The Hero's Body (30 page)

I called
Grim's office one morning, and his assistant, who had worked on my father, notched out some time to speak with me. I quickly jotted down these notes as he spoke:
fractured neck; inter-cranium damage; massive head injury; helmet pulled up on neck upon impact with guardrail; fractured larynx; fractured lower part of cranial vault; possible chest injury; knocked-over lung; air in chest outside lung
.

I said, “Would it have been possible for him to talk? One of his buddies said he heard him talk.”

“Not possible,” he said.

“What about move his arm? Two of his buddies said they saw him move his arm.”

“Not possible.”

The notorious unreliability of eyewitness reports. Two of his fellow riders had said they saw my father move his arm onto his chest, and both of them were mistaken. How, why does the mind bamboozle the eyes into seeing what cannot be there, what the body cannot do?

“Do you think he suffered?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That wasn't possible, not with those massive head injuries. There was no suffering.”

And then, unprompted, he told me this: “Once, when I was an EMT, years ago, we responded to a suicide on the train tracks. A guy got cut clean in half. It was a real mess. I took his bottom half, my partner took his upper half, and we loaded him in the ambulance. On the way to the hospital the guy woke up and started walking on his hands, trying to get to his bottom half. Imagine that, the guy walking on his hands, dragging his bloody waist across the floor, trying to put himself back together. That lasted about six seconds, I'd say.”

And then this: “I once had a mother punch me in the jaw and then pull her dead eight-year-old daughter off the table. She dragged her all the way down the hospital hallway by her ankle, trying to get her home. She punched nurses who tried to stop her—she was a big woman. Security had to restrain her. Meanwhile the dead girl is just naked there on the floor in the middle of the hallway.”

Grim's assistant, that soldier of truth who had literally peered inside my father, left me with those stories: the dying who won't die even when they want to, the bereaved who refuse to accept, to bury, their dead. And he left me with those nouns,
larynx
and
cranial vault
. They split like thin, sunbaked shale. Human evolution had no way of anticipating steel and speed and asphalt, and so we are like graham crackers in the grip of some furious, defective child. Our
bodies, adapted to the African savanna of one million years ago, are now just waiting to be minced on the macadam of civilization. What must it feel like in the blood, that lust for speed? How do some men come to crave it? Milan Kundera: “Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.” He called it “pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed,” and when I first read those words, I knew Kundera was speaking about my father.

Before we finished our call that day, Grim's assistant solved for me the niggling riddle of why the motorcycle wasn't demolished, as it should have been. My father's chest and lung injuries were caused by the bike itself. It didn't splinter into fifty pieces because his body came between it and the guardrail. Right till the last, even when the physics was wildly, irrecoverably beyond his grasp, he was trying to save the bike.

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 remembered, 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.