Vic Socotra

13 July 2008

Live Fast

I’m headed for Richmond this morning, capital of the Old South. There is a motorcycle dealership down there that has a training program for how to ride one. The State insists upon it, and I think it is a skill that would be useful to have in the coming world that will have us regressing from our sleek four wheels to two.

The emerging industrial powers of the world are going the other way.

Safety is paramount in that process, and so I downloaded the safety manual on which the test question s will be based. There is a lot of useful informa tion in it, broadly applicable beyond the world of two wheels. I have written down the two key acronyms:

SEE: Search, Evaluate, Execute
T-CLOCS: Tires, Controls, Lights, Oil, Chassis, Stands

There was a long paragraph about centers of gravity, and a sidebar about “high-side” and “low-side” crashes. Apparently high-side is bad, since that represents the flying motion of the rider over the handlebars, to land in front of the motorcycle. Low side is preferred, since the rider lands on the pavement behind the bike.

Neither option sounds appealing, based on the last crash I had on roller skates, or the thousands of crashes I have had on more forgiving snow. Some people understand the center of gravity, and use it with grace. I seem to have misplaced mine these days, and hope I can get it back..

Coming back from Baltimore I was with all the other four wheelers, sweltering. I was preoccupied about the end of the relationship, not paying attention too much except the dull knot in my stomach. I passed the places in Maryland that have occupied some of my time. Baltimore-Washington International Airport, for one, and the National Security Agency campus off MD-32, home of my occasional ally and frequent nemesis. The Daedalus book warehouse is on the other end of MD-32, near the Broken Land Parkway and the village of King’s Contrivance. The wonders of the publishing world placed on remainder can be had there for a song.

I used to hang out there for hours, emerging with heavy bags of really cool books that no one else wanted to read.

I drifted off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway onto the New York Avenue exit east of town. I muttered a curse under my breath, but traffic had me pinned in the lane and there was no way out save some radical maneuver, and my heart was not in it. New York Avenue is slow, but it leads to the truncated end of the I-395 tunnel, where the expressway ends at a stop-light on the Avenue.

The highway project was stopped in its tracks by neighborhood activists long ago. The seemingly inexorable advance under the Capitol whimpers out in a perpetual knot of waiting cars. It was an ancient power struggle, and their victory against The Man left no direct way across the capital. I crept along in the Saturday afternoon traffic, thinking of the trials of life. The grand lady I visited had lost a daughter not long ago, and I met some of her many children and dogs. She has sorrows that are real and immediate, not like mine, and she is dealing with them.

She is leaving the area for more the more pleasant climes of Southern California shortly, and I envy her departure. I’d like to fly away, too.

Creeping along the avenue toward downtown, I thought about what it was like to have a child taken from you in the prime of life.=2 0There has been so much death this last year, some predictable and some not. I don’t know how to deal with it, but maybe that is the point. It deals with you, and not the other way around.

I was approaching the usual backup near the Total Station on the Avenue, listening to the radio burble on about the financial meltdown. There was the sound of sirens in the sultry air, as there always is downtown, but with that sound I heard the whine of racing engines.

Between the lanes of stopped cars the riders came. The sound of their engines preceded them. The first glimpse I had was in the rear-view, coming hard. The rider was a blur of colored leather, hunched over his handles. If I had leaned over and opened the passenger door on the Hubrismobile he would have joined me in the front seat at fifty miles an hour.

A companion was in close pursuit, flashing by less than a foot away, the sound of their engines a visceral one-two pulse of sound and air.

They disappeared into the mass of autos in front of me. There was power and menace in those machines, and some imperative beyond that of reason. They must be high on adrenaline, I thought, glands pumping raw electricity into the veins.

I saw them a few minutes later at the gas station, the riders casually removing their helmets to reveal shaven scalps and featureless mirrored sunglasses.

Eventually I got to the light at the tun nel entrance, and things began to move again, but the image of the riders stayed with me as I navigated the familiar and i nfuriating tangle of concrete of the 14th Street Bridge and the Pentagon approaches. Live fast. Die young.

That was not in the safety manual. Jesus.

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