I heard a faint, rumbling buzz. I looked down at the track. There was a guy getting ready to ride. He sat on his bike and kicked the starter. I heard the tick of the tiny engine. He rode slowly at first, then faster, the dust flying. I watched as the bike circled around the track, the rider leaning in so hard on the curves that his knees almost scraped the ground.
Hangtown
When I was ten years old my older sister Shannon took me to the Hangtown motocross race in Prairie City, California. It was the first time I'd seen motorcycles fly. I loved the speed and the dust, and I loved watching the beautiful long jumps, the riders crouched over–when the bikes would arc in the air and seem, for a moment, to float. I felt cool watching them, as if the noise and the dirt and the danger of it all rubbed off on me somehow. I remember I wore Shannon’s baseball cap—it was red and too big and kept slipping down over my nose—but I wore it and chewed the tobacco that she had given me, mint-flavored in its little round tin, until I felt sick.
My older brother, Mischa, had a motorcycle, but I wasn’t allowed to ride on it. Mischa was cool—he was seventeen and smoked pot and played the guitar and listened to The Clash and rode a skateboard. I wanted to skate too but my mom wouldn’t let me. You could get hurt, she said. Mischa had already broken his arm, twice. If you broke your arm then you couldn't play the violin, my mom said, when I protested. I wasn’t sure that sounded like such a bad thing. Sometimes when Mischa wasn’t home I would go into his room and tentatively lift up the corner of his mattress, running my hand underneath it until I found the rolling papers that he’d hidden there. Sometimes when he was home I would hear him and his friends talking through the adjoining wall of our bedrooms. There was a sweet, thick, smoky smell and I could hear coughing and a lot of laughing. One time I heard them talking about smoking cloves but I thought they said clover. The next day I went outside to the backyard and picked some clover and took some of Mischa’s rolling papers from under his mattress and locked myself in the bathroom and climbed up onto the open window ledge and rolled a joint and tried to smoke it. It wouldn't light though because it was clover, still green, fresh-picked.
I wanted to be cool like Mischa. I talked like him and dressed like him and listened to the music he brought home and wanted nothing so badly as to skate like him, but that wasn't going to happen so I decided I would become a motorcycle racer instead. He said the riders at Hangtown had been training since they were pretty young so I knew I’d better get started. For my birthday that year I asked my parents for a BMX 24—which was a bicycle, not a motorcycle—but still, a good way to ease in. To my surprise, I got one. I rode it a lot at first, tearing around the neighborhood, pretending I was on a race track. After a few weeks I realized I'd never be like those guys at Hangtown. I’d never be an MX racer. I was too cautious, too afraid of getting hurt. It didn’t matter either way though because one night not long after I got the BMX Mischa and his friends took it out of its hiding place under the hedge in the yard and sold it to buy Heroin. That was before he got caught using and sent to juvenile hall. I became confused about how to admire or emulate him after he got sent to Juvy. I remember how sad he’d looked when I went with my mom to visit him. He got out of there before too long but my bike was still gone. I was sorry about it all but maybe a little relieved too. I was okay riding the bike around the neighborhood but that was all. Mostly I loved the way it looked—its clean, straight lines, silver and blue. After he got out of Juvy Mischa stopped going to school. After a while he got busted again and then he had to move out.
In high school I fell in love or something like it with Jamey, but it wasn’t exactly reciprocated. Anyhow he had a Honda motorcycle and sometimes he’d let me ride on the back of it which was a thrill that left no room for doomed love or anything else. Then it was like in the movie My Bodyguard when Clifford saves Ricky Linderman just by needing him and they fix up Ricky’s old bike and ride around through the streets of Chicago on it, together, invincible. Except it wasn’t like that really but then it hardly mattered because I had what the teachers described as an “active imagination” by which they meant that I was trouble and I knew what they meant and it was true, but it didn’t matter—when I was on Jamey’s bike, arms around his waist, I was Cliff and he was Linderman and everything was going to be okay.
