Chapter Three: Leviticus

Chapter Three: Leviticus

I read a lot.  One my great pleasures in life is a good book.  In my value system a well-written book has all the value of a masterful painting.  Not just well written, I should say masterfully written.  Written in a manner I have heard called "wordmansmithing". Written like a poet, constructed like a master craftsman.  Prose that puts a reader right in the protagonist's or author's brain.  I am a highly, almost totally, visual learner and thinker. 

I love a wide variety of music, but have no talent to carry a tune, let alone remember more than the first few bars.  The world of sound I do appreciate very much.  It just doesn't transcend into much that my brain seems to use.  But the written word immediately becomes imagery in my brain, if the words are put together with talent and intelligence.

Often when I get into a new activity, it can quickly become a passion.  When that happens I get every book I can find written on that activity.  So it was with bicycling and ocean kayaking.  Non-fiction preferably.  But if the fiction is, again masterfully, written, that will do in a pinch.  As it has been with motorcycling. 

I just finished a couple of books about real life motorcycling experiences.  One was very well written, not so much excellently written as well done.  In that the author did put me in his riding boots quite comfortably.  The other was like a loud conversation overheard while he was talking on his cell phone.

Admittedly I have a total of slightly less than 50,000 miles on the only motorcycle I have owned up to this point in my writing.  Far, far less experience than the authors in either of these two books.  I care almost not all to take my bike apart and fix stuff.  It even goes into the shop to have the oil changed.  The only tools in my saddlebags are a tire pressure gauge, a high quality pocket knife and a pair of Dollar Store pliers.  In my value system manly man-ness is not tied to being mechanically capable.  It is not tied to enjoying getting grease on your hands and jeans. 

I did do all of my own repairs when I raced and toured on bicycles.  All of my kayaks and canoes I have reworked to some degree.  I mention this only because none of these objects were ever given a name.  Never became part of me.  I have never become one with any of them in the sense that these possessions came to life.  Maybe I am not mystical enough.  Not spiritual enough, or something.  A lot of the authors of non-fiction literature about their machines and their adventures on them seem to buy into this theme.  Their machines become like people.  They become actual friends.  They have names. What am I missing?

What happens to me is that my body becomes an object, I become mechanical.  My mind separates from the device beneath me.  My alligator brain takes over running my body.  Pushing your body to its limits requires a very high pain tolerance.  That's just a physical thing though.  It's one of the first things any high-functioning athlete learns; i.e. physical pain tolerance.  And it, is actual more of a mind skill than a body skill.

this mind over body skill, is difficult to explain. 

Until people have put themselves into a situation where it is required there is almost no way to fully describe it.  But without this ability in use during extreme endurance activities, you will never win; you will never succeed even in finishing.  "You must know the pain, but you cannot think about how much it hurts, or you will stop - you will quit."  And every time you quit, it gets easier to quit the next time and to quit earlier and earlier.

We are taught, "pain is the body's way of telling us something is wrong."  The body does not want to run 24.4 miles (a marathon), but it can.  The body definitely does not want to climb a mountain over 24,000 feet high (Mt. Everest), but it can.  The mind will make it its highest priority when pain becomes so intense it wants to force the body to quit.  It is only when the mind is at its highest level of focus that a goal can override all physical complaints. 

Racing on skis, on a bicycle, going at high speeds on a motorcycle cannot be a mind activity in my experience.  The concept of making decisions just cannot happen fast enough to handle various dangers.  These things have to become second nature, like walking.  It has been said, "If you stopped long enough to think about how to walk, you'll fall over."  The greatest danger at these high-speed activities is when the mind wanders.  So the only, the singular, function of the intelligence, or lower order mind, is to get the fuck out of the way. 

In my thinking it is the brain that tells the body what parts to move and do things.  What I comprehend as the mind's function is not necessarily a physical one. This is where mental disorders become a bit muddled.  As it is possible for the brain to feel pain in an amputated limb, is it not possible for the brain to not recognize pain if a person can discipline it enough? 

I am not saying that I don't believe pain is not physically felt. I do believe the mind can create a systematic structure of priorities and can discipline itself to follow that systematic structure.  This can include a system of priorities of pain and pain levels.  However if the body brain organ is misfiring, sending all kinds of mismanaged sensory stimuli, what then is the result? 

Medical science has discovered a host of medications targeted at regulating and balancing the chemistry of the brain. This being an attempt to bring some harmony between the various hormones the body should produce naturally, and doesn't for some reason, and the brain. But medical science admits this is a crapshoot.  In this equation we might call "normal mental health", there exist nearly infinite variables. Gender, age, metabolism, history of injuries, genetics...environment...changes in environment...daily activities, to include stress levels...changes in daily activities resulting in redline stress levels.

