The next morning I called the hospital and spoke to one of the EMTs who’d worked on my father, and, unaccountably, I asked about my father’s racing suit, about the possibility of my recovering it. The noble soul on the line had some trouble barring the disbelief from his voice. That’s when he told me he’d sheared the suit from my father in the ambulance before he was fully dead. It was so “soiled,” he told me, it had to be incinerated with other medical waste.
“Soiled” did the trick; he saved himself from saying, and me from hearing, the indignity of all that word meant, of what can happen to the bowels of the fatally injured. I remember feeling touched by that, by the linguistic gesture of this stranger whose job it is to save other strangers, to attempt to save those who have raced themselves beyond saving.
My unbelief had not inoculated me against this morbidity, this Catholic fixation on flesh. Once Catholicism gets its talons in you, it clasps you for life, regardless of whether or not you remain a believer. Our hometowns, our families, the myths and modes we were given, those first ten years of life gusting through our present: we try to block their persistent power but they seem to form a net from which we cannot wiggle free. The narrative drama of the Mass—the music, the ritual, the pageantry, the architecture, the imposing gore-specked crucifix at the fore—helped to form the lineaments of my psyche, nor was my father subtle when it came to the sanctity of blood. As children, whenever I unloaded cruelty onto my brother, our father would grab my forearm, grab Mike’s, slam our flesh together, and say, “What runs through your veins is the same,” and for fifteen minutes afterward his finger marks would be ochered onto our skin.
The primal focus on my father’s body, on how and where it was ruined, on the helmet and suit in which it died—each dusk and dawn his helmet watched me from my dresser where I’d placed it in memoriam—was another way my bereavement sought vent. That obsessiveness was one with which Catholics have long been familiar: a re-creation, a playing out, of the Passion, the view that the body’s suffering is its ultimate expression, that agony is above all redemptive, that only through the dumping of holy blood can salvation be had, the books balanced, harmony restored. The helmet and suit, the paint chips and metal shards I’d collected at the crash site, the bike itself? The hurt in me must have processed them as Golgothan relics, hints of the crucifixion, items that would escort me into belief.
But belief in what? In my father’s death, in his life before and after that death? Father Hopkins writes:
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Wounded at my core, I must have been trying to spot one of those ten thousand places, reaching for some welcome back from the wreckage, back into the palm of the Father. And yet I’m certain I didn’t truly think that reprieve was possible for me through obsessive investigations, or by waking my faith from its long dormancy. My grief simply didn’t know what else to do with me, and so it reverted to those ancient methods of reverence. It tried to switch me into the child I once was, the parochial school student who clutched the gospels and crucifix and believed without strain. That is grief’s encore: transforming you into a child without defenses, without devices.
A letter to the editor of Sport Rider magazine. I discovered it among my father’s papers. He wrote it four years before his death, in unruly black scrawl, on lined notebook paper, with copious cross-outs. I’ve preserved his spelling, grammar, and punctuation:
Dear Sir:
I would like to thank you for the many things I have learned from reading Sport Rider Magazine. I would also like to tell you a story you might find interesting.
I am 43 and the oldest of three brothers, we have been riding motorcycles since the age of 12. In the past three years we have become very interested in sport bike riding, and have joined a group of sport riders who is led by a 63 year old man.
My brothers and I ride a CBR900, ZX9, and a GSXR 1100, the leader of this group presently rides a ZX11. He has been riding for over 40 years, and he knows every bump rise and curve on all the roads that we ride. He is an exceptional rider and i’m sure if he had ever gotten involved in racing he would have done very well.
Over the course of the past 30 years many riders have come out to follow him and many have tried to pass. Some of the riders were able to pass him, but very very few, and many of them crashed. Through out the years he rode consistently and fast, but always faster than one should ride on the streets.
In the past three years I have seen a change come over this man. It seems he is not riding as fast as he once was, and I know what has slowed him down. It is the three brothers who are following him in the turns and he’s wondering if they will make it out the other side. In the past few years I have gain a great confidence and trust in this man, and I know he would never lead me into trouble. He is my father and I thank God for the lessons he has taught me.
