The Hero's Body (35 page)

“We had the basics all wrong,” he told me recently. “Everything was totally wrong. Your father and me, Uncle Tony and Pop—we didn't have the first idea. No technique at all, no understanding of how the bike moves or how we should handle it, how we should approach a corner. What I'm doing now, it's a science class, and when you consider how stupid we were, it's a goddamn miracle we didn't all die. When you do these track days, you really, really get why so many guys are killed on the road every day. They just have no idea.”

I've been living with that sentence:
They just have no idea
. Those bikes, in other words, have no place on the road. They are far too sophisticated and fast, far too supreme for the common thrill seeker unschooled in physics. The man on the throttle is tricked by such
willing horsepower, by his own will to power, his desperate will to release. You might not be surprised to know that the organizations that host the track days cater to ex-military men, offering discounts and benefits. I recall a news headline from 2008 that blared:
MARINE MOTORCYCLE DEATHS TOP THEIR IRAQ COMBAT FATALITIES.
Those stats aren't different for the other branches of the military, either. After you've flown a helicopter gunship or fighter jet, after you've unloaded with a .50-caliber from a Humvee, or sent a fusillade from an Abrams tank, what are you supposed to do once you return to society? What then is your intoxicant? Where to let out the clamor in you?

“The blind force of the sub-cortex,” Pavlov called it. You see why these soldiers mount superbikes, why they turn to Yamaha and Kawasaki, to Honda, Suzuki, Ducati. It tells you something about the matchless exhilaration of those machines. Here in our humdrum world, they are the only thing that approaches what the blood feels in war.

A few
summers before his fatal accident, my father crashed on a different Pennsylvania back road, farmland running to hills in the distance, plots of elm and spruce, wide expanses of grass. He was riding a black and red Honda CBR900 then, the first bike he'd bought after years of not being able to afford one, of literal dreaming about those sinuous roads, the quick of those machines. He could see the sweeping right up ahead, but it swept more sharply than he'd anticipated. His approach was much too fast, his angle in the road all wrong. Centrifugal force will not be fooled with, and he crossed the yellow line at the start of the sweep, then crossed into the opposite lane. Had there been an oncoming car, a family on its way to a Sunday service or the farmer's market, we'd have attended his funeral a lot earlier.

Instead, he veered into a ditch and flipped over the handlebars, shoulder-first, into an unsuspecting somebody's front yard. The impact broke his right collarbone in two spots. The bike was dented, bruised, but otherwise undamaged, and he rode back to Jersey that way, 150 miles on highways and back roads, with a broken right collarbone. Because the throttle and brake are on the right handlebar grip, all the weight and pressure from the suspension, from gassing and braking in turns, spike up into the right arm and directly into the right shoulder. So he rode those 150 miles home in agony. For two weeks after, the entire right side of his torso, front and back, was a mottle of indigo and amethyst.

He was with one other rider during that crash, a father figure to him and Pop's closest friend of forty years, Kurt, a man of incorruptible dignity and style—his silver crew cut, his leather jacket with the Yamaha patches, his voice calloused from the cigarettes of his past. The other riders had for him the same reverence they had for Pop. Kurt helped my father back onto his bike that day and then guided him home. When they finally made it, the two men stood in the kitchen, trying to fool my father's fiancée into thinking that everything was all right, that no one had crashed.

Why did his body not hold on to the memory of that pain and what birthed it? Why was he not deterred by the pain and its promise of more? I want to ask Kurt about the crash that afternoon, what went wrong in that turn, but Kurt is dead. He killed himself on his motorcycle, later that same year, when he collided with a tree. It was the only time I ever saw my father weep.

One morning,
while Anna was still asleep, not long after I received the police report, I saw half a dozen cars parked in front of the house directly across the street from my godfather's. The men
wore black suits, the women black dresses. The wife, a young mother of two small children, had just been killed in her car on a slick interstate, her body twisted with the steel. I saw the husband, the now-single father, standing on the walkway, greeting some, saying farewell to others. On the lawn lay plastic toys, in the driveway a red tricycle, all abandoned by the disloyalty of toddlers. A car drove away; the new arrivals walked inside. And then, for a moment, he was alone. It was just the two of us now on that shaded street, across from one another, our hands searching our pockets in the same way, both looking at the space between us. Neither of us waved, neither nodded. Just that empty space there.