So we know then that a disciplined athlete can train his/her mind to override pain thresholds. Yogis, and others of similar disciplines, can train their minds to overcome body and brain physical restraints. Multi-lingual people can think in various languages.  This indicates to me there is one element which can control these variables. This would be the mind.

And sometimes, I am beginning to believe, the mind has to train itself to ignore itself. 

The wandering mind...what a topic!  The wandering mind can be downright dangerous if it wanders at the wrong time.  A deeply creative mind spends a lot of time wandering.  At times, during the dangerous activities, about which I am writing, it is better if it is ignored.   These are times when a mantra is useful.  I learned a mantra some forty years ago and it has saved my life more than once. 

Because, I guess, I have been an artist, a professional artist and art teacher, for so long, my mind wanders a lot.  Getting it to shut down and give me some peace is something I seek positive ways to accomplish all the time.  I also learned a long time ago how to mentally push through physical pain.  Even motorcycle riding can become quite painful if you ride for long distances.  Needles in the neck.  Wood hands.  Novocaine butt.

For eight hears I coached High School downhill ski racing.  The flags a ski racer dodges on a racecourse are called "gates".  The Head ski coach, a much better skier than me, used to say "If you look at the gates you will take them in the face.  Look just to side, where you want to go.  Focus on where to must go.   Each gate will come faster than the last. The time between the last two gates can be half what it was between the first two.  If you try to think your way through a racecourse, you will yard-sale.   Don't think!  Just ski."

In bicycle racing, "If you think about crashing, you will crash." 

Ocean kayaking puts your head just a few feet above water level.  At water level two miles is the perceptual distance to the horizon.  So two miles out on six foot swells with a three-foot chop coming in your face, you cannot think about the pain.  Safety is beyond the mental ken.  Your situation would seem hopeless if you thought about it.  You cannot think about the micro adjustments you have to make to the paddle blade as it enters the water.  In no wind on flat water an ocean kayak moves at about the same pace as walking.  Big swells, high chop, into the wind cuts that by two thirds.  Giving in to big water, fatigue, hypothermia, anything like that and you're sunk. 

Books, masterful wordsmithing, can bring to life the experiences and build that imagery a person can use.  If the disordered mind is willing is should be possible to begin a process of creating that systematic structure of priorities - of pain, stress level accommodations, even perceptions of realities and the emotions they invoke.

In bringing this back to the life of a bipolar person, self-imposed discipline, at first, is one of the greatest challenges.  In the beginning it can feel as though you are on a motorcycle on the freeway and you have no training, no experience – all you feel is fear.  But, you can’t get off and you can’t stop.  The traffic won’t let you pull over.

For that one moment, when fear is overwhelming you, the only thing you can do is face it.  At that you moment, my advice is to accept, as fully as you can, that your life has just changed and only you can grab a hold of what is happening.  Why it happened, Mommy fault, Daddy’s fault, genetics – it does not matter.  Get through the next five minutes, then the next hour, then the rest of the day.

And then find somebody who can teach you how to ride that motorcycle.

--

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Chapter Two: Songs

Chapter Two: Songs

She killed herself.

My first wife was beautiful, intelligent and was my first head-over-heels case of arrow through the heart love.  In her presence the world, for me, was wonderful.  Birds were always singing.  Flowers bloomed even in winter.  We married after a very brief, intense and lusty courtship in the way of which only people in their late teens and early twenties are physically capable. 

This was in the enlightened sixties.  Enlightened in the aspect of the "Age of Aquarius" sort of thing.  The "Free Love Era".  Simply one of the best eras I can remember in American history - except for the fucking Viet Nam War.  Why bother to get married in the "Free Love Era"?  Because you just received your "Draft Notice", that's why.  I was raised in a military family.  I knew from eighteen years of observation, you can't pick your nose or fart in the military unless you have documentation - in triplicate. - signed by somebody with some kind of a title.  Any title will do.  Living off-post with your girlfriend is not possible.  Wife - yes.

I am not intending to speak lightly of anyone's death under similar circumstances.  It's horrible.  It's horrible to be the surviving spouse or other family member.  I speak with the authority of living through it.  There are chunks of my memory that are missing, chunks of my life from the days and weeks following my first wife's suicide that are simply missing. Walking around like a mannequin.  Making the movements of a living person, but not feeling anything.

Standing on the sidewalk in the sun, standing in a pool full of water – no difference.  Survival instincts intact, emotions totally missing. 

I don't remember if I called the police/hospital, or her father.  Of whatever emergency people there were in those days, up to three days later, I have only a blurry gray slide show of images.  From when they carried her from the house on a covered gurney, until standing in a funeral reception line, days later, there is just fog.  Very little idea what I did...or said to anyone.