My favorite bikes were made by Honda and Yamaha. They’re weren’t huge but looked strong and like they could go fast. When you looked at one you could see how there weren’t any extra pieces trying to hide the mechanics of the thing. Everything was in view, approachable, like just by looking at it you could figure out how it worked and then work on it, yourself. I loved the smaller motorcycles because they were simple—not too bulky or slick or shiny. I figured the bikes reflected the rider, or maybe the other way around. Those big hogs, it seemed to me, were for people who had maybe started to go a little soft and had something to prove. But the people who rode the smaller bikes had true grit.
After Mischa got clean he let me ride sometimes, unbeknownst to my mom, on the back of his motorcycle. It was one of the newer, bigger ones, a Kawasaki. Maybe it wasn’t the kind I liked best but I was reasonable enough to turn a blind eye. It was still a motorcycle—fast and dangerous and fun.
When I was eighteen my friend Ken, who had HIV, decided to get a motorcycle. It was a dream of his. That, and to go to Italy. He went to Italy that summer with his boyfriend John and when he got back he got a part time job at the library and used the money to buy a motorcycle. It was the worst motorcycle I had ever seen, huge and shiny and red. He wanted to give me a ride on it. I was embarrassed just to look at it but what can you say to your dying friend who you love more than anything in the world? I got on the bike and we rode. Eventually Ken became too sick to ride—but he kept working at the library because he wanted to pay off the bike in time, which he did. The summer came to an end, I went off to college and a couple of months later he was dead.
In college I made a new friend, his name was Matt. Matt was a beautiful guy, looked Italian or like a dog with big brown, soulful eyes. Matt was obsessed with Sinead O'Connor and my best friend at college looked a lot like her which was a good enough reason for Matt to fall insanely in love with her. But she was in a relationship with my other best friend. For a while the three of them tried to share each other. There was a lot of tortured longing and heartache and for a long time I was a sort of vessel or recipient of their angst; they all turned to me to complain about the situation. It made me feel important but was also exhausting. Matt bought a motorcycle which he liked to ride around the empty roads out in the cornfields. One night he got drunk and took a ride through the cornfields but forgot to turn on his headlights and a car hit him head on and he died. Otherwise, I know, I just know that we’d still be friends. He was a true friend and one of the few men I’ve known that I felt I could fully, unreservedly be myself around.
After a few years I re-connected with Jamey from high school. Not in a romantic way or at least not on his part. Anyhow I was riding on the back of his motorcycle when we got hit. A drunk driver in the middle of the night—blew a stop sign and drove straight at us. Jamey swerved out of the way just in time, but not before I flew over the car and bounced off the windshield. I was pretty banged up and hit my head and couldn’t remember much of anything for a few months.
I was too spooked after that to get on another motorcycle. Once in a while I’d see an old Honda but it was always with a little thrill of fear. I still fantasized about buying my own bike someday but mostly I just watched clips of famous races at Hangtown, and that’s as far as it went. I guess it was more my speed.
Years later, after being married, traveling the world, getting divorced—while nurturing a healthy fear of motorcycles throughout—I reconnected with Jamey again. He’d never stopped riding, even though he’d been in a few more crashes after ours. We were both living in Portland at the time and he wanted to take me to a soccer game. He offered to pick me up on his motorcycle and drive us to the match. I hadn’t been on a motorcycle since the accident and was terrified by the idea but I was more ashamed of my fear than afraid so I did it anyway. We went to the game. Jamey drove slowly. I did my best not to fall off the bike. It was fun and nothing bad happened.
Not long afterward, I met my current husband James. He had a moped, which was cool but even more dangerous than a motorcycle if you really think about it. Eventually it broke down—a total loss, couldn’t be fixed. I was relieved. Every once in a while he says he wants to get another one and I say something like “over my dead body.”
So far, so good.
.. fantastical !
That part about not knowing how to admire or emulate your brother when he was in juvy broke my heart for both of you. I loved this and I’m so sorry about your friends.