Another Motorcycle Story

I just got back from Elizabeth City, NC.

Back story: A few weeks back my girlfriend's sister and I met our new neighbor. We were chatting on the back steps of her apartment building which is next door to my apartment building and 20 feet from my garage which I rent from her landlord. A guy appeared from the alley between the buildings. I don't remember who spoke first; it surprises me it happened at all. He was reserved, maybe even a bit standoffish, but we pushed through it - getting to know a neighbor. Silences were almost awkward until I asked if he was that guy who zips out of here on a Vespa in the mornings. Quick and a bit disaffected, he said, "Uh...no."

He pointed to his open garage 5 garages down and said, "Take a peek." Inside was a racing bike in complete juxtaposition to his quiet demeanor. When I read aloud the license plate "GSXR800," he let out a little laugh. Said Suzuki doesn't make a GSXR800, only a 750. Said he'd modified the already ridiculously fast engine even bigger for insane speeds. Said he's gonna try for 200 next time he's on the track. I pictured him and the bike screaming up the straightaway, bright blue and red melting like crayons in my mind's eye then leaning into corners at 150. This guy is mad. Like me.

Without even moving, Cortney . . . like . . . disappeared. Later, in her element, in the living room after dinner with Mom, Dad, her boyfriend, her sister, and me (the willing laughing stock of the party), she'd tell how I became a wild-eyed maniac at the mere mention of motorcycles.

The new neighbor said "There's a dude next-door who has two BMW motorcycles, a couple old classics." Cortney reappeared when I turned to her to exchange knowing looks. "That's me," I revealed trying to subdue my pride with a calm humility. "I was thinking of getting a Beemer," he said all deadpan, then paused, “I got a danger paycheck coming soon.” We learned he was a Navy Pilot recently back from Haiti after the devastating earthquakes, a mission he summarized as "smoke and stench of death."

I discounted his statement about buying a BMW; growing up in Hampton Roads, the highest concentration of military personnel on the planet, I'd seen ten thousand soldiers on motorcycles but never anything but affordable Japanese bikes.

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A few days ago back at the garages, a gorgeous new blue BMW F800ST was shining in the sun, and Fly Boy was tinkering on it, changing and adjusting to make things just right for himself.

With humble pie on my face, I admitted to him what I had assumed. Even more humbled, I became acquainted with what a Navy Pilot earns. Daylight was nearly done and I smelled that Summer was fading too. Past sundown we shared stories of riding motorcycles, hitting clouds of bees in Colorado in a T-shirt, of rain storms, and open roads across the heartland where mountains sometimes crumble into the road.

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This afternoon, Friday, one of the last days of summer before students return to school, I woke from a lazy nap dazed, rode to school for something, forgot what I went there for, was returning empty-handed, still dazed, wondering how I was going to spend my last few hours before being cast back into the Hell of teaching another year, when pulling around back of my building, I noticed the new guy opening his garage wearing riding leathers. His calm still intact, "Where is there to ride around here?" A rush of excitement woke me completely. “Follow me.”

Route 17 Dominion Blvd to Elizabeth City opens up to wide expanses with nowhere for a cop to hide and everywhere to open up the bikes to an easy 100 if you want. I didn't see any today, but usually I see Red-tail hawks, Peregrine Falcons, deer, and once, Sean and I saw a huge American Bald Eagle perched regally overlooking a field waiting for lunch to catch its eye. It's a good country road, just outside the suburbs, but I had never made it the whole hour and a half to E. City. There's too often some other engagement in my life that keeps me from living.

The sky yellowed and the air thickened a little further South as we pulled over onto a churchyard grass parking lot on the outskirts of E. City. He made another adjustment to his bike while I told a story that came to mind - The night I got my first BMW bike, I talked my girlfriend into going for a ride. It had been so many years since I had owned a motorcycle, I was too excited and forgot to check the weather forecast. Amy and I got caught in a lightning storm on the road back from the Outer Banks just 10 miles East. We got soaked to the bone in the cold rain, and for the hour-long ride home I shivered so violently I could barely keep the bike steady. Since then, I've learned to keep an eye on Mother Nature. She is beautiful, and I love her, but when she gets tempestuous, steer clear. We mentioned it might be a prudent idea to head back home.

Joel the new stranger and me (the author)

No decision was made either way. We started our bikes and were about to head north when I yelled through my helmet, "Hey, we're this close; may as well roll down main street along the water. It's quaint." I had heard. I shuttered at myself using the word quaint. He dismissed the weather, turned South and within 10 minutes we were in the heart of a quaint Southern Main Street. Whitewashed wood houses rested on flat lots of patchy Bermuda grass and bare sun-bleached white earth dotted by occasional Pine trees that grew denser further down from the road then stopped suddenly where orange sky backlit their trunks, so you understood there was brackish rivers back there that fed the lightning bugs who were coming out to dance this Friday twilight to the southern summer song of the cicadas.

Signs on stores made me revel in the poignancy of change. Names like Internet Cafe, Cellular One, and Yoga on buildings all wrinkled and cracked, beaten for a century, leaning one way or another but still there, thinking of their heyday when they wore names like Mercantile, Haberdashery, and Apothecary.

A General Store from a bygone time

There was that house every town has: the one painted wild colors and/or with 99 birdhouses, rainbow whirligigs, miniature lighthouses, a village of dwarf gnomes or some other obsession/ mental illness on full display.