A crack appeared in the ground and I fell into it. I will not claim to have been a perfect husband or lover.  But she was everything to me. Everything good and beautiful. Just seeing her made me feel that I did know what real love was, being with her was the only place I wanted to be. Even though we had some really awful fights on occasion, first love like that is your oxygen. Without that person right beside you, you just cannot breathe. For the first time in your life you truly, very truly, feel no longer alone in the world. When they are totally gone, forever, no chance of ever seeing them, being with them again, brings on a pain so intense to go on living seems simply impossible.

There is no oxygen, no sunlight. My legs would not work.  My arms would not raise my hands to wipe the tears. I did not scream or wail.  I did not curse God. Some part of me died when she pulled that trigger, though I did not know it until I found she was gone. That part, forty years later, is still gone.  A portion of my soul was raggedly amputated, with a dull rusty infected knife. It will never heal and the infection has and continues to slowly and painfully rot bits of that soul to this day.

Yes, I blame myself. Can I forgive myself? No!  What could I have done?  What should I have done?  Why didn't I see the signs?  Was I such a horrible person, this was her only way of getting away from me? 

In my heart there is screaming; "Forgive me! Oh my love, please forgive me!  I will give my life if you will come back! I should be the one who is dead!  You were the beautiful loving one!  Oh God!  Take me!  Not her?"  To this day this is what my heart screams. From morning till night. In my dreams. For forty years and will continue until my spirit leaves this life.

As hard as it was, has been and is, however, I now know I will wait until my spirit leaves of its own accord.  It is not for me to make that happen.

One thing I knew; I had two very young children who were in child-shock.  They needed me.  My heart went into mama bear mode.  Unthinking, protective.  Keep moving.  Periods of such intense weeping I actually lost eyesight for brief bits of time.  They didn't treat much for trauma such as that back then, but I know I went through several episodes of intense emotional shock.  I could feel my heart stop, then race like a rabbit, then stop.  Trouble breathing.  Unable to get air.

I was a man.  Manly-men-men did not openly weep or show a broken heart in public.  Much of my actual natural reactions I hid.  Going into whatever bathrooms I could find, turning on the fan, flushing the toilet, whatever noise might mask my sobbing.  In a military family from a very stiff Protestant heritage, men were in control or they were not men.

            Yes, even now I often hide behind attempted humour or sarcasm to keep my head held up.  To be able to deal.  With life.  With getting up in the morning.  With whoever I am working, when I can hold a job.  Being regarded as a wise-asse is less painful than being vulnerable.

When I speak of a bipolar motorcycle journal, I am referring to being bipolar.  Or, writing a motorcycle journal about having bipolar disorder and riding a motorcycle and how writing about riding helps.  I can write this memoir now because, in part, I believe I did take up motorcycle riding several years before I had my most significant mental breakdown. 

It has been forty-one years since my first wife took her own life.  For nearly all of that time, up until very recently, I never told anyone about how she died.  Except my second wife.  I said she had had a long lingering illness.  I blamed it on her diabetes.  I basically just lied.  It seemed humiliating.  Embarrassing.  Embarrassing?

I had loved her more than anything.  We had had our problems, but the love was there.  Yet I felt humiliated and embarrassed by the way she died!  Hiding the pain, lying about it, living with it.  Every minute of every day.  Getting remarried and having four more children in addition to my first two.  Pushing it down, pushing it down.  First with alcohol.  Then with increasingly severe rages against life, my children, my wonderful second wife. 

The last fifty years in our American culture much has happened.  Civil Rights.  Women's Rights.  The Americans with Disabilities Act.  A greater, deeper understanding of individual's rights.  When my first wife found her brother's twenty-two and used it against herself, it was the Dark Ages of mental health awareness and treatment.  This preceded all the recent progress.  The options if you began to experience mental problems were almost nil.  Drink or use drugs until you couldn't feel anything and watch your life fall apart from addiction.

Or, take it out on everyone who loves you until they can't take it anymore and abandons you.  Or, let the mental illness take over and be institutionalized.

In the mental institutions there were two treatments.  Give you drugs so powerful you became a vegetable.  Have your brain periodically fried until you became a vegetable.  In all cases of understanding and treatment available, sanctioned or self-adopted, you were going to become a vegetable.  You and your family were going to be labelled and shunted.  Avoided.  Lepers.

We have no way of knowing today.  No way to go back in history and perform proper diagnosis or surveys.  My belief is that prior to about 1980, the very first symptom of the vast majority of true mental illnesses, or actually chemically unbalanced brains, were successful suicides. 

At one time in recent medical history, contracting diabetes meant a slow lingering painful wasting away until death.  Then the use of animal extracted insulin was discovered and diabetes became, in the best case a mere inconvenience, even in the worst case it was still possible to increase an affected person's lifespan by decades. 

