The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  The day’s racing in Pensy lasted a little more than three hours, an uninterrupted swath of time, unless a guy was lagging too far behind the pack—then you waited for him at an intersection. When the three hours were up, just before two o’clock, you needed to make it back to the highway or else you’d run out of fuel. By the time that refueling break came at two, the original clan of fifteen guys had been shaved down to twelve or thirteen: some crashed, some had mechanical issues, some couldn’t hack it and went home. At the gas station, you hydrated, checked the bike, chattered about the ride’s many glories and dangers. Pop always ate an ice cream cone. The Pensy guys then sped west, the Jersey guys east. And all week long, all they thought about was doing it again.

  Several summers before his fatal accident, my father caused Pop to crash at the Flemington Circle, half an hour from Manville, only a handful of miles from where Robert Chittenden died in 1981.

  Pop was behind him, pushing him hard into the turn, intense and tight on his back tire. My father must have felt him there, seen him there, because instead of keeping his speed and his line in the turn, he let off the throttle. Pop had nowhere to go; he had to lock up both the front and back wheels, and the bike went down right away, slid across the circle before colliding with the curb in a burst of fifty shards. Sitting there in the road, Pop saw his leg pointing north, the bottom of his foot facing east, his ankle cracked clean through, tibial and fibular fractures both.

  The bike was unsalvageable, a purple Kawasaki Ninja ZX11, and the ankle would take six weeks, at least, at his age; he was in his early sixties then. He spent those weeks in a costly outdoor reclining chair my father had bought for him as a small recompense. When I visited Pop one morning as he recovered, I found him in that chair, in a strip of fluttering shade near the garage, his foot propped up on a spackle bucket, a Kawasaki logo beaming boldly from his T-shirt, beneath it this tip for living: LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL.

  “You know,” he said, “Evel Knievel broke every bone in his body at one time or another.”

  “Sounds like a lot of useless time in hospitals,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what happens.”

  Pop wouldn’t blame my father, and he certainly wouldn’t blame himself, or even hint at the causality of the crash. That was a core element of the masculine charter I’d seen again and again since I was young: cowardice, hubris, culpability remained unspoken, as if it was shameful even to speak of such sins. Machismo demands a certain lack of reflection upon its own tenets, a lack of acknowledgment that such tenets swayed their behavior, their conduct on a construction site, on a motorcycle, in a family.

  But I’ve been struggling to capture the nuance, the complication, of this crash between my father and Pop. There is no definitive version of what happened that day. My father never talked to me about it. What I have are the barest details from Pop. What I have is my speculation and my doubt, my imagined version, a ricocheting of loyalties. I have the aegis of the family’s masculine code—my father went yellow in that turn; he had no business being on that ride if he wasn’t going to gun it with the others—and then I have my heart-pained inclination to defend him, to speak for him because he is not here to speak for himself.

  Why did Pop feel he needed to push him through that turn? Was it his way of saying I’ll push you because I believe you can make it, because once you reach the speed you’ll reach the sacred? Because he believed, with the Great Santini, that the only effective method of inspiring greatness in his son was through the disgracing hostility that culminates in violence and injury? Some men love one another the same way they hate one another, through aggression and antagonism. By this red-blooded illogic, denigration somehow becomes celebration.

  Or was it much simpler than all that, just another instance of an older general desperate to prove his value to the younger guard, to show them and himself that he still had it, that his stature wouldn’t be abased by age? I have no trouble comprehending how some older men would crave that verification of their virility, just as some women want verification of their beauty. Pop was unreasonably competitive whether he was on a motorcycle or a racquetball court, in a boxing ring or at the bowling alley. (One of his most prized memories was of boxing in his garage as a teenager, pinning the other guy up against the bay door, and then slugging his head through a small square window.) We applaud the harsh competitive pulsing in our athletic heroes, so it should surprise no one when average American men, men who aspire to their own vocabulary of eminence, require the same competitiveness in whatever lives they’ve made for themselves.

  Because the truth is that, by the standards of his own bearing, the humiliation belonged to Pop that day, not to my father. It was he sitting in the road with his foot hanging off.

  I couldn’t see it then but I should have known: the death of my father would also mean the death of my grandfather—a walking blank, a ceaseless, soundless abrading of the will. Never mind the will to power for a formerly powerful man. I mean the simple will to comprehension. He didn’t look at you, he blinked at you, not because he was trying to place you, but because he was trying to place himself, to shake free of the grief, to remember how he’d ended up on the earth and how his firstborn had beaten him to the grave. You hear about this, about people giving up on life, but I’d never seen it before, and couldn’t have guessed at its enormous languor.

