May 7 was always my father’s self-made fate; the month and day don’t matter. The big crash, the last crash, was chiseled into his tomorrow from the moment he bought that bike. If it’s in your blood you can’t get it out. Not unless you get all your blood out, unless it spills from you onto the asphalt. Those are your choices. The men who are frightened into stopping, close-called into quitting, persuaded by the good sense of spouses and children? It was never really in their blood, never encoded in them. The blood won’t be persuaded.
Recently, for the first time in sixteen years, I asked my brother what he saw on the footage from our father’s camera. All along I’d been thinking that my father had filmed his own fatality. But the crash was not on the camera. He’d stopped filming that morning, several hours before they reached Slifer Valley Road. We don’t know why he turned off the camera so soon into the ride, except that this was the first day he’d tried filming. The camera was shakily mounted to the fore of the gas tank; he’d rigged it there himself, aimed it through the windscreen at the road, the speedometer visible at the base.
You can see him passing cars, see the needle hit 110 miles per hour on a snaked, wooded road called Dukes Parkway, just outside of Manville. The speed limit through the dips and rises of Dukes Parkway is forty, and some cars do much less than that. Deer bound out everywhere from behind boles. But for my father on an R1 passing cars, it’s glance and go—the glance makes the call. No car in the opposite lane? You go. The bike is so irrationally fast, you need no more than that glance. You can be around a car in under three seconds.
At one point near the end of the tape, my father and another rider pull to the side and park in a depressed shoulder to wait for the others who weren’t as fast. You can see his unclear reflection in the windscreen, see him remove his helmet, and you can hear him say, “It’s too hot for this shit today.” But the reflection is faded and you can’t make out his face, an image refracted in sun, marked with bubbles of light. And then the camera shuts off and the image is gone. His blurring out of the world had already begun then. In just a few hours from this final glimpse of him, he will hit the guardrail, and his blurring will be complete.
When I was old enough to suspect that it mattered, I must have told Pop that I doubted if I’d ever be able to ride a motorcycle. I remember being stumped by how something so engine-heavy didn’t topple, how so much metal stayed in motion atop two wheels. He responded with a sentence that’s never left me: “If you can ride a bicycle,” he told me, “you can ride a motorcycle.” And that’s why so many men ruin themselves each year on American roads: because they think that riding a Yamaha R1 is no different from riding a bicycle, which is a bit like thinking that there’s some connection between being able to bird-watch and being able to fly.
Three years ago, more than a decade after my father’s death, my uncle Nicky, fed up with tamping the weekly temptations, bought a Yamaha R6. He’d quit riding not long before my father was killed—the danger was too much with him then—and in all that intervening time, he’d had persistent fantasies about new screams of speed, those inner gales of adrenaline. But he didn’t buy the R6 for the road; he bought it for the racetrack in a south Jersey town called Millville.
In the warmer months, from April to October, he’s part of a coterie who pays to be instructed in the physics and art of racing motorcycles. And what he’s learned during these track days, both in the classroom and on the asphalt, is that he and his brothers and Pop, and the bevy with whom they rode each Sunday, did not have the tiniest clue what they were doing, either how a superbike works or how their bodies need to function on top of it. Not the tiniest clue.
“We had the basics all wrong,” he told me recently. “Everything was totally wrong. Your father and me, Uncle Tony and Pop—we didn’t have the first idea. No technique at all, no understanding of how the bike moves or how we should handle it, how we should approach a corner. What I’m doing now, it’s a science class, and when you consider how stupid we were, it’s a goddamn miracle we didn’t all die. When you do these track days, you really, really get why so many guys are killed on the road every day. They just have no idea.”
