Motorcycles I've Loved (7 page)

Gravity

D
uring that same summer there was a party at my house in Northampton. At the northern tip of the Knowledge Corridor, and in the midst of the Five College area, Northampton teems with young people; there was no shortage of parties there, either at that house or in Northampton, but this one I remember in particular. We barbecued ribs and dogs and burgers in our backyard all afternoon, and sometime around dusk it seemed as though the entire neighborhood was there. The gathering began in the small, overgrown backyard, but by the evening it was spilling down the driveway and into the road.

We had speakers pointed out through the open living room windows, playing Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton and assorted prog rock on vinyl, someone running inside to flip the record every twenty minutes, and there was a table literally covered with bowls of salad: pasta salad, egg salad, potato salad, spinach salad, rice salad, arugula salad. There was a bowl of M&M's being called a sugar salad. Someone's dog lapped melted ice out of a plastic bucket full of Pabst Blue Ribbon sitting next to the porch. I heard it growl when a young man reached in for a can of beer, and the young man growled back.

I watched as a steady stream shuffled in and out the back door of my house, to and from the grill, carrying paper plates that buckled under mounds of food, plastic forks rising up out of the middles like flagpoles. They found spots on the grass, among the forgotten croquet wickets, and they dug in, emerging with barbecue sauce on their cheeks and under their fingernails, corn in their teeth, and red wine stains on their lips. Someone slapped a round of tofu dogs on the squat, brick grill in the center of it all, and another swarm of guests arrived, bringing with them a chorus of carbonation, that sharp
snap-fizz
of half a dozen aluminum cans being cracked open at once.

The Rebel was parked where I could see it, just at the edge of the lawn, with the front tire on the grass. I sat on the porch railing, my feet hooked into the rungs, admiring the day and eating a handful of sugar snap peas while I talked to Chuck Meyer about motorcycles he'd ridden as a young man. Chuck was the father of my good friends. His daughter was roughly my age, but his two sons were nearer to my brother's. In fact, Phin had been close with Chuck's sons—there was even a summer that he'd practically lived at their house in Conway. As a teenager, I had clung to my brother's friends—Chuck's sons and a handful of others—as if by becoming part of their group I could keep him in some way. Though I'd lost touch with all of them while I'd been abroad, when I returned they were still there, playing noise music or making weird art, wearing T-shirts as thin and frayed as spiderwebs, shaving rarely, swimming often, working just enough to buy food and beer, exactly how I remembered. It soothed me to see them thriving: growing older with their ideals, staying constant in so many ways but also becoming more fully realized. We still gathered at Chuck's house in Conway on hot summer nights, and as time wore on and we all got a little older, Chuck became more and more likely to join us.

Although Chuck had been remembering my name at his kids' parties in the year since I'd returned to the area, it was my brother he'd known first. I am magnetized by the fossils of my brother's youth, of the “before,” an attraction that has become so familiar I barely notice it anymore. Perhaps this is the foundation on which my friendship with Chuck was built. It might be the foundation for more than I care to admit.

I think one of the first things I remember learning about Chuck was his steady consumption of periodicals:
The Advocate
,
The Recorder
,
The New York Times
,
The Sun
,
The New Yorker
,
Harper's
—anything you could subscribe to, really, it seemed he had a subscription to. I remember coveting the stacks of glossy magazines, full of current events and literature, piled all over his house, trying to read as many as I could whenever I visited, as if by flipping each page I would absorb the same worldly wisdom that settled on Chuck like dust.

He had been a newspaperman in his youth, some hotshot editor in New York or Long Island or maybe both, which accounts for his dedication to the written word, but for as long as I'd known him Chuck had been living in rural Massachusetts as a freelance pilot. He had a small aerial photography business consisting of a little plane parked out in Shelburne Falls, and he flew as much as he could. The sky seemed to occupy his thoughts almost as relentlessly as the words he so carefully spoke and so avidly read.

•   •   •

A
T THAT POINT
I already knew about the Honda CM450 parked in Chuck's garage. Earlier in the summer, before I found the Rebel, I had suggested buying it from him, but he had shied away from the idea—had said he wanted to ride it again someday, but that I could borrow it whenever I wanted to, as long as I promised not to break my neck. It was quite an offer, but then the Rebel materialized; I fell hard for that electric-blue paint job and bought it without thinking twice.