Diabetes?  Take your shots, move on.  Mental Illness - well, you're just a bad person!  Weak and pitiful.  Can't be trusted.

Today we are much aware of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I will avoid getting political, but PTSD has become a major hot topic for all the returning vets from all of our recent combat conflicts. When most people experience life and death stress, even one single event, the organic physical nature of the brain changes. For many, if not most, this change, or changes, can dramatically affect the functioning of their brain.  Stress in social situations, in the work place, in simple daily life can become a nightmarish roller coaster of highs and lows. Uncontrollable reactions.

Tremors, heavy sweating, angry confrontational mannerisms. It is as though the whole world has become the enemy.  

The whole question of "Why?" is ludicrous to the severely depressed. Conscious memory began with lots and lots of doors, just like everyone else.  Our reality is where every day it seems as though a door has closed. But no windows opened.  The windows begin to disappear. The very walls become more and more drab.  The colour in our lives begins to flake away from everything.

We find ourselves in a room with four walls, all painted a dull battleship gray. The only door is steel, also gray, locked and has no door knob on the inside.  There are no windows. Every day the room gets just a little bit smaller. One day a window is there, in the middle of a wall.  It is open, but it is all blackness outside. You know it is oblivion, but it is the only solution for escaping the room. You have been trapped in the room so long that window begins to.....

That's why.

Finding myself on the freeway my first day of motorcycle riding, when my first major psychotic episode hit I was terrified.  Today, this day, as I sit on the back deck of this rented house on the banks of a small pond in the woods of rural Virginia, my mind wanders. It is August again.  August is a very odd month in my life.  Mary killed herself on August sixth, 1976. August is the month when I most often changed from teaching at one school to the first few days at a new school.

This day, today, the sun is shining, it is beautiful.  The year I took the motorcycle safety course and got my motorcycle was in August. The day I rode, for real in traffic, was a super-hot super-humid day. Today there is a cool breeze. Fall is in the air...change of seasons. Here in this climate zone, today is unusual and I know there is a lot of very hot summer ahead of us.  But I'll take today for today.

At the mental health conferences I have attended, there is a common theme that runs through the lives of many of the participants.  It is almost never addressed in any speeches or talks. Even as we meet to discuss ways and means of fighting the social stigmas of mental illness and disorders, this one topic is still off limits.  Suicide.

Many of the other participants I have spoken to over meals or coffee, or in small discussion groups, will bring up their own attempts or suicides of close relatives.  Parents, uncles, aunts, even children.

Suicide is, in my thinking, the ultimate act of madness. However, I also believe most of the time suicide is also almost accidental. Many of us, when standing on the edge of an extremely high ledge get the feeling of wanting to jump. It is so common to human nature it's almost natural, normal. But we don't. We feel like doing it, but we know it is actually wrong...even stupid. We aren't birds. We won't instantly grow wings and fly.  We will plummet like big pumpkins and splat in a bloody mess.

If we step off that ledge, if we pull that trigger, if we swallow those pills - it will be the last thing we do. And there is so much evidence from those who came within a single molecule of doing it, and failed or were rescued, who state almost the first thing, "It was an accident.  I didn't really mean to do it."

The first ten miles of real life riding, in traffic at traffic speeds, on a machine as dangerous as a motorcycle are the most potentially lethal.  Then the next one hundred miles.  Then the next one thousand.  And so on. The farther away you get from no experience towards a lot of experience, the higher are your chances of survival, or safe riding.  But you can never forget you are on a motorcycle and there are no crush zones or air bags between you and death.

There is an obvious parallel to mental illness. If you don't admit and accept that living with a mental illness can be dangerous, it is exactly like riding a motorcycle on the freeway at high speed and not admitting, or accepting, that that is dangerous. You truly have no protection other than fully understanding your vulnerability.

I've never thought of myself as being very big or scary, but even though I'm not very large in stature I have to admit to being maybe disproportionately strong. And during those times when the rages came over me I could be extremely scary to other people... I guess. Of course, she did the right thing to leave. Although I have never struck another person in one of my rages. The thought of ever striking my wife or children has never ever crossed my mind.  I simply could never do that.

All the destruction I have carried out must be horrible and terrifying to witness. Tazzering or putting me down with a rhino dart would seem like a good idea.

Being abandoned. Never having a solid home, a neighbourhood, always being the new kid at school and being forced to confront the school bully every single year.  Never having a best friend for more than a few months at a time. Growing up with an alcoholic mother who ran out of the house many nights when I was a small child.  Having the first love of my life leave me - permanently - by putting a bullet through her own head.  That is my madness.

