The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  When I embraced Parma in the driveway that evening, she had four words of her own to say: “This is so bad.” Her understated potency has stayed with me all these years. I could not tell her Tennyson’s line, Though much is taken, much abides, because that line did not appear to me just then, and if it had, I would not have bought it. Nor would she have. This was the woman who, every afternoon for years, in every kind of weather, would carry a lawn chair to the cemetery and sit at her son’s grave, in reverie and private requiem, as if she could make him remember her, as if he could know she was there.

  Her faith, I could see from the outset, would only be strengthened by this blight. Pop, on the other hand: he’d never had any use for the divine and its dictates, and now he’d have even less. His indifference would turn to muffled scorn. That’s how it works: a personal storm of this sort rends you one way or rends you the other but seldom leaves you right where you were.

  Neighbors and family began appearing only moments after my grandparents returned from the Pennsylvania hospital. In a small town, news of death is fleet of foot, forever in a rush, much quicker than news of birth. Soon the driveway was alive with people in summer’s colors, all those yellows and light blues, people I hadn’t seen in months or years.

  The phone would not stop; information trickled in with each call. The six other men with whom my father had been riding that day gave us what they thought were the basic facts. My father was thrown from his bike in a right turn on a remote country road, hitting a guardrail headfirst, though no one had seen the crash. He’d been at the rear of the pack, taking it easy that day; there was something wrong with his front brake, he’d said; it didn’t feel right. He’d never been on that road before, didn’t know the turn was there. The others found him beneath the guardrail, in a pond of blood leaking from his cracked helmet. I can’t remember all of Pop’s sentences from that day, but I remember this one: “It’s hard to crack a helmet.”

  My father’s younger brother, Nicky, himself an expert rider, walked me around the block and attempted to explain how the crash might have happened, how my father might have been calculating that turn as it ambushed him. Speed was the factor I’d return to again and again. What else but speed? Already I was accepting the rash of clichés as they came, the unexamined inklings as I maneuvered through the electricity of this new truth. Circling the block, I told Nicky that I anticipated being “haunted” by my father’s crash. I might have congratulated myself for not resorting to the most common formulation of all: This feels like a nightmare. In truth, it never did. What was so regrettable for me—what I was beginning to digest, even during those initial jolts, in those early hours of knowing—was that my father’s death didn’t feel nightmarish at all. It felt outright expected. Of course he’d kill himself on that machine. Of course he would.

  Both of my father’s brothers had inherited the motorcycle lust from Pop. Both had decades of riding experience, up-close knowledge of racing those machines on meandrous back roads, but both had been sensible enough to stop. They had young children and nervous wives. But my father’s three children were already grown, and so perhaps he felt a less pointed responsibility to keep alive. Perhaps the risk of speed, perhaps all risk and recklessness, comes more easily to those who have finished the hard work of raising their kids. If that’s what he might have thought, that my siblings and I needed him much less now that we were grown—my brother just twenty-one, my sister twenty-three—he was very wrong. His likeliest thought, though? No thought at all. Because it’s always the other guy who dies. He’s dead and I’m clear.

  He’d been only a few months away from a marriage that promised a middle-aged fulfillment his youthful twelve years with my mother could not deliver. He and his fiancée had been about to move from their closed-in condominium to a sizable home backed against acres of woodland. I’d recently gone with him to tour the house, to hear his plans for mild renovation, where his workshop would go, where his bike would sleep, and I was gratified to see, to feel, his contentment—it felt forty-seven years in the making.

  If I’d once thought of my body as a machine for living, the motorcycle is a living machine. Parma detested the bikes. Pop had always taken several trips a year, week-long trips to motorcycle races and rallies, to Laconia, New Hampshire, and to Daytona, Florida. Each time he prepared to leave, Parma’s rancor would rise, and we’d all sidestep her conniptions over being abandoned again, over the non-paranoid possibility that the next time she saw Pop he’d have coins on his eyes. Emergency-room personnel have a special argot for motorcycles; they call them donorcycles. If you need an organ, bet on that hearty young ignoramus winging down the highway at 105, twenty years old and strong, in flawless health except for his newly destroyed neck and skull.