I passed Chuck a sugar snap and he mentioned getting the CM on the road again. He hadn't ridden it in years. “She was running okay when I put her to bed,” he said, and turned to admire the Rebel with me. He strode up to it and swung a leg over. I hopped down from my perch and followed him. Chuck got comfortable in the seat, rocked the bike back and forth a little, tested the shocks, squeezed the brakes. “If I had long pants on,” he said, looking wistfully down at his bare legs, “I'd take her for a spin.” He smiled then, and for a minute I couldn't tell if he was serious, if he was really game to zoom off down the road if only he were wearing pants. At times, the jokes he cracked were delivered with such an elegant deadpan I didn't even suspect I was hearing a joke until after he hit me with the punch line and was waiting for me to get it, nonchalantly fluffing that newspaper he always seemed to have in his hands, trying to hide a crooked, roguish grin in the folds of the Arts section.

The idea of Chuck taking a spin, with long pants or without, made me smile, but somehow I knew he wasn't joking just then. He had a thick head of downy white hair, carefully parted on the side, and a trim, lightly peppered, heavily salted beard. He was tall, a little stooped, as though he'd lost a few inches over the years, and he had a limp, but nevertheless he was a force. It wasn't possible for Chuck Meyer to enter a room unnoticed. “Next time I'll bring the long pants,” he added solemnly, in the carefully enunciated, almost Mid-Atlantic accent that I've heard lovingly impersonated so many times. Since he had his shorts on, I could see the leg brace that was usually tucked away under his pants, and it gave him an endearing, lopsided look.

Chuck put the kickstand up on the Rebel and centered its weight. For a moment, he didn't say anything, he just leaned back a little, his right hand resting on the throttle, and squinted straight ahead like he had the wind in his face. Maybe he was looking at his son Nick, tending the tofu dogs on the grill, or his daughter, Anna, eating coleslaw and laughing so hard she couldn't swallow; maybe he was remembering a ride he'd taken as a young man—or something else altogether. He nudged the kickstand back down and got off the bike.

“Fantastic,” he said. “I remember now.”

A little while later he got the CM fixed up. A handyman friend went over to help him out with the mechanics. They filled the tank, jumped the battery, changed the oil, and started her up. Chuck gave me a call sometime in September.

“Hey, motorcycle buddy, how about a motorcycle ride,” he said, and we picked a day when the weather looked good—he was always on the lookout for clear skies.

I rode out to his house in Conway on a Sunday morning, about twenty miles north. It was early and sunny and cold, and even though I had long johns on, the wind blew right through me. My feet were frozen chunks of flesh, knocking the gears up and down by memory because I couldn't feel what I was doing. I remember my hands burning from the cold and my teeth locked together to keep from chattering, and then, suddenly, a long stretch of road in the full sun. I flexed my fingers and felt the warmth soften the clamp of my jaw, part the clench of my teeth. I put it in fifth, and this time I could feel my toes knocking the gear up a notch. The air in my helmet got warmer. The thick hide of my jacket began to toast under the rallying sun, its beams like honey on my wind-chafed knuckles and my battered, bare throat. I let it soak in.

When I got there, Tchotchke, Chuck's lumbering black beast of a dog, lurched out of the house to greet me. Chuck followed. Tchotchke was a moody son of a bitch—he'd been known to snap if you touched him wrong, but as far as Chuck was concerned, he was putty. It was just the two of them out there, in that sprawling house, and I imagined them roaming the floor plan together, navigating the furniture, inspecting the rooms, securing the perimeter. Chuck had been divorced for years, and although lady friends had come and gone, he had been a bachelor for as long as I'd known him. It was just Chuck and Tchotch out there in Conway, and that was how I often thought of them—as a pair, the master and his minion, grizzled but noble; grumpy, alert, and stubborn as hell.

Chuck gave me a big hug and then a slap on the back. Tchotchke grumbled, good-naturedly, I hoped, and loped over to sniff my motorcycle. From behind, he was more bear than dog. I went inside to pee, borrow a pair of gloves, stomp my feet a little. I paused at the kitchen counter while I was inside, and I saw one of Chuck's to-do lists. There was always a to-do list lying around at Chuck's house, written out in one continual line, like this:

MILK TOMATO COTTAGE CHEESE MUSTARD
RECYCLING
OIL CHANGE DISH DETERGENT BATTERIES PAPER TOWELS
GO TO DMV
BUY TICKETS CALL RON SCHEDULE PHYSICAL
SHAMPOO