All things are relative. All situations. All life experience. For many their lives have been much worse and they have overcome much greater challenges. But it is all relative. For nearly every fully able rich man who has died trying to climb Mt. Everest, there is a disabled person who has succeeded. Tragedy can come and destroy the most privileged and blessings can come and bring about triumph for the most wretched.

I was to be safely in the care of a trained psychiatric professional. So I spent most of that summer alone, walking on a beach and trying to pull my head out of the bucket of shit into which I had plunged it. None of my children, except one son, would speak to me. My wife wouldn't answer my calls.

My son said, "You have nothing left now!  The only reason you're there is because you have nothing left!  You destroyed everything else."  And he was correct. Now I had to figure out what to do next.  I had no idea.

It was August before my wife would speak to me again.

Have you ever put a real crystal, one of those small facet-cut globes of pure clear crystal, hanging in a window?  When the sunlight hits the crystal, tiny dots of rainbow sparkle are everywhere on the walls around the room. Even in a room with flat gray walls any light source can create some of those tiny rainbows. Sunlight is best, but even a small candle, placed adjacent to the crystal will work. If enough focus, enough courage can be found it can be used to spiritually grab one of those tiny rainbows.  As soon as the gift of that tiny key is held even for a second, a keyhole will appear in that gray steel door.   It can be used to open it. 

This is a supremely difficult task to perform, but it can be done. A real life, the purpose of a true life is that small crystal globe. The truth is like that crystal when any kind of light shines upon it, millions of tiny rainbow keys are everywhere around us. This task of grabbing onto even one of those keys will draw the attention away from that window to oblivion. 

We have to force ourselves to believe, that the situation will not last forever.

With my bipolar condition this includes as one of its cycles, deep deep depression, or days and sometimes weeks in that tiny gray room.  I have to force myself to believe that the situation will not last forever. I hold onto that crystal rainbow key and occasionally, even if for only an hour once in a while, I can get away from that window and out that door.

When I do, speaking only for myself, these days, I am usually on a motorcycle.

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Chapt. One: Part Three: I learn to ride...in traffic - on the Interstate!

Part Three: I learn to ride...in traffic - on the Interstate!

For years I wanted to become a motorcycle rider.  I had finally...finally gotten into a real state motorcycle "Learn to Ride" course.  The instructors were excellent.  Not at all snooty.  Not "I'm a cool motorcycle dude and your just a shmuck."  I was finally astride a big rumbling man-machine.  Most of the time these state-run courses have a waiting list months long.  They cost over a hundred bucks and if you back out too late you loose your money.  I had signed up twice before.  Life and job changes had gotten in the way.

I was so-o-o ready ready.  The third time I had to really talk myself, and my wife, into laying out the money again.  The first opening in the class was two months away...sigh..."Do you have a cancelation policy?  Will you call if somebody cancels?"

"We just had a cancellation, but it's this weekend.  Do you want it?".

"Yes!"  I didn't even look at my work schedule.  Five, six years of waiting.  Now or never.

The bike I had so righteously researched and found, was being prepped by the dealer.  A lot of excitement, an equal quantity of anxiety, was running through my head as I waited at the DMV to get a new driver's license with the little "M" classification stamped on it.  As soon as this chore was done I was to pick up my wife and she was going to deliver me to the dealers.  I would then take a cautious Virginia back country road home.

To scout my new carefully mapped route, we drove it to the dealer's.  Offramp Warning:  I have no sense of direction.  I cannot really stress this enough.  If I was standing directly on the little flag that denotes the absolute north pole, I could not find south.  This is beyond frustrating for me.  My life has been very nomadic.  Raised in a military family, we moved every few years when I was growing up.  Serendipity or fate or God's plan, I have continued this theme to this day.  So often by the time I finally get some landmarks memorized and a few routes locked down, I'm somewhere new and have to start all over again.  Which means, in short, I spend a lot of time lost.

This trait has developed a love, nearly a passion, for maps.  Most people have paintings or posters of kittens or kangaroos playing poker on their walls.  In my office, the only room that I am allowed to decorate, I have maps.  Mostly beat-up maps of the lakes, rivers and ocean coastal places where I have kayaked.  Mountain topos of areas I have mountain biked or road raced.  These are real deal maps - water damaged, sweat stained, folded and unfolded, jammed and removed from map pouches hundreds of times.  When I move from one region of the country to the next, I take the old maps frame them and put 'em on the walls of my new office.

These maps had saved my bacon over and over again.  I develop deep affections for them.  Whenever I have to go anywhere, I get a map and plan my route to the most minute detail.  I mark it with a high-liter.  Then I make a list of the road names, or other noteworthy locators.  I memorize the list and do my best to put a photo-like image of the actual geography into my thick skull.  Half the time even this doesn't work and I still get hopelessly lost.

