My cousin Molly lives in suburban Cleveland and has a husband, three kids and cancer. Her parents, my aunt Mary Jane and uncle Phil, live nearby; I stopped for a visit. Phil taught geology at Case Western Reserve and brings real knowledge and understanding to the climate change conversation. Despite complete agreement on the subject, we spent two hours yelling at each other; climate change is real and humans are stupid and fucked. Yelling about climate change is easier than yelling about cancer.
Highway 2, two lanes, curvaceous and beautiful, crosses the Ohio river and runs east from Gallipolis into West Virginia. Russ had taken a break from trimming Susie’s hedges and was sitting on a lawn chair in the shade when I rode by. I turned the motorcycle around on that skinny road and turned around again at the hedge, “Is this the road to Ripley?” I asked him. I knew the answer, I’ve got GPS on the bike.
After a few minutes, he invited me into his screen porch where we drank sweet tea and he smoked a cigar. He’s 74, married to Susie for fifty-six years, they got married in 1968 just after her father died. She was sixteen. It was their anniversary.
That same year, Russ was drafted. He went to basic and AIT at Fort Campbell where he trained as a 13 Bravo, Field Artillery. When he was done training, he went to Viet Nam. Russ has PTSD, diabetes, three stents in his heart and needs hearing aids.
I joined the Army in 1974, trained at Fort Knox and went to Germany instead of Viet Nam. It was still Russ’s Army of blood, Jesus, alcohol and drugs. My First Sergeant, Sergeant Allen, had a baseball-size purple bulge at the base of his skull that oozed shards of bloody shrapnel in the shower. Our Troop CO, Captain Tenney, tried to make me a Mormon, I guess Joseph Smith got him through his stint. Our unit Sergeant Major bought a bottle of vodka from the Class VI store every night and I mean every night. He was a vicious son-of-a-bitch come morning. The lower ranks depended on drugs to salve the wounds, speed, hash, LSD, heroin, whatever could be had. The VA considers Russ 100% disabled.
I stayed at McCoy’s Inn in Ripley last night. Maria’s the night front desk manager. As I was going to dinner, she told me she was hungry and I bought her tacos and we had a conversation. She runs a toiletries pantry for homeless people out of her house. She says homelessness is rampant in Ripley but they’re invisible, the police have no tolerance. She votes Democrat. So does the waitress on the Upper Peninsula in Michigan who is in recovery and in a bitter custody fight with a step-grandmother for her four kids. Her ex and the grandfather are both in jail. The young waitress at the Italian restaurant in Gallipolis looked at the booths on either side of me before admitting that her politics are not the politics of southern Ohio.
Smokey ride across northern Wisconsin yesterday, I guess Canada’s still on fire. Spent the night at the Four Seasons Motel in Crandon, a town of abandoned two-story brick buildings and out-of-business businesses. For dinner, I had a California burger, fries and a root beer float at Palubicki’s Eats & Treats drive-in diner. The fries were salt-crunchy and hot out of the fryer, unfortunately the ketchup was in packets so I had to eat them naked. The concrete slab the restaurant sits on is cracked and broken so the high school kids running trays and bags out to the cars and picnic tables wear shoes instead of roller skates.
The Four Seasons Motel shares a potholed and oil-stained asphalt parking lot with a BP gas station and the rooms face the gas station. Each room has a folding metal chair in front, a sand bucket for cigarette butts next to it. My room cost $49.00.
Besides the pylon sign flashing $3.49 in neon green, store signage at the BP advertises Bud Light, Hunt Brothers Pizza, AmeriGas propane and ice. I sat outside my door for an hour as the sun went down slapping mosquitos in the humidity and watched BP customers slam the doors on Cadillac SUVs, old and new pickups, tired sedans with tired mufflers, and rusty Dodge minivans then a few minutes later come striding, shuffling, stomping back out yelling at their kids and lugging clear plastic bags of Dr. Pepper, laundry detergent, chocolate milk, diapers, cartons of cigarettes and beer.
For breakfast, I bought a copy of The Forest Republican, the county newspaper, and a cup of coffee at the BP. Front page above the fold, a story about a motorcycle cancer fund raiser, “Ride for Research,” and two Crandon High School students, Maya Quade and Madelynn Erdmann, having been selected for a U.S. State Department grant program. The paper was 16 pages and included obituaries, legal notices and a flyer for Menards. It cost a dollar.