He would use the same sheet of paper until it was full.
Milk
would be written and crossed out five or more times, and the ink along the creases would be faint by the time he was ready to throw it out. Before we left, he went through another list, this one in his head, as if he were readying his plane for takeoff. He was crossing things off, one by one, in the dust on his gas tank. Fuel line, on; key, on; power switch, on; gear, neutral; clutch, in. My bike was still warm, but we sat and let his run with the choke out for a minute. Tchotchke watched us, his head cocked. On cold days, or when the bike hasn't been turned on in a while, pulling out the choke lessens the airflow and increases the ratio of gas entering your engine. More gas burns quicker in a cold engine, but enriching the mixture can also strip off the oil you need for lubrication, not to mention it uses up a lot of gas, so it's not sustainable—it's useful only if the bike won't start otherwise. He turned the choke off after a minute and gave me a thumbs-up. I motioned for him to go in front. He revved the throttle, got his feet off the ground and the bike into second gear after a little wobbling between the frostbitten ruts in the dirt road, and then we were off. The day felt warmer, the sun higher. We tooled down through Conway's twists and turns, into Shelburne Falls, then we rode along Route 2, a meandering east-west highway that runs across the entire state of Massachusetts, but which is relatively sluggish and scenic as it passes through Franklin County.

We stopped at Gould's Sugarhouse, having already planned to meet Chuck's daughter, Anna, and her mom, Florence, there for brunch. We ate french toast and eggs, and I almost couldn't believe how nice it was to be sitting there with the three of them. Anna whispered that she thought my bike was cooler than Chuck's, and he scowled good-naturedly. After we ate, Anna and Florence waved us off, and Chuck and I kept going toward Greenfield. I remember pulling out of the parking lot after him, seeing him drag his feet a little too long, switch gears a little too abruptly, a little too soon, and I grinned to myself, thinking that even if we went thirty miles per hour all afternoon, it was the kind of perfect day you might hope and hope for but almost never get. I let it soak in.

•   •   •

W
E SNUCK IN
a few more weekend rides before the season ended and it was time to put the bikes to bed. At that point in my life, Sundays were sacred. I was in the midst of my first semester back in school since going to community college, when I was mostly concerned with doing the bare minimum, and a lot had changed since then. I was keenly aware of the debt I was accruing, and I was wholly invested in every single one of my classes. I wasn't totally sure what I wanted to study, just that I wanted to be a student again and I wanted to be good at it. I'd applied to one school, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, because it was close and cheap, and once I sent in the application, the logistics fell into place. I enrolled over the summer, as a junior, and suddenly my rambling way of life—lazy mornings, work in the evenings, then drinking till dawn—shifted into a strenuously organized, deeply purposeful existence.

Sunday was the only day of the week that I didn't go to work or to campus or both, and I usually spent it curled up in bed, looking at my Kanji flashcards under the covers and catching up on all the bullshit that had fallen through the cracks during the week on my antiquated little laptop. As a rule, my feet didn't touch the floor until sometime in the late afternoon, when the e-mails had been sorted, the Japanese worksheets copied out, the physics equations scribbled on graph paper, and my legs had stopped aching from the Saturday-night rush, but those riding adventures with Chuck somehow managed to get me out of bed early. I looked forward to them as one of my only respites from an otherwise grueling routine.

•   •   •

O
NE
S
UNDAY
we went flying in his plane instead. I met him at the airport, grumpy and sleep-deprived. It was bright, so bright the sunglasses I was wearing didn't seem to be helping at all, then I remember looking up and realizing the sky was totally cloudless, a perfect day for flying. The mood lifted. I watched a bird riding the thermals and sighed, thinking, That will be me soon. I had found the airport without too much trouble, but when I got there, I wasn't so sure
airport
was the right word for it. I wandered through an open chain-link gate into a cluster of small airplane hangars set out in rows, each the same size and shape, and a road right down the middle. At first it seemed like I was alone, but as I walked farther in I saw a few planes being rolled out of their hangars, a few pilots and passengers loading up their gear, all of whom gave me a wave or a friendly nod. It reminded me of that brief gesture between motorcyclists: the recognition of someone else traveling among the elements, of someone else as close to the road as you are. I found Chuck eventually, getting the plane set up and checking everything over. He showed me where to put my bag, and then where to put myself. “Ready?” he asked. “Ready,” I said. And after some more checking and double-checking, he got in and started her up.