To me the person who invented the cell phone should receive knighthood. The person who invented GPS should be made king or queen.  The person who figured out how to put GPS on a cell phone should receive Sainthood.  But my first ever-actual motorcycle ride on real streets and roads, predated all that stuff.

At that time I did have something almost as good for getting me out of various mazes I frequently found myself stuck in.  I had a wife.  I had a wife who was born and raised in Philadelphia.  Which you may, or may not, know is one of the oldest of the largest American urban sprawls.  Philly, Valley Forge, Norristown, Morristown, plus a half dozen other formerly separate and distinct burgs, have melded into one giant splat of paved cow paths.  Four lanes for a few blocks shrinking to two lanes.  Back to four lanes.  Three way intersections, four way intersections, five way, veer to the right, now left - if you don't know where you are going a minimum of eight traffic lights before you get there, you have two choices.  One, you are lost.  Two, you are going to be in a traffic accident.

 And even though she might get lost, somehow she'd figure it out and get unlost.  More on that ability later.  My wife however, does not believe in, does not carry, ever use, I am not sure she even knows how to read - maps!

Where this was a problem, or became a problem, is that I had my printed detailed route in my hand.  I was too anxious and excited to explain this to my wife...if I had remembered...which I did not.  We chatted about this and that, everything but the actual route.  She thought the country road was pretty, which is true of much of rural Virginia.  Such a pleasant change from Virginia Interstate 64, our usual route.  A little longer maybe, but worth it. 

Nice safe, two lane, lightly travelled, hardly any traffic.  Perfect for my first real motorcycle ride. 

Virginia Interstate 64.  Running mostly east and west across the entire state, damn near smack in the middle north and south, 64 is heavily travelled.  Two lanes each direction, sometimes widely separated, with woodsiness very tight to the road skirts.  In fact not much side skirt at all; i.e. no break-down lanes.  If you must pull over and stop,  like maybe you feel a heart attack coming on,  do not open the driver's side doors.  Some trucker will lop 'em off like a sushi chef.

The agreement was she would lead the way home. I was on a motorcycle and could not just lean over and read a map.  Or like most people, put the map on the steering wheel and glance at it while driving.  Not safe but who doesn't do that.  I would then be free to concentrate on not riding my new motorcycle into some hard object. 

Neither of us had ever been in this part of Richmond before, other than the time we had first looked at the bike...and I had gotten us lost doing that. 

As said, narrow one-ways, stop signs nearly every corner, blind corners.  Cars parallel parked crowding what narrow lanes there were.  The one-way street the bike shop was on runs the wrong way for the direction we needed to go.  The garage area where my bike was waiting opens directly onto the sidewalk  The door is maybe three feet from traffic.  Fairly frequent traffic.  Two car lengths at any given second to get out on to the street, make an immediate left and keep from ramming into the back of a parked car or one stopped at the first stop sign.

It was August in Virginia, thus ninety-five degrees with ninety-five per cent humidity.  I am wearing a full face black helmet, full length jeans, engineer boots and a heavy Levi jacket.  If I was going to crash on my first ride, I wanted to have some protection.  By the time I eeeased, tippy-toe, up to the rushing sound of traffic, I was sweating so hard my glasses were slipping down my nose and my face plate was fogging up.  The sidewalk was concrete cast at what seemed like a forty-five degree angle to the rain gutter.  From there the road seemed to heave up at another forty-five degrees.  From where I was straddling the bike it looked like I was going to have to ride into and out of a castle moat.

My wife pulls out at the first break in traffic and never looks back.  Three, then four, then five cars whoosh right in behind her before I can wobble, lurching in first gear, panicked popping of the shift lever, out in front of a bread truck which slams on the brake to let me in.  He was not happy and pulls up within the width of a child's hand behind me.  My wife stops at the corner stop sign.  She turns right.  I have to wait, still lurching in half clutch and half first gear behind each car as it does whatever it chooses to do at the same stop sign.  A duck trying to ride a huge log, boots pumping left and right on the baking pavement.

In this part of the city these are short blocks.  By the time I get to the intersection and rabbit glance to my right to find her, she is nowhere in sight.  My instinct says "go straight until you see her."  My instinct to never trust my instinct says, "Two one-way rights makes a U and puts us back in the direction we came."  I look to the right at the next corner and there she is.  I'm still gunning the engine, popping between gears -not on purpose, but because I am suddenly, very suddenly aware of how much I really don't know whatthafuck I am doing!

In the motorcycle course we just rode around a huge parking lot in a circle.  Then we did a cones course.  Then stop 'n go stuff.  Then figure eights in each direction.  We never got out of second gear.  Down one to first, grind up the tach till the engine sounds like it's going to explode, put your toe under the gear lever and pop it up past neutral to second gear.  Easy-peasy.  Never wound it up high enough to need third, or fourth, or ...lord-almighty...fifth. This was real life, real traffic.  The cars in front of me pay no attention to what is behind them...could not give a shit.  The cars and trucks behind me just want me to keep the fuck moving.