Vincent is my neighbor two doors down. Forty-seven, untrimmed beard, divorced, four kids, three at home with the ex. He’s raced motorcycles, built custom bicycles and worked as a union electrician. Now he works as a mechanic at an ATV shop and lives at the Four Seasons Motel. The shop is seventy miles away; Vince doesn’t have a driver’s license and carpools with a coworker, they drive an hour and a half each way. He had a pack of American Spirit cigarettes resting on the leg of his jeans and we chatted while he smoked one and then another.
On the wall at the BP, alongside the handicap ramp, are cork-boards thick with advertisements and business cards for stump grinding, a farmers market, masonry, opioid addiction support, an indoor craft and flea market, a classic car show, real estate agents, taxidermy, homemade jewelry, off-road expeditions, lawn services, hair stylists, military recruiters and dozens of other hard-times hopes and scams.
During the Jim Crow years, during the depression, during the war years, Bessie Stringfield, a Black woman born in Jamaica in 1911 (or North Carolina in 1912, depending on your source), made repeated solo motorcycle trips across the continental United States.
She was a wanderer, a traveler for whom the destination was not the destination. According to lore, she chose her itinerary by laying out a map and tossing a penny onto the paper, where the penny landed was where she rode. As a Black woman, she often couldn’t rent motel rooms and slept on the motorcycle, her riding jacket rolled up and laid across the handlebars for a pillow. When she was lucky, she was invited to stay in the homes of Black Americans.
Bessie supported herself performing motorcycle stunts in carnivals and racing flat track, a particularly physical and dangerous form of motorcycle racing. She raced disguised as a man and at times was denied the winner’s purse when organizers discovered she was a woman. That she won speaks volumes about her athleticism and riding ability.
She was married and divorced six times having lost three babies with her first husband (Stringfield is the name of her third husband who asked her to keep it because he was convinced she would be famous). Over the years, she owned 27 Harley Davidson motorcycles, worked as a motorcycle courier for the Army during the Second World War and ended up in Florida where she was dubbed “The Motorcycle Queen of Miami.”
Bessie died in 1993 having never quit riding.
Us guys who ride motorcycles, especially us white guys, like to imagine ourselves as tough, we’ve got the tattoos and the leather and the foamy beer stories. But let’s be honest, as generally pursued, motorcycling is not a difficult task; clutch, gears, throttle, brakes, all very straightforward and easy to master and generally as unworthy of approbation as walking or driving a car. And modern bikes and modern gear and modern roads and being white and male further insulate us from the demands of character. Tough, not story tough, real tough, the tough that reveals character, was a 5′ 2″ tall Black woman in her twenties riding alone on an unreliable motorcycle on bad roads through a country ripped asunder by economic strife, a country built on social and legal misogyny, a country where slavery and the Civil War were living memories, a country where, according to Wikipedia, there were “…4,467 total (Black) victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941,”
Bessie Stringfield was the first Black woman to be inducted into the American Motorcyclist Association Hall of Fame and the Harley Davidson Hall of Fame.
Two weeks ago, Jane fell and broke her patella (for those of you who don’t know me personally, Jane is my wife of 29 years). Tuesday, she had surgery. While she was in surgery, I sat outside Methodist Hospital in suburban Minneapolis on a white plastic chair at a white plastic table chatting with Michael Bartholomew, he was wearing a hoodie and had a 12-sprout goatee and a cross tattooed under his right eye. He was there for his grandmother’s knee surgery. He sat under the No Smoking sign chain smoking Kools and throwing the butts into the hydrangeas. It was a seventy-degree, blue sky morning. It was his birthday. He was 23.
We were bored so I told him stories of my travels, wandering Europe and north Africa when I got out of the army, of sleeping on the beach in Spain, of being attacked on the beach in Morocco and the next day being asked to marry a slim, dark-eyed Moroccan teenager by her father. I told him about living in Tokyo and riding a motorcycle around the world; SE Asia, Australia, Nepal, India, the African continent. He listened rapt, his eyes fixed somewhere distant, ignoring the cigarette between his fingers. His geography was quite good, particularly countries on the African continent. He wanted to know what continent I liked best. He said if he had $10,000, that he’d disappear into the world.