  The best pro racers in the world, the MotoGP maestros who top two hundred miles per hour on the straightaway—Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo and their intrepid brethren—those men won’t ride on the road. Combining a maximum of sense with a prudent dose of dread, they know that to ride on the road is to shorten their lives. On a racetrack, there’s nothing to hit. There are gravel-trap runoffs at the turns you’re likely to miscalculate—they know where you’re going to crash: it’s always in a turn—and even if you lose it at two hundred, you slide for a while before tumbling into the grassy infield. The armored suit, with its padded humps along the back, saves you from a snapped neck and spine. But on the road? Trees, guardrails, telephone poles, streetlamps, mailboxes, trucks and cars intent upon grinding a rider into tinfoil. There’s no escaping them.

  Statistics tell a story. Death by motorcycle is nearly thirty times higher than death by car. Helmets are only 37 percent effective in preventing death. In 2000, the year my father was killed, close to three thousand other American riders were also felled. Most motorcycle fatalities happen from May to August for the very reason you suspect: the weather is pleasant. My father crashed on the seventh of May. The time of day when most crashes occur? Between the hours of 3 P.M. and 6 P.M. For those who began riding in the morning, the late-afternoon crashes are due to fatigue but also to overconfidence. The longer you go without crashing, the more actively you believe you won’t. A simple but deceptive equation. My father hit the guardrail at 3:06 P.M. More than 30 percent of all motorcycle fatalities result from speeding—of course they do. The species of my father’s bike (known technically as a “super sports” bike or “superbike” or “sport bike,” rather less technically as a “crotch rocket” or “Jap bike”) is four times likelier to kill a man than a soberer species of bike, a cruiser or touring cycle. You’ve no doubt seen those jolly, hirsute fellas in helmet headsets, grinning wives at their backs, a youthful Billy Joel crooning from a cranked-up radio about an uptown girl. Pop called those riders “jackasses.”

  I don’t know what my father had elected to do with his organs, and I’m ashamed now that I was too stomped by sorrow to ask, or even to think of asking. My grandparents are not the breed of people to whom you can speak about such things. And certainly not when they’d just beheld their son lying dead on a steel table. A flesh-obsessed Catholic in her every cell, Parma no doubt believed that my father required his organs on those auspicious avenues of the afterlife, that his kidneys and liver would be welcome when a tarrying Christ finally came back to call up the dead. I’ve no notion how she squared this belief with what happens on an embalming table, the formaldehyde, the glutaraldehyde, the ethanol and humectants, the sewn-shut eyelids and lips.

  In the kitchen, Pop was trying to land my brother on the phone in Colorado. Mike has never been easy to call or hear from. In 1996 he went out west to snowboard for a weekend and never came back. For weeks at a clip he’s ungettable by phone or by email, hiking some hill, canoeing some ravine, camping in some off-the-map Edenic wild, backpacking through boonies, rock climbing, mountain biking, communing with bearded and tattooed others who puff enough weed to tranquilize a pachyderm. Our home state had never been a proper fit for him. He’s long-haired with a hie
roglyphic fresco inked onto his entire left arm, and he tends to favor women who are named after seasons. Jersey is short on those.

  I haven’t shaken loose this characteristically terse message Pop left on his voicemail that day, the last of the evening’s light about to die: “Mike, it’s Pop. We’ve got a problem here. Call us back.” We’ve got a problem here. Fourteen years earlier, I’d spoken identical words to my father when I called him from the gas station, after I fed diesel fuel to a gasoline engine: “I’ve got a problem here.” The problem upon me at the gas station was, by contrast, welcoming in its possibility of remedy, while the problem we all had on May 7, 2000, stood solid in its unfixability. A problem suggests the possibility of a solution, the chance of correction. What was the antidote to my father’s fatal crash? How to fix that large thing? Death is not our problem, is not an algebraic equation to be overcome. It won’t be solved. We make an adversary of a fate and then feel swindled when the adversary wins. Larkin: Most things may never happen: this one will.