Short blocks.  Street not much more than alleys.  Bomb craters everywhere to dodge.  Every time I'd hit a dog sized pot hole or a huge crack in the road I'd shoot a foot off the seat.  The motorcycle course parking lot had been fairway smooth.  Now I was whack-a-moling up and down, lurching between first and third gears with that embarrassing neck-snap through second, trying not to stall out and fall over.  Weaving around avoiding as best I could not to drop a wheel in a crater or smack a continental drift abutment.  I should have had one of those stand-up placards that says "Learner" on it.  You know, the ones on Drivers Ed cars.

The throttle on all motorcycles, in a recent agreement between manufacturers, is on the right handle grip.  The right peddle is the rear brake.  Your right hand grip lever controls the front brake (the right hand generally being the strongest) and can stop a motorcycle in a matter of feet if it's jammed down too hard, sending the rider head over ass over the handlebars or down on the side in a micro-nano second.  The gear shift is the left peddle and the clutch is the left hand grip lever.  In the sedate motorcycle course parking lot, everybody in a line, the instructor yelling instructions and encouragement, all this seems like "Hey...this ain't no big deal.".

Compare this to the modern car.  Point it with the steering wheel.  Want to go fast, push down with the right foot.  Want to slow down, angle the right foot over just a tad to the left and push down again.  A chimpanzee could drive a modern car... go to a circus, they have chimpanzees driving little clown cars. 

After many, many years of car experience we must now retrain the driver in us to do a half dozen new actions.  With both hands and both feet.  In a precise sequence at very precise pressures in hummingbird movements while balancing a six to eight hundred pound machine.  In this instance things tend to take on a new, totally new, sense of fun. 

All of the above came down to a very abrupt epiphany.  Books, training, practice, theory - empirical experience cannot be substituted by, or with, anything else. I was in a "God, please look down upon your child and save my ass!" situation.  If you don't happen to believe in God, I don't know what advice to give.  Don't really care, but I would put even money on the fact, you'd be praying to something.  I am not a church going man, but I was praying like an unarmed man at the OK Corral.

My wife not being a map person and being a person whose toast always lands butter-side up is up in front.  She is just enough ahead that I can still see her in traffic.  Just barely.  Weaving, lurching, gear popping, riding the rear brake, wobbling I stay within four to five cars as Richmond falls behind and we make it to the strip-malls that seem to be on the periphery of every American city.  My heart rate is beginning to level off.  Traffic, stop signs and lights have kept out speed down.  I haven't dropped the bike or run into anything.  "It's all good."

So far I haven't had the courage to take my eyes from the immediate road in front of me.  I have been darting panicked glances at my rearview mirrors.  When I do manage a look at the one dial on this bike, something registers about the the trip odometer. 

This a very basic basic bike.  It does not have a fuel gauge!   I did not notice this before!  I naturally assumed all gasoline powered machines had fuel gauges.  However, thinking back I could not recall any of my old lawn mowers having fuel gauges.  You knew the tank was empty when the machine stopped.  That's just peachy when you're in your own yard on soft grass!  On asphalt in heavy traffic, this would not be peachy!  It would not be a good thing, it would be a fucking bad thing!

The dealer said the bike got about...sixty miles to the gallon.  It was a 2.3 gallon tank.  Quick math, not my best subject.  That would be about a hundred miles before the reserve valve would need to be switched on - where's the fucking reserve valve?  So-o-o many questions I should have asked.  So-o-o many questions I was apparently either too assuming, or naive, to ask.  Or just too stupid to even think of asking.

The trip odometer says twenty (something) miles, but did the dealer top off the tank?  I don't know.  No, I hadn't asked.   When you have been married, living in connubial bliss, comparatively, with another person for over thirty years (at that time) you do develop some  psychic connections.  Some.  My wife pulls over into a gas station.

"Do you know how much gas you've got?", she asks.

"Uh...." I respond, really struggling not to appear too shaken. 

"I think you'd better check it.  Maybe top off the tank.  What kind of milage does the bike get?"

"Uh..." I respond with puffed up equanimity, still trying to work the math out in my mushy brain.

Which is when I discovered I also did not know how to take the gas cap off this bike.  Pushing a little thingy on top of the gas cap over to one side revealed a keyhole.  Attempting to appear experienced, and to be an old hand at this, I took the ignition key, the bike only came with one key (very lucky for me at the time), I inserted it and twist.  Plunk! The cap comes off.

