I was lonely on the road last year, and I've been thinking about joining a club. I haven't been with one in a long time, and I'm considering an international three-patch outfit who have occasionally invited me. But I just don't know if I'm up for the club politics, the two-or-three 10-hour days in a row in the saddle in a high speed grind to make a nationals meeting, the rules, the drama, the other clubs…the sheer organization of it all just wears me down. Bikers brag all the time about the freedom they have — it's one of their main things — but club members are as enmeshed in duty and rules and orders as any military outfit, and to say I chafe under them is rather an understatement.
It's the main reason why I left the last club I was in, although I will say that riding in a tight pack of 30-40 roaring down the road at 80+ like the thunder of God in high style and with a finely-tuned disdain and disregard for literally anything or anyone outside our group — if there's anything on earth like it, I've never found it. Tribal and pack urges call us from deep in our most buried limbic system, and are too rarely answered in our civilized society these days. Most of the jobs I have had have strong echoes of it, and all the brotherhood you could ask for. But belonging to a hard-core pack, any one of which demands my trust at 24" at 75 MPH necessarily involves putting up with the pack rules.
Pfft. I won't even belong to an HOA.
Ah well, I doubt it, but we'll see as the year wears on. I'm reminded I'd go in as a "Prospect" and putting up with six months or a year of prospect status in any club is just a bigger pain in the ass than I care to engage in. That's one of those things that, having done it once in my life, has been done plenty, thanks. To quote the movie dudes, "I'm getting too old for that shit." I could throw my lot in with a family-oriented "Riding Club" doing supper at Joe's Crab Shack, along with a bit of bar-hopping and wannabe swagger in mid- to up-scale bars a real biker wouldn't be caught dead in. Think "Wild Hogs" except they bring their wives with them, often as not as members.
At any rate, as I was hanging up my leathers and feeling another day older (which is a much bigger deal than it used to be,) I caught a flash of turquoise and yellow and silver. My leathers, as true with many bikers', have a variety of icons, representations of things, sewn or attached to them. They may or, more commonly, may not, mean anything to anyone else, faded patches and pins and scraps of this and that, acronyms, arcana obscure as alchemists' ciphers. I have several icons scattered around my vest, accumulated over fifteen or twenty years. I probably ought to get a new vest instead of this ragged-out, road-worn leather scrap, but I know I never will. When I die, this thing will be in my closet, along with all the other "WTF was grandpa up to?" stuff they'll have to sort through and, probably, toss in the dumpster.
Yellow, silver, turquoise. I sat with the vest in my lap instead of hanging it up, and ran my fingers over them. They are attached to the side-loops with leather lacing.
A piece of a yellow ribbon, kept from the bundle of yellow roses I finally found the courage to bring to that grave as I'd promised a lifetime ago. I asked for, and, maybe, got forgiveness after all those decades. Even if it was only me forgiving me, when I was broken to my hands and knees in the cool bordered grass that marks the end of her journey for all time, tracing her name in the polished marble and talking to her — it fixed something. I don't know what. Some sharp place that I used to touch constantly, a dull background ache that was always there has dropped away from me and is gone; the yellow makes me smile, and now she lives perfect in my memory.
A leather bracelet from a woman who profoundly changed my life, a small thing that touched her, was part of her for a long time. After all these years, right up to this day, as my fingers pass over the worn leather and the silver flower I can still feel the consuming flame of the dragon as he opens an eye and stirs lazily in the marrow of my long bones and chest. A peaceful life depends on the beast's enforced somnolence. I'll never fully waken him again, but am always pleasantly(?) tempted when I feel the heat of his breath rolling slowly up my spine.
A turquoise stone given to me offhandedly by the love of my life as she laughed and made my heart hammer in the desert heat as one of the best days of my life wound down. She bought it from a roadside stand from a Navajo who in fact turned out to be a Pakistani pretending to be Navajo. One of the funniest guys I've ever met. But nothing really happened that day — it's utterly ordinary in the telling, no fireworks, no trips to Europe, no particular celebration — it was simply all us and all perfect in every single breath and moment from sunrise to sunset. We have those, occasionally. But even by the standards of those rare, polished days, this one was special, and a brush against that cheap lump of turquoise floods me with a near-eidetic memory of the entire day, even now these years on.
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I can't remember the name of the movie, but it involved the good- or bad-guy having a small crystal shard that was packed with someone's memories. I realized as I put the leathers away that it's not science fiction at all. We humans are really good at chaining and packing memories into small, hidden spaces. It's astonishing, really, how a scent or a taste or touch — anything — can suddenly be our lives, full to bursting with 3D-surround-sound-immersive-virtual-reality hi-fidelity.
I know I'd forgotten.
But now I know why I collect these icons. It's for those bleak days when everything is all just too much, and in the midst of it, I can take one of the magic talismans and suddenly be on a hillside at sunrise and she's curling herself under my arm in the blanket for warmth, shivering a little against me, skin morning-cool, the sun barely beginning to boom up over the plains. And she smiles and whispers and breaks my heart with her innocence of times yet to be -- and I realize yet again that it really is all worth it. THAT'S what they're for.
In Our Next Episode: I attempt to publish a third blog entry. We'll see how it goes.
Damn. This was good... can I say beautiful? In a rugged, bikerly way of course!
ReplyDeleteYour blog had disappeared from my reader and I just now added it back. I think the blogspot ones weren't showing up correctly, but now the reader grabs the feed name it needs and I don't have to C&P anything. Soon it'll simply read my mind.