Michael had ridden the bus from Seattle for the surgery. The trip took two and half days. When he got here, he took another bus from his grandmother’s house to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) and spent the day at the Van Gogh exhibit. In elementary school, Michael read at the college level. I asked him what his favorite book was; Harry Potter, he’s read them all many times. There’s a library within walking distance of his grandmother’s house, he told me that. He didn’t graduate from high school and doesn’t have a GED. Or a driver’s license. He has an expired Georgia ID card.
Michael went to jail for the first time when he was fourteen. Since then, he’s spent almost five years in detention or jail. The girl he had a crush on when he was a freshman in high school was shot in the face with a shotgun at a house party. He cried for her when she was killed, he was crying when he told me the story.
He talked about his friends in Seattle and Baton Rouge and small towns in Georgia, friends he did drugs with and whose spare beds, couches and porches he slept on, about a cellmate who ratted him out for stealing a guard’s lunch, a crime that got Michael sixty days in the hole. He’d shared the guard’s lunch with the cellmate. He was in a gun battle with another friend over a stolen car, Michael had a 9mm with a laser sight, they shot at each other until they both ran out of bullets. Nobody was hurt.
He wanted to join the Army, he’d spent time at an ROTC high school. But with his criminal record and face tattoo, he’s not eligible. He works as a construction laborer. He’s installed tile and crown moldings, maybe that’s a career.
His mother’s a devout Catholic. She’d flown up from Georgia for the surgery. He told me a story about her refusing to let him out of the house and when he snuck out, chasing him in her van. He asked some “hillbillies” hanging around a shack, a confederate flag on the wall, to hide him, told them that it was his girlfriend’s mother in the van. When she stopped and asked if they’d seen her son, the hillbilly’s threatened her with a shotgun until Michael came out of hiding and begged them not to shoot her. They cussed him for lying. He doesn’t know his father.
He’s on a prescription drug for his chemical dependency. He stood and vomited into the trash can beside our table three times during our conversation. He complained about the drugs and said he was fine.
Jane’s surgery went very well. She’s home and comfortable and recovering nicely.
John walked up to me in the Best Western parking lot to tell me that he liked the Revival. Small talk, he traded his Ford pickup for an Indian motorcycle, he liked state government but not the federal government and he shouldn’t have to pay federal taxes, soon we’re going to send troops to Ukraine and their deaths will depopulate the United States.
A year ago his wife found him unconscious on the bathroom floor covered with blood and feces, she turned him over and gave him CPR until the ambulance crew got there. He talked about his three daughters under six and his wife at home, about the intermittent pain, overwhelming and unpredictable, about not wanting to die. He’s 30 and delivers medical oxygen tanks for a job. He didn’t tell me his diagnosis.
I chanced upon the Everwild Music Festival at Legend Valley, an outdoor venue of rolling grassy hills surrounding a little valley, stages at the bottom facing an open area for audience and dancing and further back a crescent of food trucks and vendors hawking beer, swag and grease. The Grateful Dead (and pretty much everybody else from the seventies and eighties) played there. The hair, the tie dye, the dirt and dust, the incense and pot smoke, the tents and sleeping bags, the costumes and clothes (and lack of clothes), the music, the energy, the raw sensuality; it was 1973 and I was just seventeen.
The lineup included a dozen or so bands I’d never heard of; Madison Pruitt rocked the hell out of her guitar all by herself in an off-stage tent, wonderful, gravely voice and missing the high notes (she needs to lay off them and celebrate the grit). Gabe Reed fronting for Mooky rocked the main stage with a hip-hop alt-rock theme with no regard for costumery, making the crowd shimmy and stomp in baggy shorts and painfully north European skin tones. Artikal Sound System was a well oiled machine presented under a dazzling light show led by fuck-bomb spraying frontwoman and vocalist Logan Rex. I kept thinking that it would suck to have to follow her onto the stage….
