My phone rings one evening while cooking dinner.
“Hello,” a gentle male voice speaks. “This is Henry Winkler.”
I almost drop the phone. “You just made my night,” I say.
Weeks ago, I’d told a writing colleague, who coauthors his Hank Zipzer series of children’s books, that I’d love to chat. I never thought he’d actually call. He graciously agreed to schedule a phone interview. I try not to gush.
• • •
By the end of my sixteenth year, I gave up my skateboard and Levi’s 501s for high-heeled Candie’s sandals, makeup, and giggles. I wore Calvin Klein must-lie-prone-on-the-bed-to-zip-them jeans. I learned to toss my hair and came to understand that boys didn’t want to hang with girls at empty swimming pools if they could make out with them in cars.
If that’s what it took to have male energy in my life, I was game.
That first boyfriend, who seemed like the only person in the world who knew the details of my home life and who was concerned about me, pressured me into having sex when I’d been just as happy to cuddle. And just like that, my life changed permanently. Ugly notes were left on my high school locker, cruelties whispered by former friends within earshot. That was the surface damage. More injurious was the cloud of shame surrounding my sexuality that would shadow me for the next thirty years.
I finished my education and was married upon graduation to the most Richie Cunningham–type man I could find. No more bad boys for me! I never lived away from home, didn’t date widely, and chose as soon as possible what seemed the only safe role available. In short order I became a mother and settled in. Long gone were both extremes: the tomboy in torn Levi’s, as well as the girl surprised by her budding sexuality, unsure what the sensual realm entailed other than trouble.
My life choices after high school were exactly what my father would have wanted. Traditional Irish Catholic to the core, he prized the virtue of motherhood above all else and was most pleased with me when I fulfilled that role. I wanted his approval more than anything. On the other hand, he disapproved of my writing. When my first book was published, I’d included just a few sentences about my mother’s mental illness and the quality of silence that had filled our home in the narrative about knitting. He was so angered by those words that he didn’t speak to me for two years. I tried through my writing to get him to see the “real” me, asking him to acknowledge who I was. But he preferred the construct he’d already created: the good wife and mother to his grandchildren, the docile and obedient woman he’d hoped I’d become.
• • •
But the motorcycle changed everything. The minute I got the machine to skim smoothly over the blacktop, I was hooked. The genie was out of the bottle and not about to go back in. As I began to master the bike, a more complete version of myself fused. Weaving through orange cones on the training range, I sensed the two parts of me work in tandem for perhaps the first time in my life. I felt as weightless and graceful as a dancer, executing moves of precision and elegance, as feminine as possible, while also aware of the brawn and boldness required to get that machine to do what I wanted.
When I interview Henry Winkler, I ask him about his experience with the motorcycle. I’d heard he was terrified of it.
“Not terrified,” he explains. “But I almost never rode the motorcycle. I think I rode it for, like, twelve feet. But I was intimidated. I did not think that I could ride it with the internal confidence of not spilling it. I did not think I could figure out the hand, and the hand, and foot, and the hand, and the gear, and the speed, and the brake.”
I am ashamed of the hint of smugness I feel, hearing this. No wonder getting my motorcycle endorsement at the DMV felt so great. I had mastered a skill even he had shied away from.
So what was the draw of the motorcycle for the Fonzie character—the outlaw persona, the macho element, the beauty of the mechanics?
He laughs. “All of it! He rode a motorcycle, loved it, loved just sitting on it.”
I know the feeling. Not overnight, but fast enough to draw strange looks in my suburban world, leather boots and a jacket appeared, followed by a matte-black machine. The approval I’d craved from my father, my husband, and men in general was now rising up from within me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t simply want to be the Fonz. I had, on some psychic level, become him.
• • •
For me, perhaps the motorcycle is a metaphor. To be clear, it isn’t an act and the clothes aren’t a costume, but simply protective gear, not unlike the padded shorts I wore as a skateboarder. And because I have never again since high school actively sought to appear overtly sexual in my manner of dress, I can wear my black leather gear with no self-consciousness.
