by Steve Kenny
to me. I look up. He looks down.
"How about them Cubs?" he asks me, still smiling...
Instinctively, the vague remembrance of a long-ago satisfaction, purer than happiness, in stereo, drifts into my mind; a moment in 1982 when I was so fucking high that I could hardly stand it. But man, I was happy.
What could I have been thinking?
---
We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray
And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
She said, 'There is no reason
and the truth is plain to see.'
But I wandered through my playing cards
and would not let her be
one of sixteen vestal virgins
who were leaving for the coast
and although my eyes were open
they might have just as well've been closed
She said, 'I'm home on shore leave,'
though in truth we were at sea
so I took her by the looking glass
and forced her to agree
saying, 'You must be the mermaid
who took Neptune for a ride.'
But she smiled at me so sadly
that my anger straightway died
If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean
My mouth by then like cardboard
seemed to slip straight through my head
So we crash-dived straightway quickly
and attacked the ocean bed
-Procol Harum
"A Whiter Shade Of Pale"
----
-Drifting Subconsciously Into the POV Lane-
I am not a religious man, or so I like to believe. My first eleven or twelve years were completely without any references to any God nor Religion. I just lived the day-to-day, experienced everything in good old black and white. I have never prayed to God, either, although I can clearly remember shouting once, in the rain, with real anger, and with surprise, at a God I thought I'd decided didn't exist. I remember it well. It was five or six years ago... back in 2005 or 2006... I was southbound on I-55, tooling along on my Kawasaki Vulcan Drifter, bound for my little town, from Chicago. That Vulcan Drifter was a big machine, that looked, with its solo seat and stylish fender skirts of bent metal that covered almost half of each of those chromed, spoked, fat black rubber wheels, a lot like the old Indian motorcycles of the 1950's.
I saw a rain shower rolling in across the plains from out of the southwest, so I pulled off the road at the 127 mile marker and got a cup of coffee at the local McDonalds. Two or three cups of coffee later, I became restless, and decided to try to ride it out. So I wrapped my spare t-shirt, pirate-style, around my head for protection from the rain, fired up the motorcycle and pulled out from under the relative safety of the Golden Arches. Slowly wheeling that machine out onto the wet State highway, I rolled up the overpass, and turned left, and as I rode down the on ramp, turned the throttle up as the rain came down. I built up speed, and, as anyone who rides can tell you, rain, even a gentle rain, hurts when you're being pelted by it at sixty miles per hour, yet I pressed on. The rain hurt. My face hurt. The rain was cold and hot at the same time, yet I maintained a steady pace of sixty miles per hour. And while sixty is a respectable speed in the rain on a bike, it fell far short of the pace I liked to keep. But, in consideration of the wet road and personal safety, I let it be for a while.
The sky darkened. A few cars passed me. With t-shirt tail wafting in the wet wind, trailing behind, soaked, heavy as an elephant's trunk, I'd sometimes glance over and stare through my rain-streaked glasses at the folks who'd pass me. It ran through my mind that I must either look, A; pretty goddamned cool and determined and fearless, or, B; pretty goddamned stupid and soaked, out in the rain, an imbecile on two wheels, hurtling down the road at a mile a minute. And, I thought, those occupants of the vehicles that passed me, glad to be on the right side of the glass, either looked at me astonished, or stared with complete indifference, if they stared at all. And I imagined that some were with me, and were hoping I'd make it, and some, I was sure, were making bets and forming odds on whether or not I'd crash and slide down the highway.
Soon, perhaps because of the caffeine, perhaps because my confidence in myself began to grow, perhaps because I was trying to ride a commercial tiger while being driven by personal dragons, I found myself going faster; much faster. For nearly an hour, I'd driven against the wind, rain, and was pouring it on, and going a reckless eighty miles an hour, rocketing past everyfuckingthing that moved, a flash of wet and wild wonder. I had traveled seventy four miles, and streaked past the 53 mile marker almost before I knew it. I had one mile to go.