Hey! Everybody look at me, Easy Rider!  I put the gas pump nozzle in the tank and squeeze the lever.  About one tablespoon of gas goes in and thunk...pump stops.  Squeeze again...thunk.  Must be full.  I look in.  Obviously not full.  Squeeze...thunk.  This is a very small tank compared to a car.  It must be the pump's automatic pressure shut off.  So I pull the nozzle out to just above the tank opening, where the pressure valve won't kick in.  The tank fills in about ten seconds and I proceed to pump about half a gallon of premium gas all over the tank and down on to the super-hot engine and muffler. 

Hey! Everybody look at me!  An old boob who doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.  But I get it filled.  With a lot of fumbling and luck, I get the cap back on the tank.  At which point my wife, who fortunately for my sense of dignity, missed the whole debacle, has gotten her cup of coffee and is impatient to leave. 

She gets in the mini-van and zooms off.  I manage to get in right behind her.  Now we are approaching the intersection where the back-country road we had come in on passed under IS-64.  From this direction that overpass was not visible until after the 64 on-ramp. !!!  I'm totally transfixed on the rear of our minivan.  My mind says this doesn't seem right?  Didn't we come straight on through under the overpass?  She must know what she doing.  Where she's going?!  We went over this.  Don't go on 64.  I'm not ready to try and ride this thing on an Interstate yet.  Especially "not" on Interstate 64!

I barely got out of fucking Richmond alive!  Now I'm gonna be on the worst road in southern Virginia! 

"Oh Lord, look down carefully on this sinner and don't let me get fucking killed on this road.  I haven't even made the first goddamned payment on this fucking machine yet!"

In the back of my mind I hear him say, "I'll do what I can, but you really are a fucking idiot."

I've never had any trouble with the police in over fifty years of driving.  One speeding ticket back in the Nixon era and the cop was pretty nice about it.  In general I have a lot of respect for the men and women of the law.  Always been respectful to me.  And here in Virginia the Highway Patrol is everywhere.  By and large they keep Va's roads quite safe.  But even the Va HP stays off IS-64.  The posted speed limit of sixty-five is held to be a myth...a mere polite suggestion to be righteously ignored

Being as how 64 is the only major highway from the large coastal cities and the state capital, the traffic is heavy, fast and Big!  Back to front semi's with impatient commuters darting in between and experienced motorcyclists darting in between all of them.  Then all of a sudden on this sweltering summer day there was me.  Slightly over twenty miles of real motorcycle driving under my belt and not a very good job of that.  To say I did not belong there would be like dropping a mouse in the middle of an NBA play-off game.

In my entire motorcycle experience I had not gotten over thirty miles an hour yet.  Now I was being forced by a truck, which was boxed in behind me by a truck to his left, to do over seventy!  And the truck was closing in under the obvious misunderstanding that I actually knew what I was doing.  My right foot was naturally pressing harder and harder on the rear brake in order to make the bike go faster - not remembering at that moment that it was, in fact, the brake!  For fifty years the right foot made things go faster.  Now every time I dug down with my right foot the bike lurched what felt like was backwards! 

Having spent two years commuting on a scooter, my right hand was frantically twisting the hell out of the throttle too.  This combination was not working!   My wife was disappearing ahead, just keeping with the flow. I had somehow, with the God, that I rarely ever credited, clasped with iron claws to my shoulder, made the 360 degree on-ramp and fed into the right lane.  That was an experience that my memory has pretty much blacked out like scenes from a Saw movie.

I was on the giant "Death of Hercules" roller-coaster ride from hell, but this one wasn't going to be over in forty-five seconds.  It was going to go on and on until I got off the fucking freeway!  I had driven this stretch of 64 hundreds of times when I coached soccer.  I had particularly planned to avoid it today, but here I incontrovertibly was.

 I had driven soccer teams in mini-buses at all times of morning, day and night on this section and knew every turn and tree.  The familiarity of it began to calm my brain down bit by bit.  I finally realized that my right foot did not belong pushing down on anything at this point.  Focusing on the throttle to speed up and releasing it slightly to slow down seemed to be a better plan. 

I didn't have more than a few miles until the exit I had used all those soccer trips was coming up.  I knew the rest of the route home by heart.  "Just stay in the middle."  I kept reminding myself.  No idea where my wife was at this point.  She was a good driver, I wasn't worried about her.

Down shifting, this time feathering the clutch, on the off ramp.  Also this time feathering the rear brake, I was still alive!  I was on a sedate country road.  About twenty five miles from home.  Just me on my new motorcycle.  Cruisin'   What a rush!

When I did get home, un-wrecked and non-killed, my wife was there.

"How'd it go?  Sorry I made that turn onto 64.  Did you say you didn't want to go on 64?  I never saw you behind me, so I figured you took that other road."

"Uh....." I replied.  Which was when I forgot to put the kickstand down and dropped the bike for the first time.

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