent section, the section of his ruling, would be a debasement of the dead:

While a recall exists for the front brakes of the involved motorcycle, there is no indication the defect in the front brakes contributed to this accident. The existence of lining on three of the four brake pads, although very thin, was sufficient to stop Unit #1 when driven at legal and prudent speeds
.

The statements of uninvolved witnesses and the length of the one-wheel skid mark both indicate excessive speed, well above the posted suggested speed for the curve of 20 mph
.

Operator of Unit #1 was solely in violation for failing to drive at a safe speed
.

There's no revising the word choice, no erasing those terms:
legal, prudent, excessive, safe
. But it's the word
solely
I feel trembling in me now, because it means
solely responsible
.

X

Calamity usually results from
the confluence of bad things. On May 7, 2000, on Slifer Valley Road, that confluence was present for my father. The day's cruel heat, the condition of the front brake pads, the fatigue at the end of the ride, his ignorance of the road, the warning sign much too close to the turn, his not wanting to keep the other riders waiting for him. Eliminate just one of those factors and perhaps there's no crash that day. But you can eliminate all of those factors and it will make no difference if he's kissing a hundred miles per hour at the near lip of that crest. And those men, I know, were always kissing a hundred miles per hour.

May 7 was always my father's self-made fate; the month and day don't matter. The big crash, the last crash, was chiseled into his tomorrow from the moment he bought that bike.
If it's in your blood you can't get it out
. Not unless you get
all
your blood out, unless it spills from you onto the asphalt. Those are your choices. The men who are frightened into stopping, close-called into quitting, persuaded by the good sense of spouses and children? It was never really in their blood, never encoded in them. The blood won't be persuaded.

Recently, for the first time in sixteen years, I asked my brother what he saw on the footage from our father's camera. All along I'd been thinking that my father had filmed his own fatality. But the crash was not on the camera. He'd stopped filming that morning,
several hours before they reached Slifer Valley Road. We don't know why he turned off the camera so soon into the ride, except that this was the first day he'd tried filming. The camera was shakily mounted to the fore of the gas tank; he'd rigged it there himself, aimed it through the windscreen at the road, the speedometer visible at the base.

You can see him passing cars, see the needle hit 110 miles per hour on a snaked, wooded road called Dukes Parkway, just outside of Manville. The speed limit through the dips and rises of Dukes Parkway is forty, and some cars do much less than that. Deer bound out everywhere from behind boles. But for my father on an R1 passing cars, it's glance and go—the glance makes the call. No car in the opposite lane? You go. The bike is so irrationally fast, you need no more than that glance. You can be around a car in under three seconds.

At one point near the end of the tape, my father and another rider pull to the side and park in a depressed shoulder to wait for the others who weren't as fast. You can see his unclear reflection in the windscreen, see him remove his helmet, and you can hear him say, “It's too hot for this shit today.” But the reflection is faded and you can't make out his face, an image refracted in sun, marked with bubbles of light. And then the camera shuts off and the image is gone. His blurring out of the world had already begun then. In just a few hours from this final glimpse of him, he will hit the guardrail, and his blurring will be complete.

When I
was old enough to suspect that it mattered, I must have told Pop that I doubted if I'd ever be able to ride a motorcycle. I remember being stumped by how something so engine-heavy didn't topple, how so much metal stayed in motion atop two wheels. He
responded with a sentence that's never left me: “If you can ride a bicycle,” he told me, “you can ride a motorcycle.” And that's why so many men ruin themselves each year on American roads: because they think that riding a Yamaha R1 is no different from riding a bicycle, which is a bit like thinking that there's some connection between being able to bird-watch and being able to fly.

Three years ago, more than a decade after my father's death, my uncle Nicky, fed up with tamping the weekly temptations, bought a Yamaha R6. He'd quit riding not long before my father was killed—the danger was too much with him then—and in all that intervening time, he'd had persistent fantasies about new screams of speed, those inner gales of adrenaline. But he didn't buy the R6 for the road; he bought it for the racetrack in a south Jersey town called Millville.

In the warmer months, from April to October, he's part of a coterie who pays to be instructed in the physics and art of racing motorcycles. And what he's learned during these track days, both in the classroom and on the asphalt, is that he and his brothers and Pop, and the bevy with whom they rode each Sunday, did not have the tiniest clue what they were doing, either how a superbike works or how their bodies need to function on top of it. Not the tiniest clue.