I’ve been living with that sentence: They just have no idea. Those bikes, in other words, have no place on the road. They are far too sophisticated and fast, far too supreme for the common thrill seeker unschooled in physics. The man on the throttle is tricked by such willing horsepower, by his own will to power, his desperate will to release. You might not be surprised to know that the organizations that host the track days cater to ex-military men, offering discounts and benefits. I recall a news headline from 2008 that blared: MARINE MOTORCYCLE DEATHS TOP THEIR IRAQ COMBAT FATALITIES. Those stats aren’t different for the other branches of the military, either. After you’ve flown a helicopter gunship or fighter jet, after you’ve unloaded with a .50-caliber from a Humvee, or sent a fusillade from an Abrams tank, what are you supposed to do once you return to society? What then is your intoxicant? Where to let out the clamor in you?
“The blind force of the sub-cortex,” Pavlov called it. You see why these soldiers mount superbikes, why they turn to Yamaha and Kawasaki, to Honda, Suzuki, Ducati. It tells you something about the matchless exhilaration of those machines. Here in our humdrum world, they are the only thing that approaches what the blood feels in war.
A few summers before his fatal accident, my father crashed on a different Pennsylvania back road, farmland running to hills in the distance, plots of elm and spruce, wide expanses of grass. He was riding a black and red Honda CBR900 then, the first bike he’d bought after years of not being able to afford one, of literal dreaming about those sinuous roads, the quick of those machines. He could see the sweeping right up ahead, but it swept more sharply than he’d anticipated. His approach was much too fast, his angle in the road all wrong. Centrifugal force will not be fooled with, and he crossed the yellow line at the start of the sweep, then crossed into the opposite lane. Had there been an oncoming car, a family on its way to a Sunday service or the farmer’s market, we’d have attended his funeral a lot earlier.
Instead, he veered into a ditch and flipped over the handlebars, shoulder-first, into an unsuspecting somebody’s front yard. The impact broke his right collarbone in two spots. The bike was dented, bruised, but otherwise undamaged, and he rode back to Jersey that way, 150 miles on highways and back roads, with a broken right collarbone. Because the throttle and brake are on the right handlebar grip, all the weight and pressure from the suspension, from gassing and braking in turns, spike up into the right arm and directly into the right shoulder. So he rode those 150 miles home in agony. For two weeks after, the entire right side of his torso, front and back, was a mottle of indigo and amethyst.
He was with one other rider during that crash, a father figure to him and Pop’s closest friend of forty years, Kurt, a man of incorruptible dignity and style—his silver crew cut, his leather jacket with the Yamaha patches, his voice calloused from the cigarettes of his past. The other riders had for him the same reverence they had for Pop. Kurt helped my father back onto his bike that day and then guided him home. When they finally made it, the two men stood in the kitchen, trying to fool my father’s fiancée into thinking that everything was all right, that no one had crashed.
Why did his body not hold on to the memory of that pain and what birthed it? Why was he not deterred by the pain and its promise of more? I want to ask Kurt about the crash that afternoon, what went wrong in that turn, but Kurt is dead. He killed himself on his motorcycle, later that same year, when he collided with a tree. It was the only time I ever saw my father weep.
One morning, while Anna was still asleep, not long after I received the police report, I saw half a dozen cars parked in front of the house directly across the street from my godfather’s. The men wore black suits, the women black dresses. The wife, a young mother of two small children, had just been killed in her car on a slick interstate, her body twisted with the steel. I saw the husban
d, the now-single father, standing on the walkway, greeting some, saying farewell to others. On the lawn lay plastic toys, in the driveway a red tricycle, all abandoned by the disloyalty of toddlers. A car drove away; the new arrivals walked inside. And then, for a moment, he was alone. It was just the two of us now on that shaded street, across from one another, our hands searching our pockets in the same way, both looking at the space between us. Neither of us waved, neither nodded. Just that empty space there.
