Motorcycles I've Loved (3 page)

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you got balls, kid.”

“Huh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“That an' a fuckin' brain. One's no good without the other.” He laughed and flipped my visor back down, then gave me a resounding smack on the top of my helmet.

Riding that ridge between reason and recklessness, stillness and speed, is the first, maybe the most important, thing I learned about motorcycles. It's a balance I'd never fully understood in any setting. I experimented with both extremes, in Ireland, hitchhiking on rural roads, taking rides from just about anyone; or in India, refusing to walk to the bazaar alone, making Thom go instead. As a woman traveling by herself I'd confused bravery with stupidity, and as a woman in a partnership I'd confused caution with cowardice. It's an equilibrium that takes practice, but on a motorcycle there's not much room for interpretation—some things are just easier to learn when the pavement is keeping score.

“Now,” Joe said, “go do it again.”

Force

I
had been casually scanning the local motorcycle classifieds for weeks, but when I finished the safety course and passed the riding test I began to search in earnest, shutting myself in my room for hours at a time to sift through motorcycle listings. I had lived in western Massachusetts for almost a year by then, in a town called Northampton, waiting tables in a French restaurant and partying hard, with a constant rotation of five to six other housemates.

My life in Australia was still vivid, but the details of my old routine had begun to feel distant: riding the train to the city center each morning, walking through Carlton Gardens in flip-flops, high heels stowed in my shoulder bag. Eight-hour days spent at a boutique market-research firm, answering the phone, helping the researchers with their reports, leading focus groups into comfortable rooms where their reactions could be watched and recorded from behind a one-way mirror. Then arriving home a little past six, making dinner, feeding the cat, and later watching television while Thom did the dishes.

Thom and I stayed in touch after we broke up and he returned to Australia. He would send me packages with some of my belongings now and then, a box of clothes, some old letters, a stack of photos. Every time something arrived with an Australian postmark I would sit on my bed and cry. We talked on the phone a few times, e-mailed occasionally. We discussed the possibility of getting back together someday, and while it was earnest at the time, I see now that it was always an empty plan, grasping at straws to damp down the distress of being so far apart and the very real prospect that we would never see each other again.

Although memories of Australia were slowly receding, my current life had yet to sharpen. The ground I stood on felt shaky. I was still expanding, accumulating matter, waiting for my ambitions to materialize and then solidify. The plan with Thom had included a permanent-residency visa and going back to school in Melbourne, but without Thom and without Australia, there was no plan. I still wanted to finish my bachelor's degree but didn't know what to study or where to apply—all I knew was I didn't want to feel lost anymore. I wanted a direction, but I didn't want to keep drifting to find it. The physical motion of my travels began to seem more evasive than transformative. I knew there had to be a way to move forward without buying a plane ticket.

It didn't help that almost as soon as I had decided to stay in New England, my parents decided to leave. They sold the house in Vermont where I grew up and moved to Florida, where my father could work outdoors all year round and my mother could continue teaching online college classes but retire from public school, exploring a whole new gardening climate in her free time. After thirty years of hard Vermont winters, they were ready for a change. I understood their reasons for going but was dismayed to lose my childhood home. It seemed like I'd just returned, and already I was packing up my old room, inheriting the furniture and carpets and appliances they didn't want to transport south.

I grew up in a beautiful, unusual house with tall, expansive windows, my father's woodshop on the first floor, our home on the second, set on a hill in the middle of a spacious meadow, acres of forest all around. My parents designed and built it together, the art teacher and the carpenter each playing to their strengths. The view of it from the bottom of our driveway, my mother's gardens sprawled on every side, was rustic and elaborate all at once: a grand gray-blue barn with a silo, a weather-vane shaped like a rooster spinning on the peak of its roof. I had never planned on living there again, but when they sold it and went south I felt more adrift than ever. I ached for an anchor, a place to call home.

For a time, the house in Northampton was that anchor, and although it never quite felt like home, it kept me occupied. Something was always happening at the house on North Street: a stew being cooked; a show being played; a dinner being eaten; a dog visiting, or a small child, or an old friend; a noise band sleeping on the floor; a yard sale out front: a traffic jam in the driveway. We never locked the doors, because there was always someone home, and we never bought bread, because there was always someone living there who worked at the Hungry Ghost bakery and brought home the day-old loaves. It was a transient way to live—the house was for sale the entire time I was there—but that felt okay. After bouncing around the globe, I no longer felt the need to constantly be on the move, but as much as I craved a home, I wasn't ready to stop completely, to let the dust settle and commit, so it was a good compromise. I was on the verge of something, a new adventure, a stretch of fresh terrain, but I had yet to find the right vehicle to take me over the brink.