There is a simple lesson for everyone in this story. The next time your headed into a turn and your confident that you will make it, think about the rider behind you. Does he have the same skill to make it out the other side? There is nothing more tragick than leading a rider into a situation that he can not handle and have him crash. Ride safely and always think of the other guy.
The letter is unsigned; he never mailed it. I can’t pretend not to notice the tremendous chasm between Pop’s He’s dead and I’m clear and my father’s own Think of the other guy. But I see from this that Pop did eventually slow down when all three of his sons started riding with him. The man described here is not the same man who’d crashed pushing my father through the Flemington Circle the year before. So mercy did come to him, albeit more slowly than it comes to others.
The possibility that his brakes had failed, had either locked or disengaged when he went into that turn on Slifer Valley Road, would not stop stalking me. When I learned that the insurance company had sent the bike to a repair shop to have the brakes inspected—both of the women I’d spoken to at the insurance company were named Regina—I phoned the guy at the shop who had done the inspection, a motorcycle expert named Myron.
“There was a recall on some element of those brakes,” I said, “but for some reason my father never did it.”
“Right, he never did the recall,” he said. “I can’t say why that is. But the brakes didn’t fail on him, so it didn’t matter. One is worn down to the metal, but they wouldn’t have locked up or failed to stop. In my opinion he was trying to save his rotor by applying the back brakes because it’s three hundred dollars to replace the rotor. The one pad is about twenty miles from worn down to metal, but the recall Yamaha did was for a bad adhesion connection pad, and that wasn’t the problem here. They’re original R1 brakes, never changed, but they have a life of nine to twenty thousand miles.”
“So the brakes didn’t fail.”
“No,” he said, “the brakes didn’t fail.”
I thanked him then, thinking we were finished, not wanting to inconvenience him with grief-born queries.
“Listen,” he said, “if it means anything to you, I could tell that your father was an expert rider, a serious racer, not one of those typical Sunday dudes who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“How could you tell that?”
“From the tires,” he said. “The tread is worn in such a way that shows me how he rode this bike, and he rode it hard, seriously hard, I mean. They’re worn in the same way as the tires on MotoGP bikes. You’ve probably seen them on TV, going two hundred miles per hour. They lay those bikes down practically horizontal in the turns, knees scraping the track. Your father had tires like that. You should be proud, is what I’m saying.”
I should be proud of two hundred miles per hour, a ludicrous speed no man was every meant to reach. It sounded incorrect to me, that application of pride, and yet, against such a weakened will, I was proud of that number, that racer’s tread on the tires. And I remember
ed, too, what a friend had said to me shortly after the funeral: “To die like that, to go out doing what you love. That’s the only way to die, man. It’s honorable.”
W. S. Merwin once put it this way: We were not born to survive / Only to live. But I did not believe that then and I do not believe that now. Wanting to be helpful, friends dished me the curative rhetoric they thought I needed to hear, the formulations that might have helped them had it been their father dead on the road. There’s not one thing honorable about dying a violent death at forty-seven years old, leaving behind a score of family members whose worlds are all wrecked in ways both major and minor. We don’t live in Homer’s warrior society where a man’s vicious death on the sand of Ilium is a guarantee of panegyric, of immortality in song.
I said to Myron, “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” he said.
“What’s it feel like?”
“What’s what feel like?” he said.
“That speed. The bike beneath you at such speed.”
“You never rode before?” he said.
“Never,” I said.
“Well, I can’t really explain it,” he said. “It just feels like . . . like you’re alive for the first time, like you’re gonna live forever.”
Myron told me then that he was keeping my father’s bike, buying it from the insurance company for a mere $1,500. Not bothered by a curse on that machine, undeterred by the blood he had to wipe from the gas tank and engine, he planned to modify it into a drag racer and run it at the track at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey. I wasn’t sure what to say to that, although I know I didn’t like it—not the way it sounded, not the way it made my intestines clench. I wished this young man good luck. What else could I do? In the weeks after this phone call, I kept checking Englishtown newspapers for information on fatalities at Raceway Park. And to this day I wonder if he died on the machine that killed my father.