Coda
I began this book on the day of my father’s death, but I didn’t know it then. That night, after returning to my dormitory, before Anna absorbed my quaking till dawn, I opened a notepad and penned a single line: “Absence takes up space.” In the days and months, in the years, that followed, the lines accumulated, one by one, sometimes in twos, rarely in threes. They were often the words of others, lines that crooned to me out of the depths of memory, as I was eating or driving, mostly in the mornings after waking, or else in that liminal murk between the dark of sleep and the light of day: Wordsworth or Coleridge, Kafka or Auden. Over the years the notepads multiplied, stacked on my desk as if a bulwark against further dismay. But I could do nothing with them, could find no arrangement, could not complete the story of my father, or my own story among men. From where would that apprehension come? How to find the language, the armature, for such telling?
Benvenuto Cellini’s magisterial Autobiography begins with this: “All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, or which may properly resemble excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty.” For me, those words crouched like a dragon at the gate of autobiography. When Cellini advises us to wait until after forty to embark on “so fine an enterprise,” he means that most of us need that long to acquire the psycho-emotional skills in order to execute our life stories properly, to envisage the proper angles of comprehension—to begin to see ourselves as we really are. I’ve never approached what Cellini means by excellence, but by the age of forty, I’d been born as a father, and with that comes its own brand of staggered excellence.
In his memoir Experience, Martin Amis remarks that the childless never fully understand their parents. My sons, Ethan and Aiden, were the spur I’d needed to decode the deceptive phonics of memory, to transcribe the notebooks, knead them into a shape loyal to the vicissitudes of truth—to tell the story of my family’s masculine order so that my sons might know the grandfather who was killed many years before their births. And so that they might know what made me, as well, and by extension, what helped make them. It’s simple for them to comprehend that I am their father, but shuffling through photographs together, I can see their faces straining to comprehend that I once had a father too, and that he now lies in the earth. Small children must conceive of their parents as outside of time, not tripped by the many lurchings of the past. A child is all present; he has no firm conception of his past, and his future seems an incredibility that never will come. Just try to tell a child he has to wait a week for something—for him that week might as well be an eon.
Schopenhauer: “The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary.” If that’s accurate, my father had only seven years of commentary. After the birth of my sons, I began to feel the onset of a duty—the duty to continue that commentary because he could not continue for himself. We all of us want our stories told, and the tellers should perceive the debt they owe to the heroes of those stories, and to the stories themselves. The firstborn son, duty-bound by definition, will take on some debts but not others. I would not name my own firstborn William, would not make him the fifth in that lineage, shackle him with a name to a particular fate he must then labor to overcome, as I had. I’m not one to traffic in curses, or that sins-of-the-father fatalism, but I was certain that four generations of William Giraldis were quite enough. Born in Boston, reared in Boston, half-Asian, my kids are fully Boston boys, not the provincial Manville boys I and my father were. They speak Mandarin and live in a home besieged by books. If Parma and Pop had expected Ethan to be named William, they never said anything to me about it.
My grandparents are eighty-five years old now; I imagine the elderly care less and less about issues that once shrilled with such urgency. Maybe family legacy doesn’t mean very much in the hoary grip of exhaustion and grief. How annihilating that must be, at day’s end, slouched there at the rim of such blackness. I was spared from having to see my father wither—he will never be old—but I am not spared from having to see the withering of the grandparents who were never merely grandparents to me. No shawl-knitting frump, Parma almost singlehandedly rescued us from destitution after my mother vanished from our family. She’s never been sick, she’s never been slouched, never been an ounce over ninety-eight pounds. Give her a habit and she could pass for Mother Teresa. A gallon of Breyers ice cream for dinner and an economy-size bag of Lay’s potato chips afterward—they cannot kill her. Once, I watched her frost twelve cobs of corn with toxic quantities of salt and then gnaw each one with the flitting thoroughness of a squirrel. Currently, five days a week, she ministers to several cyclones of great-grandkids, including my sister’s two sons. “They’re my heart,” she says, and that’s true in more ways than one.