I had only two specifications within my modest price range: at five-foot-three, I wanted a motorcycle with a frame low enough for my feet to comfortably touch the ground, and with enough force in the belly of its engine to be taken seriously.

Since I have always looked both younger and smaller than I feel, being taken seriously has often felt like an uphill battle, with my anatomy fighting for the other side. For years the word
cute
has been robbing me of my dignity; even my anger seems to inspire the same reaction toddlers receive. When I raise my voice it goes up an octave, and when I want to get the salad bowl down from the cupboard I need a chair to reach it. At fifteen I got a job as a waitress, then promptly lost it when they realized I was too young to serve alcohol, and when I started traveling at seventeen I was constantly scolded, told over and over again that the world was just not safe for a girl like me to be all on her own, as if I wasn't strong enough or smart enough or bold enough to take care of myself. To this day, people I don't even know sometimes insist I don't look a day over sixteen—as if this is what women in their twenties want to hear.

People implied or just flat out told me I was too young, too fragile, or too small so often I bought it. As an adolescent I could never quite reconcile this discrepancy between who I wanted to be and who I appeared to be. I began to think being cute was the only way I could have any power at all, and although I've never liked that aspect of myself—that part of me that is willing to cash in on the doe eyes and the blood that flushes my cheeks red-hot at the slightest provocation—I went with it. It felt like my only weapon.

Learning to travel, to make my way in the world, shifted this perception, and then learning to ride motorcycles shattered it completely. People looked at me a little differently when I arrived in leather, on two wheels, and it made me begin to look at myself differently, too. I remembered that I'm not this undersized shell, or at least I don't have to be—I have a choice. When I see myself now, my shoulders are broad enough to fill an elevator, my hands are big like dinner plates, and I can reach anything I damn please. My voice is low and gravelly, my skin rough and grooved by the elements, tough as alligator meat. I am ancient—old and wise and stoic, like a giant sea turtle that swings herself up out of the sea every now and then to see the young, pink sunbathers, then sinks back down below to sleep in the sand. But it doesn't change the fact that in the mirror I'm just this little piece of pale, blue-eyed fluff who looks as though she might blow away in heavy winds. At first I struggled to reconcile the reality of my mind's eye with my reflection. I wanted the force I felt welling up inside me to be apparent to everyone. I wanted it to show on my face.

In physics, force is an influence that causes a free body to undergo a change in velocity or a change in shape. It's a fundamental concept in Newtonian mechanics—the foundation for everything that comes after. In conversation, force is synonymous with strength or power. Both the physical and the metaphysical facets of force inhabit the world of motorcycles: the force provided by the engine, and the force provided by the rider. For decades motorcycles have been symbols of power, transforming anyone at the handlebars into a demigod of the road through sheer imposition: the rumbling exhaust, the thumping engine, the glittering chrome, the studs and the leather. The motorcycle itself is the avenue for literal, mechanical force, but its rider is the apex of its strength, the crest of its power. I think of oiled black hide, hidden faces, heavy boots; I think of long, empty roads and dark, close streets and saddlebags packed for anything that might lie in between. I think of the motorcyclist as an archetype: the lone rider, or the restless soul, rolling through seedy towns like a tumbleweed until the wind catches her up and carries her back out to the desert to spin in the dunes.

•   •   •

O
NCE
I
GOT
my new license
in the mail, marked with an
M
for
motorcycle
, I doubled the time I spent haunting the motorcycle classifieds, Googling models and makes until they ran together in one long, metallic streak. I retreated to my bedroom and shut the door more and more often, growing tired of all the hanging out that transpired on the other side of the wall, beginning to feel a rift widening, my bedroom breaking away from the house like an ice floe and drifting downriver. The years I had spent traveling were all blank pages to my friends—I had simply disappeared for a time, and then one day returned. At first, as I tried to numb the grief and the guilt I felt over leaving Thom, this suited me, but as the months wore on I began to realize I was regressing rather than advancing. I was acting like my seventeen-year-old self, pretending those years hadn't happened. I was perpetually drunk or stoned, but ideally both, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day although I'd quit around the same time I'd met Thom, stumbling through a series of events and calling it fun.