At least, that’s what I thought.
I was dressed in my leathers one day at Rebecca’s shop, looking at helmets and chatting with the guys. Quentin introduced me to one of his biker friends.
“You ride?” the friend asked, probably wondering if I just sat on the back of some guy’s bike.
I nodded.
“She also runs marathons,” Quentin added, as if that explained the motorcycle thing.
The friend did what no one had done to me in decades—the slow up and down with the approving nod. Every inch of my thighs felt lit in neon.
“I can tell,” he said. “With legs like that, you could cut diamonds.”
I was so embarrassed I fumbled my words and dropped my helmet. (Dropping a helmet can compromise its integrity and is a huge no-no.) I scrambled to leave as quickly as possible.
That moment of male attention, after years of actively avoiding it with mom-type jumpers and loose-fitting clothing, felt unfamiliar and unpleasant, tinged with something akin to disgrace.
I was able to identify the source of my shame, and within a day or two to let it go. The sexual vibe given by the leathers, I decided, was a vibe others were adding, an identity I did not have to be categorized by. The safety equipment I wear is not meant to be someone’s sexual fantasy. If there were a female Fonzie, I reflected, she would totally blow off this guy’s sexualized read of my manner of dress.
And so I did, reclaiming a sense of my own sexuality and attractiveness. A few weeks later I allowed my daughter to pick out jeans for me a full size smaller than I usually wore. Thanks to the years of running, I could comfortably downsize. At first, I felt silly, like I was trying to be younger than my years, a “cougar” in the making. But compliments followed, and others encouraged me to play up the figure and features I’d worked hard to preserve. Soon, I was able to recapture a bit of the teen girl I’d left behind, the hybrid tomboy and sex kitten, but who could still own both parts of herself.
• • •
When Neil, away at college, called to ask about the separation between his father and me, he asked a question. “Mom, did the motorcycle have anything to do with it?”
“Of course not,” I replied, which was the truth. But not the whole truth. The motorcycle had allowed me to reconnect with the part of me that had lain dormant all those years. I had found myself again—a self my father did not want to meet, a self that hadn’t fit with my husband for at least a decade.
I am alone on most days, now. After two decades raising three kids, the sound of backpacks hitting the kitchen table after school and the sight of dirty socks on the living room floor are no longer part of my life. A motorcycle doesn’t keep me warm in bed and isn’t a lot of fun to confide in. But like Fonzie, I feel okay being on my own now and whole again for the first time in a very long time. Beloved. Anointed, finally, if only by myself.
Alas, it’s a fleeting sensation. Six months later, a setback will come out of the blue and challenge all the advances I have gained.
•CHAPTER SEVEN•
TOTALLY HOSED
Anything that is successful is a series of mistakes.
—BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG
I hit a ninety-one-year-old man Saturday night. There’s no other way to say it but to spit it o
ut. I hit a ninety-one-year-old man with my car and the guilt and shame of feeling wrong and flawed to my very core do not want to leave. The words, the images, keep repeating in my head.
I was driving down a dark street just a block away from a bustling urban area when, out of nowhere, no crosswalk in sight, he was in front of me, tottering across the street with a cane. I don’t think he even glanced in the direction of my headlights. I slammed my brakes and yet, the nightmare still unfolded. His body slammed against my windshield, starbursting the glass. The smell of brakes filled the air. He tumbled to the asphalt where he lie unmoving, almost in a fetal position, before me.
I flew from my car with a howl of a banshee. Help! Someone: Please. Help! In that instant, I believed I had killed him. And that my life, as I’d known it, had just ended. One moment, everything’s fine. The next moment, nothing will ever be the same again.