Yesterday I rode past the Shawnee Mission Church, there were cars in the gravel lot. I yanked on the doors at the top of the steps, they wouldn’t open and I turned to leave and someone unlatched them from the inside. Helmet hair, riding jacket, jeans and boots, I walked in at the front of the congregation. The Reverend Clifford Burgess stopped his sermon, shook my hand and welcomed me. Before I could sit, I had to shake the hands of all ten parishioners.
After the sermon, Reverend Burgess and I chatted. He’s married and has a daughter, “the loud one in front,” he trained to be a car mechanic, worked as a carpenter and then spent four years in ministry school. For a while he owned a Gold Wing motorcycle (Honda’s big touring bike). He had the closest shave and best-trimmed mustache I’ve ever seen (except maybe in the movies). He described his religion as non-denominational, an intersection of Baptist and Nazarene. The church building before it was a church was a soda pop bottling factory, the handicap ramp is where the loading dock used to be.
I rode on wet roads all day and didn’t get rained on. Pays to go to church.
This is getting long but before I get on the motorcycle, I want to tell you about Taylor and her new husband Bonanza Marco Polo Napoleon Cummings. Married last week, they’re honeymooning in Logan Ohio. Bonanza is from Jamaica, accepted on an athletic scholarship to the University of Detroit (track and field, he’s a sprinter). He’s working on his MBA. Taylor is an architect, commercial and residential, she particularly likes the fact that their hotel is across the street from Hocking Hills Moonshine where shots are a buck apiece.
My son, Eli, works in Bethesda, MD. This morning he texted me an invoice from a towing company for $519.75 to tow a garbage truck eight miles. I know something about that.
When I was an undergraduate studying Chinese at the University of MInnesota (1978-1982), I drove a wrecker for Rice Street Towing in east St. Paul. I drove from 3:00 to 7:00 in the evening during the school year; rush hour in the winter in Minnesota. The job paid $7.50 an hour, big money in those days (tuition was $180.00 a quarter).
The company was owned by Dick and Peggy Berget. He ran the shop, maintained the trucks and drove a truck when needed; she took the calls, dispatched the drivers and took money from customers who came to pick up their cars from the lot. There were bars on the window of her office and she kept a .38 revolver in the cash drawer. At all hours, the place, was cloudy with smoke, Marlboros in the shop, Kool menthols in the office. They had a mutt, I can’t remember its name. The dog ate burgers and fries tossed on the oily shop floor by drivers cleaning out their cabs. Dick and Peggy were divorced and hated each other.
They had the Highway Patrol contract so we worked everything from jump starts to semi rollovers. It was a dangerous job; lying on my back dropping the driveshaft or backing off the brakes on a semi-tractor in sub-zero weather while rush hour traffic raced past on black ice a few feet from my face was, well, something.
Garbage trucks (we called them “packers”) break all the time and we towed them routinely. They’re heavy. One afternoon, I picked one up, the truck was full and I had to pull it to the dump to empty it before taking it to a repair shop. The driver was sitting next to me as we exited the long down grade on southbound Interstate 35W onto the exit at Black Dog Road. The exit is a sharp downhill curve and the wrecker brakes weren’t slowing us down, air brakes give you what they give you. And of course, all that weight on the rear means very little weight on the front tires of the wrecker, very unnerving when the steering wheel of a big truck goes soft in your hands and the truck isn’t turning and the weight on the back is shoving you forward and the bar ditch is getting close and you’re working the hell out of clutch, throttle and shift lever looking for a lower gear. We made it, although I’m not sure how, I must have found that gear, but I am pretty sure that poor driver is still losing sleep.
An experience like that is worth at least five hundred and twenty bucks.
Sorry about all that. What I planned to write about this morning was Cody and Justin, second marriages for both, three kids, nine, six and two, one from her previous, two together. He’s from Detroit, a history major at the University of Michigan and an Army medic in Fallujah, they met playing World of Warcraft on line. She drove to Detroit to meet him for the first time. He works second shift at the front desk at the Best Western, she works first shift at the breakfast bar. His politics are hard left and we had that conversation.
Cody and I chatted this morning. We talked about Cole Porter. Cole Porter is from Peru, apparently the town is reluctant to celebrate its most notable son because he was gay.
There’s a lot to say about Cody and Justin, and Denise who owns Club 14 where I had dinner and her waitress Katie but I need to take a shower and get on the motorcycle.