When I discovered motorcycles, roughly a year after I'd returned to the United States, it was the first time since I'd made the decision to leave Thom that my sense of adventure was stirred, my curiosity aroused. It was the feeling I had been looking for all along. It reminded me of the power I'd felt when I bought my plane ticket to Ireland four years before, the tremors that had set the tectonics of my consciousness in motion, and when I felt those tremors again I knew I was finally doing something right.

I went to look at one motorcycle, a dud, then arranged to see another. On the way, I picked up my friend Rigdhen, the man who had taught me to ride out in the meadows, and threw a pack of American Spirits into his lap in exchange for his expertise. He lit one for me and one for himself, and together we found the address on some tiny dead-end drive on the Northampton/Easthampton border. Rigdhen fiddled with the motorcycle in question and talked shop with the guy selling it as I looked on, trying to seem seasoned or knowledgeable, and failing miserably. The bike began to smoke a little when we started it and sounded like a dying animal. Rigdhen gave me this look, like,
Nice going,
and I shrugged at him, as in,
What the fuck do I know.
We left shortly thereafter. I brought Rigdhen back to the garage where he worked and we sat on the hood of my car for a minute before he went in. He assured me there would be other motorcycles.

“There's a Rebel 250 in Waltham,” I said, summoning hope and remembering the ad I had been looking at earlier. I was still hung up on wanting something a little bigger—400 or 500cc's, maybe, but by then impatience had won out. I had gotten my license and saved the money. I wasn't interested in shopping wisely, or in waiting for a certain look, a great bargain, or even a smart investment. I wanted to be on two wheels by Friday. Rigdhen raised an eyebrow and shook his head slightly.

“I don't think I know where Waltham is.”

“Me neither,” I said. He considered for a moment, and smoked the rest of his cigarette in one long drag before flicking it into the bushes and hopping off the hood. The metal made a loud pop as it shifted back into its usual shape.

“I guess I'll bring the van, then,” he said, and loped inside with a backward wave.

A few days later we cruised down the Mass Pike,
Car Talk
on the radio, a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips between us. We were on the hunt for Waltham, ready to haul the bike back with us in the big, white painter's van if the sale went through. Rigdhen tried to temper my excitement for the purchase, but without success; I was already determined that, barring catastrophe, the van would not be empty on the ride home.

I looked out the window while Rigdhen told me about the new yoga teacher he was dating, and then we talked about the other yoga teacher, whom he was no longer dating. We talked about India, where Rigdhen grew up, and Tibet, where his parents are from. He told me he liked to paint—murals, mostly. The conversation drifted; we turned up the radio when “Born to Be Wild” came on and decided it was a good omen. Touching the swell of cash in my pocket, I checked the directions again, not wanting to miss the exit. We did, of course, but after a few wrong turns and some backtracking we managed to arrive at the address only a few minutes late. The man selling the Rebel was waiting for us when we pulled up, and as we got out and shook hands he didn't say much, just twitched his gray mustache in my direction and pointed at the electric-blue motorcycle parked in the driveway. He was a little guy, with his plaid shirt tucked into his jeans and his belt done up real tight. His wife floated in and out of the garage without ever speaking to us directly, and a grown son leaned up against the wall, looking sullen. It was the wife's bike, we learned, and she was trading up for a Nighthawk 450, already bought and parked just inside. I couldn't help but fawn over the Nighthawk a little; it was, after all, the exact thing I had been looking for, but her smaller Rebel sister was the reason we had driven all this way.

Rigdhen confirmed that all was reasonably well with the Rebel after some tinkering. We tried knocking the price down, but the seller was firm. “She's worth it,” he said, and the simplicity of his conviction was enough to end the haggling. I was hesitant because of how small the Rebel seemed, but then I realized that this instinctual connection between size and force was exactly what I was trying to disprove. I wanted a bigger bike so that I would, by association, be more forceful, but then I realized we matched, she and I, our strength hidden away beneath an unlikely exterior, and so I gave him the money and he gave me the title. Rigdhen rode it up a metal ramp and into the back of the van, where we strapped it down, and then we all shook hands again. In the sideview mirror I saw the man give us a loose salute as we took off, and then he went back inside. Rigdhen drove; I folded the title twice and put it in my pocket. The dashboard glowed orange in the glare of a quickly sinking sun, and as we swung out onto the highway I couldn't help but look over my shoulder at the Rebel every now and again, peeking out of the darkness, her big, luminous headlight staring back at me, and the sunset reflected in her gaze, warm and golden.