Bystanders gathered. A young Armenian man came to help and put a jacket under the older man’s head. A woman called 911. I couldn’t do a thing but stand there and twitch. I had completed a Red Cross course only days earlier and knew what I was supposed to do: identify myself as someone with first aid training and ask the man if I might help. But I could not even approach. I walked back and forth between my car and where the man lay, unable to do anything but shake and cry. The young man caring for him stopped his ministrations long enough to tell me that I needed to calm down and breathe slower. Sirens wailed, red and blue lights filled the pitch-dark night. One of the bystanders brought me a bottle of water. “It’s going to be okay,” this nameless, faceless person told me.
A female police officer approached. What happened? I told her. Was he crossing left to right or right to left? I had no idea. I was just driving and suddenly he was there. Using your phone at the time of the accident? I had the earbuds in and was listening to Pandora, and if the truth be known, I had glanced at a text message only a few minutes earlier. But at the time of the accident, the phone was pumping out music by the Gaslight Anthem. She brought me a second bottle of water and asked for my license, registration, and proof of insurance.
A male police office took photos of my windshield. He measured my skid marks. How fast were you going? I didn’t know. I’m not a speed demon, was not in a rush to get anywhere, but odds are I may have been going over the speed limit. The male officer put his hand on my shoulder. You must have good reflexes. Your skid showed you tried to stop. Both officers told me the same thing. This is why they’re called accidents. And while I appreciated their desire to help me feel better, I needed something else entirely. I wanted to be told unequivocally that it wasn’t my fault.
The paramedics, meanwhile, moved the old man onto a backboard, attaching a cervical collar, asking him if he knew where he lived. He was alive. One of the officers told me that he didn’t seem hurt. No blood. No broken bones. He wanted to go home, not to the hospital.
How can a ninety-one-year-old man suffer a trauma like the impact of a 2,500-pound car and not be dead?
Come to think of it, what was a ninety-one-year-old man doing alone at night in the middle of a dark street? A sizable crowd had gathered, but no family members appeared. No one seemed to know him. I answered more questions, called my friend Kitty to ask her to come and be with me. I still could not stop shaking and repeated to anyone who would listen. I thought I killed him.
The paramedics put him in the ambulance and took him to L.A. County hospital. How could I find out his condition? The female officer gave me her card with a case number handwritten on the back. Since tomorrow was Sunday, and Monday would be a holiday, the police department’s communication’s staff wouldn’t be in until Tuesday. I could call then and learn his status.
We see this all the time, she tried to reassure me. We had one of these just earlier tonight, a few miles from here.
She said I could leave. How could that be? Surely, they needed to arrest me. But I got into my car and tentatively pulled away. I had driven less than a quarter block when she pulled me over. Please get out of the car and follow me.
I didn’t smell alcohol on your breath, but for protocol’s sake, I need to give you a field sobriety test, she told me. Please, test everything you can, I wanted to say. I was shaking violently, but I was sober. She instructed me to put my ankles together and follow her pen back and forth with my eyes.
I was guilty. Of what, exactly, I didn’t know. But I waited for her to pull out the handcuffs and take me away. Certainly, you can’t plow down a ninety-one-year-old man and not be guilty of something. But she finished the sobriety test and told me for the second time I could go.
I went to Kitty’s house a few blocks away and called my insurance company and felt the guilt building. Maybe I hadn’t been on the phone at the time of the accident, but how many other times had I used my phone in traffic? Surely, that was evidence against me. Only days earlier I’d bragged to a friend that I had a perfect driving record—no accidents and one moving violation in twenty years. Maybe this was divine retribution for that hubris. Plus, I’d been stupefied by grief in the days and hours leading up to this accident.