VIII
After my father’s crash, I sifted through his stacks of motorcycle books and magazines. One book was titled The Soft Science of Road Racing Motorcycles, and you can ask yourself if you’d ever choose to trust your life to soft science, because when you hit the guardrail, it will most assuredly be the opposite of soft. I also found a trove of DVDs about the aptly named Isle of Man and the annual race that happens there, called the TT, or Tourist Trophy. This was motorcycle porn for the velocity-addicted. My father watched these DVDs on Saturday nights to charge himself for the next day’s ride, to fall asleep with the Doppler-effected scream of a 1,000 cc engine still in his ears, to let that speed infiltrate his dreams.
The Isle of Man is a green, cliff-rich arcadia in the Irish Sea, midway between Ireland and Britain, and the TT is the deadliest motor race ever devised. A thirty-eight-mile, time-trial motorcycle race on narrow island roads, roads of cambers and dips, bends, bumps, kinks, wet in some places, dry in others, uneven textures everywhere, gravel when you don’t want it, ridges to the left of you, ditches to the right, average speeds of 130 miles per hour, the smudge of 200-plus on straightaways, mere inches from stone walls and hedgerows, street signs and spectators, cottages, lampposts, objects made of concrete. Road racers call it “the furniture.” A rock in the road and you’re dead.
Since its inception in 1907, a staggering 246 racers have been killed at the TT. In 1970 alone, six racers died. This risk is inbuilt, and the coterie of riders not only accepts it, but thrills at it. Crash on a racetrack and you slide into a patch of grass. Crash at the TT and you hit a house. One you walk away from; the other makes sure you never walk again. Try to envision the stupendous violence a house inflicts upon a human body at 160 miles per hour. In little more than a gesture of safety, hay bales are strategically placed in some of the deadliest spots, but hay bales haven’t kept men from killing themselves. The chances of calamitous injury or death at the TT are so high that a casual observer is left with a dislocated jaw, incredulously agape, speculating about the mental hygiene of these racers. Edgar Poe called it “the Imp of the Perverse,” that mischievous force within that prompts us toward our own demise.
Here’s further testament to the lunacy or purity of the TT, depending on your view: the prize money for winning is a pittance. There’s no large purse because sponsors are slim, and sponsors are slim because those roads are ruby-hued with blood. It’s a mite bad for business when your product adorns a “death race,” which is what one disillusioned racer recently dubbed the TT—although “disillusioned” isn’t literally right, since these men are not gripped by a single illusion. They know better than anyone what can happen, what will happen, on those island roads each summer.
No man is an island proves demonstrably untrue on the Isle of Man. On those bikes, each man races and wins or dies alone, and each dead man is enisled in his grave. The pas de deux is between either the bike and the rider, the rider and the road, or the rider and his death. There’s the incontrovertible skill and fearlessness of these riders, yes, but another reason my father admired the TT was this: they are overwhelmingly working-class family men who have to keep their day jobs. Coarse-palmed carpenters and plumbers, mechanics and truck drivers with perpetually blackened fingernails and worried wives. You’d have trouble finding the pampered and the privileged among their number.
At the urging of my brother, I recently spent an hour and forty minutes with the film TT: Closer to the Edge, a docudrama about the 2010 TT. “If you want to understand Dad’s mentality,” Mike told me, “then watch this film.” During the dramatic opening images you hear a mélange of riders in voiceover, their unmistakably British lilts, measured, contemplative, soothing in the slowness of their gravitas, a slowness that belies the speed within:
“There is nothing to compare it with.”
“It’s the most exhilarating place in the world.”
“It’s like being able to fly. Just like growing wings.”
“If it’s in your blood you can’t get it out. You just want more.”
“My mind goes completely blank. My mind just turns into madness.”
