Five years ago

"I want to get a motorcycle," I said.

"Absolutely not," my mother replied.

We were in Colorado at the time, on vacation early in the summer. My family and I were sitting in a cafe restaurant in Crested Butte.

"Oh come on," my dad said to her. "We rode around on a Vespa all the time in California, way back in the day."

I had seen bikers all over the place in Colorado. They were gnarly dudes, mostly. Older. Beards, denim, tattoos. Bad-asses. At the time I was just entering a bad-ass phase in my own life, or so I'd thought; I'd got my first car, worked out with the football team at school, lost a bunch of weight and started chatting up girls. Up to this point I'd just played video games all the time. I felt powerful, and worse, I had just finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a novel on philosophy, not really on motorcycles, and I pretended to understand what it was talking about even though I'd mostly skimmed the philosophy to get to the road-trip scenes. The man was taking a seventeen-day road trip across America with his son. Holy shit.

As much as Mom loathed the idea of me riding a motorcycle, she knew her bikes. This is evidence of the motorcycle's dying primacy in American culture. Her generation had Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Mine got Paul Walker and Fast and the Furious. (We must prefer our soul-searching to be over in eight seconds.) Make of that difference what you will. Anyway, as soon as Mom told me no-- and after describing every kind of horrible operations that come with bike wrecks-- skin grafts, pin insertion-- she started talking Harleys, Victories, Indians, Triumphs. Choppers, roadsters. Sidecars, bitch seats. I liked the idea of having a Triumph. It sounded sexy and victorious. It was a Brit bike too, so the gear shift would be on the right handle, not the left, which seemed exotic and sophisticated. I wanted to be exotic and sophisticated, just as I saw myself as being the guy that could wear a leather jacket when I rode it to school.

"Absolutely not," my mother then reiterated. A moment later, outside, a peloton of motorcycles passed.

After we came back from our vacation, I came up to my parents' work one morning after weights with the football team. My folks ran a photography business, which meant a lot of sets, outdoor and indoor. Farmhouse, map room, library/study, industrial fan, log cabin. I was interested in the one that had the big American flag and the working '78 Harley Roadster. My dad brought out me back to the parking lot behind the studio when I got there, shushing me not to tell Mom.

There it was, in all its black and chrome glory, leaning up on its kickstand with the front wheel at an angle towards us like a bikini model contorting herself to the camera for a photo shoot. It sat aloof and alone on a row of empty parking spaces away from Mom's and Dad's cars as if the parking lot was its kingdom and the empty spots were the dais upon which it reposed. Just sitting there, the gargantuan two-wheel chassis exuded an awesome and effortless power. When we walked up to it, it thrillingly reeked of gas. Dad told me to get on, and when I straddled it, I felt the cushion of the leather seat, the grip of the rubberized handles, the radiance coming off the metal parts superheated by the hot sun. I could feel the huge weight of the bike below me.

My dad grinned evilly.

He told me how to operate it. Here's your gas tank, your speedometer. Ignition. Here's the front brake, the back brake, there's the accelerator. The clutch is on the left handlebar. The shifter is right below your foot there. Neutral is between first and second gear. Upshift, downshift. Be careful with that front brake, you don't want to throw yourself. You don't want to pop the clutch. If you have to ditch it, here's how I'd do it.

Turn it on.

rumblerumblerumbleRUMbleRUMBLErumbleRUMBLERUMBLERUMBLE--

I put it in first and tapped the gas and scooted forward and then stopped and then hit the gas, tried to remember the clutch, forgot where the brake was, mistook it for the accelerator, and promptly plowed this half a ton of steel and flesh moving at twenty-five miles per hour into the side of my mother's 1995 Buick Riviera.

I don't remember what happened in that single second when I hit my mother's car. It's a blank spot in my memory. I remember everything up to it: the car rushing towards me, the bike vibrating beneath my thighs, the oh fuck, you dumb shit feeling, but I don't remember the impact. It's gone.

I once realized that in a way I actually died when I hit my mother's car. I didn't know it then, but my life had just ended and started over. Someone else might have been killed in that situation, some other guy. Yet here I was. What if this was really paradise, the only afterlife I'd been given, and I was missing it? I was the luckiest man alive and I didn't know it.

Call it fate, call it luck-- it doesn't matter. One second later, when I came to, I was miraculously upright. The bike lay sprawled on the ground between my legs and no part of me was pinned beneath it. My arms were braced against the side of the car. I hadn't hit my head. Had I even hit anything? I was too adrenalized to feel pain. You dumb shit, I then thought, you could have killed yourself. And then: I am never riding a motorcycle again.

My dad came running up. I had just put this man's motorcycle into his wife's car. I had just taken his judgment and shamed him in the eyes of my mother. Yet with all the decency of a saint he asked me desperately if I was okay. He must really love me.

"I don't know," I said. "Am I all right?"