     Coda     

I began this book
on the day of my father's death, but I didn't know it then. That night, after returning to my dormitory, before Anna absorbed my quaking till dawn, I opened a notepad and penned a single line: “Absence takes up space.” In the days and months, in the years, that followed, the lines accumulated, one by one, sometimes in twos, rarely in threes. They were often the words of others, lines that crooned to me out of the depths of memory, as I was eating or driving, mostly in the mornings after waking, or else in that liminal murk between the dark of sleep and the light of day: Wordsworth or Coleridge, Kafka or Auden. Over the years the notepads multiplied, stacked on my desk as if a bulwark against further dismay. But I could do nothing with them, could find no arrangement, could not complete the story of my father, or my own story among men. From where would that apprehension come? How to find the language, the armature, for such telling?

Benvenuto Cellini's magisterial
Autobiography
begins with this: “All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty.” For me, those words crouched like a dragon at the gate of autobiography. When Cellini advises us to
wait until after forty to embark on “so fine an enterprise,” he means that most of us need that long to acquire the psycho-emotional skills in order to execute our life stories properly, to envisage the proper angles of comprehension—to begin to see ourselves as we really are. I've never approached what Cellini means by
excellence
, but by the age of forty, I'd been born as a father, and with that comes its own brand of staggered excellence.

In his memoir
Experience
, Martin Amis remarks that the childless never fully understand their parents. My sons, Ethan and Aiden, were the spur I'd needed to decode the deceptive phonics of memory, to transcribe the notebooks, knead them into a shape loyal to the vicissitudes of truth—to tell the story of my family's masculine order so that my sons might know the grandfather who was killed many years before their births. And so that they might know what made me, as well, and by extension, what helped make them. It's simple for them to comprehend that I am their father, but shuffling through photographs together, I can see their faces straining to comprehend that
I
once had a father too, and that he now lies in the earth. Small children must conceive of their parents as outside of time, not tripped by the many lurchings of the past. A child is all present; he has no firm conception of his past, and his future seems an incredibility that never will come. Just try to tell a child he has to wait a week for something—for him that week might as well be an eon.

Schopenhauer: “The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary.” If that's accurate, my father had only seven years of commentary. After the birth of my sons, I began to feel the onset of a duty—the duty to continue that commentary because he could not continue for himself. We all of us want our stories told, and the tellers should perceive the debt they owe to the heroes of those stories, and to the stories themselves. The firstborn son, duty-bound by definition, will take on some debts but not others. I would not name my own firstborn William, would not make
him the fifth in that lineage, shackle him with a name to a particular fate he must then labor to overcome, as I had. I'm not one to traffic in curses, or that sins-of-the-father fatalism, but I was certain that four generations of William Giraldis were quite enough. Born in Boston, reared in Boston, half-Asian, my kids are fully Boston boys, not the provincial Manville boys I and my father were. They speak Mandarin and live in a home besieged by books. If Parma and Pop had expected Ethan to be named William, they never said anything to me about it.

My grandparents are eighty-five years old now; I imagine the elderly care less and less about issues that once shrilled with such urgency. Maybe family legacy doesn't mean very much in the hoary grip of exhaustion and grief. How annihilating that must be, at day's end, slouched there at the rim of such blackness. I was spared from having to see my father wither—he will never be old—but I am not spared from having to see the withering of the grandparents who were never merely grandparents to me. No shawl-knitting frump, Parma almost singlehandedly rescued us from destitution after my mother vanished from our family. She's never been sick, she's never been slouched, never been an ounce over ninety-eight pounds. Give her a habit and she could pass for Mother Teresa. A gallon of Breyers ice cream for dinner and an economy-size bag of Lay's potato chips afterward—they cannot kill her. Once, I watched her frost twelve cobs of corn with toxic quantities of salt and then gnaw each one with the flitting thoroughness of a squirrel. Currently, five days a week, she ministers to several cyclones of great-grandkids, including my sister's two sons. “They're my heart,” she says, and that's true in more ways than one.

Wordsworth did much of Freud's work in one terse line:
The Child is father of the Man
. Six years from now, when I reach my father's age at his death, that line will assume a freshly skewed meaning for me. We are meant to outlive our parents; the cosmic order balks
only when parents are forced to outlive their children. The grief of Pop and Parma has not slackened in sixteen years. But to outlive our parents by such a margin, to become my father's elder so soon, and for so long, will no doubt be a disorienting perversity. Though perhaps not only that. I suspect there will be a boost in the obligations I feel toward my father, chiefly the obligation to adopt his verve for living. Not to live for us both, as it were—I can't accept the speed that brought his blood alive, that emptied his body onto asphalt, the risk that meant valor—but somehow to let my senses be amplified by the quickness he beheld in the world. Living well might indeed be the best revenge against those who harmed you, but it is also the best homage to those who made you.