  Sixty-seven years old, he blinked for hours at the TV, blinked at the grass, immobile on the sofa, immobile on a kitchen stool, insomniac until the dawn, a hundred pounds too many, his only brief reprieve the hillocks of sausage and meatballs he wasn’t supposed to be eating, the corrosive effects of which were combated by a daily fistful of pills. He’d sit in a lawn chair in the garage, both bay doors open, blinking down the driveway at the drowsy street, behind him an homage to masculinity from other eras. A portrait of a cowboy-hatted John Wayne, a still of Steve McQueen on a motorbike in The Great Escape, a yard of Louis L’Amour novels (his favorite, Last of the Breed), a shelf of motorcycle helmets. A shrine to his richly buddied past, a giant wall of blown-up photos in frames, he and his pals posing at some rally or race in ’75, in ’79, in ’82, in ’91, he and his three sons on their bikes in ’95 and ’97, a kinship of leather, brawn, blood, Pop always the chieftain at the center of the shot.

  To see that wall-sized shrine was to see what brotherhood meant to him, what certain men mean by “a full life.” And to see him slumped before it after my father’s death, oblivious and blinking, was to feel the cold contrast of what’s gone and what remains: his atrophy of spirit, his persistent bracing against a stridor only he could hear.

  Flipping through albums of my boyhood, the mood of the late ’70s and early ’80s upon me like a stain, it’s hard to find a photo in which one or more motorcycles does not appear in the frame with me. On Pop’s lap on a Harley Davidson Sportser V-twin in 1975, again on a four-cylinder Kawasaki 1100 in ’79, a Yamaha VMAX in the background in ’81, a Suzuki 1000 in ’83, a Yamaha FJ1100 in ’85. Sifting through the thousands of loose family photos Parma keeps in plastic bins, eighty years’ worth of shots, I find that fully half of them contain a motorcycle of one kind or another. The history of my family in photographs is a photographic history of motorcycles. Considering this, it’s something of a wonder that I escaped the two-wheeled contagion.

  V

  After my father’s death, I found this among his many papers: a letter he’d written to the daughter of his fiancée. I’ve preserved his spelling and grammar:

  Dear Tracy:

  Your mother said I should write you a letter on your graduation. So this is it.

  1st you should thank me for talking your mother into not reading the letter she wrote at dinner!

  2nd your mother kept me up all nite with Childhood stories of you. And so today I am tired!

  3rd Why do they have to have a graduation on Sunday, when everybody knows that is motorcycle riding day!

  4th Thank You God for not making me ride two hou
rs with Millie in the car. [Millie would have been his future mother-in-law.]

  5th Do not buy beer with your graduation money.

  6th and finally let me give you some advice on your graduation day.

  LIFE IS SHORT RIDE HARD

  Love Bill

  When he strapped on that helmet, when he woke that engine and gripped one hand to the throttle and the other to the clutch, when he eased from the driveway of his home for a Sunday of road racing—a race against his own skill, his own hunger for risk—then he shut out the regular world and its quotidian concerns, the daily grating of domesticity, that work-week attrition, and he welcomed his new isolation, the monastic focus on the asphalt, on the yellow lines at the center and the white line at his flank. He welcomed that focus because it was wanted but also because it was required for the spiritual thrill of being able to maneuver such an unforgiving machine, to keep such power from slipping into disaster. Milan Kundera, at the beginning of his novel Slowness:

  The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

  All of our lives are set by a certain terrible inevitability, causality ruled by the forces of speed and momentum, energy and force. Those superbikes, and the way my father’s clan rode them, took that fact and boiled it down to its most brutal and thrilling essence. They demonstrated the perhaps uniquely male quality of submitting to the insane, the great, and the deadly almost exclusively within the dynamic of a group, a setting in which, on Sunday afternoons, time collapsed into itself at excessive speeds, in which social rules melted away and were replaced by Homeric codes.

  The brotherhood, exaltation, and worship my father found on Sunday rides was no different from the brotherhood, exaltation, and worship I found training at the Physical Edge. “After a certain age,” wrote Proust, “the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one’s family traits become.” My father and I were not as far apart as I sometimes pretend. We both had the unignorable impulse to extremity, an impulse passed down from Pop.

  A day after the burial, the men of my family made the hour-and-fifteen-minute drive to the crash site, to the town of Springfield in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philly, five miles north of the Delaware River, which divides the state from our own. Pop, unwilling or unable to see the site, remained behind. My two uncles, my cousin, my brother, and I left Jersey before nine in the morning on a day when the weather matched perfectly the day that saw my father’s death. Before we left, Parma had given me a white wooden cross to hammer into the soil near the spot where he died. I didn’t ask where she’d got it—though it occurs to me now that she’d made it herself in the garage—and I took it without protest. What good would have come from my telling her that the heavens have absconded, that God was unworthy of His rule?

  On Route 202 in western Jersey, we drove past the diner where the pack of riders had met before crossing the state line, the place that served my father’s last meal. My uncle slowed the car as we passed, but not a one of us had the appetite to suggest we stop.

  The name of the road he died on: Slifer Valley Road. I’d spent abundant hours thinking about that name; it put me in mind of Robert Lowell’s alliteration “a savage servility slides by on grease.” The word Slifer gives off a serpent’s hiss, suggests sinews and dips. Eliminate the first and last letter and you are left with life, with the inverse of what that road now meant to us. Eliminate only the S and you have lifer: one who gives a lifelong commitment—to motorcycles and manliness, yes, but there’s no commitment as lifelong as death, no commitment like the commitment to the grave. For all of everybody else’s life, you are dead. Eliminate the first two and last two letters of Slifer and you have the silent emphasis of if—if only he’d craved slowness instead of speed, if only we hadn’t tolerated that craving, if only I hadn’t been too preoccupied to ask about his Sundays.