It was all so completely unfamiliar to me it felt I could be a thousand miles from home. How could it be? Just 50 miles from home here was an organized township full of people who for all these years I never even knew existed. I loved it. After this trip, I returned regularly to Muddy Waters Coffeehouse (a converted Gas Station/Garage) to get this same feeling or to read for hours or to grade papers with the blessing of knowing no one.

Approaching the main intersection, we noticed two girls with great bodies in little black dresses and heels on the sidewalk passing a brick house. Heading to happy hour no doubt. At the stop-light, we flipped up our face shields and asked the girls where was a good spot to eat. "I gayess the bayest plyess would buyee Hoppers, stright ahayed." "Hoppers," I repeated since it was the only word I dared repeat. Riding ahead toward the downtown riverfront, I thought about those 50 miles again and wondered how they could do what I just heard. I must've sounded like Bill and Ted or Jeff Spicoli.

I was stoked when, at the bar, my new neighbor asked the bartender if they had any local/seasonal beers. He could've been a tee-totaling Bible-thumper and I wouldn't have found out until just now. We both ordered salads and seafood, and in the middle of my white ale, it dawned on me.

"Dude... What's your name?"

"Joel. What's yours?"

"Bobby." We both did that half-laugh thing guys do which is really just a quick exhale of air and almost no vibrations of any vocal cords. “Hhhm.” He still upheld his cool apprehension, that wary scrutiny street smart people use to protect themselves from getting tangled up with freaks or psycho killers.

"Man, we are such guys," he said, again with almost no expression. To show I understood, I told another story: When my wife and I were breaking up, she asked what my guy friends thought. I said I didn't know, we didn't talk about feelings. She found this impossible to believe given the amount of time my dude friends and I hung out. And this story needed another story to develop the character of my ex-wife: When my son was like 7, at the age when the thing boys want most is to impress their dads by finding out everything their dads love and love it too, he was learning to identify cars. He was good. He'd get 35 in a row sometimes. Once though, he pointed at a big black Lincoln SUV...

"NAG-ivator!" he proudly announced. I laughed out loud...I had to. Unable to resist a rare opportunity to be witty, I said "No Sebastian. Your Mom's a NAG-ivator. That's a NAV-igator." A day later, I felt bad for losing control and tactlessly skewing my kid's perception of his mom negatively, but more recently have been consoled in the fact he tells me he loves her dearly, but her nagging drives him crazy too.

Bringing the conversation back to the original point, that my wife didn't believe I didn't talk about our divorce with my dudes, impersonating the quintessential nag, I mimic, "Well then, what do you talk about?"

Even though she's nowhere, we both, in unison, answer her question...

"Bikes."

Duh.

The ride home was...well...different. I'd been living in a city a long time, and before that knew only life in the burbs - street lights, emergency lanes, safety in infrastructure. Joel's GPS took a different way home, leaving E. City immediately going into twenty miles of narrow winding roads deep into dark woods.

Joel is fifteen years my junior, in his prime with lightning fast reflexes, plus he is riding a state-of-the-art new bike, and he rides track. He is a better rider than I, no doubt. There is something very alive though about surpassing one's comfort-level. Something stupidly thrilling about going a little faster than you should, trying to keep up or compete with people better than you at something. Something absurd, hurtling myself into blackness, praying, "God, please don't let any animals, other than me, run wild tonight on this road." Something sick and twisted about my romanticizing the deaths of a hundred bugs I killed tonight as a stage play, how they were all aglow for their second in the spotlight with their white wings, in love with my high-beam, buzzing in space between me and the black backdrop of night, in their last instant before death it all ends as a quiet pop on my headlight, helmet or handlebars. It could just as easily be me.

When we came out of the woods onto Route 168 we could see the horizon again. While we were eating, the gathering clouds from earlier had passed over us due north, swelled into an actual late-summer rain storm, and was in cells all around us now. Lightning was popping off a few miles away in seven directions, but somehow, for now, we were running a gauntlet without rain. I wanted nothing to do with another drenching story, so I pointed at the sky, shook my head, and rode faster.

There was a weird synchrodestiny tonight - a halo - a force. People on the OBX toll-road kept merging out of our way where they usually stupidly parallel drive and create blockades. The dude with a badge in the toll booth gave us a look of approval and said words to the effect, "You boys better get home." When he lifted the barrier, I pulled ahead slowly waiting for Joel to pay his toll. Again, like his choices so far of bikes, girls, beer, salads and seafood, his decision coming out of the gate was exactly what I was thinking. He shot out from under the fluorescent canopy and blasted past me.

I knew the road well: four wide new lanes of well-lighted highway, free of potholes, tight turns, or anything that should cause the tragedy of 45 mph. It was finally time to really let my motorcycle do what she was begging to do. I blipped the throttle, dropped down from third to second gear and cracked open all 1000 CCs. Within a second, I was passing the guy who flies airplanes, screaming 7500 RPMs, with my front end starting to lift off the ground. We rode fast to be safe. Rain would be dangerous.

Almost home, approaching the Berkley Bridge, blue reflective letters on a car we were fast approaching caught my eye. I throttled back, Joel copied, and just like that we were good. We breathed. We were here. We were home. No rain. No rush. Euphoria hit like a drug. I felt thunder under my leather jacket subsiding as the adrenaline flowed off until another day.

I was happy seeing Norfolk's downtown at night. Sometimes I talk a little shit about it, because I've been here too long, but it's home, and the lights on the water always make me feel good. Especially coming in from a great ride.

Norfolk Virginia city lights reflecting on Elizabeth River at night