  My brother called back much sooner than we’d expected, and before Pop could speak, I jerked up from the kitchen table and told him to hand me the phone. “Here,” he said to Mike, “your brother wants to talk to you.” I hadn’t planned on that, was not sure from what place that impulse had arisen, or what it meant that I wanted to be the one who delivered him this news. I was not aware of feeling a newfound parental obligation; he was an able adult who lived seven states away, and we’d never been very brotherly to begin with.

  I said his name, I heard the opening notes of his panic, the quavering in his words: he knew. In his very marrow, he already knew. That’s when my sobs began gradually to gyrate and then to spiral up from the well of me. For the last several hours I’d been somehow inoculated against tears, not prepped, unready for the fearsome work of real sobbing. As I stalled there on the phone with my brother, gauging the tremors as they moved along my fault lines, he wailed at me to tell him, to get on with this filthy chore. I spoke this wedding of words that would repeatedly spear me for the next several months, a linguistic pairing forty years premature, the most terrible sentence I’ve ever spoken: “Daddy’s dead.”

  I suppose I’d had other options—“Dad has crashed” or “Dad’s been killed”—but it was “Daddy’s dead” that came unthinkingly from my throat. The child’s plea in Daddy, the decisive thud of dead. Even then, I see, in that stricken state, euphemizing was not possible, the placid dishonesty of passed away, the insulting gibberish of a better place. A loved one’s place is with his loved ones; there is no better place than that. To miss a loved one without interruption is a special kind of torture, and talk of that supposedly better place does nothing to mitigate it.

  In the coming days, many would mumble to me about that better place, about how sorry they were for the passing. It would be impossible to scorn them for such knee-jerk condolence, for relying on those euphemisms. Death makes people babble, makes them blunder. They don’t know what to do with the thing, how to think and speak of it. Nor did I—I least of all—as I groped after answers that stood stalwart in their silence. And yet people do mean what they say at a funeral, are never surer in their intentions with language. It bothered them, I saw, when I refused to say passed away, when I insisted upon killed and dead, when I did not shrink from the unadorned truth of it. Your father’s gone. Yes he was. Yes he is.

  In the hours and days, weeks and months following his death, I developed a distracting fixation on word choice, as if the precision of language could summon understanding or deliver an atom of acceptance. It was a detour of obsessiveness over which I had no control. Whatever else it is, grief is a succession of byways. If words are instruments of revelation, my confusion and grief must have glommed onto them in an effort to be enlightened and ameliorated. Gather the right words, use them to fill in the many new frets of the spirit and heart, and maybe you’ll give yourself a chance at healing. Our grief-eaten obsessions are never pointless trivia or pathologies; they are enactments of understanding, deep forms of meaning.

  There on the phone with my brother, after I uttered “Daddy’s dead,” the emotional contractions of this labor that began several hours earlier at last ended in birth, a prolonged burst. Solar-plexus sobs that harnessed the body whole, vacuumed all the air from the room. It left me there panting on my knees. Then I was pacing between the living room and dining room with the cordless at my mouth; the telephone delivery of such news demands pacing, as if you can walk off the cramp of it. I tried to breathe through this eruption, this hefty tension in the head. I couldn’t hear what my brother was asking or exclaiming, but I could tell that he was taking in the magnitude of the problem, this unmendable mistake.

  Someone took the phone from me then, Pop or an uncle or cousin, and I reeled down the hallway into a vacant bedroom where I lay on the mattress and shook there, gnarled inward, convulsing with these sobs. My godfather hurried in after me, held me there on the bed, in the day’s new dark. He’d always been the male member of my family least infected with machismo, and I’ve never forgotten his tenderness that night, his selfless lack of regard for the masculine protocol, so prevalent in our parts, that calls for a man never to spoon another man on a bed, no matter the sorrow.

  After those sobs I felt unaccountably animated—I remember standing in the kitchen, trying to rally my family with motivating inquiries: “Okay, everyone, what are we gonna do about this now? What’s the next step here? What’s the plan?”—but in a few hours I’d be back on a bed, in my dorm room at school, my quaking frame in Anna’s hold, our faces pressed together. Sleep that night was the negation of rest, a wakeful, dreamless sleep in which I stayed conscious of my father’s crash, and when we sat up at dawn, half the pillow was damp.