Four days earlier, I’d passed my fiftieth birthday. A pathetic mantra had taken root in my head. Fifty and divorced. Fifty and alone. This is not how I thought my life would unfold. Other recent events put that self-pity in perspective. Last week, I’d learned that friends had lost their twenty-year-old son to suicide. Erik had struggled with depression and mental illness for years and the pain had finally become too much. I’d spent the previous Friday, the day I’d learned of his death, in quiet mourning, canceling all appointments to hold him and his parents in my heart. And then, the next morning, I’d gotten the text I’d been dreading from my friend Emily. Her precious son Ronan, whom I’d held and carried and fed and loved, had just died from the Tay-Sachs disease that had started to consume his neurological system before he was even born. He was a month shy of his third birthday. A mutual friend was en route from Phoenix to be with Emily in Santa Fe, but I was stuck in L.A. So I’d spent another Friday, the day before the accident, at home, stopping life long enough to feel deeply this second loss, to be with Emily in my heart.
These losses all started to become too much, the pain of the divorce, the loss of my children in my living space, even the loss of my little dog, Sami, since my rental didn’t allow dogs. My heart was shattering into bits too small to ever piece back together.
Not an hour before the accident, I had attended the memorial for Erik. He was the same age as my own children. His buddies spoke so eloquently of him, and I held my friends, his parents, as they shook with their own grief. Had I been too addled with heartache to be driving?
Worse, still, was the simmering old guilt. I was oblivious to its presence until Kitty pulled me up short. As I blathered on about how I must somehow be to blame, she cut me off. You are no more responsible for this accident than you were for your mother’s illness. She wouldn’t let me look away. Kitty, like me, shares a history of maternal mental illness with traumatic institutionalizations, violence, and suicide attempts. She knew exactly what the voices in my head were telling me.
Later that night, another friend did me a similar favor when she, too, spoke firmly. You cannot afford to give these voices room in your head. You simply cannot let them take over.
I lay in bed that night, seeing the nightmare images over and over again. And then the words of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace—who also suffered from mental illness and committed suicide at the age of forty-six—came to comfort me. In a commencement speech at Kenyon College, he told graduates about the power of thought. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
So I began to construct meaning, separate from the feelings that were
flooding me. The accident had taken place in a heavily Armenian neighborhood where people are joined tightly by culture and stand up for each other. I was clearly not Armenian and had hurt one of their own. Yet, not a single person from the gathered crowd accosted me, yelled at me, or in any way challenged me. Rather, they brought me bottles of water and told me it would be okay.
Every time the words and images provoking guilt intruded—I hit a ninety-one-year-old man—I countered with a piece of evidence.
It’s Monday now and I still don’t know the condition of the man. I pray he was released that night and that, if he suffers cognitive impairment that would have put him in the middle of a dark street, this accident helps his family seek the help he needs. I pray that he’s still alive because a part of me is convinced I killed him. And I pray that I may be free of the guilt I cannot seem to shake.
But I’m not there yet. The sound of sirens in my neighborhood sets off flashbacks. The red-and-blue police lights spin in my head. I know there’s no one who can tell me what I desperately long to hear—that I’m not to blame—so I guess I’ll have to settle for knowing I am powerless to stop bad things from happening.
I did not have the power to stop my mother’s mental illness. I did not have the power to stop this accident from occurring. But I was given the power to arrest my own nascent alcoholism. And thanks to friends, I’m learning to stop the destructive, guilt-focused thinking that tries to pull me down.
But the whispers are still there. I still don’t fully believe I couldn’t stop my mother’s illness. I cannot completely embrace that degree of powerlessness. How am I to make peace with a world filled with such random horror? I’m trying but cannot fully let go of the what-ifs—what if I’d taken a different way home, what if I’d not stopped to visit Kitty instead of going straight home that night? Because if I admit I’m that powerless, then I also have to make room for the tragedies that happen to others—babies who die of neurological disorders, and young men who kill themselves because the pain of living is simply too great. And I have to acknowledge that such things may visit me, too. So the choice of how to think about this accident, how to construct meaning from it, is mine alone. If I’m not in control of accidents and mental illness, then bad shit can happen to me and the ones I love at any moment. And if I am in control of such things, I’m hosed by guilt. Which will it be?
Harley and Me Page 9