Wordsworth did much of Freud’s work in one terse line: The Child is father of the Man. Six years from now, when I reach my father’s age at his death, that line will assume a freshly skewed meaning for me. We are meant to outlive our parents; the cosmic order balks only when parents are forced to outlive their children. The grief of Pop and Parma has not slackened in sixteen years. But to outlive our parents by such a margin, to become my father’s elder so soon, and for so long, will no doubt be a disorienting perversity. Though perhaps not only that. I suspect there will be a boost in the obligations I feel toward my father, chiefly the obligation to adopt his verve for living. Not to live for us both, as it were—I can’t accept the speed that brought his blood alive, that emptied his body onto asphalt, the risk that meant valor—but somehow to let my senses be amplified by the quickness he beheld in the world. Living well might indeed be the best revenge against those who harmed you, but it is also the best homage to those who made you.
The son as father, the father as son. It took no great powers of prediction to see that once my own sons arrived, I’d experience a further onloading of my father’s absence. He adored small children with a silliness that was wonderful to see, a toy-giving clown and tickler. (If you’re looking for the most accurate measure of a person’s character, watch him with children; how he treats them will be the best or worst you can say about him.) Even during the many twitchings of my teenage years, when I wrongly thought he was being tyrannical, I never doubted that he’d make a perfectly loving grandfather.
Having children diminishes your need for your own parents. You become the thing you need. Adults don’t make children; children make adults. Six and three years old, my kids are boisterous as only boys that age can be. The daredevils scale the twelve-foot built-in bookshelves in our home and then drop, in skydiving form, to the bed below. Destructively physical in their trampling and grappling, their nonstop superheroing, my sons don’t notice that someone essential has gone missing. They don’t see that they need my father. But I see it for them; he is a daily lacuna in their lives. I feel a reluctant pride in their athletic talents—they’d really rather swing a bat and speed on bikes than read Lewis Carroll with me?—but there would have been nothing reluctant in the pride my father felt. He would have been heroic for them in a manner I can never be. Their loss of him is enormous, and yet minor compared to his loss of them, his loss of the world.
That term, hero, thrives within its sundry meanings. From the Greek hērōs, it literally means “protector.” Like love, it’s a term in constant flux: a term with wings. Messiah and messenger, saver of the day. Christ derives f
rom the Greek christos, “anointed one.” Oedipus and Romulus and Robin Hood, Shakespeare and Joan of Arc and John Brown, Oskar Schindler and Michael Jordan, Batman and Obama. The distressed damsel’s squeal of “My hero!” A story’s protagonist, in battle with an anti-hero. Quester, explorer, guru. The rebel as hero—James Dean, or else Milton’s Satan—an up-ender of order. The hero as witness: Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Anne Frank, Primo Levi. The hero as leader, statesman, murderer-in-chief: Augustus, Napoleon, Lenin, Castro. The hero as Everyman, your unruffled parent or selfless sibling, the grandmother who sacrifices years for you, or the donator of a kidney, the neighbor who unsticks your snowed-in automobile. But I keep coming back to its origin: protector.
In On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle separates his study into six units: the hero as divinity, as prophet, as poet, as priest, as man of letters, as king. Joseph Campbell understood heroes as embarking upon cyclical journeys: the departure from their comfort and unknowing, the initiation into wisdom and their true selves, the return to assume roles of leadership or deliverance. It looks like tough work being a hero; no woman or man should sign up for it. The pedestal all too easily becomes a pillory. But here’s Ortega y Gasset: “A hero is one who wants to be himself.” Or rather, one who has no choice but to be himself, which means the unheroic are those who hide, or who never really comprehend who they are, what they were meant to do. When I say that my father would have been heroic to my sons, I don’t mean only that he would have seemed superhuman in his red-and-black helmet and racing suit, in his mastery of tools and the masculine arts, supremely cool, supremely fast, in all the ways I am not. I mean also that he would have appeared to them as he was, a man wholly and convincingly himself, a seeker of speed who would not be denied release.
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