Suddenly the wind drove hard and low from out of the west, across the soft and muddy wet fields of green and brown and blue and gray and yellow, and drove up from the shoulder, slamming and pushing my wheels across the wet road, and instantly, I knew that to steer into a wind like that to attempt a correction, even with skillful balance and a firm grip, I would surely lose control and go down, so I had no choice but to move with the wind, and onto the center line, while still going eighty. On the center line micro-seconds later, now realizing the danger and making calculations, a little late, with my heart in my head and stupidly happy with myself for a split second because I'd just stabilized for a silly millisecond, another gust slammed into me, and sent a half ton of man and machine unwillingly and violently into the show off lane. Not daring to turn and look, hunched over and staring straight ahead, I was very, very glad that I was the only show off in the show off lane right then, as I tried to get the wiggle out of my handlebars. Then I remember distinctly realizing, for the first time, why Kawasaki had named that bike the 'Drifter'; it was because it drifts. It drifts. Its fenders weren't really fenders at all, but were, in fact, sails; sails that caught every fucking breeze, and every fucking gust, too, for that matter. Drifter. Ha ha. I get it now, assholes. A faint and bitter smile crossed my rain-needled face. I would have tried to fight for ground and make my way back into the right lane, if given another chance, but another hurricane-force gust blasted me and that bike, sliding my wheels off to the left. I went off the road.
I remember, even now, thinking very clearly, many things at that moment. First; that my new found insight into the hazardous nature of stylish motorcycle fender skirts might just be my last thought [which really sucked, as last thoughts go, to my mind], and, that, although I had managed to slow the bike down somewhat, I was still going faster than a speeding idiot in a Midwestern Illinois rain storm had any right to be going, out there, out on the edge of the prairie, on the edge of disaster, on the edge of the Great American Tornado Alley. I knew this wasn't good. I knew I was going to crash, and knew that maybe I would hit something. Forced off the left shoulder, I rode down the grassy hill, and I remember a feeling that my eyes became wide, and remember thinking that my hands were probably white-knuckled. My whole body was stiff in anticipation and my mind was wildly focused on staying upright. I remember thinking that I was going to hit a concrete drainage block. I remember a jumbled, confused mass of jumping, violently shaking, bouncing images. I remember riding it down...
Then, stillness...
stillness... and rain.
...and water...
I was wet...
My face, my entire body, was half in and half out of water. It happened so fast that I found myself in this position before I knew what hit me or how I got there. My mind did a quic
k inventory: no pain. I'm okay, I think. And still here. Slowly pulling myself up, soaked, mud-covered, madder than hell and yet glad to still be alive and uninjured, I looked around. Nobody had seen me crash. The rain was too thick, the distance from the road, too far. I looked up and over, across the southbound lanes of I-55 and could see, through the hard-driving rain, the reflective white exit arrow on the green government highway sign pointing toward the exit ramp. I surveyed the situation. I couldn't believe it. I'd come seventy four miles, through rain and wind, at eighty miles an hour, for this? Real anger moved me. I strode as best I could in that ditch, sloshed through the deep pool of drainage water over to my bike, which was lying on its side half submerged, lying like a horse that'd just been put down in a creek. I grabbed the handlebars firmly and pulled, but that heavy machine didn't budge. I pulled again. The suction of the mud on that eight hundred pound bike was real, and a force to be reckoned with, and reminded me that I was no longer in my comfort zone, as if I have a comfort zone. Now I had something real to be angry at, something right before me, something I could add to my long list of new complaints: Nature. I thought about how close I was to my exit. It seemed to me that Nature itself had risen up against me, at the last minute. I became determined to finish my ride, or, if not my ride, then, at least, my trip, victorious: I'd walk home if I had to.
Somehow, with a struggle, I managed to get that bike upright, and smiled to myself grimly at my achievement. I straddled it, tried to start it, but it wouldn't start. There were forces here that were