  Because no one saw my father crash into that guardrail, no one knew what happened. But everyone knew this: the pack was a minute in front of him, pushing hard down that snaked Pennsylvania back road. They’d planned to wait for him at an intersection. And because he was unfamiliar with the road, another rider would then point him in the direction of the highway so he could return home. The place he hit was a ninety-degree right turn, 120 feet over a crest.

  The morning after the crash, Anna and I drove to my uncle Tony’s house, and we found him bent over the kitchen sink, his back to us, tears dripping into a cereal bowl. He couldn’t turn around. My father’s helmet sat looking at me from the counter, a crack in the lower left side—not a surface or hairline crack but a saw-toothed fissure, cracked clear through—and a dent just above it. Tony had taken it from the hospital and rinsed half a gallon of blood out of it. Soon he told me this, from his own experience on rides like that:

  “Your father was on a road he didn’t know, and he was trying to take it easy while the other guys were hauling ass ahead of him. He was afraid he’d get lost, wouldn’t be able to find his way back to whatever highway he needed. It happens all the time. You get lost on those back roads, you’re screwed. So he sped up to try to catch them. There was that crown in the road, and the sharp right turn just beyond it. He had what’s called a high-side. As soon as he saw the turn, he locked up the back brake, which you never do unless you’re going a hundred miles per hour and need to stop fast. Most of your brake work is done with the front brake.

  “As the back brake locks, the bike doesn’t want to stay up, it wants to go over, in whatever direction you’re turning. When your dad felt the bike slipping under him to the right, he tried to save it. He didn’t want to low-side—he was thinking about the bike. And when he straightened up to the left, the back tire stepped out, it caught on the road and flung him like a slingshot over the bike, into the guardrail. This all happened in two, two and a half seconds. If he had let the bike slide from under him, without trying to straighten up and save it, he would have gone feet-first into the side of the road and got up and walked away, I think, no problem. Maybe a broken foot or leg, but otherwise, no problem.”

  Let the bike go and walk away, no problem.
But he couldn’t. He’d let us go, let all of life go, but not the bike.

  III

  If someone had asked me to help with my father’s funeral, I would have said to bury him in his carpenter’s clothes: the brown Carhartt hoodie, a torn T-shirt that still held his sweat, those beige and beaten work boots, the Lee dungarees scabbed with caulk and stained with paint. I would have said to place him in a plain pine box Pop and my uncles had built with their own hands, with my father’s own tools, not the high-end mahogany casket, a capsule designed to keep out the moisture and the air, as if either now could do him any harm or good. I would have vetoed the mortician’s art, the embalming, the sewing of his eyelids and lips, and that tiny smile, that vestige of a grin, they fashioned to his face for us.

  They want to honor the dead, I know. They want to clean the tremendous mess. They do the noble work of giving the family what it needs most now: a last look that isn’t violated by the vicious fact of the body’s breakability, its fragile pumps and vessels. My family needed to see my father done up like a life-size doll, in just-bought clothes he did not buy, a hasty three-piece he’d have loathed. They needed, as so many need, not to confront the scowling fate of our flesh.

  At the casket before the mourners arrived, my family formed a crescent wall of moans, a team’s half huddle of grief, trying to prop each other up, literally hold ourselves together, gaping at my father and that clownish grin now stitched upon his face. This was the first most of us were seeing of him since he’d crashed into that Pennsylvania guardrail. My grandparents, my father’s fiancée, and my uncle Tony had gone to the hospital three days earlier to identify his body. Sometime that week, I’d ask my father’s fiancée how he’d looked when she saw him on the steel table. It was important to me to know how he’d looked. She’d seen the blood dried brown in his nostrils and ears, she said, and from her position slightly beneath him—she’d crashed to her knees beside the table—she’d seen his slitted eyes clouded and specked with blood, his pupils in permanent expanse, as if wanting to let in the light they no longer needed.