Just like growing wings. It’s a felicitous simile. The TT racers, like the MotoGP pros, are easily thought of as kin to fighter pilots: cool heads, quick vision, superior eye-hand coordination, and blood that welcomes the rush of it. Guy Martin, the charismatic, uncontainable star of the film, his hair styled by a storm, has this to say: “I can imagine, from the outside looking in, anyone who’s racing the TT looks like the lights are on but no one’s home.”
That’s one way to put it, I suppose. Throughout the film Martin cranks up the wattage on those lights, an illumination of what it’s like to be a conquering pale rider, to live in triumph bestride the white horse of death. And if he seems mad to you, if he and the others seem to have vacated their braincases, well, that’s the cost of the glory they want. Here’s Martin on the many perils of the TT: “You do end up in that position where it looks like it’s gonna be game over at any moment. But those positions—money cannot buy the buzz you get, that thing you get when you think, That’s it, game over.”
The sober and sensible adult person strives, I think, never to be in that position. The “buzz” to which Martin refers is, for most of us, a gut-clapping fear. Whenever I’ve come close to being killed, in a car or on a bicycle, it didn’t feel to me like the buzz of being alive. It felt like being almost dead. That’s one of the danger-seeker’s bromides, the first clause in the credo of every skydiver, cliff diver, bungee jumper, road racer: in order to be fully alive, you must come to the very lip of death. You see the logic. Only Martin and his brethren of extremity are really living. The rest of us are effectively dead, zombies in bondage to the mediocre. Yeats: The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind / In balance with this life, this death.
Near the end of the 2010 TT, Guy Martin must have had more buzz than he knew how to feel. He came within an inch of dying in a filmic fireball when he went down in a lethal corner called Ballagarey. In the prologu
e of his memoir, Guy Martin: My Autobiography, he writes this of Ballagarey:
This is the kind of corner that keeps me racing on the roads. It’s a proper man’s corner. You go through the right-hander at 170 mph or more, leant right over, eyes fixed as far down the road as it’s possible to see, which isn’t very far. Like so many corners at the Isle of Man . . . it’s blind. I can’t see the exit of the corner when I commit fully to the entry.
And then Martin describes the crash that resulted in his bike tumbling across the asphalt in an inferno, igniting the hay and hedgerows along the road. The model of Honda he was riding is aptly called a Fireblade, a 210-horsepower missile on wheels. The front end tucked, the tires lost grip, the bike began to slide. He thinks, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it . . . But he doesn’t have it. And the bike is “steadily skating, increasingly out of control toward the Manx stone wall that lines the outside of this corner.” And then what happens?
Then the thought “Game over” entered my head. At those speeds, on a corner like that, you’re not jumping off the bike, just letting it go. I was leant over as far as a Honda CBR1000RR will lean, and a little bit more. I released my grip on the bars and slid down the road. I didn’t think, “This is going to hurt,”—just, “Whatever will be, will be.”
Or, perhaps a bit more accurately: whatever will be will be what I made happen. You can’t choose to enter a famously fatal turn at 170 miles per hour and then throw up your hands to providence, appeal to predestination, blame the caprice of fate. Providence has a hard time caring about you when you’re standing still, never mind when you’re a nearly airborne blur in the Ballagarey turn. Barring blindsides, the lightning strikes of God and man, our living or dying is the outcome of the decisions we make.
In TT: Closer to the Edge, the wife of a rider remarks that if you love the men who do this, you support their wishes, apparently even if those wishes are death wishes. Two riders died in the 2010 TT: the New Zealander Paul Dobbs and the Austrian Martin Loicht (the film spotlights only Dobbs’s death; he was forty years old). “Climbing without a safety net” is how another rider describes the road race. No margin for error. One minute miscalculation toward glory and you are no more. A white-haired reveler and speed fan, referring to “the bravest men in the world,” imparts this wisdom about the TT: “If it doesn’t excite you, you’re not alive, and that’s a fact.” But, sir, here’s Larkin: Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood.
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