  As we approached the spot, we saw the road sign before the crest, that black arrow inside a yellow diamond shape that warns of the ninety-degree right turn ahead, and that yellow square beneath the diamond shape, the number 20 inside the square—not the suggestion but the insistence of only twenty miles per hour. And as we came to the other side of the crest, when I first saw the sharp right, my thought was this: That warning sign is way, way too close to the turn. You’d better not be speeding, not even a little, because by the time you see that sign you won’t have space enough to make the right without crashing.

  It’s a secluded spot, near a rock-cluttered rill, an umbrella of trees repelling the sun, farmland etched onto the earth and stretching into the distance. A calming road, only the occasional Buick, the intermittent Ford. We parked off to the side and began looking. A crimson smear from his helmet on the guardrail. Beneath it, spread on the asphalt, a large oval of his blood, laminate in a rhombus of sun punching through the trees, a brigade of black ants feeding in it.

  I found pieces of the bike in the road: white and red paint chips, metal shards, small plastic shapes from the fairings, a steel foot peg. I collected them all, the relics, and slipped them into my pockets, and in the coming days I would spend untold hours touching them, turning them over in my hands, inspecting them with a magnifying glass.

  Up the road thirty yards, in the direction from which we’d come, on the near side of the crest, the two skid marks began. They were each over fifty feet long, punctuated by a space of nearly forty feet, evidence that the bike was moving at a lunatic speed as it emerged over the crest. He must have seen that ninety-degree turn waiting like the grave. Those skid marks—a skid means panic. If only I could have lifted them from the pavement. It all began with those skid marks, and ended where the skidding stopped, where the panic was no more.

  My grandparents had an itch to blame anything or anyone but my father: the brakes, his riding partners, a homicidal old farmer in a pickup truck. Pop was convinced that my father hadn’t miscalculated, hadn’t made the tyro’s error of speeding at a crest when he didn’t know what lay beyond it. My father wasn’t speeding at all, Pop reasoned, because there was relatively little damage to the bike, only a gouge in the gas tank. If my father had been doing a hundred miles per hour, as some of us suspected, then the bike would have been demolished when it hit that guardrail.

  A middle-aged couple from the nearby house came out to greet us. They hadn’t seen the crash but they went to my father’s side soon after. The husband wore aviator glasses and looked to be recovering from extensive plastic surgery—the peculiar tautness and sheen of his face, the stiff-jawed talking, the sentences of a ventriloquist. The wife was gnomish, recently popped free from the pages of a storybook. We all shook hands and introduced ourselves there in the road, at the mouth of their driveway.

  “I unbuckled the helmet strap and told him to hang on,” the husband said, “told him that help was on the way.”

  “That means a lot to us,” I said.

  I did not ask: Was he alive then? Was he breathing then? And I did not ask about the blood that must have been on the fingers of both hands after he unbuckled the strap. I don’t know why I didn’t ask: I’d arrived at this spot in hope of discovering such information, and yet when the time came to know it, to hold the facts, I could not.

  “Anybody would have done it,” he said. “It’s what a person does in a situation like that. What was his name?”

  “William Giraldi,” I said. “The third.”

  He looked at his wife, then back at us.

  “Our son was the third William, as well,” he said. “He was killed, five years ago, on April 7, just one month earlier than your father. Same day, though, the seventh. Someone shot him in the head. Only thi
rty years old. We never did find the killer, though we tried. God knows we tried.”

  My uncles, brother, and cousin were uneasy now, I could see. They didn’t want this reconnaissance to turn maudlin, were highly suspicious of the mushy, and I hoped that, whatever else he did, this husband would not start sobbing on our necks right there in the road.

  “It’s a funny thing,” he said. “Both of them William, both of them dying on the same day.”

  My brother glanced at my cousin, then my cousin glanced at me, and both of my uncles weren’t sure where to glance. They only nodded, maybe in agreement of some kind, their own ilk of understanding, and they nudged around some stones with their sneakers. I couldn’t see the husband’s eyes behind his mirrored glasses, and for some reason I thought that he might not have eyes at all, just two black holes, a hellish vision out of Lovecraft.

  “There was an old man here at the crash,” I said. “An old fella in a pickup truck?”

  “Yes,” he said. “He wasn’t happy. When the other guys arrived, he kept screaming at them, saying, ‘See what happens? See what you did?’ At one point he wanted to drag your father out from underneath the guardrail, get the bike off him, but I said not to do that. Said it was best to wait for the paramedics.”

  Get the bike off him. Then the bike was on him. How did the bike end up on top of him if he’d been flung over it?

  “This old guy was very concerned, though,” he said. “His hand was crippled, very strange.”

  “A crippled hand?”

  “Yes, a crippled hand. He unloosened your father’s jacket to give him some more air. There were some others here too. Some motorists who’d stopped. Everybody was very concerned.”